The Fat Angel Sings

The Rolling Stones have long established their resiliency, but perhaps the most impressive artistic testament to their endurance is having top-rated albums a decade apart, in both 1968 and 1978. It’s not just the time between the acclaimed releases of “Beggars Banquet” and “Some Girls”, but the dramatic differences in those respective eras of popular music that the Stones were able to somehow dominate.

As they approach the end of their sixth decade of performing and recording, The Rolling Stones know they’ve been written off by some critics and music fans as irrelevant has-beens—just about as many times as they’ve been hailed for their ability to “reinvent” themselves and stage a “comeback.” To be anointed the World’s Greatest Rock and Roll Band one year and a weak parody of themselves the next is no doubt a source of some vexation, and perhaps rueful hilarity, to a group that transcended any need to defend itself many years ago.

The band was entering the recording studio to follow up 1976’s “Black and Blue“, an album that got mixed reviews and only yielded one rather anemic hit single, “Fool to Cry.” With highly regarded lead guitarist Mick Taylor gone and Keith Richards’ buddy Ron Wood now officially on board, the group took advantage of its new European recording contract to enter the EMI-owned Pathé Marconi Studios in Paris, with the trusted Chris Kimsey once again engineering.

In 1968, the American sound of Bob Dylan and The Band were the rage, with Dylan coming off a string of electric albums that revolutionized the genre and The Band graduating from backing Dylan to orchestrating their own towering musical achievement with their debut, Music From Big Pink. A decade later, the pop landscape was in the midst of the disco craze while rock was overthrown in Britain and New York by an ascendant punk movement, with classic-rockers like the Stones seeming hopelessly out of step.

But the Rolling Stones managed to adapt to 1978 as deftly as they had 10 years earlier by co-opting the prevailing disco sound and somehow making it cool for rock fans. As impressive, they captured both the sound and tone of the punk scene in downtown Manhattan, which may as well have been a thousand miles from the pulsating and chic Studio 54. Songs like “Shattered” and “When the Whip Comes Down” successfully established the Stones’ continued relevance. The former song, written by Jagger in the back of a cab, is the greatest rock song ever written about New York City, The Ramones’ own turf. “When the Whip Comes Down” sounds influenced by Dee Dee’s male prostitute confessional “53rd and 3rd.” It’s openly gay, as Jagger explained at the time, somewhat uncomfortably. But Jagger’s singing actually channels Sex Pistols leader Johnny Rotten, who ironically would call the Stones “one of the most notoriously inept bands in music.”

“When the Whip Comes Down” uses only a few chords and relentless forward movement to tell the lurid story of a gay Manhattan street hustler: “I’m going down 53rd street/And they spit in my face/I’m learning the ropes/I’m learning a trade/The East River truckers/Are churning with trash/I’ve got so much money/That I spend so fast.” It’s one of the punkiest performances the Stones ever laid down, a successor to “Midnight Rambler” in its ferocity.

On Beggar’s Banquet, the Stones had clearly been influenced by Dylan and The Band. In fact, the famous bathroom graffiti on the cover included the words, “Music From Big Brown,” a sly reference to the Canadian rockers. Note that the Stones on their 1968 opus were working for the first time with an American producer, Jimmy Miller. Dylan comes through most clearly (though not entirely convincingly) on the slide-guitaring “Jigsaw Puzzle.” And “Parachute Woman” echoes Dylan’s Basement Tapes, which had been recorded in 1967 and, though not released until 1975, was heard by 1968 by everyone who mattered in rock.

While released a decade apart, Beggar’s Banquet and “Some Girls”, and even individual songs, are easily connected beyond trying to channel rock’s cutting edge. Both albums are salacious to the point where teenagers at the time could never listen to them with their parents in the room. “Stray Cat Blues,” from Beggar’s, and the “Some Girls” Some Girls title track are unapologetically misogynistic.

