Some Girls (original) (raw)
SOME GIRLS
Recorded:
October 10-November 25, 1977: Path� Marconi Studios, Paris, France
December 5-21, 1977: Path� Marconi Studios, Paris, France
January 5-March 2, 1978: Path� Marconi Studios, Paris, France
Mixed:
March 15-Mid-April 1978: Atlantic Studios, New York City, USA
Producers:The Glimmer Twins
Chief engineer:Chris Kimsey
Mixer:Chris Kimsey
Released:June 1978
Original label: Rolling Stones Records (on WEA & EMI)
Contributing musicians:Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Charlie Watts, Bill Wyman, Ron Wood, Ian McLagan, Sugar Blue, Mel Collins, Simon Kirke, Hassan.
THE COVER
It's like a parody of a wig ad that they would have in a women's magazine... On the original version we had kind of old-fashioned pictures of Hollywood film stars. I think Doris Day was one of them, Joan Crawford and so on. And then we got into some copyright problems with that. Stupidly, nobody in those days was very good at lawyering. They didn't get the right permissions from the artists. And of course some people wouldn't have minded at all.. And then we got into problems and had to change the cover (laughs). It was a big hassle. It was good fun. The cover was a really good cover. And we loved it but unfortunately we had to change it half way through so it became slightly disappointing to Charlie and myself.
- Mick Jagger, 2011
Some girls weren't so happy (i.e. Lucille Ball, Raquel Welch). We didn't ask them (for their permission). We should have been more gentlemanly.
- Keith Richards, 2011
CREATION
(W)e didn't really make any gas-out records in early '77... We were just fuckin' around. But we had them all in the back of our minds and by the time we reached Paris we'd stored up a lot of songs which we then began to write. When we were doing the mix-downs for Love You Live, we'd tell the engineers to get on with the mix while Keith and I and whoever was around just started playing the new material.
- Mick Jagger, 1978
Well, Mick and I have been working on some songs for the studio album. I've written a bit with Mick, a lot with Keith wherever we've been, New York, Paris, Munich - we've just collected all the ideas, like the stuff we were trying out in the studio. I've gotta make sure I do contribute. After all, I'd hate to become the DORMANT member of the Rolling Stones.
- Ron Wood, August 1977
I think we'll tour, but as we have all these songs for the next album, I think we should get them down.
- Mick Jagger, September 1977
We COULD talk about the next album, but then that's difficult (grins). I don't know what to say about it. I've written a lot of songs for it which are REALLY GREAT. I hope it's gonna be a good album. I ALWAYS hope it's gonna be a good album... You can get a feel for the album from the songs that have been written. But there's no use bragging about it or theorizing it 'til we've at least started it. It SHOULD be a good album. I'm hoping to get it done quickly. Of course, that sounds very good now, but this time next year we'll be sitting here saying What happened to that really QUICK album?
- Mick Jagger, September 1977
(The songs on the next album) should all be good. I think that before every album. But you know, you just do what you do the best that you can. We'll do our best to make it as good as possible. Songs are always important. Yeah, this has to be a really great album. But again, that's what I usually think. Maybe we can make this one better than the others. I hope so. I'm very optimistic about it.
- Mick Jagger, September 1977
While we were in Paris Mick and I wrote more songs together than we had done in ages.
- Keith Richards, 1978
Because we hadn't been together for a while, we needed to get back our old form of writing and collaborating - doing it all on the day, there and then, composing from scratch or semi-scratch. We jumped straight in, back to our old ways with remarkable results.
- Keith Richards, Life (2010)
All but one track, Far Away Eyes, were cut before Christmas and we started the sessions at the beginning of last November. That includes rehearsing... I mean, we took a month off just playing together before we actually commenced laying down backing tracks.
- Keith Richards, 1978
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.
- Mick Jagger, 1995
(T)he album itself (has a lot of New York references) because I was staying in New York part of last year, and when I got to Paris and was writing the words, I was thinking about New York. I wrote the songs in Paris... I'd written some of my verses before I got into the studio, but I don't like to keep singing the same thing over and over, so it changed. And I was noticing that there were a lot of references to New York, so I kept it like that. Some Girls isn't a concept album, God forbid, but it's nice that some of the songs have connections with each other - they make the album hold together a bit... But then there's Bakersfield (laughs).
- Mick Jagger, 1978
We recorded it in Paris, but it was mostly written in New York. Mick was living there and so was I. So there was a New York vibe behind it, absolutely, we just had to transfer it to Paris for whatever reason.
