Why Did The Rolling Stones ' Shattered ' Do So Poorly As A Single?

I think many people assume any combination beginning with schm- is something bad, even if they don't know what it means -- and it often is: schmuck, schmaltz, schmoe, arguably schmooze, etc. (Of course, there's schmeer...) There's even a Wikipedia article about it:

Shm-reduplication - Wikipedia

So I guess to some people, the title song is "Schmattered"?

 

I'm scrolling through the WNEW section right now...amazing stuff and so much of it!

 

After reading further in the thread, I think the notion that it was disliked in the "heartland" has some traction. It was clearly about New York City, and that's enough to evoke hostility in some quarters.

 

. . . second only to "I know" in "Ain't No Sunshine."

 

I live in Wisconsin, and Shattered got lots of airplay on FM AOR stations at the time. It was not the kind of song popular on Top 40 radio at the time. Look at the US billboard charts from the summer of 1978, you’ll find Grease well represented as well as stuff like Copacabana ( I know I’m generalizing, bear with me).

As was noted early in the thread, by fall of ‘78, people who wanted Shattered probably already had the album.

In the US, there are many songs from that era that are now considered classic and young people might assume they were chart-topping hits, when such is not the case. For example, Under Pressure never broke the top 20 in the states, but my kids think it was some huge hit, same with Heroes, which barely broke the Top 40.

Just look up Billboard Top 100 singles in a year to year basis. The number of well-regarded or now-classic songs that are not represented is surprising to those of us not old enough to remember what was charting at the time.

 

Uh Shoobie!

 

This is a very long thread for a simple question about one song so forgive me if this has already been mentioned but... the singles from Some Girls were not cut and dry globally as they are/were for lots of other albums. I think "Miss You" was the obvious universal hit and globally released with the marketing and promotion to support it. But everyone here who is citing "Beast of Burden" as just as obvious neglects to mention that it was not the second single in the UK, and in fact there was more promotion (including a music video) done for "Respectable" over there, which was not a single in the US. (And then "Shattered" was released in the US as the third single instead of the already-viable "Respectable.") "Respectable" appears on hits compilations such as Rewind and Jump Back, but "Shattered" does not. In retrospect, "Shattered" appears to have been released as a way for the US label (Atlantic?) to glob on to the punk market and was not intended for widespread consumption by the mainstream.

 

thats too funny, you're right. cap lock must have stuck momentarily.

i can't type. properly

 

Whereas in the U.S., "Shattered" actually opened Sucking in the ’70s.

 

I remember that station.....Only lived on the east coast about 5 years and haven't been there since I was 15 in 1980...... I guess my memory must of been off. I could swear WPLJ called themself NY's best rock, but I'll take your word for it.

 

I don't think so. It was a late release designed to cash in on Some Girls...or whatever was left of Some Girls by early 1979.
Punk was a very small market in an America still very much in the thralls of Kansas and Styx. I bought the single Shattered in the mid-West, where hardly anyone was listening to the Clash, Elvis Costello, the Sex Pistols. By the time that the Clash got any sort of recognition on American radio New Wave had already displaced punk. I don't think Atlantic would waste vinyl if they believed only people on colleges campuses and in New York and Los Angeles were going to buy Shattered.

Punk was sort of like a UFO in America...seen on TV...but not seen everywhere. I did buy Never Mind The Bollocks, but it was sort of a delayed reaction after buying some Clash and Costello albums....I think that is how many New Wave/Punk listeners in America came across it. Your post makes it sound like all the people with safety pins in their noses were just waiting to hit the college record store to pick up Shattered. I think the small true punk market/community probably wouldn't even have considered buying it at the time. Of course this is just my memory of the time. I wasn't in college yet or couldn't go to a punk bar.

What I mean to say is that by the time the Rolling Stones would do a nod to punk culture by putting it on the picture sleeve of Shattered punk was basically dead as a cultural meme in America (or worse even conventional)...sort of like when Mohawks became fashionable lol. Shattered is probably more New Wave. I am not saying punk music was over though.

 

Aha! Gotcha

 

it is not my intention to share with you the joys of yiddishkeit.

but. you left out "schmutz" lol

re "schmatta". loosely translated it means "rag". as in frankie valli's "schmatta doll" ha.

the inherent if not overtly spoken "disdain" is primarily syllabic. such are the joys of yiddish.

( the censors have just gone verklepmt and i have just given them tsurris as they make an on the spot determination that what i posted might or might not "offend" someone LOL )

funny to watch it in "real time"

 

You still don't get it, do you?

