Respectable

The Zoo Crew has got Respectable cranked up on the board right now, and if you are out there riding with the Zoo Freaks, you already know this one does not sneak up on anybody. It comes in loud, three chords slammed down like somebody just kicked the door in, and it stays that way until Charlie Watts and Bill Wyman have wrung every last mile out of the groove. The Rolling Stones cut it for Some Girls, the record they put out in June 1978, and it is still one of the meanest rockers they ever committed to tape. Over at THE ZOO we play it the way it was meant to be heard, loud enough that the needle would have been jumping if this were still a turntable and a stack of vinyl.

Mick Jagger told Rolling Stone, right around the time the album came out, that Respectable started in his head as a joke about how respectable the band was supposed to have become. We are so respectable, he said. Now we are respected in society. He kept making lines up as he sang them, fitting them to the music instead of sitting down with a notebook and a plan. He even drops in a line about his wife, the famous get out of my life, go take my wife, do not come back bit, and he was clear that nobody was supposed to take it as a sermon. When you hear it sung, he said, it is not what it is, it is the way we do it. Lighthearted, he called it, which is a funny word for a song that sounds like a bar fight set to Chuck Berry.

In the liner notes he went a little further. He said he was banging out three chords incredibly loud on the electric guitar, which is not always a wonderful idea but was great fun here, and he tagged the whole thing a punk meets Chuck Berry number. The lyric, he added, carries no fantastically deep message, though he allowed it might have had something to do with Bianca. That White House lawn line has been chewed over for decades. Bianca Jagger had been photographed around Washington society, including a visit tied to President Ford's son, and Mick turned the gossip pages into a throwaway gag. He thought it was funny. A lot of people did not, which has never stopped the Stones from singing it.

Keith Richards heard the song coming together slower than he wanted and fought to keep it an uptempo rocker. There were arguments over the tempo, the kind of studio scrapes those two have been having since they were kids in Dartford. Keith won that one, and he took the guitar solo. Ronnie Wood was in the band by then, and Mick picked up an electric too, so Respectable is one of those rare Stones tracks with three guitars grinding at once. Woody later joked that the album took longer than usual because he had to teach Mick how to play again. Road manager and piano man Ian Stewart sat out a lot of those Paris sessions. With Mick already on guitar, Stu figured a piano would just be in the way, which is why Some Girls is one of the few Stones records where you do not hear him.

They cut the track at Pathé Marconi Studios in Paris, between October and December 1977, with Chris Kimsey engineering and the Glimmer Twins producing. The band had somewhere around forty songs in the can by the time they were done, maybe more, and Jagger said that was why the album held together. They could throw out the deadwood. He called Some Girls the best record they had made since Let It Bleed, and he was not in a modest mood about it. Respectable landed on side two, between Far Away Eyes and Before They Make Me Run, and in Britain it came out as a single on September 15, 1978, with When the Whip Comes Down on the flip. It peaked at number 23 over there, not a smash, but the video Michael Lindsay-Hogg shot for it showed a scruffier, punkier Stones than the satin-and-stadium version people had gotten used to.

The whole album was made with a boot on the band's neck. Punk had blown up in London, and the music papers were ready to file the Stones under yesterday's news. Keith later said the punks made them look around and say they had already been around for ten years. He loved the attitude and called it a kick up the ass, then added the only trouble was none of them could really play. Mick, living a lot of the time in New York, said they were conscious of living in the day, with basic rock coming back, hip-hop starting up, and dance music cross-pollinating everything in the clubs. Meanwhile Keith was still staring down the Toronto bust from February 1977, a trafficking charge that could have put him away for years. The case did not get settled until the fall of 1978, months after Some Girls hit the stores and went to number one in America. Before They Make Me Run is the song everybody points to for that story, but Respectable is the sound of the same band refusing to sit still while the lawyers talked.

If you want the long road that led to that Paris room, it starts in Dartford, Kent, not in a boardroom. Mick and Keith grew up near each other. Jagger has said they lived on the same block for a while as kids, and he figures he has known Keith since he was about six. The meeting everybody tells is the one on the train at Dartford station in October 1961. Keith spotted Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters records under Mick's arm, and that was the handshake. They started knocking around with Dick Taylor, then fell in with Brian Jones, the slide player who was already deep in American blues, and with Ian Stewart on piano. Alexis Korner gave them a shove onto the London club circuit. They took the name from a Muddy Waters song, Rollin' Stone, and by 1962 Charlie Watts had come over from the jazz side and Bill Wyman had joined on bass. The first single, a cover of Chuck Berry's Come On, arrived in June 1963. Andrew Loog Oldham pushed them to write their own songs, and the Jagger-Richards partnership that still gets the credit on Respectable was born out of that shove. Fifteen years later they were in Paris, Mick banging three chords and Keith refusing to let the tempo sag, still arguing and still making the best rock and roll in the room.

The catalog, the tours, and whatever the band is up to now live on the Rolling Stones official website, where the Paris years and the Some Girls sessions still turn up in the stories they tell about the records that came after. You can follow the day-to-day on Facebook, Instagram, and X. For the fan side of the street, the long-running club It's Only Rock'n Roll has been gathering Stones people since 1980, and their album files include a full write-up on the Some Girls cover and the record it belongs to. Spin Respectable again if you have got room. It still sounds like a band that had no interest in being respectable, and never really was.