- Keith Richards, 2011
Obviously it was all influenced by New York feeling and the French never got ... there was no accordions used. 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.... (There was s)o much going on, a lot going on musically then. You've got punk and dance and the beginnings of hip-hop. And there's also some really quite interesting documentaries of the city of that time, some really fascinating ones. And the art scene as well. It was very vibrant and very quick-changing so there's really a lot on amidst the kind of squalor of the whole thing, the fiscal uncertainty of it all.
- Mick Jagger, 2011
New York was fantastic. Well, it was fun for some people. I'm not sure it was fun for everyone. For regular families it was a very difficult time. The city was in a terrible financial mess, the services didn't work, the garbage didn't get picked up... But out of this Third World city came this great ferment of music and art... A lot of interesting music and art made it through the squalor. There was a big art scene then, as partly described in Do You Think I Really Care, a country song about New York. Yeah, it was a vibrant art scene, lots of comings and goings, new things, new people. And great music scene, too, with dancing, clubs - you know, a mix-up, a mash-up of everything. I saw this documentary a year or two ago, and it reminded me of that time. You had Sugarhill Gang and Blondie playing on the same bill. It was before the time when people were afraid of mixing up genres. It was so new, no one knew what genre they were in, really. And New York being geographically small, it was quite easy to get around, so there was lots of people connecting. The Clash did great dance remixes, you know?... In a lot of ways, Some Girls reflects those comings and goings.
- Mick Jagger, 2011
You also had Afrika Bambaataa, and hip hop beginning in Brooklyn... You can live in a complete bubble but the fact is I DON'T live in a bubble. So if the fashion for the last three years had been sweet folk music I dare say there would have been a bit of that on the next Stones record. If that's what you're hearing on the radio, you start playing it.
- Mick Jagger, 2011
I think a lot of (the reasons for the album's quality) 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?_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. We're talking about that post-Exileperiod:Goats Head Soup, Black And Blue, which was really an audition for a new guitar player, and Only Rock 'N Roll. We were dealing with a whole load of problems that built up from being who we were, what the '60s were. There was the fact that we all had to leave England if we wanted to keep the Stones going, which we did, and then trying to re-deal with each other when suddenly we were scattered half-way around the globe instead of see you in half an hour. Also dealing with a lot of success and a lot of money over a long period. We'd been working non-stop and then suddenly had to deal with a backlog of problems that had built up because nobody'd had time to deal with them.
- Keith Richards, 1985
The interesting thing about making that album was we felt an enormous kick from the punks. There suddenly was this other generation coming on and they couldn't play for (anything) but they were kicking (butt). Some Girlswas the response because we had been cruising before that, I think... Not that I'm a really big punk fan, but their energy - and the fact that you realize another generation was coming up on top of you - was a kick up the ass. It felt time to get down to the nuts and bolts of it and not play around with glamorous female voices and horns and stuff.
- Keith Richards, 2011
The Some Girls sessions were good sessions. That was the first time that I'd worked with the band, engineering for them. I met them during Sticky Fingers when Glyn Johns was working with them and I was assisting Glyn... I didn't meet them again until Some Girls, when Ian Stewart called me up one day - I'd just arrived back in England from the States - and the phone rang and Stu said, Mick and Keith would like you to come do the new album in Paris. That's how it started.
- Chris Kimsey, 1982
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 Path� Marconi, it was intended for rehearsals only. But the room had such a good sound even though the disk was only 16-track, they began to feel comfortable. It made for a more relaxed atmosphere which led to a certain spontaneity in the music.
- Chris Kimsey, 1979
For Some Girls, Mick hooked us up with Chris Kimsey as the engineer, and found a very good studio in Paris, which turned out to be somewhere that we felt very comfortable working in. I practically lived there for the best part of six years... A lot of the good stuff was done, as it always is, when we nailed the right team to work together in the right room. In theory, you can make a record anywhere as long as you've got the right guy to do it with and he's brought the right microphones along.
- Keith Richards, 2003
We were in the Path� Marconi studios because they were owned by EMI, with whom we'd just made a big deal. This one was way on the outskirts of town in Boulogne-Billancourt, near the Renault factory; nothing around like restaurants or bars. It was a car ride, and I remember taht I was listening to Jackson Browne's Running on Empty on a daily commuter basis.
