Homemade Rolling Stones cartoon by Justin Melkmann originally drawn in 1987
KEITH RICHARDS: First of all those mid-’70s LPs remind me of being a junkie (laughs). What happened was I’d been through the bust in Canada, which was a real watershed—or WaterGATE—for me. I’d gone to jail, been cleaned up, done my cure, and I’d wanted to come back and prove there was some difference . . . some . . . some reason for this kind of suffering. So Some Girls was the first record I’d been able to get back into and view from a totally different state than I’d been in for most of the ’70s.
The Rolling Stones haven’t lasted for fifty years by standing still or staying static. As the times have changed, the Stones have changed: from an R&B cover band to a rock ’n’ roll powerhouse; from playing small clubs to playing huge stadiums, then back to playing small clubs; from the music world’s most outrageous young punks to its esteemed elder statesmen.
This ability to adapt, reinvent, and transform was never more apparent than it was in 1978. First of all, there were a couple of lean years and misfires after Exile on Main St. Goats Head Soup, It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll, and Black and Blue weren’t bad albums—you could make a great compilation taking the best of those three—but none had the power of the Stones’ best work.
Then too, the music business itself was in the midst of its greatest changes since . . . well, probably since the changes that the Beatles, Dylan, and the Stones themselves had wrought in the ’60s.
Punk and new wave were beginning to rock rock ’n’ roll. Disco was inexplicably (to me anyway) pushing rock music out of the spotlight. There were even rumblings of a new kind of laser technology that could eventually supplant vinyl and long-playing records as the main delivery system for music. Against this backdrop, the Stones came roaring back with Some Girls.
KEITH RICHARDS: I think a lot of [the reasons for the quality of Some Girls] was Chris Kimsey. We were at a point where we asked ourselves, “Are we just going to do another boring Stones-in-the-doldrums sort of album?”
Kimsey had worked with the Stones as far back as Sticky Fingers, and while his credit on Some Girls is as an engineer, it certainly sounds like he functioned as a producer as well.
CHRIS KIMSEY: If I had any plan at all regarding sound, it was simply to get more of a live sound. Before I began working with them, their last few albums like Black and Blue and Goats Head Soup had sounded too clean in places, almost clinical. When I first went to Paris to set up the room at Pathé Marconi, it was intended for rehearsals only. But the room had such a good sound even though the disc was only sixteen-track, they began to feel comfortable. It made for a more relaxed atmosphere which led to a certain spontaneity in the music.
We’ll talk about the influence of disco in the next chapter but start with the influence of punk rock on Some Girls. While the Stones were clearly a major influence for many punk rock bands, their rock-god status by the late 1970s also made the Stones an object of derision for many in that crowd. But Keith saw the similarities more than the differences.
KEITH RICHARDS: There’s always new bands. I’ve seen them come and go, most of them. And the same probably occurs to the bands who are around now. I don’t know if they’re trying a little too hard to make something new out of something that really isn’t but there again, we didn’t consider what we were doing particularly new when we did it. We were really rehashing old stuff. It’s just that people had missed out on it the first time around. Maybe that’s what it’s all about and what the Sex Pistols and the Clash and the Stranglers, etc., are doing now in England is rehashing what we did for people who missed out on it then. I see a lot of similiarities in terms of images, PR-wise, sound-wise, of what they’re doing to what we did. Some of the press stuff, you could just delete “Rolling Stones” and put in “Sex Pistols.”
I was in England a year ago for a month or so when the whole hype thing started with punk rock. This was at the time the Sex Pistols appeared on TV and let a few Victorian curses go and everybody was shocked. That’s England, you know. It was real adolescent stuff. But it was no worse than us when we appeared on Juke Box Jury for the first time and everybody thought we were absolute morons. It was same old thing. They sound more like we did fifteen years ago than we could possibly do. I couldn’t re-create that sound now. Some of those records sound like they came out of the same studio as our first album.
RON WOOD: Those punk songs [on Some Girls] were our message to those boys. We never sat around talking about punk, but you couldn’t avoid it.
Though the album was recorded in Paris, one of the biggest inspirations for Mick’s lyrics was New York City, where he was living and beginning his two-decade relationship with Texas-born model Jerry Hall.
MICK JAGGER: Obviously it was all influenced by New York feeling. More obviously I’d say in “Shattered,” when I was writing that I was thinking, “God, I’m really nowhere near there but I’m just reliving it all.” I’d been living there for the two years previously on and off, and it was a big interesting time for the city: the place falling to bits, going broke and Son of Sam and all that. It loomed large as an object in your imagination.
