Ah, 2011. Another year, another deluxe reissue of a vastly overrated Rolling Stones album. Remastered, two discs, outtakes, extra tracks, and a “Super Deluxe” version with three discs, a book, and postcards, all for the low low price of $200. And who would hesitate even momentarily to shell out a small fortune to line the pockets of four men who are already multi-millionaires?
After sycophantically fawning all over Exile on Main Street last year – easily one of the three most overrated rock albums of all time – western music critics turned their obsequious hyperboles to Some Girls, the Stones’ flaccid, tedious, overwrought 1978 offering. Some Girls was the band’s fifth Stones-on-autopilot album in a row, and yet Stones fans, long in denial about Mick and Keith’s full-throttle descent into decadence and self-indulgence leaving them burned out and lacking anything remotely interesting to say, constantly point to it as the Last Great Stones Album. “Some Girls,” a friend of mine who owned a record store ruminated years ago, smiling at the mention of it. “The last great Stones album.”
Each and every one of us has bands that we simply cannot be objective about. We'll defend their horrible, uninspired latter-era work because our love for these wretches is so great, we’ll allow for the toll age and drugs take on men and women who once saved us during life’s darkest moments. This is perfectly acceptable behavior provided you’re willing to swallow your pride and admit that it’s more guilty pleasure than anything rooted in reality. A friend of mine once told me about his love for the Ramones’ Mondo Bizzaro. “Really?” I said. “You like that album?” He nodded, painfully. “I’m what you would call an apologist,” he said. I appreciated his honestly. In fact, I nodded right along with him, thinking about my love for AC/DC’s For Those About to Rock, not the first, second, third, or even eighth album I’d recommend to anyone wanting to know what AC/DC is all about.
But that doesn’t mean that a crappy album isn’t a crappy album. What would you recommend for someone wanting to acquaint himself with the Stones? Beggars Banquet? Fuck yes. Sticky Fingers? Certainly. Let it Bleed? Of course. Between the Buttons? Beats Some Girls anytime of the day. Hell, I’d loan you Satanic Majesties before Some Girls (if I even owned a copy; I don’t) to give you an idea of what made these guys great.
Some Girls, though, is shit. If I made five Stones mixes, not one song from Some Girls would appear on any of them. FUCKING DICK, you’re shrieking, WHAT ABOUT KEEF’S BEFORE THEY MAKE ME RUN? FUCKIN’ ROCKS, MAN. No, it definitely don’t, man. Production’s crap, Keith’s vocals are crap, and really, what the fuck ever, folks. This is supposedly the baddest of Keith’s badass lyrics, but there’s not much badass about a burned-out junkie who’s desperately still trying to convince you of his badassedness now that his band has lost all street cred. How badass can you be when your lead singer is Mick Jagger? Don’t fucking tell me Before They Make Me Run is badass, because there ain’t nothing – NOTHING – more badass than Sympathy for the Devil, Stray Cat Blues and Midnight Rambler, all of which were nine years in an increasingly distant past by the time of Some Girls.
Here’s what Joe Posnanski recently wrote about this year’s decidedly lackluster batch of Baseball Hall of Fame nominees:
“There’s something worth remembering: In baseball, in sports, in life, there is always downward pressure. Once you make some money, there’s the temptation to feel comfortable. Once you’ve proven yourself, you can lose your hunger. Once you’ve run into a wall, you don’t want to do that again. Once your arm starts hurting, you might throw with a little less enthusiasm. On and on and on, we all see it in our lives — downward pressure, the force to relax, back off, take the foot off the gas, and whatever other cliché you want. There are some people who never stop raging — and that has its own pitfalls. But by and large, those people, the ones who never stopped raging, are the ones in the baseball Hall of Fame.”
He could have been writing about the Stones, post Sticky Fingers. Finally becoming multi-millionaires in the early 70s brought that downward pressure upon Mick and Keith, and there was nothing interesting forthcoming in their songs beyond that. That they backed off and lost their hunger was evident on Black and Blue, an undistinguished album largely remembered today for its idiotically misogynistic advertising campaign. Interestingly, the departure of Mick Taylor and subsequent arrival of Ron Wood was the true onset of the Boring Stones, the beginning of what is in retrospect a parade of countless forgettable albums and tours from the once dangerous five-some turned harmless middle-aged stadium juggernaut.
I wish I could report that those musicians who took their foot off the gas are the ones we don’t celebrate, but strangely, it’s the creeps who play nice for the big labels and stop raging who are celebrated by wealthy industry parasites at the annual back-slapping fest known as the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony. Shifting millions of units also helps, and Some Girls is still the Stones' best selling album. Jagger & co., naturally, showed up and accepted their statue when their turn came around, thanking an auditorium full of unimaginably rich, black-tie wearing industry drones for the dubious honor. How, exactly, does an event where only the rich and connected have access have anything to do with rock and roll?
It doesn’t. And neither do the Stones. That’s what no one gets anymore. I wrote last year that a palpable ennui courses through Exile on Main Street’s grooves. Beyond Exile – and especially on Some Girls – the Stones’ ennui is replaced by a bored contempt for innovation and exaltation, an indifferent capitulation to the most clichéd excesses and banalities of Rock and Roll’s mainstream artery. After Before They Make Me Run, Stones fanboys always point to Shattered as proof somehow that the Stones still had It. I direct you to the crucial missed opportunity at 1.50, where Ron Wood’s already dull lead, instead of exploding back into the verses, limps along unimpressively with help from a fucking synthesizer. Boring, boring stuff, and nowhere near the craziness of pre-’71 Stones. Hearing a poofter like Jagger warn that you have to be “tough tough tough” to live in Manhattan is embarrassing - for him - considering the real deal, in the form of the Ramones and The Dictators, had already been singing about life on mean streets of New York for years.
"We had this idea that we'd reinvigorate certain albums by finding other songs recorded in that time that would hold up," Jagger says, with respect to reissuing more old albums with extra tracks. "That sounded like a better idea than doing mindless compilations."
How much more mindless does it get than everything the Stones have recorded since Sticky Fingers?