- Keith Richards, Life (2010)
Mick or Keith would come in with a riff or an idea. No one else in the band had heard it until that moment. Paris is a very good environment for them. It was a great place for them to work... A lot of that album was so much fun. It was like being at a club every night, like a nightclub atmosphere. What they would do - it was either Mick or Keith's song - was to jam it for a couple of hours and then fine tune it and get it down.
- Chris Kimsey
At first, we'd booked into this enormous rehearsal studio like a soundstage, with a tiny control room that fitted barely two people and with a primitive 1960s console and a basic 16-track. The shape was odd because the console faced the window and a wall, which held the speakers, but the wall went off at an angle, so one speaker was always farther away from you than the other during playbacks... Kimsey spotted immediately that this studio had truly great sound properties. Because it was a rehearsal room, we'd rented it cheap, which was lucky because we spent a long time on this record and never moved into the proper studio next door. The primitive mixing desk turned out to be the same kind of soundboard designed by EMI for Abbey Road Studios - very humble and simple, with barely more than a treble and bass button but with a phenomenal sound, which Kimsey fell in love with... The sound it got had clarity but dirtiness, a real funky, club feel to it that suited what we were doing.
- Keith Richards, Life (2010)
The live area was a huge oblong, but you couldn't see the left-hand side of it at all from the control room at the far end. What's more, the walls were decorated with these goddamn awful orange hessian cubes and white pegboard - a classic case of the French going for moderne and getting it horribly wrong. It was awful. The only thing I liked was that, despite the floor being shiny graphite, those orange hessian cubes soaked up any reverb and so the huge room wasn't at all echoey... I set up the band in a semicircle facing the control room, with the drums in the middle, Keith to the left of Charlie from my perspective, Ronnie's amp next to Keith, and then, to the right of Charlie, Mick's guitar and Bill on the end. The keyboards were in front of the control room window. Screens were placed behind the band and used as divisions between each amp, so that each of the guys were in their own little booths without anything in front of them. That meant they could actually hear what was coming out of their amps, and I also put up a little Shure PA for them to hear Mick's vocals as well as Charlie's snare and kick.
- Chris Kimsey, 2004
There's quite a characteristic drum sound on Some Girls, and as the guitars were so loud it helped to have Charlie's snare fill up the room a bit more. I didn't really want them to use headphones, I wanted to create sort of a live atmosphere, and they went along with that. I remember being terrified the first time Mick and Keith ever came in the control room, because they just stood at the back and whispered. But then they said, Yeah, it sounds great. OK, next.That was it. They knew it sounded great. That having been said, God knows how anybody knew it sounded good, because the control room was the weirdest place of all. For one thing, you couldn't fit more than four people in it. And for another, the wall slanted outwards as it went towards the door, with the desk placed at an angle to the speakers so that the left-hand speaker was closer to you than the right-hand speaker. It looked like a complete shit-hole, yet somehow it sounded amazing. There were these huge great JBLs that could tear your ears off, and it was very rock & roll.
- Chris Kimsey, 2004
(I)t takes too long (to produce our own albums). I'd like someone else to produce them, but I can't find anybody... No one even calls us up and offers! Luckily, we've got Chris Kimsey, who's our engineer, and he made things easier. We didn't have to spend a lot of time in the control room. I knew he'd get a good drum sound, so I didn't have to run in all the time and worry. He was great.
- Mick Jagger, 1978
They were long sessions, some of them. I mean, we wouldn't start until midnight. It was just Paris. Everybody would have dinner first and then wind their way to the studio around midnight so then you would go on until whenever. For all I know, the sun was always up when I went out (laughs)... To me, I remember it as a load of fun, but I'm sure some other people might have other ideas (laughs).
- Keith Richards, 2011
Sometimes you still hadn't heard anything by 3 AM, you'd go to bed, then the phone would ring an hour later. And it was Keith: Where are ya?
- Bill Wyman, 2011
We'd go into town to party. I didn't speak French, so half the time I didn't know where the hell I was. I'd be on the phone, I'm in a club. Couldn't pronounce the name. Mick would try and give me French lessons when we were both stoned. I still have these tapes of him trying to teach me phrases. They are hilarious, because I have the attention span of a fly... What was that again Mick? Voulez-vous what?
- Ron Wood, 2011
I wanted the new album to be a dance record with mostly fast stuff on it. And there were other songs we cut out that I would have preferred on the album. I wanted to take _Beast of Burden_off - that would have depressed you - you know what I mean?
