When the POLL Comes Down: The Stones' "Some Girls"

or "I was gay in New York and a fag in L.A."

man I voted Shattered but I sure do love the hell out of Respectable

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPKbCRkMlUM

voting in this poll = nothing but regret for your other nine favourites

i thought everyone hated faraway eyes

Beast

omigod

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVEdYYMlOJ4

So. deeply. disturbing. The cutaways to Charlie Watts-as-outpatient only heighten the phantasmagoria of the Dreyer-like closeups of Jagger and his hideous "you know yer a redneck" sprechtstimme...

and where exactly are they performing, the studios of Manhattan's Channel D public access channel?

As for the Stones' reaction to punk thing: Nothing has made me happier in my record-buying life than when as a 16-year-old I went to the punk-centric Wax Trax Records in 1978 Denver (back then buying every Clash, Talking Heads, and Vibrators single, etc, I could find) and finding the clerk-written plug above the Some Girls display: "Old Farts Fight Back!".

I thought, "Yes! My boys still got it." Later only John Elway evoked such little jewels of fandom pleasure.

(I'm voting Shattered or Miss You.)

I like the idea of this album more than the real thing. 'miss you' and 'beast' are the only songs I have any love for.

yikes! serenity now!!!
"imagination" is one of the greatest RS covers, but...., "lies", "respectable" or "whip"....impossible to go wrong

Before You Make Me Run

Sounds like every entry here's getting a vote. So does anyone have a least favorite song? For a while mine was "Just My Imagination," but now I love how swaps the original's ethereality for smut.

"Miss You" over "Shattered" though "Respectable" needs loving too. But "Miss You" has such a hard groove & is a blast to sing along with; not surprised to hear it's a Jagger song since for me the performance comes down to his scats/coos/dyintameetcha.

I don't like "Far Away Eyes" very much; it's another cornball Jagger country vocal & I just don't relate.

Voted "Shattered". The Stones' 'SNL' appearance from this time period rocked my 11-year-old world.

this is a great album, second all the positivity here - listening to it I'm usually struck by how simple everything is. most of the songs are just a disco beat and two chords then a lot of vamping and silly lyrics, it's a great marriage of punk, disco, and classic rock dickishness

a lot of these songs run together for me though, have no idea what I would pick as a standout

"Shattered" is some kind of Platonic ideal of whatever that is.

Voted "Shattered". The Stones' 'SNL' appearance from this time period rocked my 11-year-old world.

i'd never seen this respectable & shattered on snl (with Ian Stewart(?) on the piano): http://www.livevideo.com/video/KeithRichards1972/91D7FF56577B47C09D8D7A6709DE2C19/the-rolling-stones-shattered.aspx

oh and beast of burden is there, too.

i'm prolley a bad person for it, but i kind of hate "Beast of Burden"...

The one Stones ballad I never, ever get tired of hearing.

Ben Williams once posted on ILM that "Shattered" was an overlooked punk-funk classic, and he's right. That's what I voted for.

(Speaking of punk, and New York, I once read Jagger attributing the groove of "Stray Cat Blues" off Beggars Banquet to the Stones trying to sound like the Velvet Underground!)

yeah, i read that interview recently, too. what's weird is he said they were trying to get the sound of "heroin" which doesn't seem right at all! maybe he meant waiting for the man?

that sounds like some serious retconning to me

The quote was in a book published sometime in the the '80s, I think.

The quote was from a Crawadaddy! or Creem interview, maybe? Something along those lines.

Shattered. It gets in that groove & wears it down about 15 feet.

It's not that collection of interviews by Bill Flanagan, is it?

It's not. It was from some 8 x 10 paperback with a red cover of quotes from the Stones about all their songs. (That Flanagan book is fantastic, one of the best music books I've ever read.)

It sure is, and Jagger is unusually forthright in it.

