On the turntable this Sunday...Some Girls

Some Girls is the 14th British and 16th American studio album by The Rolling Stones, released in 1978 on Rolling Stones Records, catalog COC 39108. It peaked at #1 on the Billboard 200, and became one of the band's biggest-selling albums in the United States, and has been certified by the RIAA as having six million copies sold as of 2000. It was a major critical success, with many reviewers calling it a classic return to form, and their best album since 1972's Exile on Main St.

With the advent of punk rock, The Rolling Stones, among many of their musical contemporaries, were being targeted by some in the movement as cultural dinosaurs, compromising their standing. Mick Jagger felt invigorated by the provocations and was determined to answer them lyrically. It helped, however, that almost all the punks had, openly or not, idolized the Stones in the 1960s and were heavily influenced by the band's rebellious records from that era.

At least as important for the band's re-invigoration was the addition of Ronnie Wood to the line-up, as Some Girls was the first album recorded with him as a full member. His guitar playing style meshed with, and was similar to, that of Keith Richards. Wood's slide guitar playing would become one of the band's hallmarks, and his unconventional uses of the instrument are prominent on Some Girls. In addition, Jagger, who had learned to play guitar over the previous decade, contributed a third guitar part to many songs. This gave songs like "Respectable" a three-guitar line-up.

Jagger is generally regarded as the principal creative force behind Some Girls. Richards spent much of 1977 under threat of imprisonment (see below), but he was present at all of the "Some Girls" recording sessions. Jagger claimed in a 1995 interview to have written a great number of the album's songs (though when the amount was pointed out to him he denied that the record was mostly his own), including its signature song, "Miss You". In addition to punk, Jagger claims to have been influenced by dance music, most notably disco, during the recording of Some Girls, and cites New York City as a major inspiration for the album, an explanation for his lyrical preoccupation with the city throughout.

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.

For the first time since 1968's Beggars Banquet, the core band — now Jagger, Richards, Wood, Charlie Watts, and Bill Wyman — would be the only musicians on a Rolling Stones album, with few extra contributors. Ian McLagan, Wood's bandmate from The Faces, played keyboards, harmonica player Sugar Blue contributed to several songs, in addition to saxophonist Mel Collins and Simon Kirke, who played percussion (the three jokingly credited as "1 Moroccan, 1 Jew, 1 WASP"). Jagger's guitar contributions caused the band's road manager, Ian Stewart, to be absent from many of the sessions as he felt piano would be superfluous, making this a rare Rolling Stones album on which he did not appear. An alternate story has Stewart pointedly boycotting most of the sessions, claiming the band was sounding like "bloody Status Quo!"

A serious concern was the issue of Keith Richards and his highly-publicized heroin possession bust in Toronto, Ontario in early 1977, resulting in a very real possibility that he might be sent to jail for years. However, due to the judgment that Richards was very separate from the usual theft and anti-social culture that is associated with heroin use, he was sentenced very lightly. He was ordered to perform a charity show for The Canadian National Institute for the Blind. As a commemoration of his second lease on life following the end of his heroin addiction, Keith reverted his surname to "Richards" with an "s" for Some Girls, after fifteen years without it.

The sessions for Some Girls began in October 1977, breaking before Christmas and starting up again after New Year's before finishing in March 1978. Under their new British recording contract with EMI (remaining with Warner Music in North America only), they were able to record at EMI's Pathé Marconi Studios in Paris, a venue at which they would record frequently for the next several years. The Rolling Stones ended up recording about fifty new songs, several of which would turn up in altered forms on Emotional Rescue and Tattoo You. These sessions have also served as a prime source for many bootleg compilations over the years. Engineer for the sessions was Chris Kimsey, whose approach to recording breathed life into the somewhat dense sounding recordings like Goats Head Soup and It's Only Rock 'n' Roll albums. Kimsey's direct method of recording, together with the entrance of the then state-of-the-art Mesa/Boogie Mark I amps instead of the Ampeg SVT line of amps, yielded a bright, direct and aggressive guitar sound. In fact, there have been few Stones sessions as widely bootlegged as these.

There was some controversy surrounded the lyrics to the title song, an extended musing on women of various nationalities and races. The line "Black girls just wanna get fucked all night" drew strong protests from various groups, including Jesse Jackson's PUSH. Jagger famously replied, "I've always said, you can't take a joke, it's too fucking bad," although he was reportedly more conciliatory to Jackson in private, as he claimed the song was intended as a parody of racist attitudes. Saturday Night Live cast member Garrett Morris would have the final say on the controversy with a mock-editorial on the show's Weekend Update segment: After giving the impression that he was going to openly criticize the Stones, he quoted a sanitized version of the "Black girls just..." line, then stated "I have one thing to say to you, Mr. Mick Jagger... where are these women?!?"