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Some Girls and the MXR Phase 90

November 26, 2011

I’ve been listening to the newly released remastered version of Some Girls and enjoying the 12 bonus tracks that accompany it. I’ll be writing about those tracks here in the months to come with the idea of producing a Kindle-based companion volume to my book on the album, which appeared in Continuum’s 33 1/3 series.

Meanwhile, my friend and former doctoral student Robert Gunn (a member of the English Department at the University of Texas, El Paso) recently sent me this reminiscence prompted by his reading of the book:

I really enjoyed your reading of the album in the context of your personal experience of NYC as a kid.  As an ill-reformed rock and roll guitar player myself, I must say I also delighted in your discussion of the technical side of the Stones’ sound, including Keef’s infatuation with open G tuning on five strings.  As it happens, Some Girls was the first full Stones album I bought, in high school (I, too, began with Hot Rocks, and wore it out before bothering to venture deeper into the canon).  Nowadays, Beggars Banquet through Exile remain steady in the rotation (love the country blues stuff), but Some Girls has enduring appeal.

As I was reading, I felt wistful reflection back on my own unselfconscious identification with Jagger’s lyrics.  It was kind of comical, actually—I mean, I knew he was talking about New York in “Miss You” and “Shattered,” but somehow that place didn’t seem real to me; I was sure he was talking, instead,  about that somewhere else I always wanted to be, in a mystical zone of cool and where everyone had that jaded, faded, rocknroll strut.  And even if no one else knew what it was about, that’s where I belonged (and often felt I was, in my own mind).  And so I’d walk down the rainy streets of Eugene, Oregon, humming riffs to myself, thinking you needed to be tough tough tough tough tough tough to live in this town(!), and keeping an eye out for all of those Puerto Rican girls who (I dearly and earnestly hoped) were just dying to meet me.

But the best part was the sound—my best friend and I were in rival bands, and I was extremely envious of his old MXR Phase 90, which produced the “Shattered” sound perfectly; my band played that song for a while, too, but I dropped it because, ultimately, it sounded like shit approximated on my Peavey digital flanger (a truly worthless relic of 80s hair metal; I don’t think I ever, even once, produced a cool sound off of that thing).

You can hear Keith Richards talking lovingly about that MXR box, by the way, in a recent interview broadcast on NPR’s World Cafe show. The segment lasts about 30 minutes, with Richards getting the first 15 and Mick Jagger getting the second. No, they weren’t in the same room; in fact, the interviews were conducted by different interviewers. Apparently, after all the sniping that’s occurred in the wake of the release of  generated by Richards’s autobiography, Life, it’s hard to imagine the Glimmer Twins ever being in the same room together, let alone sharing the same stage.

In the meantime, I’m thankful that those Some Girls-era outtakes have been polished up and given a legitimate release. Wish they’d included “Fiji Jim” though.

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Remembering Some Girls and Marquee Moon at McNally Jackson

June 21, 2011

Bryan Waterman and I celebrated the release of our books for Continuum’s 33 1/3 series last night with a joint reading at the McNally Jackson Books in Nolita.

We talked about the ways in which we conceive of my book, The Rolling Stones’ Some Girls, and his, Television’s Marquee Moon, as companion pieces that paint a portrait of New York in the Seventies and its influence on both established and emergent rock bands. After describing the counterintuitive proposition that opens my book — that Some Girls is a “New York album” by a “New York band — the Stones of the late Seventies and early Eighties” — I took a closer look at the song “When the Whip Comes Down,” suggesting that it might be seen as the bastard child of “Rhinestone Cowboy” as performed by Glen Campbell and the Ramones’ “53rd and 3rd,” from their eponymous debut album.  I closed by citing Robert Christgau’s Village Voice piece “The Stones in 1978,” in which the critic praised the band’s onstage rendition of “Whip” and other songs from Some Girls at its show in Passaic, NJ, but described Television’s Bottom Line show during the same week as a glimpse into the future of rock ‘n’ roll: “Television’s syntheses promise a future the Stones can no longer imagine.”

Television customarily played a version of the Stones’ “Satisfaction” during their 1978 shows, and I played the version that can be found on the live album Blow Up as a segue to Bryan’s talk, which focused on Television’s debt to the Stones but then explored their invocation of other pop traditions that were important to the bands playing at CBGB’s. His exemplum was “Prove It.”

We’ll be doing another joint reading next Tuesday night at 7:00 p.m. at Word bookstore in Brooklyn, playing different songs as we explore connections between the two books. And we’ll be appearing at that morning on DJ Trouble’s show on WFMU. The program, “This is the Modern World with Trouble,” runs from 9:00 a.m. to noon on Tuesdays. We’ll be on  at about 10:30. Trouble did a guest playlist for us over at “Patell and Waterman’s History of New York” last week, one of a number of guest spots that Bryan has organized to celebrate the release of the books.

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