This month, Keith Richards will meet fellow Rolling Stones Ronnie
Wood and Charlie Watts in a London studio. "We're just going to play a
little together, because we haven't played for three or four years,"
Richards says. "You don't necessarily want to rehearse or write anything – you
just want to touch bases. That's a good start: me, Charlie and
Ronnie. Mick's welcome, and I'm sure he'll turn up, but right now we
just want to get our chops down."
Beyond that, the Stones' plans for their 50th anniversary next year
remain unclear. "I just hope we can perform live," says Wood. "It'd be
great to see if that old spark is there."
For now, the closest fans will get is the stellar Some Girls Live in Texas DVD
– shot on a hot night in Fort Worth during the Stones' brief summer 1978 tour.
It's part of the upcoming Some Girls reissue – due November 21st and packed
with extras including 12
previously unreleased tracks, which sent the band back to a period when
Richards was awaiting trial for heroin possession, Mick Jagger was
hitting the New York club scene hard, and the Stones were forced to
confront changing times. "We were getting a certain kick up the ass from the
punks," says Richards. "Not that I'm a really big punk fan, but
their energy, and the fact that you realize another generation was
coming up on top of you, was a kick up the ass. It felt time to get down to the
nuts and bolts of it and not play around with glamorous female
voices and horns and stuff."
Beginning in October 1977, the band hunkered down at a live rehearsal space in
Paris' Pathé Marconi studios and jammed for months on end.
"Everybody was exploding with riffs," says Wood. "The motto was 'More
fast numbers.' " They churned out their most eclectic album ever,
ranging from after-hours disco glitter ("Miss You") to speedy punk
("When the Whip Comes Down") and soulful ballads showing off Richards
and Wood's newfound guitar-weaving majesty ("Beast of Burden" and "Just
My Imagination"). Says Wood, "We'd go into a Western mode, we'd go into
heavy rock n' roll mode, and we'd just go into songs in A."
With producer Don Was (who helmed last year's Exile on Main St. reissue), the
Stones returned to Some Girls earlier this year, scouring hundreds of hours of
tapes from the
original sessions, using long-circulated bootlegs as a guide to
highlights like "Claudine," a stripped-down boogie about French singer
Claudine Longet, accused of murdering her boyfriend, ski racer Spider
Sabich, in 1976, and "Tallahassee Lassie," a raucous Chuck Berry-style
number cut during a stop on the Some Girls tour.
"There was a really great version of 'Miss You,' which is almost
jazz," Richards says of one surprise the band found in the vault. "Mick
didn't like his vocal on that. I would have loved to put that on, just
because it's so different from the other one. But at the same time Mick
said, 'No, I'm not cutting it.' The same would happen to me. … We go
into a couple things like that, then we just look at each other and go,
'Oh, what a shame.'
Revisiting Exile and Some Girls inthe last two years, Wood says, "has
re-injected some past energy, and made us realize what a kicking live band we
are."
The Some Girls and Exile reissues might only be the beginning: Was wants to
tackle Beggars Banquet, Let It Bleed or Sticky Fingers soon. "There's so much
material," he says. "If they never went in the
studio again, you could have a new Stones album every year for the next
50 years, and it would all be good."
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