- Mick Jagger, 1978
I'm very pleased with what the band was playing in Paris, when we recorded. And I'm pleased with what I'm playing too. I played guitar on the album, I enjoyed very much playing guitar - more than singing almost. I like to do both, but the thing is, I can't do both very well yet, that's the trouble... I wanted to do it because I want to do everything. I play drums, you know, I love to play the drums. Ask Charlie. We all play drums. Ronnie plays drums, everyone wants to do the other role, you know.
- Mick Jagger, 1978
A lot of these tunes are me playing the guitar very loud.
- Mick Jagger, 2002
I remember on Sticky Fingers if there was going to be two guitars Mick would play acoustic, but this was the first time I saw him play electric. I think that's where the punk element came from - Mick playing electric rhythm guitar, very loudly. Keith used to go around sometimes and unplug his amp because it was too fucking loud!
- Chris Kimsey, 2002
The punk influence was really coming in strong. It had a great energy and attitude. It moved our ass, boy. See, the thing I loved about those times was the attitude and a new generation coming up.Unfortunately, only a very few (bands) could actually play, you know, music.
- Keith Richards, 2011
The punk stuff was really the mood of the moment. Mick is a great flavour-of-the-month person, so we had gone from playing the four on the floor rhythms on Miss You to trying to be Johnny Rotten, who was trying to be us, in a way. That was fine with me, because it's really all the same thing.
- Charlie Watts, 2003
I liked The Clash and thought the Sex Pistols were interesting. They were doomed to crash because of what they did to themselves. As musicians, they didn't mean the same to me as Marvin Gaye, but it was all about a sound and an atmosphere.
- Charlie Watts, 2011
Those punk songs were our message to those boys. We never sat around talking about punk, but you couldn't avoid it. It was on the news all the time with the Sex Pistols and the Clash and all the other punk bands... Funnily enough, I saw the guys from Green Day backstage on the Forty Licks tour: they made some records that reminded me of Respectable and W_hen the Whip Comes Down_ from Some Girls.
- Ron Wood, 2003
The Stones didn't know punk. When I was in Paris, Keith was going, What are they like, these punks? He thought they were aliens because they had alienated themselves from us older boys. I said, Keith, they are just l ike you and me. And most of them wre huge Stones and Faces fans.
- Ian McLagan, 2011
The punks had the energy and attiude and presentation more than the actual music. I went to places like CBGB's, but I was in and out. But the punk thing had heen crossing over from England, and Mick always had a keen ear for anything new. I think it caught his attention, and so we transported it to Paris. Some Girls is a review of where Mick was going out to - one minute, slumming it down at CBGB's, the next going uptown to Studio 54.
- Keith Richards, 2011
I never liked punk. Didn't like anybody that played it.
- Bill Wyman, 2011
(It's n)ot really (influenced by punk rock). When you look at the original album and even if you want to look at the outtakes, it sort of is but that's an easy kind of tag you can always put on it. Miss You isn't really punk and Far Away Eyes isn't. Some Girlsis kind of a blues. It's with harmonica and slide guitar and all. It's got that kind of attitude to it but it's not that music, except in a couple of places.
- Mick Jagger, 2011
Well (the) punk heyday was sort of ’76 and ’77, really. So this was kind of the end of it, if you want. Nobody knew it was going to be quite so short-lived perhaps, or morph into sort of something else. And also, punk meant something a bit different in New York than it did in London. The sort of punk scene in New York, you know, you had The Ramones and you had the New York Dolls, but they didn’t really play that kind of music, you know what I mean? And it was a very different – it was more of a glam look. New York was sort of different than what the Sex Pistols were putting out. I mean, my favorite band of that period, was The Clash, definitely. They definitely had a dance sensibility, as well as a rock sensibility.
- Mick Jagger, 2011
In many ways, Some Girls was a celebration of getting Keith back, but I was also enjoying the interplay with Mick. I was having a lot of fun hanging out with Mick and being involved in shaping up the songs, as much as with Keith. Whereas Keith was saying to me, Hey, come over to my side a bit more, you don't want to hang with the vocalist. I had to play the whole thing very carefully!
- Ron Wood, 2003
(A) lot of bands have used three guitars effectively, and as long as all three don't play together too much it has interesting possibilities. When I'm singing I tend to stop playing at the beginning of a number, so it just sounds normal. Then when I start playing on the chorus it can give that extra lift. I don't know if Keith and Woody agree with this, but I think it enables them to solo together while knowing that I'm playing the bottom rhythm parts and so nothing is lost.
