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

'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?
― calstars, Friday, June 25, 2010 8:04 PM

It may well be an Army thing from way back, but it was definitely used by guys in Vietnam - I distinctly remember the slogan being referenced in Michael Herr's "Dispatches" which came out in '77.

http://www.vspa.com/images-zippo/zippo-bt-levinson-2-1969-1970.jpg

http://www.camosurplus.com/images/tour_jackets/vietnam_qui_nhon.jpg

Some Girls and "Who Are You" were more oblique, but I'm equally confident that their creators felt both liberated and threatened by punk in roughly equal measure, and that punk was very much on their minds when those records were made

Indeed. Townshend in 1977: "I'm sure I invented it, and yet it's left me behind. ... I prayed for it, and yet it's too late for me to truly participate. I feel like an engineer. Just let me...watch."

Also, "Who Are You" was written the morning after (and about) a drunken encounter with Paul Cook and Steve Jones in a pub.

Thank you, Tarfumes. As with anyone who takes my side when I'm politely disagreeing with xhuxk, you've just won yourself a brand-new set of steak knives. (For you, sw00ds, nothing!)

You're welcome. The thing is, Townshend was willing to engage punk in a way none of his peers were. Not just because they were scared of/felt threatened by it (not all were), but because none of them had the kind of artist-performer relationship that the Who had. Townshend (and, to a far lesser but still significant degree, Daltrey) constantly pored over all possible meanings and implications of any given shift in scenery because of how the Who's engagement with their audiences had been formed in their early days.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Daaaamn.

shocked that BoB beat Miss You...these polls are wacky!

fuck i forgot to vote. i'd have liked to seen a lot more votes for respectable, but tbh i often start on side 2 so i don't blow my wad on miss you, so my vote woulda gone to that.

ok who voted for far away eyes

I like those results, actually. "Beast of Burden" was my runner-up.

i was unable to decide between "miss you", "lies", and "shattered". depends on my mood, i guess.

Expanded Reissues of Some Girls due in November

I like these results. I don't get why there's a couple of posts upthread saying Shattered sounds frightening. It sounds like Jagger's doing a funky rant against NYC and none of the notes played are particulary dismal. Then again, I can't think of any Rolling Stones song that I'd qualify as scary.

The album cover for this release tho, is definitely scary.

I was frightened at the time.

btw I forgot about the xhuxk-clemenza-Soto panel.

I was in my early 20s when I first heard this album... I wasn't around at the time of the release and I didn't get to hear it when I was younger. Is there any particular reason you found it scary Soto? Or is it just Jagger's persona which scared you off?

My first interaction with the Stones music was the bridges of babylon album I was about 11 or 12 I think... and although there wasn't anything particulary scary about that record I did find Mick Jagger's voice oddly disturbing. I'd say his over-sexed persona sometimes borders on rapist and when you're young and new to the whole sex thing listening to him is a bit too much. You just want to to take it slowly and he's giving you the whole thing without any foreplay.

mick's unbelievable mugging in that faraway eyes clip posted above is kinda scary tbh

sometimes I marvel that anyone ever took Mick Jagger seriously. more often than not I find his antics positively clownish/silly

cf. Mick Jagger doing the funky chicken, or the "naughty schoolteacher", or the "watch me attempt to imitate James Brown"

"Gimme Shelter" and "Sway" are the only times he ever sounds demonic.

would add memo from turner + some live versions of midnight rambler to that list.

sympathy for the devil too

sway he sounds half asleep, not demonic

scary=anything off dirty work

There's a live CD/DVD from the 1978 tour coming out this fall, too.

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sometimes I marvel that anyone ever took Mick Jagger seriously. more often than not I find his antics positively clownish/silly

― you will always be wrong (Shakey Mo Collier), miércoles 14 de septiembre de 2011 07:53 PM (31 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

cf. Mick Jagger doing the funky chicken, or the "naughty schoolteacher", or the "watch me attempt to imitate James Brown"

― you will always be wrong (Shakey Mo Collier)

Yeah I get he's being silly, but when you're young and non-british you can't tell the difference and you think he's actually serious so it's borderline creepy. Nowadays I get the humour and I love it.

I do love it sometimes, others I find it distracting. oddly the most genuinely affecting Stones moment for me is "Dead Flowers", a song Jagger reportedly could not/did not take seriously at all.

Track Listing for Reissue

Damn! The three-guitar lineup at its purest.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&feature=fvwp&v=oBlLbNVBKCc

"Do You Think I Really Care" and "Claudine" = classic

The Some Girls bonus disc is the best Stones album since...Some Girls?

Sheer Heart Attack constantly referred to in this thread as being from 1977. It came out in 74. Kind of makes the discussion of it being influenced by punk irrelevant,as if the whole punk conversation on this thread wasn't irrelevant enough.

I wouldn't want to reopen the specifics of what we were going on about three years ago, but surely punk is very relevant to a Rolling Stones album in 1978. I looked up the Jagger Rolling Stone interview from that year, and there's this:

RS: Yet during that time you also wrote "Time Waits for No One," which really is a powerful, ominous, vatic song that no one commented on that much — as if it were a Seventies throwaway.

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

Punk rock, too. I don't want to get into the accusations that the Rolling Stones gave in or up or whatever. It's sort of vaguely true, but it's not really true. To me, rock & roll just goes back to the basic things. It doesn't exist because other people don't come across, it exists because kids want to get up and play very simple. The punk-rock movement said things to get a lot of copy. It's just an excuse to say that Rod Stewart lives in Hollywood and spends millions of dollars. It was just a good line. It wasn't the real reason punk rock existed.

I looked up the interview because I was pretty sure that the topic of punk would come up somewhere. But I expected it to come from the interviewer, not Jagger. I don't have any doubt that it was a subject very much on his mind at the time. This too:

http://www.iorr.org/talk/read.php?1,1560468,1560905

and there's Jann Wenner's 1995 interview:

WENNER:
You came back, though, with “Some Girls.” Did that have to do, perhaps, with being in New York City?
JAGGER:
Yes, you are absolutely right! Well done! I’d moved to New York at that point. The inspiration for the record was really based in New York and the ways of the town. I think that gave it an extra spur and hardness. And then, of course, there was the punk thing that had started in 1976. Punk and disco were going on at the same time, so it was quite an interesting period. New York and London, too. Paris – there was punk there. Lots of dance music. Paris and New York had all this Latin dance music, which was really quite wonderful. Much more interesting than the stuff that came afterward.

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