Review: 'Some Girls: Deluxe Edition' by The Rolling Stones

As soon as The Rolling Stones moved beyond the rudimentary blues and Chuck Berry homages of their first couple of records, they became Rock & Roll’s greatest bandwagon jumpers. Whether the times were ruled by pop, psychedelia, or the Dylan-led roots revival of the late ‘60s, The Stones were always game and almost always did it better than anyone else. After the rough transition that saw them lose their most polished guitarist, Mick Taylor, and their most competent producer, Jimmy Miller, The Stones got straight on 1978’s Some Girls. Although they’d definitely lost a good deal of true grit in the years that saw them gain the gritty Ronnie Wood but slip into a jet set lifestyle more befitting decadent royalty than decadent Rock stars, Some Girls is a solid selection of ten tracks well steeped in the late ‘70s triumvirate of New York punk, disco, and Smokey and the Bandit-style hick country. This may not be The Stones at the peak of their powers, but it is further proof that they could casually dip into the zeitgeist and come up with a bona-fide winner. Some Girls became their biggest seller and is regularly cited as the band’s last great record.

The new deluxe edition of Some Girls is genuinely fascinating because it reveals that even with all the fashionable posturing entombed on that record, The Stones never lost their love for the earthy Rock & Roll and blues that defined them in their earliest years. Appended to the original album— which is presented as a louder, though not necessarily clearer or punchier, remaster than the 1994 CD—is a bonus disc of The Stones sounding looser and more sincere than they had since 1964. Between channeling Studio 54 on “Miss You” or Johnny Rotten on “Respectable”, The Stones were jamming away on Hank Williams and Freddy “Boom Boom” Cannon classics just because they dug them. Along with the covers are untailored originals such as “Claudine”, a lively Rock-a-Billy jam, the pumping blues “So Young”, a close cousin to “Dead Fowers” called “Do You Think I Really Care”, a light-hearted, slightly Latin jaunt called “Don’t Be a Stranger”. Fresh stuff.

A few of these tracks—“No Spare Parts”, “Don’t Be a Stranger”, “You Win Again”—didn’t receive vocal overdubs during the original sessions, so Mick gave them a go in 2011. Because his vocal delivery had already gotten more affected in his current style by the Some Girls sessions, his new vocals don’t stick out as much as they did in the bonus tracks on last year’s deluxe Exile on Main Street. You’d be hard pressed to detect any significant difference between Mick’s delivery on “No Spare Parts” and his work on “Do You Think I Really Care”.

At a non-sprawling twelve tracks, the Some Girls bonus disc creates the pleasing illusion of a long-lost Rolling Stones L.P. If it isn’t essential, it’s certainly a more respectable collection than Black and Blue or Dirty Work. Like Black and Blue, these numbers are more about performance than composition. Unlike Black and Blue, none of them are long-winded or half-hearted. Ultimately, the bonus disc is more of a contrast than a compliment to Some Girls, proof that real hearts still beat in the guys at a time when they seemed to be transforming into automated mimics for good.

Review: ‘33 1/3: Some Girls'

One of the marvelous things about Continuum’s 33 1/3 series is that it allows writers a wide range of approaches to discussing classic albums. Without any set format, the books range from neatly organized (Andy Miller’s The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society and Bryan Waterman’s Marquee Moon opt for tight chronologies followed by track-by-track analyses) to creatively messy (Marc Woodworth’s book on Guided by Voices’ Bee Thousand mimics that album’s random abandon with pleasing results). Some of the series’ writers would be better served by tighter parameters. John Dougan primarily used his The Who Sell Out as a study of pirate radio, failing to give The Who’s greatest album the attention it deserves. Cyrus R.K. Patell is another writer who could have used some editorial guidance. While Woodworth’s Bee Thousand was purposefully sloppy, Patell’s look at The Rolling Stones’ Some Girls gives the impression he wasn’t sure how to fill 150 pages.

This book is all over the place. The writer begins with a personal anecdote about a high school teacher without tying it into the album’s story satisfactorily. He then wastes time going over familiar territory: Andrew Oldham’s grooming of The Rolling Stones as the anti-Beatles. I think Patell’s intention is to establish how every move The Stones made was a reaction to existing factors in the pop world, which he explains via a discussion of literary historian Hans Robert Jauss’s “horizon of expectations” theory, but it’s overly labored for such a short book. All of that wordiness does little to illuminate why Some Girls is exceptional, which is contentious in itself. The album was a good return to form after the water-treading Black and Blue, but it doesn’t measure up to the band’s work from the ‘60s through Exile on Main Street. This book seems as though it was written by a writer who did not realize his subject lacks substance until after starting his assignment. So he filled it out with unnecessary autobiographical tangents, pretentious literary theories, and way, way too many passages pulled from other sources. Patell recycles so much of Life that Keith Richards should receive royalties for this book. What does a reprint of Patell’s own blog review of the Shine a Light concert film have to do with an analysis of Some Girls? I understand how Glen Campbell’s “Rhinestone Cowboy” may be relevant to a discussion of “When the Whip Comes Down” (both songs are about rubes and their eye-opening experiences in NYC), but do we really need to know how Campbell came to record the song and how it moved up the pop charts? More filler.

The most interesting chapter is the one titled “Aftermath”, which covers the controversies Some Girls stirred, The Stones' “Saturday Night Live” performance in support of the album, and reactions to the band in their middle-aged years. But the book goes off the rails again when Patell gets into an extended, irrelevant discussion of the Steel Wheels tour. Is the point to show how commercially minded Jagger had become in the ensuing ten years after The Stones made their reaction to punk? Because punk gestures aside, he was pretty commercially minded in ’78 too. Whatever. This is not the worst book about The Stones out there, but with so many superior choices, it’s not really essential. Kind of like Some Girls.