I've always found Jagger's interviews fascinating. He has a reputation for being cagey but a lot of the ones I've read he's been pretty straightforward: his comments in Rolling Stone about John Lennon's death, for example.

Did you ever read Mikal Gilmore's Night Beat? Excellent summer of '87 interview with Jagger (some of the best longform interviews with Joe Strummer, Dylan, Sinead, etc I've ever read).

I got it out of the library a long time ago but didn't pay it that much attention. I should go back. Gilmore is probably the best stylist of all the obvious-RS-canon guys, something I appreciate more as the years go by.

(Just to be clear: "obvious-RS-canon guys" meaning writers who articulate the mag's core musical values rather than the likes of e.g. Hunter S. Thompson.)

I'd like to read more of Gilmore's music writing - have only read Shot Through The Heart, which is just incredible.

'When I die I'll go to heaven, cause I've spent my time in hell' is cribbed from a Korean war vet motto, isn't it?

"Shattered," I guess. Hard choice.

I know this isn't the place to register your antipathy towards this album, but I will anyway. I was finishing up high school when it came out, and also, I'm pretty sure, just discovering Let It Bleed and Beggars Banquet (I'd known the hits, of course, but not "You Got the Silver" and "Prodigal Son" and all the other amazing album tracks). So beyond a half-hearted "Oh, that's pretty good," Some Girls didn't mean anything to me--not then, not now. It's like the difference between Gosford Park and Nashville. Gosford Park is very well made, and you can tell it's Altman, but it's just not Nashville--it's not really even close. It also makes me think of that Joy Division line: "I've got the spirit, but lose the feeling." Some Girls is good music well played. The moment has passed. For me, anyway. Clearly a lot of people love this album.

That's exactly how I feel about Tattoo You.

One's reaction depends on how much of the band's mythos you're ready to accept. I knew the Stones first as snarling craftsmen (c/o the Steel Wheels period).

I think it's a timeline thing. For you, Tatoo You = Some Girls. For me, Some Girls = snarling craftsmen. I wouldn't mind losing about 15 years, though, even if it means Some Girls becomes my favorite Rolling Stones album. Want to trade timelines?

Some Girls came out just before I entered high school. I had discovered Beggars Banquet and Let it Bleed a year of two before that. I thought Some Girls measured up to those classics at the time a lot better than Goats Head Soup and It's Only Rock 'n' Roll did.

this is up there with rumors for my favorite coke-rock record. voted "shattered" because it seems most emblematic of the record as a whole, but "miss you" is a close second.

Ben Williams once posted on ILM that "Shattered" was an overlooked punk-funk classic, and he's right. That's what I voted for.

i'd buy this except for the overlooked part. contrarily, "shattered" is the only punk-funk classic i can think of that was in regular rock radio rotation when i was in high school. (granted it's not like the djs were saying, "and here's a punk-funk classic from mick and the boys!")

In my 4th grade class we had a copy of this on cassette for some reason & I used to play Shattered over and over again. I was very literal about songs back then, and probably liked it because it sounded like it was about breaking things.

Some Girls was definitely a re-entry point into the Stones for me. I loved them as a kid because my brother owned a few of their classic albums (though the one I gravitated to was the stop sign hits collection, Through the Past Darkly -- the album that "formed me" as much as any single album could be said do have done so). I guess you could say I kept tabs on them throughout the seventies -- I was familiar with all of the albums -- but they ceased being a primary obsession as I got lost in the haze of glitter, prog, punk, etc. (though they were definitely always there). For reasons others have already suggested (punk, mostly, at least in connection with my life) Some Girls just seemed to perfectly fit that moment in what I still cherish as one of the most amazing years I've ever lived through for discovering music (new and old). The Stones mattered to me, in a renewed way, all over again with that record. All that being said, it's not a record I find myself listening to often, though I love the best stuff from it whenever it comes on (I could seriously do without ever hearing "Miss You" and maybe even "Beast of Burden" again, though; the former, for sure, is as played-out for me as "Satisfaction" and "Start Me Up" and half a dozen other Stones classics).