The mid-tempo romp “Some Girls” is next, with its infamously offensive lyric, “Black girls just wanna get fucked all night/I just don’t have that much jam.” Jagger struts and sneers, multiple guitars wailing behind him as he (humorously?) castigates women for being gold-diggers, spreading venereal disease and being too generous when they treat him like a gigolo. As a contribution to the long history of the band’s misogynistic lyrics, it attracted numerous critics, and drew a typical Jagger response noting that Ahmet Ertegun at their American label “tried to get us to drop it, but I refused. I’ve always been opposed to censorship of any kind, especially by conglomerates. I’ve always said, ‘If you can’t take a joke, it’s too fucking bad.’”

The frantic “Lies” closes the first LP side with another three-guitar attack, Jagger pushing his voice to its breaking point. Again, one or two chords suffice and Watts pounds away in a way that few we’re-proud-we-can’t-really-play punk rockers would even attempt.

Side two begins with “Far Away Eyes,” with Jagger affecting an even thicker phony American accent than usual to recite a countrified tale straight out of Bakersfield, with Wood’s expert pedal steel and Richards’ note-bending electric in full flower (Richards also handles the piano part). There’s some beautiful harmony singing too, but beyond some light amusement from the parody, it doesn’t earn its prominent position in the album sequence. The spirit of Richards’ running buddy Gram Parsons, and his influence over “Let it Bleed”, “Sticky Fingers”, “Exile on Main St”. and beyond, is clearly still alive in some corner of the collective Rolling Stones brain.

Both make you wince today. Incredibly, Jagger wasn’t even content to make the girl at the centre of “Stray Cat Blues” 15, as on the album. On the 1969 live album Get Yer Ya Ya’s Out!, he changed her age to 13. But it’s too over-the-top to take too seriously. It’s just Jagger strutting. In “Some Girls,” he sings about women who are seemingly of appropriate age, but sexualizes possessing them while also making it clear that they are sexualizing and trying to possess him and Keith, too. “Some Girls” is the evil twin of The Beach Boys’ “California Girls,” lumping women together by race and region.

“Street Fighting Man,” like “Shattered,” tried to capture the essence of urban despair in its era. But neither offers answers, which would be too preachy and idealistic for the Stones. While that can leave listeners of “Street Fighting Man” cold given the stakes at the time, with
Civil Rights on the line and a war raging in Vietnam, it actually works on “Shattered,” where laughing at the madness of the Carter era seems the most appropriate response.

“Sympathy for the Devil” and “Miss You,” the tentpole songs on Beggar’s and “Some Girls”, respectively, are relentless dance grooves. Jagger said of “Sympathy” at the time, “It has a very hypnotic groove, a samba, which has a tremendous hypnotic power, rather like good dance music. It doesn’t speed up or slow down. It keeps this constant groove.”

The parallels continue with the albums’ respective cover songs. “Prodigal Son,” on Beggar’s, is a retiled version of Robert Wilkins’s “That’s No Way To Get Along.” “Some Girls” similarly nods to music crafted by black Americans with a cover of the Motown hit “Just My Imagination (Running Away With Me),” written by Whitfield-Strong and originally performed by The Temptations. While that cover version is fine, the Stones actually wrote a better soul ballad than that original. The version of the Temptations’ “Just My Imagination” is absolutely fine, but one can’t help but wonder if the slot would have been better served by something like the hard rocking “So Young,” one of the outtakes featuring barrelhouse pianos by Ian Stewart and Chuck Leavell that showed up on the 2011 CD expanded reissue of the album.

“Beast of Burden,” from the groove right down to the Eddie Kendricks-inspired falsetto, is a masterpiece on par with “Miss You“.

While those assessing the entire The Rolling Stones cannon inevitably place these two albums next to one another in the top 5—often behind Sticky Fingers, Exile on Main Street and Let It Bleed, it’s almost always Beggar’s Banquet over “Some Girls”. Yes, their 1968 effort set the stage for arguably the greatest stretch of recording excellence in rock history. But the public voted with record sales and made “Some Girls” the best-selling Stones album of all-time. Could the public be right in ranking “Some Girls” over Beggar’s Banquet?

