Shattered

The Zoo Crew has got the turntable locked on a mean little closer, and if you have been riding with the Zoo Freaks for any stretch of time you already know the feeling. “Shattered” by the Rolling Stones, the last track on the 1978 album Some Girls, is the kind of record that makes a room lean forward. Keith Richards came up with the guitar figure and that half-sung hook, “sha-doobie,” and Mick Jagger filled in the rest. Richards has told the story plain. He sat down, played the riff, and at some point said the thing was called Shattered. From there on, the subject and the delivery belonged to Mick. That is the old Jagger-Richards workshop in one sentence, and it still sounds like a couple of cats passing a riff across a kitchen table.

Jagger wrote the words in the back of a New York cab. He has said so himself. The city he was looking at was a rough one. A garbage strike had the sidewalks piled high, the garment trade on Seventh Avenue was hanging on by threads, and the whole town felt worn through. When he spits “shmatta, shmatta, shmatta, I can’t give it away on Seventh Avenue,” he is reaching for an old Yiddish word for a rag, the kind of worn-out cloth the garment district lived on. “This town’s been wearing tatters” is not poetry class. It is a man staring out a taxi window. The line about a brain battered and splattered all over Manhattan landed in the studio not long after a Kojak episode used almost the same threat, which tells you how thick the street talk was in those rooms. Jagger half-speaks the verses, a talk-sing that rides the riff instead of floating over it, and the punk bite coming out of London in 1976 and 1977 is all over the tempo.

The sessions ran from October into December of 1977, mostly in Paris, with the band cutting close to fifty tracks and then sorting the ten that would make the record. Richards later compared that sorting to pin the tail on the donkey. Bill Wyman was not on the bass for this one. Ronnie Wood took the low end, and he also laid in pedal steel, extra guitar, a bass drum, and backing vocals. Richards’ part is mostly a steady strum between the tonic and the dominant, run through a modest phaser so the riff has a little liquid shimmer. It does not need fireworks. The riff does the walking, and Mick does the talking.

There was a heavier cloud over those sessions than any garbage strike. In February 1977 the Mounties had searched Richards’ room at the Harbour Castle in Toronto and found enough heroin and cocaine to hang a trafficking charge on him, a charge that under Canadian law could have meant years, even life. The case stayed open all the way through the writing and the recording of Some Girls, and past the June 9, 1978 release. Richards has said he let Mick carry more of the load while that hung over him. He put his own fear on the same album in “Before They Make Me Run,” which he later called pretty autobiographical, a cry from a man who felt hounded and was not sure which countries would still have him. He stood in front of a judge in October 1978, got probation, and was ordered to play a benefit for the blind. The band had already made the record under that shadow, faster and tighter than they had sounded in years.

Some Girls went to number one on the Billboard 200 and sold more than six million copies in the States. “Miss You” was the big one. “Beast of Burden” and “Shattered” followed it onto rock radio and stayed there. “Shattered” came out as a single in the States on November 29, 1978, backed with “Everything Is Turning to Gold,” a Ronnie Wood co-write tied to the birth of his son, and it peaked at number 31. The title of the 2019 book Can’t Give It Away on Seventh Avenue is lifted straight from the lyric, which tells you how long that cab-ride picture has stuck. Not long after the single, the band played the song on Saturday Night Live. It was not their cleanest night. There had been a few libations backstage, Mick’s voice was ragged, and in the middle of it he leaned over and licked Ronnie Wood on the mouth for a good few seconds. Television did not do that sort of thing in those days. The girls in living rooms shrieked. Woody raised an eyebrow and kept playing. Cast members later said the band had rehearsed themselves hoarse that week. It is still the performance people bring up when this record comes on.

Jagger has said the spark for the whole album was New York and the ways of that town, with the punk thing giving it an extra spur and a harder edge. The working titles floated around before they settled on Some Girls. Richards once remarked, half in admiration, that Mick had finally written a rock and roll song by himself. The title track stirred its own storm, a long ad-libbed roll call of girls that Jesse Jackson and others wanted pulled, and Atlantic boss Ahmet Ertegun told the papers Mick had framed it as a parody. Jagger refused to drop it. That argument is a different song. “Shattered” is the one that closes the side, street-level and jumpy, pride and grime in the same breath. Success, sex, success, and look at you, you have been tattered. The Zoo Freaks know that feeling. You can hear it on THE ZOO any time the Crew drops the needle on this one.

None of that New York snarl happens without a couple of kids in Dartford who lost touch and found each other again. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards had gone to school together as boys, then drifted. In October 1961 they bumped into each other on the platform at Dartford station. Jagger was headed for the London School of Economics. Richards was on his way to Sidcup Art College. Under Mick’s arm was a stack of Chess and blues records, Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters among them, and the talk started there. They had a mutual friend in guitarist Dick Taylor, who was already playing with Jagger in a little outfit and jamming with Richards between classes. The three of them, with a couple of others, became Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys, sitting around listening to American records and trying to play what they heard.

The trail ran through Alexis Korner’s blues nights at the Ealing Club, where Jagger started sitting in with Blues Incorporated and where drummer Charlie Watts was already in the room. Brian Jones, a Cheltenham multi-instrumentalist who had dropped out to chase the same Chicago blues, crossed their path and pulled the circle tighter. Pianist Ian Stewart came aboard. When a journalist asked the still-unnamed group what they were called, Jones reached for a Muddy Waters record, “Rollin’ Stone,” from 1950 on Chess, and the name stuck. They played their first show as the Rolling Stones at the Marquee in London on July 12, 1962, with Jagger singing, Richards and Jones on guitar, Taylor on bass, Stewart on piano, and Mick Avory, later of the Kinks, on drums. Taylor soon left for art school and later formed the Pretty Things. Bill Wyman took the bass. Watts settled in on the drums. Manager Andrew Loog Oldham pushed them toward Decca, and in June 1963 they issued their first single, Chuck Berry’s “Come On.”

The long run started when Jagger and Richards, nudged by what Lennon and McCartney were doing across town, began writing their own songs. That is the hinge. A blues cover band becomes a band with a catalog, and the catalog is what a freeform station can still live on. Some Girls, fifteen years after that first single, is the proof they could still hear the street. “Shattered” is the proof they could still write it down in the back of a cab and have Keith’s riff carry it home. If you want the band’s own door, the official site is rollingstones.com. They keep the lights on at Facebook, Instagram, and X. For the fans who have been trading set lists and stories since 1980, the It’s Only Rock ’n Roll club lives at iorr.org. Put the record on, turn it up past polite, and let that sha-doobie do the rest.