Lol...wish this wasn’t true...but it is - in the USA anyway. But it gives me more room to dance. In Japan...they sing every last ooooh aaaaah...awesome!
See Frank...I don’t have a damn thing to add here. Nothing. Love this song. I didn’t really get into the LA punk scene...but this tune opened me up to some after it was released. I played the hell out of the Beast Of Burden 45 with this as the B side. Owned it for years. Could’ve sworn I had another 45 that came out later with this & Respectable? Maybe I’m spacing. Definitely bought the BOB/WTWCD 45. I’ll have to pull out my singles box from a few yrs back & check.
A great album. "Lies" and "Respectable" are fives in my book but listenable. "Far Away Eyes" is just OK IMHO. I would have replaced it with "Do You Think I Really Care" That would have given it 8 killer tracks. A solid 9.5
What a strange and funny review, thanks for finding this. Agree with the line: There is no dead time on the album. Here's one of the odder paragraphs: “Lies” would have leapt off Goat’s Head Soup (name three songs from it, quickly), It’s Only Rock ‘n Roll, or Black and Blue; here it sounds second-rate next to “Shattered,” “Miss You,” “Beast of Burden” (a lovely tribute to Joe Tex), or “Before They Make Me Run (Walk Don’t Run ’78),” which features a guest vocal by the famed Appalachian ballad singer, Clarence Ashley (1895-1967), who is uncanny in his ability to sound so much like Keith Richard without for a moment compromising his own style.
OP got me fired up with that write up.... Great Stones album, that I rate better than a couple of the ones with Taylor, and the best with Wood. It's not like what's come since has sucked much. I wish they'd let Ronnie put a song or 2 on each album.
I always thought one of Keith's best lines was "We're a bunch of tough old b-stards. String us up and we still won't die." Rolling Stone interview in '94, I think that was. I admit I'm not a big fan of the drum sound on Some Girls. I much prefer the sound on Black And Blue and Emotional Rescue. But hey, at least they didn't give us a drum sound like the one Ronnie used on Gimme Some Neck! Oh hell no, by that point in their career I'd say they deserved it. One of their greatest songs, IMO. My wife likes Dirty Work, it's not one of her favourites though. Like I've said in other Some Girls discussions, it'd be switching out "Lies" for me. Either way, though, "Everything Is Turning To Gold" should have been on the album. Excellent. I think I can hear two edits in "Miss You" (the album version). One during the sax solo and then another leading into the coda/fade. Excellent once again. For me when it comes to "When The Whip Comes Down" I prefer the live versions.
Portland, Oregon, June 1985 As a teenage middle-schooler, my dad told me to go along with him and help my evicted aunt move into a Section 8 apartment. My aunt's lifestyle was what my churchgoing parents called "unsavory," and in moments it would be all on display for me: scores of empty beer and liquor bottles, heaping ashtrays and incense holders, cigarettes, pills, the nasty leftover smell of who-knows-what kind of illegal substances, people passed out on the couch and the floor, urine and vomit in the bathroom, and filth everywhere. I was witnessing the hangover from someone else's orgy for the first time in my life and it made me suddenly feel a lot older. My aunt stumbled out of the bedroom, followed by some shirtless dude. She shooed everyone out, lit a cigarette and asked if we could start with the furniture. Before long we had all the big items in the U-Haul and were helping her sift through the detritus to pick out her belongings and put them in boxes. As a habitual garage sale vinyl crate-digger, I instinctively started gathering up her LPs, putting them back into the sleeves, matching the records with the jackets, and sorting them by artist in a box. Up to that point I was into my parents' records: Aretha, Sly, Simon & Garfunkel, Donna Summer, Michael Jackson, what I could find at garage sales (disco, folk, disco, and more disco) and my own newly discovered passion: the Beatles. When my dad occasionally went into work downtown on Saturdays and Sundays, I'd go along and take my paper route money, walk several blocks over to Django Records (long gone now) and buy as much as I could afford. Used vinyl was cheap in those days, but I was only 13 and didn't make much. On my last excursion before that day I was so happy to have bought used copies of Beatles 65, Hey Jude and the 45 of "Let It Be" complete with the picture sleeve. Sitting in front of the LPs I had just compiled and sorted, I pointed out to my aunt that she had two copies of the Rolling Stones' Some Girls. "Huh. Most of these aren't even mine, they're just ones people have left. Well, why don't you keep one of them." And so I got my first Rolling Stones album, for free. I played that album on my hand-me-down 60's mono Philco radio/turntable and was struck by how different it was from anything I'd heard before. The Stones were rockers, real rockers, and the record screamed out