ANTHONY DECURTIS: There was a sense in which the Stones became a New York band, and that’s reflected on the record. There were New York references throughout Some Girls. In “Just My Imagination” where Jagger sings, “Of all the girls in New York, she loves me true.” That’s not in the Temptations’ version of that song. Of course, “Shattered” and “Miss You”: “Walk in Central Park/Singing after dark/People think I’m crazy.” These references are so specific and so much a part of the texture of New York. They were alert to what was going on in New York. That sense of New York kind of falling apart had all of the social tensions that were developing there. The Stones just sucked that up, man. They just really thrived on it. It’s part of that energy they have . . . Part of a job of an artist is to channel the complicated energy of the times, and that’s what the Rolling Stones do. That’s what they do in Some Girls. That was an album that was a survival statement of a city in crisis. It’s framed by two songs about New York: “Miss You” and “Shattered.”
Keith suggested a final reason the album was special: the growing rapport between him and the Stones’ new guitarist.
KEITH RICHARDS: And you gotta remember it was Ronnie’s first full album, first real album with the Stones. Some Girls was kind of like Beggars Banquet. Like we’d been away for a bit, and we came back with a bang.
THE STONES’ PROCESS
In this never-before-published interview from 1977, Keith talked with our friend Dave Herman about the beginning of the album that would become Some Girls.
KEITH RICHARDS: While we were working on the live album, we were together quite a lot and we wrote quite a fair number of songs, considering the amount of time; probably we’ve got another three, four each that we’ve worked on alone; and then there’s other things that Woody and I have had riffs of, which I think we’ve deliberately not worked on too much. A lot of rock ’n’ roll tracks, I’m always scared of overworking them before we get to the studio because a lot of a good rock ’n’ roll tracks depend so much on spontaneity, enthusiasm, and not being too familiar with the thing. I’d rather just have a riff and as long as I know this one, basic, interesting riff to hang something on, I know that we can tot it up in the studio and still get something of that first-take feel about it as well.
By this time, Keith had earned a reputation as the Stones’ music director.
KEITH RICHARDS: Let’s put it this way, at the beginning when we’re cutting tracks, you could say I’m the director as far as the actual studio is concerned, which leaves Mick a free hand to be in the control room with the engineer and/or producer if we happen to be using one, so that I don’t have to think too much about what’s going down on tape but I can just concentrate on what we’re all playing, and leave the sound of the actual track up to Mick to a certain extent. So it’s kind of a split thing. I’m only director on one side of the glass. That piece of glass is a brick wall in a way. It’s a very effective block to communication. The fact that you have to communicate just through microphones and headphones, you block a lot of contact with everybody when you’re normally writing songs, eye contact and things like that, that you have when you know somebody well. That’s all cut off.
So what does a Rolling Stones recording session feel like?
KEITH RICHARDS: Usually starts with no more than two or three of us. Very rarely will the whole band start off on a track at once. There will always be Charlie, there will always be some rhythm, drums. Maybe one of us on guitar, maybe Ronnie, sometimes Mick plays good rhythm guitar, sometimes me. And then maybe after a bit, Ronnie or Bill might join in on bass or another guitar and then slowly maybe Mick will start to find a top line, without lyrics but maybe just chanting, just sounds, phonetics. It helps a lot to have a lead vocal line to go with, so you know that everybody’s following at least one thing. And also because that is going to be the top line when you eventually do the vocals. Usually we have a bit of shouting going and everybody gets into that. It slowly builds up. Some songs will start off with the weirdest lineups. Like “Happy” started with one guitar, baritone sax, and that was the beginning of that track. Bobby Keys was with us at that time and it just so happened that we were the first ones at the session and we started going and then drums came and slowly we started adding more. Generally, especially with fast tracks, rock ’n’ roll tracks, quite often they’ll start with two, three people at the most, to get into a groove, to get a thing going, and then I guess the criterion is if everybody else starts going and picking up on it and playing it, then you know you’ve got something going. And if they don’t, eventually it just pieces out and you find something else and start again on another riff.
By the time Some Girls came around, Keith was no longer trying to write singles, and hadn’t been for some time. As he reflected in that same 1977 interview:
KEITH RICHARDS: Not since 1966. Ever since albums have become bigger than singles, we haven’t because the pressure isn’t there to do it. You don’t need singles now. Yeah, it’s nice to have them but it isn’t an absolute necessity. In the early and mid-’60s it was an absolute necessity to have a new number one hit song every three months and because it had to be there, you did it.
I think it would be a shame if that art was lost completely because one of the things that rock ’n’ roll is suffering from is overindulgence. Musicians are bound to do it if given the situation. The great thing about the single was the limitations that it set. You’ve got to say it all in two minutes thirty seconds, three minutes at the most, and you know when you’ve done it right; and it was a little form in itself which has disappeared now because the necessity of it has disappeared. I think now if people still want singles and still go in to make a single as such, as opposed to just a track and choosing after, “Oh this one would make a good single,” and just editing it down. But if you make a single, if that’s becoming more of a trend then that’s a good thing because limitation is what rock ’n’ roll is all about. It’s a very limited form of music and the great thing about it is how many variations you can get within those very strict confines. Although it’s just a label, like anything else, rock ’n’ roll these days can cover everything from the Sex Pistols to Weather Report. It’s a universal term for popular music now.