I jokingly replied to a poster claiming that everybody loves this song, saying that this thread gives plenty evidence that this isn't necessarily a fact. Then you told me that this isn't yer typical top 40 audience, which I thought was rather strange since every other thread here is about the most popular band ever. Then I got drunk.

Now I'm hung over and I wonder what your point was in the first place.

 

RIF.

I said that I didn't know anyone, and I knew lots of music enthusiasts, that were buying singles in the mid to late 70s and beyond. Everyone, even girls, that I knew were buying albums and cassettes or 8 tracks. Now...I did have a friend that was a 45 collector..but his focus was the 50s and 60s exclusively and he had a very very large collection of that.

Oh yeah...I almost forgot. I DID buy some singles in the late 70s. The Beatles had a reissue series on Parlophone and I bought several then. STILL though...not contemporary. So my original post still holds. NO 'current' singles after 1970 for me. I didn't need them. All the tunes I cared about having were on albums. I could hear anything else on the radio if I desired.

 

Not at all. I wasn't even thinking about people with safety pins in their noses, and I believe you that the 2nd British Invasion was still a few years off. But Some Girls was an album about the NY sound of the time, right? And all the NY "punk" stuff was in full swing by 1978, Television, Patti Smith, Ramones, etc. and this fits into that sound, whether or not the market was big. Talking Heads, Blondie. You are assuming that record labels only released things for mainstream consumption and I don't think that's true. All of those bands had albums and audiences who bought them. If you're an executive at Atlantic trying to combat the notion that the Stones were dinosaurs at that time (and that the new music was a threat to your cash cow), you would likely make an attempt to package and market the Stones to that audience, to change the attitude. It all kind of worked, maybe not specifically due to "Shattered" but as part of the comprehensive whole of the campaign... because Some Girls did reverse the Stones' decline and extended the shelf life of their original run for a few more years.

I would agree with you if we were talking 1982 but this is still pretty early. Punk was only just about to break through in the U.S. That it was already over in the UK didn't really matter. Punk became an active style and market in the U.S. by the end of the 70s and kind of lingered in the cultural consciousness for much of the next decade. The U.S. doesn't move that fast.

 

I didn't even know it was a single. It was an FM hit of such magnitude that most people today likely consider it one of the Stones' biggest hits.

Pretty harsh evaluations of "It's Only Rock & Roll" and "Wild Horses" ya got there. Even "She's So Cold" was a good bubbly rocker for the AM airwaves, imo.

 

The idea in this thread of "Shattered" being punk or punk-adjacent, or even "New Wave," is a total surprise to me.

I'm not saying it was "fake punk" or a "poor attempt at punk." It's just that it never crossed my mind that that's what it was supposed to be. I was a punk California kid at the time and can't recall anybody saying "what a lame attempt at punk by the Stones."

The tempo wasn't punk, the beat wasn't punk, the guitar sound wasn't punk, the vocal (shadoobie) wasn't punk.

I'll spare myself the pleasure of listening to it again, but at a distance, to me and my friends, it was just the sound of the Stones running out of inspiration. It was like a Stones song, but with a lot of talking and stale urban imagery.

 

"Shattered" was a weird, unconventional song that came on the heels of two masterful pop hits. The Stones were everywhere in the summer of '78 and by fall had acquitted themselves badly with a cringe-worthy performance on Saturday Night Live. Weird song by an over exposed band who looked like a bunch of ghouls rather than the rock gods of a few years earlier.

 

Something that many of us around in the US at the time have noted, but some have doubted it.

 

For me, Shattered is just one of the worst songs the Stones ever made. After Lady Jane and Mother's Little Helper, I think it's probably their dullest tune. It just sort of sits there, lifeless. The attitude feels fake, and it's not backed up by any particularly impressive musicality. Just boring. The gristle floating around on top of the otherwise tasty stew that is Some Girls.... and now you tell me this was a SINGLE? Hah! Why would anyone... ever... even THINK that was a good idea? As a song, it's dullsville, as a single it's positively disastrous. And I love the Stones!

 

Well ok, I fail to see the relevance to the question being asked here.

 

Great post. Even seeing this episode in reruns as a kid in the '90s I was like WTF.

"Bunch of ghouls" hahahaha.

 

Oh, I'm sure they did. I was just giving you by biased opinion.

 

Definitely. Heard it as much as "Brown Sugar" in the late '80s.