Mick Jagger's Cassette Demo Experiment on Some Girls

By 1977 the Rolling Stones were fraying – Keith Richards deep in a heroin bust, the band’s sound feeling stale. Mick Jagger started carrying a cheap cassette recorder everywhere, humming melodies and half-formed lyrics into it between hotel rooms and car rides. For Some Girls, he brought those wobbly home tapes to the studio and refused to polish them. The band played along to the rough demos live, and that raw, catch-as-catch-can energy became the album’s nervous system.

The experiment forced the Stones to work faster and looser. On “Miss You,” Jagger’s original cassette had him muttering the bass line and snapping his fingers – the finished track kept that same skeletal groove. Keith hated the approach at first, calling it “Mick’s Dictaphone bullshit,” but the tension produced Some Girls’ lean, punk-adjacent bite. The cassette demos essentially became the blueprint, and the band’s job was to kick the walls in around them.