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

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
 
 
 

(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.

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.

I think we'll tour, but as we have all these songs for the next album, I think we should get them down.

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?

(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.

While we were in Paris Mick and I wrote more songs together than we had done in ages.

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.

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.

(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).

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-Exile period: 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.

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.

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 Pathé 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.

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.

(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 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.

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.

A lot of these tunes are me playing the guitar very loud.

I remember on Sticky Fingers if there was going to be two guitars Mick would play acosutic, 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!

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!

(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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

(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.

(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.

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.

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 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 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.

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.

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.

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.

(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.

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

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