Contributing musicians: Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Charlie Watts, Bill Wyman, Ron Wood, Ian McLagan, Sugar Blue, Mel Collins, Simon Kirke, Hassan.

Miss You
When the Whip Comes Down
Just My Imagination (Running Away with Me)
Some Girls
Lies
Far Away Eyes
Respectable
Before They Make Me Run
Beast of Burden
Shattered
 
 
 

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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 When the Whip Comes Down from Some Girls.

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.

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.

I never liked punk. Didn't like anybody that played it.

(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 Girls is 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.

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.

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.

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.

I think it's great. Yeah, I think it's one of my best...

This (new album) is more up - especially Shattered and Miss You.

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..

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.

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.

The records that came (just) before this were not as good. This was better.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Some of the British reviews have been unbelievable... things like Death Knell for the Stones! I mean Some Girls is 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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I've always liked the album. It's very different from Exile because 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.

I think the album really stands up. It's a great album in my opinion - humbly, he said..

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.

(My favorite Stones album ) with me (is) Some Girls.

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.

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.

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 keeps Some 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?

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.

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

Back to Main Page.