- Mick Jagger, 1978
That's right. The reason why we got into the three guitars on this album is because Stu wasn't playing any keyboards during the Paris sessions - he was either somewhere else or didn't feel like it or wasn't into it... or probably the piano wasn't any good! So there was just the five of us in the studio. The way we always lay new songs out is, whoever has written it plays it over so as to familiarize the rest of us with the basic tune and chord sequence... so, by the time we've run many of the songs down, Mick has got his bits off dead right. And so, from the very beginning we've worked the songs out for three guitars.
- Keith Richards, 1978
Yeah, this is the album were we allowed Mick to play guitar. He's a great rhythm guitar player. But other times I'd think, Christ I wish I had never let you put that thing in your hand! Did I unplug him in the studio? I have no doubt I did, and more than a couple of times.
- Keith Richards, 2011
Keith could get a bit territorial. What I was trying to do with my guitar playing was make it simplistic. I just wanted to give the songs an edge, because Keith and Ronnie can be quite relaxed blues players - and I am not.
- Mick Jagger, 2011
I was more tolerant of it than Keith was. Mick would show me an idea on the guitar - like Shattered - and then leave it to me. But Keith would see him and go, Why the bloody hell is Mick playing guitar again? And I'd be like, Keith, he's just explaining what he wants.
- Ron Wood, 2011
Musically, Ronnie meshed into the jumble of guitar sounds which that album had. (He brought) a lot of energy and enthusiasm and some nice licks, which is what you're asking from him, but I don't think it changed things much.
- Mick Jagger, 2002
(I)t was the first full album that I was doing with Ronnie, so we were all feeling our way in that respect. We were just getting into each other's way of playing on this stuff... That was one of the joys of it. Every session we'd go to, every day - and we were there a long time - Ronnie and I realized we were finding a way to play together. As Ronnie calls it, the ancient form of weaving. You don't know which guitar is doing what. And that's the joy of playing with two guitars or three, the interaction. I remember it as a fun album to make.
- Keith Richards, 2011
When I really think about Some Girls, I recall that we were just having a lot of fun, you know? It was Ronnie’s first complete record with us, and he and I were figuring each other out and stuff. Very electric, very exciting. So for me, it was a interesting record to make.
- Keith Richards, 2011
Everybody was exploding with riffs. The motto was More fast numbers... We'd go into a Western mode, we'd go into heavy rock & roll mode, and we'd just go into songs in A.
- Ron Wood, 2011
Basically (Mick)'d say, I've got a song, and then I'd say, What if we do it this way or that way?
- Keith Richards, Life (2010)
What a lot of Some Girlswas down to was this little green box I used, this MXR pedal, a reverb-echo. For most of the songs on there I'm using that, and it elevated the band and it gave it a different sound. In a way, it came down to a little bit of technology. It was kind of like Satisfaction. On Some Girls I just found a way of making that thing work, at least through all of the fast songs.
- Keith Richards, Life (2010)
Ian McLagan, my old sparring partner from the Faces, also came over to Paris... Mac was, and is, very valuable: he has the piano-playing spirit of Nicky Hopkins and Ian Stewart and - from more recent times - Chuck Leavell.
- Ron Wood, 2003
I've used (my first bass guitar) on nearly every single record with the exception of the Some Girls album; I used a Travis Bean for that... I've now got a Travis Bean that was built to my size specifications... The bottom notes were clean all the way down, which was something I was really looking for... I used it on Some Girls exclusively, and it's probably the best bass sound I've ever had on record. And if you can hear yourself sounding that good, you can play that good, too... I've felt more daring over the last four years. I took a lot more chances on Some Girls, and I was very pleased because most of the things worked out really well.
- Bill Wyman, 1978
On the new record, the band is much more together; they really played well during the sessions - and not only on what you hear, but also on all the stuff we did. We did so much that we didn't know what to do with all of it. We had four songs with the same uptempo idea, and originally I thought of having every song be a continuation of the other. Ian Stewart, who plays piano with us, said: Everything seems to be in A. And I said: _Well, Beethoven wrote whole symphonies in one key, what does it fucking matter?_So we decided that the songs that would go on the album would be the ones that we finished first!
- Mick Jagger, 1978
The real difference for us was cutting Some Girls without having any other rmusicians present - any other musicians that we did use were only called in later to contribute specific extras. For a change, this album was purely our own affair. Sure, we overdubbed a couple of things later, but the actual record and the overall feel depended entirely on the five of us. And that kind of made us work even harder at it. There was more incentive.