at me with a rawness and grittiness that packed a wallop that gave me a visceral response that I felt in my gut. In a way, I thought, Some Girls was an analogue of my aunt's hard-partying lifestyle. I was intrigued by it all, and I played that album like crazy. On my next trip to Django Records, I told the guy at the counter I loved Some Girls and asked if he had anything else like it. I left with used copies of Goats Head Soup and the 12" disco mix of "Miss You." Yeah, I was hooked! Portland Oregon, October 2016 Life's a bitch sometimes. I was newly divorced, broke and looking for a cheap room to rent near to the house I had just recently bought so I could still see my kids regularly. My aunt, who had since gone clean, gone to college, traded cigarettes for vaping and bought a house had an empty room since my cousin moved to Seattle. I started moving my stuff in, and she commented on the boxes of LPs. She said she used to love LPs but hadn't seen or heard one in many years. I pulled one out of a box, my copy of Aretha Now, and showed her that mostly what I collected were original first pressings. She didn't seem impressed. Then I remembered Some Girls, so I pulled that one out. It wasn't the exact same one she had given me; somewhere along the way I had upgraded to a much cleaner Monarch pressing and had put the new LP in a MFSL rice paper sleeve. At that moment my collecting habits suddenly seemed elitist, and I wished to God I had that copy, the one that came out of that flophouse, the one that was probably playing as random strangers were shooting up or getting it on. I recounted the story of her giving me her duplicate copy, but she said that she didn't even remember that. On my record shelf now are early UK Decca stereo pressings of Beggar's Banquet and Let It Bleed, and US Monarch pressings of everything from Sticky Fingers through Dirty Work. I have digital copies of all Stones albums and various singles comps. And I give all the credit to my aunt and that duplicate copy of Some Girls I got as a music-hungry 13 year-old. Since the advent of the internet, I've read a lot of talk about the "Four classic Stones albums: Beggar's, Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers and Exile" and I think that's sad, because if that's where you stop, you're missing out on so much. Some Girls is definitely an overlooked gem.
When The Whip Comes Down - I have never warmed to this one. One of the most ordinary and boring of the band's cast off filler rockers. Just mud. I always skip it on live recordings.
When The Whip Come Down - Great high energy punk influenced track about a street hustler. Allmusic says it's the most Lou Reed influenced track the Stones cut. There is some unexpected pedal steel guitar from Ronnie Wood in the punk influenced song. A live version of the song recorded in Detroit 1978 was included on the Sucking In The Seventies compilation album. It was played live in 1978 and 1981 and sporadically after that. I am always happy when they trot this one out. It is probably my favorite track on Some Girls.
Some Girls was the 3rd new Stones album I'd bought on release - 5th, if you include Metamorphosis and Love You Live - and having read mixed reviews, my excitement was somewhat tempered, particularly as my tastes had moved on to more sophisticated stuff by then. But hey, this was THE STONES, so there had to be at least a couple of decent rockers on there, right? Cos, like, I'd read about the supposedly 'punk' WTWCD, so I knew there would be at least one...and yes, there was one, but it wasn't WTWCD. Thank god for Respectable, because without that, SG would've been the lamest Stones album since Buttons (and I'm including Metamorphosis in that assessment). The album is saved by the final 4 songs, although it took me some time to recognise these meagre crumbs of comfort...but side one was face-palmingly weak, and there remains nothing on that side that I'd care to hear again before I die. Going back to WTWCD, it felt like some burnt-out old farts' effete take on No Fun, a quarter-hearted stumble through a turgid two-chord jam so underwhelming that even a minor punk band would've thought twice about sticking it on a B-side...to add insult to injury, they followed through on the very next track with another two-chord snooze-fest - the same two chords, if I'm not mistaken - and by halfway through side one of this supposedly vibrant, current-sounding album, any objective listener was already scratching their head, wondering where the songs had gone...in fact, as one UK reviewer astutely observed, they were hiding on the new debut solo album from David Johansen, released a week or two earlier. But don't take our word for it...
When The Whip Comes Down: Charlie kicks things off, and the guitars swagger and sway through this track, Mick is in great voice. I also love Bill’s bass run on this track, and I love Bill’s bass playing in general, when you hear Bill Wyman, you know it’s Bill Wyman. And Ronnie’s solo is great on here as well, Dirty schorchin solo. This song rules on record and especially live.
