Keep Your Hands To Yourself

You are locked in with The Zoo, the listener-supported, commercial-free rock station that still treats a great record like it matters. Pull up a chair at thezoorocks.com and stay awhile, because the next three minutes and twenty-six seconds are pure bar-band lightning from Atlanta. This is The Georgia Satellites, and the song is "Keep Your Hands To Yourself," the track that walked out of a cheap demo and nearly owned the whole country.

Dan Baird wrote it to make his drummer laugh. That is the honest origin, and it is better than any boardroom story a label could invent. In a 2005 recollection, Baird said "Keep Your Hands" was written to crack up his good friend David Michaelson, and Michaelson did laugh. The picture that stuck is a bus ride home from a construction job, pocket change jingling, no paper handy, first verse and a half already bouncing around his head. He chanted it so he would not lose it. He got home, held up a hand so nobody would break the spell, filled the hole in the second verse, and the thing was done. Influences in the room were Carl Perkins, NRBQ, the Johnny Burnette Trio, and Rockpile. Twelve-bar blues in A, moderate tempo, a two-string figure that sounds like it has been hanging on a nail in a roadhouse since 1957. The punch line belongs to the woman in the song. No huggee, no kissee, until there is a wedding ring. Do not hand her lines. Keep your hands to yourself.

People heard that pocket-change line and decided it meant something else. The band denied it. Baird has called the lyric dumb on purpose. Four dollars in change, going jing-a-ling-a-ling, a telephone ring that never gets past the rules. The yodel arrived as he was about to fall asleep, and he woke himself up because he knew he was onto something. It is a marriage ultimatum dressed as a Chuck Berry shuffle, clever without being cute, and loud enough to cut through a decade that had fallen in love with synths and hairspray.

The band that carried it started in 1980 as Keith and the Satellites. Baird, late of an Atlanta outfit called the Nasty Bucks, joined lead guitarist Rick Richards, bassist Keith Christopher, and drummer David Michaelson. Christopher moved on, the name shortened to The Georgia Satellites, and the group worked the Atlanta bar circuit until the usual gravity pulled them apart around 1984. The demo did not die with the breakup. Manager Kevin Jennings took a six-song tape to a British indie, Making Waves, which issued it in 1985 as the EP Keep the Faith. Melody Maker and NME noticed. That was enough to put the pieces back together, this time with Baird alongside Richards, bassist Rick Price, and drummer Mauro Magellan, players who had been running as the Hell Hounds.

Mike Bone at Elektra heard the demo and decided "Keep Your Hands To Yourself" was a hit before the rest of the building was ready to agree. He pushed A&R. An advance followed. The band went into Cheshire Sound Studios in Atlanta with producer Jeff Glixman, the same man who had shepherded the earlier recordings, and cut the self-titled debut. They tried to beat the original take of the song. They could not. What you hear on Georgia Satellites, released in October 1986 on Elektra, is a remix of that cheaply made demo. Studios listed on the single include Axis and Cheshire Sound. B-side was "Can't Stand the Pain." Radio got the record in November. The album also carried "Battleship Chains," written by Terry Anderson, which scraped to number 86, and deeper cuts that proved the band was not a one-riff accident. Elektra had given them a five-figure budget to make a whole album, and the best thing on it was the tape they already owned.

The single entered the Billboard Hot 100 at number 96 in the week of November 22, 1986, and climbed for twenty weeks. It cracked the top 40 by late December, the top 10 in early February, and peaked at number 2 for the week of February 21, 1987. Bon Jovi's "Livin' on a Prayer" sat on top of it. Album Rock Tracks also parked the song at number 2. It finished the year at number 35 on Billboard's year-end pop list. Britain saw it reach 69. Australia landed it around 20. New Zealand eventually certified it gold. The band picked up a Grammy nomination for Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal. Mary Deacon won Best Art Direction at the MTV Video Music Awards for the clip.

That video, directed by Bill Fishman, is a shotgun wedding on wheels. The band rides a flatbed down the highway. Flashbacks show Baird and a very pregnant bride getting ready. Guests gather. Tin cans trail the truck. "Just married" gets painted on the bed. Fishman's other credits run from the Ramones' "I Wanna Be Sedated" to later pop clips, but this one belongs to 1986 MTV heavy rotation, gap-toothed grin and all. Baird has laughed at the long echo of the song. Somebody told him it saved rock and roll and ruined country music at the same time, meaning it dragged guitars back toward the roots for a minute and also taught Nashville that dumb, loud chords were allowed. Hank Williams Jr. cut it in 1987. John Anderson took a pass in 1994. Sawyer Brown recorded it in 2005. The Satellites kept insisting it was a rock and roll song. They knew what country was. They were not it. They just happened to hand country a riff it could not put down.

The debut was the peak, and the band did not vanish after it. Open All Night arrived in 1988, with a cover of the Ringo Starr Beatles song "Don't Pass Me By." The same year they cut the Swinging Blue Jeans' "Hippy Hippy Shake" for the movie Cocktail, and that single reached number 45. In the Land of Salvation and Sin followed in 1989, the last album of original material with the classic lineup, and a record fans still argue is the deeper one. Baird left in 1990. On his own he scored a genuine hit in 1992 with "I Love You Period," which peaked at number 26. "The One I Am" reached number 13 on the album-rock chart. He later rolled with the Yayhoos and with Dan Baird and Homemade Sin, a band that has included Mauro Magellan and, for a stretch, Keith Christopher, plus guitarist Warner E. Hodges from Jason and the Scorchers. Richards never really left the Satellites name. He also spent years with Izzy Stradlin and the Ju Ju Hounds. The group resurfaced in 1993, cut Shaken Not Stirred in 1996 with new songs and re-recordings, and kept working rooms. Richards remains the constant. Later lineups have included drummer Todd Johnston, singer and guitarist Fred McNeal, and bassist Bruce Smith. A 2022 official live album, Lightnin' in a Bottle, finally put a 1988 show on record, hits included.

Stephen Thomas Erlewine heard Chuck Berry in the single, and he was right. Brent Mann called the vocal a Texas honky-tonk attack. Both descriptions fit a band from Atlanta that never pretended to be anything fancier than a loud, swinging rock and roll group with country dirt on the boots. If you want the trail, start at the band's own site, thegeorgiasatellites.com, then the long-running page for Dan Baird and Homemade Sin at facebook.com/danbairdandhomemadesin, and Rick Richards at facebook.com/RickRichardsOffical2. The paper trail lives at Wikipedia, the song file at Songfacts, and the discography at Discogs. When you are done digging, come back to The Zoo. We still play the demo that would not be beaten, the one with the jingling change and the wedding ring and the hands that had better stay where they belong.