I think I might vote "Respectable."

It has to be up there with Exile on Main as one of the most richly detailed album covers.

Don't these opening lines specifically address/make fun of their situation with regards to punk?

Well now we’re respected in society
We don’t worry about the things that we used to be
We’re talking heroin with the president
Well it’s a problem, sir, but it can’t be bent

("But it can't be bent"? Cut-and-paste from some lyrics site...)

That's the way I hear it. And I have no idea how those lyrics relate to punk. Just cuz some girls came out in '78 and had some fast songs doesn't mean it's a "punk" record. The whole "punk" narrative, an example of which is contained in this thread, is so goddam overblown

Overblown, maybe, but not irrelevant. It seems so obvious. Besides the quote from Jagger above, here's Richards two years ago:

"Without a doubt, the punks certainly made us sort of look around and say, 'Oh my God, we've been around for 10 years already!' The energy of the punk thing affected Some Girls in many ways."

The Rolling Stones didn't make music in a vacuum. They seemed acutely aware of what was going on around them at every stage of their career--Brill Building pop, psychedelia, glam, reggae, disco, whatever. As far as "Respectable" goes, they seem to be either making fun of the punk view of them at the time, or reveling in it--you're right, we hang out at Studio 54 with Truman Capote and Andy Warhol now, take drugs with Margaret Trudeau, don't you wish you were us?

Or both.

dig this

But I don't see things in terms of years — the Sixties, the Seventies — it's just a journalistic convention.

the basic things

this record still siren calls all my most kneejerk cheeseball wastrel instincts

like to lay around all afternoon and eat cheeseballs you mean

that is not a terrible way to spend an afternoon

any daypart basically

been thinking about the songwriting of the earlier 70s albums lately, esp. 'sticky fingers', and i was struck by how many of their songs seemed to start over every 2 bars or so, probably due to being written around riffs, but to hide that fact through a lot of very musical interplay from the band, with people always playing around the main block determined by that riff rather than right in it, so that the songs always just seem very restive. nothing with the very stodgy architectonic feel of ~~~songwriting~~~ you can get from 70s rock. or more conventional pop songwriting's blocked-out feel. when they switch to definite 4-bar forms or something else, it becomes obvious that they do it not just because of the prosody in the lyrics, but because they opt for harmonic structures that make for more conventional rises and falls to mark out the bars.

which is maybe one of the many thrilling things about 'miss you', the basic cell is 4 bars and it's got this incredible boiling billowing motion to it because of the harmonic structure and because of the disco bass arpeggiating all over the place, but it's still being used the way they tended to use their 2-bar cells in an earlier period, with the guitars especially using the space created by the empty fourth bar after the 3-bar riff to make the song like a five minute rubato that still has that charlie watts motor underneath

One of the discoveries of the last twenty years is how many of the riff rockers were actually written by Mick.

Co-DJ'd a fan afterparty for this weekend's Stones concert. One of the turntable needles was acting up, skipping/skating/sticking on perfectly fine records and such, and of course one of the places it got stuck was on that line during "Some Girls".

woke turntable

^^I still laugh about that. It was a Kanye sample waiting to happen.

Reviving because I was today years old when I learned about the CBS version of the album cover from the '80s.

https://images.recordsale.de/600/600/therollingstones-somegirls(41).jpg

Ah:

A third version of the album cover with the hand-drawn faces from the original Valmore ad was used on the 1986 CD reissue.

Re-upping the reference to the videos from their live in texas '78 show

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MYvy3kBYN4Q

sexandsexandsexandsexandsex

shmatteshmatteshmatte

...some kind of fashion

Jumpin' Jack Flash on that Texas show is really hot.

I actually have this show on Blu-Ray, and the picture quality is stunning. (It was shot on film and they still had the camera neg well-preserved.) Worth owning, especially since I usually see used copies for less then $10.