- Keith Richards, 1978
Let's put it this way. The more musicians you use the longer it takes. The bigger the band the slower the process. Without any conscious effort, this time around we stripped things right down to the bare bones. Also, you have to remember that this is the first album proper that Ronnie Wood has cut with the Stones. Luckily, unlike Mick Taylor's introduction where he came straight in and began recording, Woody and I have enjoyed two years on the road which has enabled the both of us to really get our thing together.
- Keith Richards, 1978
The thing that makes this record very focused, it's a limited amount of people in the same place doing just 10 tracks and zeroing in on them. It's not two years' work in three different studios and all this sort of stuff. Songs came very quickly. You're not going to have 18 songs. You're only going to have 10, bang bang bang, and the rest you leave by the wayside and pick them up 30, 40 years later. I remember it being a very enjoyable experience because you got something at the end that was exciting.
- Mick Jagger, 2011
One of the good things about the record is this unity - it was all done in Paris in a relatively short space of time. There were a lot of Keith problems but once we were in there, it was pretty concentrated.
- Mick Jagger, 2011
I think that's what actually made it more fun. Once I was in the studio, I could forget all the several indictments that were hanging over my head (laughs). Just send them away. That's what music can do, I guess. At the same time, I was never particularly concerned about the outcome of any of these things. I just felt that the people wouldn't put me in jail, you know? (laughs)
- Keith Richards, 2011, on making the album while awaiting trial
I don't really recall that pressure being in the studio. I think we just got on with it. In the run-up to it, it was a hassle, and I remember working on some of the songs while Keith was actually in prison or working on his defense or whatever, but I remember in the studio it didn't seem to affect anyone particularly. It was good to put it out of your mind, sort of forget it.
- Mick Jagger, 2011, on making the album in those circumstances
We wanted to forget about Keith's agonies. Put on the blinkers, get obliterated and concentrate on the music.
- Ron Wood, 2011
(I didn't want to make a disco album.) I wanted to make more of a rock album. I just had one song that had a dance groove: Miss You. But I didn't want to make a disco album. I wrote all these songs - like_Respectable_,Lies,When the Whip Comes Down.
- Mick Jagger, 1995
(T)he studio was really great to work in and the engineer, Chris Kimsey, was on top of things, so Keith and I didn't really have to work too hard during the actual cutting - we just worked hard on the mixing. And what you have is the basic sound that came off the original tape. We had all these tracks and so Keith and I agreed that the FIRST ten to come out completed would be the ones on the album. That was the only way we could do it.
- Mick Jagger, 1978
The main reason (for the album's success) is and was that I'd kicked junk (heroin), and that we hadn't worked, we hadn't been in the studio for a long time and everybody, including most of the Stones, were thinking, Ah well, Keith's finally rode himself into the dirt, and we got together for that - and thanks to the incentive the Canadians have given me (giggles). It's another one of those impossible things to put your finger on because it was a great studio, first time that we'd worked with Kimsey, who was one in a long line of Olympic Studios (engineers) - that's in England, folks, for you that don't know - T-boys, who've always been our best engineers. Keith Harwood is another one. And it all came together very nicely and also 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.
- Keith Richards, 1982
APPRECIATION
I wonder what other people are going to think of the album. I mean, we've been knocked a lot recently - I don't really know what they expect us to do.
- Mick Jagger, 1978
I think it's great. Yeah, I think it's one of my best...
Mick Jagger, 1978
This (new album) is more up - especially_Shattered_and_Miss You_.
- Mick Jagger, 1978
There aren't any filler tracks on this album. The band was most aware of avoiding that. From the start we KNEW the album was going to be full of strong tracks. Anything slightly dodgy was shelved. I know people expect this album to be great. And I don't think anyone will be disappointed..
- Ron Wood, 1978
Yeah... I guess you're right. We were feeling a little under pressure to come out with something different... or the same... or whatever... (I don't think the Stones became lazy.) I read all those reviews that insist that Some Girls is the best Stones album since Exile On Main Street - but you remember what that very same reviewer wrote about Exile when that first came out. He slagged it off unmercifully. As you're aware, Exile took a long time for a lot of people to really get into.
- Keith Richards, 1978, being told the album
is their best since Exile On Main Street
I think Some Girls is the best album we've done since Let It Bleed. I hate to say that because usually I say I love all the albums, or I hate them all, or none of them means anything to me, don't bother me with it, etc. But I do think it's a good album, and I'm not going to be too modest about it. I think it has continuity in the characterizations - it doesn't have the holes, it's a bit better than the others. Most albums I buy have four out of ten good songs. And this one has, I think, more than that.
