rolling stones some girlsCan You Hear the Music?

ROLLING STONES SONGS: ‘SOME GIRLS’ (1978)

Rolling Stones songs: Some Girls
*Click for 
MORE ROLLING STONES SONGS 1962-PRESENT

Give me all you money/ Give me all your gold…

Also known as: Some More Girls
Written by: Jagger/Richard
Recorded: EMI Pathé Marconi Studios, Paris, France, Oct. 10-Dec. 1977, Jan. 5-March 2 1978
*Data taken from Martin Elliott’s book THE ROLLING STONES COMPLETE RECORDING SESSIONS 1962-2012

From Songfacts:
Mick Jagger and Keith Richards wrote this song about the women in their lives, mostly groupies. Richards said they called the song “Some Girls” because they could never remember their names.

The line “Black girls just want to get f–ked all night” caused an uproar. American civil rights leader Jessie Jackson used his Operation PUSH (People United to Save Humanity) group to call for a boycott of the album. Jackson had been railing against “sex rock” songs since 1976, when he started pushing record companies to be more “responsible.” Most industry executives refused to meet with him, but Ahmet Ertegun, head of the Rolling Stones’ label Atlantic Records, did. He tried to get some kind of redress, but Ertegun insisted he had no creative control over the band, and there were no plans to alter or remove the song.

“Mick assured me that it was a parody of the type of people who hold these attitudes,” Ertegun explained in Rolling Stone. “Mick has great respect for blacks.”

Jackson had to settle for a halfhearted apology. The band issued a statement saying: “It never occurred to us that our parody of certain stereotypical attitudes would be taken seriously by anyone who heard the entire lyric of the song in question. No insult was intended, and if any was taken, we sincerely apologize.”

The offensive line was just something Jagger ad-libbed, but he wasn’t going to change it.
This wasn’t the first Stones song that outraged feminists and other activist groups. “Brown Sugar” and “Under My Thumb” were also considered degrading to women.

At the time, Jagger said, “If you can’t take a joke, it’s too f–king bad.” He later softened his stance, and began performing the song with these lyrics removed:

White girls they’re pretty funny
Sometimes they drive me mad
Black girls just wanna get f–ked all night
I just don’t have that much jam


The lyrics are comically offensive, as Mick Jagger shares his thoughts on women of various nationalities and ethnicities. Among his observations:

French girls want Cartier
Italian girls want cars
American girls want everything in the world
English girls are prissy
Chinese girls are so gentle

Jagger explained: “Most of the girls I’ve played the song to like ‘Some Girls.’ They think it’s funny. Black girlfriends of mine just laughed. And I think it’s very complimentary about Chinese girls, I think they come off better than English girls. I really like girls an awful lot, and I don’t think I’d say anything really nasty about any of them.”

The Stones considered this song a dirty version of The Beach Boys’ “California Girls.”

The album cover was a parody of a newspaper ad for wigs, but the women wearing the wigs were celebrities like Raquel Welch, Lucille Ball, and Farrah Fawcett. They had to remove the famous women when faced with a lawsuit.
Before they edited this down, the song was 24-minutes long. Many of Jagger’s outrageous ramblings were cut.

Sugar Blue (real name: James Whiting) played harmonica on this track. An American blues player, he also worked on Emotional Rescue and Tattoo You. Someone from The Stones record company found him playing in the Paris metro, and brought him to these sessions, where he fit in well with the band.

This was the second Stones song that was also the album title. “Let It Bleed” was the first.

In a 2013 interview with Sabotage Times that spent a lot of time covering his relationship with groupies, Keith Richards was asked about the “Black girls just want to get f–ked all night” line in this song. His reply: “Well they do. At least in my experience. That’s not all they want to do. But if you can go all night, then they will do. I mean, Mick wrote that line. And he was probably moaning because he couldn’t keep up with some chick he was seeing. So, in a way, it’s a reverse joke.”

From the The Rolling Stones – All the Songs book:
This is one song to be avoided by any sensitive souls! Mick Jagger once
again indulges in a settling of scores with women—and does not go in for
half measures. Initially in the guise of a gigolo, the narrator describes his
relationships with his female clients (Some girls give me money.). He then
reassumes the role of rock star and turns the spotlight on groupies (Some
girls get the shirt off my back/And leave me with a lethal dose
). All,
wherever they hail from, are hauled over the coals. French girls they want
Cartier, Italian girls want cars, American girls want everything in the
world.
Having found English girls so prissy, he then attacks black girls,
who just wanna get fucked all night. This explains why the feminist and
antiracist organizations were so outraged at the release of the album, a
reaction that inspired the following response from Keith Richards: “Well,
we’ve been on the road with a lot of black chicks for many years, and
there’s quite a few that do. It could have been yellow girls or white girls.”
One can only imagine the uproar that would have ensued had the most
cynical and compromising verses not been cut from the song, which
originally lasted nearly twenty-three minutes.

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1 reply »

  1. The line with American girls is wrong. You forgot to add at the end of this line… American girls want everything in the
    world. “You can possibly imagine.”

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