Some Girls: Live in Texas '78

Great performance by the Rolling Stones.

Recorded during the Fort Worth concert of the Rolling Stones' 1978 Some Girls tour, this captures the Stones at the rawest and most natural. Some Girls was their last great album, and soon after this they moved onto stadium rock and light shows.

Also has a stripped-down feel to it. No horn section, no backing singers, very few additional musicians.

On the negative side, they do tend to concentrate largely on the songs from Some Girls. Yes, the latest album will always have a disproportionately-higher-than-deserved weight in the set list - the aim of touring is to market your latest album - but it seems too much in this case. We end up with one song from Let it Bleed (Love in Vain), three from Exile on Main St (Happy, Tumbling Dice, All Down the Line), one from Sticky Fingers (Brown Sugar) and none from Beggars Banquet, plus Jumpin' Jack Flash and Honky Tonk Women.

This said, the performances of even the lesser songs from Some Girls give the songs new life. Some of the songs on Some Girls are quite forgettable, yet here they sparkle. Girl with the Faraway Eyes is the highlight, revealing the fun, tongue-in-cheek side of the Stones.

Great concert, great recording of it.

At this point The Stones had transitioned from The Greatest Rock and Roll Band in the World to The Greatest Garage Band in The World. This is an excellent concert form 78.

Some Girls was essentially a "come back" album. They stripped down from the over-the-top 75-76 lives shows to the basics in 78. The set list is heavy on Some Girls with a few warhorses thrown in.

78 is one of the best tours from the Ronnie years in regard to how much Ronnie and Keith actually played. And how well they played! The negative- Mick was nearing the end of his very flamboyant stage antics era that included some questionable cringe-worthy moments with Ronnie (or Billy Preston a couple of years earlier).

After a trend-setting career as the 'bad boys of rock'n'roll' in the 1960s, come the 1970s the Rolling Stones began to subside into a kind of comfortable corporate entity with progressively less inspired music and performances. 'Love You Live', the enervated, heavily-overdubbed 1977 album drawn from 1975 performances, represents the nadir of the band's 1970s releases. During the time between the tour and release of that album, punk rock broke and immediately condemned as irrelevant poseurs all but a very few 'old guard' rock stars (David Bowie and perhaps one or two others escaped unscathed). Forced to confront their own increasing disengagement from the current rock scene, the Rolling Stones reacted by cutting out the excess, playing hard and writing 'Some Girls', released in 1978 and celebrated as one of their career- best albums. 'Some Girls: Live in Texas '78' presents a conspicuously energised-by-punk Stones, with upbeat tempos and a sublimely strutting Jagger wearing vinyl pants and the same 'Destroy' design t-shirt as worn by Johnny Rotten a year before. The set list is basically the titular album played live with some Stones classics mixed in for good measure, and the whole package makes for easily the best live Rolling Stones DVD of them all. Turn it up, sing along and dance all around your living room; this burst of energy is invigorating enough to delight even those who detested what the band had become by 1977. It didn't last, but here are the real Rolling Stones, back on form and proving they still had it even as the Clash et al were snidely (and not a little jealously, as it turned out) saying they were through.

The Rolling Stones: Some Girls - Live in Texas '78 (2011)

*** 1/2 (out of 4)

Yet another excellent release from The Rolling Stones, this one here recorded at the Will Rogers Memorial Center in Fort Worth, TX on July 18th, 1978. This was the first show I've watched from this tour and the first thing that struck me is how laid back the stage is. There are a few items located on it but for the most part it's just the band out there delivering great performances in a very memorable show. The setlist includes numbers like Let It Rock, All Down the Line, Honky Tonk Women, When the Whip Comes Down, Beast of Burden, Just My Imagination, Love in Vain, Tumbling Dice, Brown Sugar, Jumpin Jack Flash among a few others. I really don't see how any Stones fan could be disappointed with the show here because it really starts off incredibly strong and never slows down. Mick is certainly in fine form as he dances around the stage and there's no question that both Richards and Wood are right on the mark. A lot of times when you watch these concerts you notice that the rarer songs are usually the ones that really stick out but that's not the case here. The intro to Honky Tonk Women was terrific and I think this here was the highlight in regards to the guitar playing. The overall highlight of the concert was a downright fabulous version of Beasts of Burden. Just the way the music is played and the way Mick delivered the lines was something special and it really brought the song to life. My only complaint and this might just have been an issue with my system is that the vocals were far too back in the sound mix. There were times where the guitars were just way too loud and you couldn't really get a clear sound from Mick. Still, the concert itself is full of great energy and some wonderful music.

I've always enjoyed the Stones records, but I had no idea how great they were live. And I'm not just talking about how much their personalities shine, and the lengths to which they go to entertain their fans. This show is an excellent display of the musicianship of the band. Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood are absolutely incredible. Many of the songs that hover around the 4-minute mark on their records are extended into 7+ minute jams in these performances. The rendition of Beast of Burden really sticks out for me – it's emotional and workmanlike at the same time, with no theatrics, just a bunch of guys at the absolute top of their game. And one could certainly argue that this was indeed the last high point of their music career.