Their 1968 LP has three to five essential tracks: “Sympathy for the Devil,” “Street Fighting Man,” “Stray Cat Blues” and probably “Salt of the Earth” and “No Expectations.” The rest of the album grades passable to okay—not filler, necessarily, but nothing historic. “Some Girls” is stronger up top with “Miss You,” “Beast of Burden” and “Shattered,” and then adds “When the Whip Comes Down” and Keith Richards’s “Before They Make Me Run,” about his heroin bust in Canada.

“Shattered” is a virtual spoken-word piece, which Jagger acts out magnificently—listen to what he does with “Pride and joy and greed and sex/That’s what makes our town the best” and “Don’t you know the crime rate is going up, up, up, up, up/To live in this town you must be tough, tough, tough, tough, tough/You got rats on the West Side/Bedbugs uptown.” Jagger gives the impression of improvising the lyrics, an illusion he no doubt meticulously rehearsed. The grinding background holds on two chords during verses, and saves any development for the bridge, which adds Wood’s pedal steel and a variety of percussion (probably among those few elements overdubbed in brief additional sessions in Paris, New York and Los Angeles). The track ends dramatically with no fade, the equivalent of a mic-drop in today’s parlance.

In his autobiography, “Life,” Richards explained: “For sheer longevity—for long distance—there is no track that I know of like ‘Before They Make Me Run.’ That song, which I sang on that record, was a cry from the heart. But it burned up the personnel like no other. I was in the studio, without leaving, for five days…”

Richards’ feature “Before They Make Me Run” is one of his best songs, right up there with Exile On Main St.’s “Happy.” He and Wood handle half a dozen guitar parts, including slide and pedal steel, and Richards even subs for Wyman on bass. The strong lyrics are constructed from a series of contrasts and juxtapositions (“Only a crowd can make you feel so alone,” “Gonna find my way to heaven/’Cause I did my time in hell”), ending in the sardonic and defiant affirmation that, “After all is said and done/I did alright, I had my fun/But I will walk before they make me run.” With Jagger and Wood providing backup vocals, Richards’ keening, strangled vocal becomes beautiful in a characteristically offbeat way.

If you include “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” from the “Beggars Banquet” sessions, then there is no quarrel with ranking that album higher. But it’s not on the LP, having been released earlier as a stand-alone single, rising to No. 3 on the U.S. charts. The rest of “Some Girls” is stronger with the title track and the funnier (and far less offensive) “Far Away Eyes.” “Some Girls” has a stronger cover song and “Lies” is a more conventional, throwaway Stones rocker, while “Respectable” is another punk-inspired, snarling song that Jagger and the band pull off. Richards said of “Respectable,” “This is a punk meets Chuck Berry number…”

Mostly true to Jagger’s no-frills wishes, the album revolves around the still-potent blend of drummer Charlie Watts, bassist Bill Wyman, Jagger, Richards and Ronnie Wood, the latter on pedal streel, acoustic and electric guitars. Jagger himself contributes guitar parts to several songs, especially beefing up the power on “When the Whip Comes Down,” “Lies” and “Respectable.” The harmonica of Sugar Blue (a Paris busker Jagger found who’d played professionally with Roosevelt Sykes and Louisiana Red) greatly enlivens “Miss You” and the title track, and there are contributions from Faces keyboardist Ian “Mac” McLagan and saxophonist Mel Collins, but the overall sound is vintage five-piece Stones. Under Kimsey’s scrutiny, the recording clarity is extraordinary, every nook and cranny of the arrangements illuminated.

While it’s arguably hair-splitting, “Some Girls” is not only stronger at the top but the deeper album, too.

Released on June 9th, 1978