Far Away Eyes

The Zoo Crew has Far Away Eyes spinning right now for the Zoo Freaks, and if you have not heard this one in a while, pull the car over and listen like you mean it. The Rolling Stones cut it for Some Girls in 1978, side two, right after the disco flash of Miss You and the New York street snap of the rest of that record. It is the twangiest thing on the album, half sung and half talked, with Mick Jagger leaning into a drawl so thick you can almost smell the truck-stop coffee. The band is not winking the whole song away. The guitars and the piano play it straight. Mick is the one doing the character.

He told Rolling Stone in 1978 that the scene really happened. Driving through Bakersfield, he caught the country stations handing the air over to live black gospel services coming out of Los Angeles. That is the preacher in the lyric, the one who says you always have the Lord by your side. Mick was so pleased to be informed of this that the narrator runs twenty red lights in His honor. Asked if the girl was real, Jagger said she was a real girl, and then, when they pressed him, that she was right across the room, a little bleary-eyed. The song, he said, is really about driving alone and listening to the radio. That is a Zoo kind of line. We know that feeling.

Keith Richards had his own read on where the twang came from. He said Mick listened to a lot of Merle Haggard out of Bakersfield, and that is why the town shows up in the lyric. Keith figured he ought to ask Mick why Bakersfield specifically, then allowed that Mick might not even know himself. The Bakersfield sound, Buck Owens and Haggard and that sharper California country, sits under the whole track. Ronnie Wood plays the pedal steel. Mick is on piano, with Keith adding the top part later. Ian Stewart, the sixth Stone who never quite got the poster, is in the piano chair on the session as well. It feels like a bar band that wandered into a church parking lot and decided to stay for one more song.

Gram Parsons is in the family tree even if Mick would not pin the song on him alone. Jagger knew Gram well and said Gram was one of the few people who really helped him sing country, back when he and Keith were mostly copying it off records. Mick used to play piano with Gram. On the influence question, Mick was careful. He would not say Far Away Eyes was specifically a Gram song. What they shared was the tongue-in-cheek country idea. Gram had it on Drugstore Truck Drivin' Man. The Stones have that sardonic streak too. So you get a love letter and a gentle ribbing in the same three minutes. The narrator sends ten dollars to the church of the Sacred Bleeding Heart of Jesus, somewhere in Los Angeles, so they will say his prayer on the radio and all his dreams will come true. He does it. Then he finds the girl with the far away eyes sitting in the corner, worse for wear, and the chorus turns almost tender. If you are down on your luck and you cannot harmonize, find a girl with far away eyes.

The record company put this thing out as the B-side of Miss You, which is about as odd a pairing as the Stones ever shipped. Disco on one side, Bakersfield gospel country on the other, same summer, same album. Rolling Stone later parked Far Away Eyes at number 73 on its list of the 100 greatest Rolling Stones songs. They played it at every stop on the 1978 U.S. tour. The Texas show that ended up in Some Girls: Live in Texas '78 brings in Doug Kershaw, the Ragin' Cajun, on fiddle, and the song opens up like a roadhouse. It has come and gone from the set since then, turning up on the stripped-down 1995 run, on the Shine a Light film from the Bigger Bang tour, and again in Los Angeles on the 50 and Counting tour. It is not a nightly warhorse. When they dust it off, the room leans in.

None of that country detour makes sense unless you go back to where the band actually started, which was not a boardroom and not a pop plan. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards grew up near each other in Dartford, lost touch, and ran into each other again on a train platform with Mick carrying Chess and Muddy Waters records under his arm. They started sitting in with a little outfit called Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys, with guitarist Dick Taylor. The real door opened at the Ealing Club, where Alexis Korner's Blues Incorporated was holding down the London blues scene. Brian Jones was up there playing slide under the name Elmo Lewis, after Elmore James. Mick and Keith fell in with him. Ian Stewart answered an ad in Jazz News and brought the boogie-woogie piano. When Korner had to bow out of a Marquee Club date, he handed the gig to this unfinished group. Brian pulled the name off a Muddy Waters tune, Rollin' Stone. On July 12, 1962, they went on as the Rolling Stones, with Mick singing, Keith and Brian on guitar, Dick Taylor on bass, Stu on piano, and Mick Avory, later of the Kinks, on drums. Charlie Watts came over from the Korner scene not long after. Bill Wyman replaced Taylor. That is the root. American blues records, a London club, a Muddy Waters song title, and a band that never stopped listening to the radio.

Some Girls came out of a different weather. New York, punk and disco on the street, Keith back from the Toronto bust, Ronnie Wood settled in as a full Stone. They cut a pile of music in Paris, some of it country, some of it funk, some of it nasty rock and roll. Far Away Eyes is the deep cut that proves they still had room for a joke and a hymn in the same groove. The Zoo Crew keeps it in the box for that reason. It is a driving song, a radio song, and a reminder that the greatest rock and roll band in the world learned half of what they know from the dial.

You can dig the whole story, the tours, and the catalog on the band's own site at The Rolling Stones official website. Their official pages sit right alongside it: Facebook, Instagram, and X. Stones people also gather in the public Rolling Stones Fan Club group, and the long-running SHIDOOBEE crowd keeps a board at SHIDOOBEE with StonesDoug. If you want the station that still spins the deep cuts the way a freeform rock room ought to, the Zoo Freaks are already home at THE ZOO. Keep it on. Far Away Eyes is the kind of record that sounds better the farther you drive.