The Rolling Stones - Some Girls

Some Girls (COC 39108) 

Released 1978

Miss You

When The Whip Comes Down
Just My Imagination
Some Girls
Lies
Far Away Eyes
Respectable
Before They Make Me Run
Beast Of Burden
Shattered

With the awful, suspended longing of "Just My Imagination", the cosmic rush of "When the Whip Comes Down," and the sleazy, sweaty embrace of the title tune, a sexual tour of everything under the sun. - Greil Marcus

This is New York 70's music.  Honky sax, the sound of the Saturday Night Live band.  It's New York from the discoid kick-off to the Manhattan litany on "Shattered."  It's a New York as The Dolls or The Velvet Underground and Nico.  You could do a whole shelf full of New York albums.  This would be on it.

This is the comeback.    Only RnR was rock star glitzy.  Black and Blue was flailing and funked-out.  This is closer to the big city sleaze of Exile.  This is also the beginning of the Ron Wood era.  A pricklier, tighter, punky/funky sound.  The map for the next 8 years is here.  

It's New York in the late seventies.  And Mick's lonely.  To a slick disco beat (an "eerie" disco single as one reviewer called it), he longs for his old lay.  Friends call to cheer him up ("Hey, what's the matter man? Were gonna come around at twelve with some puerto rican girls that are just dyin to meet you. Were gonna bring a case of wine. Hey, lets go mess and fool around
you know, like we used to.").  It ain't working.  So he walks Central Park after dark, singing to himself.  The stage is set.  The whole album's about sex and longing.  

"When the Whip Comes Down" is all sex and NYC.  "Yeah I'm coming from fifty-third street and they spit on my face/Well I'm learning the ropes and I'm learning the trade/Well the east river truckers are churning with trash..." Mick once cited the Velvets as inspiration for "Stray Cat Blues," but this is more Lou Reed-y than anything he's ever written.  "Just My Imagination" was a gorgeous, string-laden suite by The Temptations.  Here Keith and Ron turn the strings into gnarly, gorgeous guitar licks while Mick manages to sound simultaneously sincere and smirking.  The "runaway runaway runaway run run run run run" fade-out may the last transcendent moment on a Stones record.  Then he takes it all away on the "sleazy, sweaty embrace of the title track," extolling the virtues of girls of every ethnicity he can think of and lamenting their unreasonable demands.  This was a new (high)(low) in smirking sleaze for Mick's persona, and the music backs him every step of the way.  

"Lies" is a throwaway, but "Far Away Eyes" is the last of the Stones great country songs (until "The Worst" shows up on Voodoo Lounge 16 years later).  That its pure pedal steel in cheek is only part of its charm.  The Bakersfield reference tells us Mick`n'Keith hadn't forgotten what they learned from Gram Parsons, or which side their cornbread is buttered on.  

"Respectable" - classic Chuck Berry rocker.  I used to rewind the tape just to hear the guitar windout Keith plays at the end.  "Before They Make Me Run", Keef's last great outlaw anthem (who cares if he got off with a slap on the wrist).  Also his best voal.  "Beast Of Burden", Mick pleads for love.  It's great vocal acting - he sounds utterly insincere and yet you can't imagine she'll turn him down.  Much like the rest of the Stones career - us fans keep letting them back in no matter how much they disappoint us, because, god forgive us, we still love them.  

And then it's back to the streets.  Go ahead, bite the big apple.  Don't mind the maggots.  This was their "punk" number, and it only showed that the Stones could master any rock and roll move they set their minds too.  It seemed like in high school everyone hated this one.  Me, I've always loved it.  Pure monoto-rock.  Jagged and hard and you could dance to it.

As an epilogue to Exile, not bad.

The Rolling Stones - Exile On Main St.

Exile On Main St. (COC 2-2900)

Released 1972

Rocks Off

Rip This Joint

Shake Your Hips

Casino Boogie

Tumbling Dice

Sweet Virginia

Torn And Frayed

Sweet Black Angel

Loving Cup

Happy

Turd On The Run

Ventilator Blues

I Just Want To See His Face

Let It Loose

All Down The Line

Stop Breaking Down

Shine A Light

Soul Survivor

Exile was a nice tour of morgues, courthouses, sinking ships, claustrophobic rooms, deserted highways; the whole album was a breakdown, one long night of fear - Greil Marcus

_______

When the legend becomes fact, print the legend. It doesn't matter if Exile was written and recorded in a lavish French villa (albeit in the basement) and at Sunset Sound in L.A.  It doesn't matter if the band was untogether as hell during the sessions.  It is cinema.  It is illusion.

______

Close-up of the wall of tattoo parlor,so they say. The film is noir-ish and grainy.  A low-budget, 1950's crime film.  William S. Burroughs'  Junky or The Man With the Golden Arm beside the bed, in a ratty, hot hotel room, on the sleazy side of the Naked City.  Sex and dirt; even the opening chords sound sleazy.  He sings in a slur, his voice is buried in the murk.  The images rise out of a blues/soul/rock fog.  I only get my rocks off when I'm dreaming.  She comes every time she pirhouettes over me.  Harder, faster.  Like fucking.  Driving harder towards a climax (this soon?).  Rockabilly style.  Southern white hellraiser music.  Bobby's screamin' on the sax.  Dick and Pat Nixon have some drugs for ya.  Then slowing down.  All slinky, rattling blues groove.  Don't move your head, don't move your hands, don't move your lips, just shake your hips.  Whaddaya know? There's Slim Harpo. Slower still.  The hot night.  A smoky bar/nightclub'casino (boogie).  Wounded lover - got no time on hand (this is my favorite track on the album). Stomp.  Then I hear a kind of winding guitar lick, and its gospel time.  Fever in the funkhouse now.  As they hit the finale ... got to roll me ... got to roll me ... and the guitar just keeps playing that riff over and over, hypnotic-like, and Charlie('s good tonight, inne?) starts hitting it harder and harder and harder and then rolling it down while the gospel girls tumble around him, like dice.  If they never made another piece of music - if they'd never made one before this - they still paid for their ticket to heaven right there. 