- Mick Jagger, 1978
The records that came (just) before this were not as good. This was better.
- Mick Jagger, 2011
Yeah, every song should be good... and the reason perhaps WHY this album IS good is that we did 42 songs (laughs). So we could cut the deadwood away, but there was a lot of good material.
- Mick Jagger, 1978
Well, I just realized that we had to (do it right with this album). People expect a lot more from us than they do everybody else.
- Mick Jagger, 1978
Well, the fact that we did deliver... hold on, we didn't FEEL that we were going into the studio under that sort of pressure, 'cause we always try to make a good album. Whether or not an album hits the right spark is another thing entirely.
- Keith Richards, 1978
Personally I don't particularly want to milk this album for singles. But you're right. Potentially there are at least three strong singles on it. So I wouldn't mind pulling off another track... two at the very most, then follow through with a brand new one.
- Keith Richards, 1978
The radio stations are spinning some of the more up-tempo cuts, but when you take a close look at the album there are only about three songs that are similar - the rest aren't. Miss You,Far Away Eyes, Shattered and Beast of Burden are quite different to the out-and-out rockers like Respectable, Lies and When the Whip Comes Down... And despite the fact that all of the songs aren't of the 1-2-3 Go! variety, there's continuity about the new material.
- Mick Jagger, 1978
Some of the British reviews have been unbelievable... things like Death Knell for the Stones! I mean Some Girlsis our biggest album in years and some of those provincial newspapers... the least said the better. You sometimes wonder if they've actually heard the bleeding album... And those who like the album all say it's the best since Exile, right?... Well I did like Exile very much... But people don't understand, especially the English reviewers. They seem to have this weird idea of the Rolling Stones as being this band and we've never been THAT band, but they imagine we are. We can do THAT band if we want to... (A)t the same time they conveniently forget Lady Jane,Ruby Tuesday and Play with Fire, which is more or less the same period.
- Mick Jagger, 1978
I think Some Girls is a good record to party to. It's not one of my favorite Stones albums, because some of the other ones have been so much better.
- Mick Taylor, 1979
There's so much energy on the tape and on the record. It's - I mean, when I listen to it, you compare with other bands and people say, _It makes me sound like the Rolling Stones_but, you know, there's an energy they have that no one else really capture. There's a rawness and - I haven't got it down yet but the Stones certainly HAVE got it down (laughs).
- Chris Kimsey, 1982
Yeah, well... I really don't know why it came out like that (laughs). There were so many other songs we cut... I guess we picked those because they hung together, lyrically and musically. They were all written over a short, recent period of time.... My anima is very strong... What you're saying, though, is there are two different types of girls in my songs: there's the beautiful dreamy type and the vicious bitch type. There are also one or two others, but, yeah, you're right - there are two kinds of girls... only I never thought about it before.
- Mick Jagger, 1978, asked about the lyrics
being primarily concerned with women
As far as the songs go, one talks about one's own experience a lot of the time. And you know, a lot of bright girls just take all of this with a pinch of salt. But there are a lot of women who ARE disgraceful, and if you just have the misfortune to have an affair with one of those... it's a personal thing... It's easy for me to write that kind of song because my talent seems to lie in that direction, and I can only occasionally come up with a a really good love song - it's easier to come out with the other side of the coin. So I choose what I do best, that's all.
- Mick Jagger, 1978
As far as the songs go, one talks about one's own experience a lot of the time. And you know, a lot of bright girls just take all of this with a pinch of salt. But there are a lot of women who ARE disgraceful, and if you just have the misfortune to have an affair with one of those... it's a personal thing.
- Mick Jagger, 1978
I thought Some Girls was the most immediate album we had done in a long while and you can't argue with seven million sales. It took off just at the right period in the band's evolution.
- Keith Richards, 1979
I don't think Some Girls was very good because it was full of really simple two-chord sogns and I think they went on a bit.
- Ian Stewart, 1982
There's quite a few songs on that album I think are good. I still like things like_Miss You_... The whole album has something in it.
- Mick Jagger, 1984
It was a really great record. I seem to like records that have one overriding mood with lots of little offshoots. Even though there's a lot of bases covered, there's lots of straight-ahead rock and roll. It's very brass-edged. It's very Rolling Stones, not a lot of frills.
