The Jagger-Richards Dynamic Shift on Some Girls (1978)

By 1978 Keith Richards had kicked his heroin habit—not fully clean, but functional enough to show up for sessions at Pathé Marconi in Paris. That changed the balance. Mick Jagger had dominated the previous album Black and Blue (1976), steering the band toward funk and world music while Richards was often absent or nodding off. For Some Girls, Richards was present, sharp, and pushing for a back-to-basics guitar sound.

The tracks that best show Richards’s renewed influence are the ones that feel like classic Stones rockers: “Respectable,” a snarling three-chord punk blast he co-wrote and played with ragged energy; “Beast of Burden,” built on his open-G tuning riff; “Lies,” another aggressive, guitar-driven cut. Even “Miss You,” Jagger’s disco experiment, got its nerve from Richards’s choppy rhythm guitar and his reggae-tinged playing—though Richards famously hated the song at first. The whole record came out tighter and tougher because Keith was in the room.