______

From `68-`71 the Stones, with Jimmy Miller behind the boards, had refined and mastered a sound.  A steaming gumbo of Chicago blues, delta blues, soul, Chuck Berry, British hard rock, country, and whatever else might be left lying around among the debris of the late 60's.  They had lost their innocence.  Brian was dead.  Their music was more explicit, sleazier, more violent, than anything that had gone before.  By `72 they had perfected it.  They had it down.  They wielded it effortlessly.  

______

Let's sit down on the front porch and play, while mosquitoes bang away at the screens.  Country style.  Gram's here - or his ghost is.  Got to scrape that shit right off your shoes.  The guitar player looks damaged. His coat is torn and frayed (this is my favorite track on the album).  Just as long as the guitar plays.  A little Caribbean lilt.  Ain't someone gonna free the sweet black slave?  Then its romance time.  Break out the piano. Soul music.  Post-Aretha.  I can run and jump and fish, but I won't fight you if you want to push and pull with me all night (this is my favorite track on the album).  

______

Wags complained.  It was too long.  They couldn't sustain it over four sides.  Are you kidding me?  Where's the filler?  It was like a catalog of everything they did, everything they could do. And it held together and it told a story (did I mention all the great albums tell a story).  Take out one song and its taking a scene out of the movie.

______

Time for a fast one.  Never kept a dollar past sunset.  Then its blues time again.  Fast delta shuffle.  Diamonds rings, vaseline, you gave me disease.  Then harder.  Howlin' Wolf hard. Up against the wall in a dark alley.  Feel like murder in the first degree.  Calling on Jesus - just wanna see his face - all groove, not-quite-laid-back.  Lonely ballads.  Sitting in the bar, drink in hand, all over a woman.  Bedroom blues.  Ain't in love, ain't in luck.  

______

I can get lost in Exile.  It belongs on the shelf next to Touch Of Evil.  Gun Crazy.

______

Time to clear your head.  Hit the road.  Open up the throttle, bust another bottle.  There's a girl out there.  Won't you be my little baby.  Just for awhile.  I'll show you.  Stop breaking down.  Stuff I got'll bust your brains out, baby.  Robert Johnson knows.  He knows sad and lonely nights, too.  Stretched out in room ten-oh-nine, with a smile on your face and a tear in your eye.  God bless you.  You're gonna need it.  Drowned in her love, the bell bottom blues, gonna be the death of me.  The ship is breaking on the rocks.  Fade to black.

#0 - What the ...? (by way of explanation)

What is this thing?
Well, I think that should be obvious.  It's my ego-wanking list/blog of the 300 rock`n'roll records I    
think are the best.

Isn't this completely self-indulgent and pretentious? Why should anyone else be interested in your bullshit opinions? Don't you have better things to do?
In order: (1) Yes, completely (2) No one should be but us music geeks love to read each others opinions and get all excited or pissed off about them.  I harbor no illusions that I'm going to educate anyone (3) Yes

Why aren't all the selections numbered?  You've got #1, and then a bunch of #?'s.  Wha'fuck?
Well, truth is I started out with this absurd spreadsheet with all the albums ranked with a numerical score (50 being the top score - no one got a 50)(don't tell me you haven't done this, music geeks - I know you have!). Then I began to discover that there were tons of albums I think are really great that rank about 35.  And did I really think a 35 was a lesser creation than a 40, per se?  I decided the rank system just wasn't really workable and I needed a more holistic approach - needed to go more by feel.  So I'm still figuring out where most things rank.  I'll do the rankings when the blog is complete.

Do you have a planned date to complete it?
Nope.  I work on it when I feel like it.  Might be next week.  Might be never.

Seriously, why do you do this?
Seriously - I like to think about music and I like to write about it.  Mainly, it's a creative exercise - I wanted to write about music in a way that was a bit "freer" for me (my old writing tended to be a bit academic), but also better than the "this is the shit man" kind of album reviews I usually find online.  So, it's a workbook.  

Your choices are the usual critics-fave stuff, man.  Lots of punk, sixties, indie.  Why can't you be bolder?  Where's the hip-hop? Where's the metal? Where's Radiohead?
Spare me.  The views expressed herein are obviously completely, totally, personal.  The idea that opinions not backed up by money can sway the reception of music is absurd.  If that were true, Celine Dion would be an unknown and Yo La Tengo would be the biggest band on the planet.  Yeah, I freely admit my preferences are pretty well in line with the rock-crit orthodoxy as expressed in countless books and blogs.  So?  The fact that so many of these albums turn up on everyone's list says something about them, just as much as the mega-million sales on, say, Celine Dion, says something about her.  I'm not in the least compelled to compose a list of 300 albums that no one else has chosen, and I'm not a contrarian.  I don't cover hip-hop because I'm just not into it.  Same goes for metal.  Radiohead suck ass.