- Mick Jagger, 1995
The important body of work, say from Beggars Banquet through to Exile. And then again Some Girls. I like Tattoo You very much and I like Dirty Work very much.
- Keith Richards, 1995, asked what are his favorites Stones albums
I've always liked the album. It's very different from Exilebecause it's so focused. It's 10 tracks and it doesn't have tons of horn parts or backing vocalists or anything like that. It's sort of a very group-focused piece and stripped down and to the point.
- Mick Jagger, 2011
I think the album really stands up. It's a great album in my opinion - humbly, he said..
- Mick Jagger, 2011
Um, well, both really. I think you just keep the whole thing going with both albums. The thing about Some Girls is it’s really short and straight and to the point. Exile’s completely the opposite. It’s sort of rambling and takes in everything, and has lots of different sounds on it.
- Mick Jagger, 2011, asked whether he'd put on Exile or Some Girls for a party
(My favorite Stones album ) with me (is)Some Girls.
- Ron Wood, 1998
Some Girls is one of my favourite Rolling Stones albums out of the ones that the band has made since I've been with them.
- Ron Wood, 2003
I suppose that over the years Some Girls has proven to be something of a milestone that I was happy enough to be involved in.
- Ron Wood, November 2018, asked what his favorite Stones album is
REVIEW EXCERPTS
With Bob Dylan no longer bringing it all back home, Elvis Presley dead and the Beatles already harmlessly cloned in the wax-museum nostalgia of a Broadway musical, it's no wonder the Rolling Stones decided to make a serious record. Not particularly ambitious, mind you, but serious. These guys aren't dumb, and when the handwriting on the wall starts to smell like formaldehyde and that age-old claim, the greatest rock & roll band in the world," suddenly sounds less laudatory than laughable - well, if you want to survive the Seventies and enter the Eighties with something more than your bankbook and dignity intact, you'd better dredge up your leftover pride, bite the bullet and try like hell to sweat out some good music. Which is exactly what the Stones have done. Though time may not exactly be on their side, with Some Girls they've at least managed to stop the clock for a while.
This is no small accomplishment. It's not a big one either. Thus far, the critical line claims that Some Girls is the band's finest LP since its certified masterpiece, Exile on Main Street, and I'll buy that gladly. What I won't buy is that the two albums deserve to be mentioned in the same breath... Instead, Some Girls is like a marriage of convenience: when it works - which is often - it can be meaningful, memorable and quite moving, but it rarely sends the arrow straight through the heart... Because Jagger is such an excellent singer, he almost makes you believe everything he says, but it's that "almost" - which wouldn't matter at all if he weren't a Rolling Stone, i.e., the best - that keepsSome Girls from going right over the top. Too often, we're faced with a question that goes well beyond the usual some-tension-within-the-material-is-necessary argument and into the area of, why is this man lying when he's obviously pleased as punch with himself and is getting roomfuls of satisfaction? After all, if you don't believe that Jay Gatsby really loves Daisy in his divinely crazy way, what good is it?
- Paul Nelson, Rolling Stone, August 1978
I'm not pissed at you personally, I'm fucking pissed at Rolling Stone. I got real mad at this vicious shit that was printed. I've given all this great access. This is the end. No more interviews... I don't mind criticism, REAL criticism, but I don't expect this kind of bitchiness. I can smell it. It STINKS. Rolling Stone will always say, the Stones are great for four weeks and then knock us down. Set you up and then knock you down. That cunt of a boss of yours... I've known Rolling Stone a long time and gotten on with a few people. I don't trust many people, you know. I trusted Rolling Stone and they let me down... This is goodbye for Rolling Stone.
- Mick Jagger to Rolling Stone's Chet Flippo, 1978, after the review
The Stones' best album since Exile on Main Street is also their easiest since Let It Bleed or before. They haven't gone for a knockdown uptempo classic, a Brown Sugar or Jumping Jack Flash - just straight rock and roll unencumbered by horn sections or Billy Preston. Even Jagger takes a relatively direct approach, and if he retains any credibility for you after six years of dicking around, there should be no agonizing over whether you like this record, no waiting for tunes to kick in. Lyrically, there are some bad moments - especially on the title cut, which is too fucking indirect to suit me - but in general the abrasiveness seems personal, earned, unposed, and the vulnerability more genuine than ever. Also, the band is a real good one - especially the drummer. A
- Robert Christgau, Consumer Guide (Creem), 1978