(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction (The Rolling Stones)

Loved this article! - FYI, for my friends reading this: should I ever slip into a coma, I hope you know which song I'd like on Repeat Play until I wake up - Love Shack, baby ("tin roof, rusted"... :-)

Rolling Stones classic wakes grandfather from coma
A 60-year-old grandfather woke up from a 10-week coma after his favourite Rolling Stones song was blared into his ears.
By Chris Irvine, 07 Aug 2008

Sam Carter lost consciousness after contracting severe anaemia but was brought back to life when "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" was blared into his ears.

The anthem was the first single the retired baker from Stoke in Staffordshire ever bought, released in 1965 when he was just 17.

Despite only being given a 30 per cent chance of survival, he woke from his coma after his wife Eva, 65, took the doctor's advice and played him his favourite tunes through a set of earphones.

After three days of listening to the local Stoke station Signal 2, his eyes opened as soon as he heard the sound of Mick Jagger's vocals and Keith Richards' guitar riff.

Sam said: "I can't remember much from being in a coma, but I do remember that when that song came on it took me right back to when I was a youngster.

"I could remember how excited I was to get it down at the record shop.

"I suddenly had a burst of energy and knew I had a lot more life left in me and that's when I woke up - to the sound of the first song I ever bought."

Sam, who has three children and six grandchildren, added: "I would love to thank Mick and the rest of the Stones personally - I feel they really did help wake me from my coma."

Wife Eva said she had switched on the radio at Stoke's City General Hospital in a last-ditch attempt to bring him back a fortnight ago, after growing increasingly frustrated with his lack of progress.

She said: "I didn't really think it would work.

"I couldn't believe it when he started opening his eyes and looked at me. It was like we had been given another chance."

SONG: (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction by The Rolling Stones

BOOK: Time Flies When You're in a Coma: The Wisdom of the Metal Gods by Mike Daly (author), Mark Weiss (photographer)

POEM: Chrysalis by Joan Murray

1
It's mid-September, and in the Magic Wing Butterfly Conservancy
in Deerfield, Massachusetts, the woman at the register
is ringing up the items of a small girl and her mother.
There are pencils and postcards and a paperweight--
all with butterflies--and, chilly but alive,
three monarch caterpillars--in small white boxes
with cellophane tops, and holes punched in their sides.
The girl keeps rearranging them like a shell game
while the cashier chats with her mother: "They have to
feed on milkweed--you can buy it in the nursery outside."
"We've got a field behind our house," the mother answers.
The cashier smiles to show she didn't need the sale:
"And in no time, they'll be on their way to Brazil or Argentina--
or wherever they go--" ("to Mexico," says the girl,
though she's ignored) "and you can watch them
do their thing till they're ready to fly."

2
I remember the monarchs my son and I brought in one summer
on bright pink flowers we'd picked along the swamp
on Yetter's farm. We were "city folks," eager for nature
and ignorant--we left our TV home--and left the flowers
in a jar on the dry sink in the trailer. We never noticed the
caterpillars
till we puzzled out the mystery of the small black things
on the marble top--which turned out to be their droppings.
And soon, three pale green dollops hung from the carved-out leaves,
each studded with four gold beads--so gold they looked to be
mineral--not animal--a miracle that kept us amazed
as the walls grew clear and the transformed things broke through,
pumped fluid in their wings, dried off--and flew.
I gauge from that memory that it will be next month
before the girls are "ready." I wonder how they'll "fly"
when there's been frost. "And they'll come back next summer,"
the cashier says, "to the very same field--they always do."
I'm sure that isn't true. But why punch holes
in our little hopes when we have so few?

3
Next month, my mother will have a hole put in her skull
to drain the fluid that's been weighing on her brain.
All summer, she's lain in one hospital or another--
yet the old complainer's never complained.
In Mather, the woman beside her spent a week in a coma,
wrapped like a white cocoon with an open mouth
(a nurse came now and then to dab the drool).
My mother claimed the woman's husband was there too--
"doing what they do"--though it didn't annoy her.
Now she's in Stony Brook--on the eighteenth floor.
I realize I don't know her anymore. When she beat against
the window to break through, they had to strap her down
--and yet how happy and how likeable she's become.
When I visit, I spend my nights in her empty house--
in the bed she and my father used to share. Perhaps they're
there. Perhaps we do come back year after year
to do what we've always done--if we can't make
our way to kingdom come, or lose ourselves altogether.

QUOTE: "There is nothing in the world so much like prayer as music is." ~ William P. Merrill