This tour deserves way more respect. For one thing, the band performed all of the “Some Girls” songs, except the title track and "Before They Make Me Run." That alone makes the tour’s setlist exciting and historically anomalous. The Stones were mostly a hits band, before and after this tour, and I don’t believe there’s any album that was as throughly performed live at the time of its release.
And it’s “Some Girls,” played exactly right by a gloriously fucked-up and entirely appropriate Rolling Stones. This mix pulls from all the FM broadcasts I could lay my hands on (a while back), plucking one version of nearly every song played on the tour. When it was right, it was great.
There are a million miles between this band and the thoroughly boring one documented on the 1975 tour album, “Love You Live," released in 1977 – and between the 1978 tour all all subsequent, highly-professional ones. I’m not saying that all later live Stones is to be ignored, but rather that the 1978 tour was probably the last time anyone witnessed the unruly entity that built the Stones legend.
So, this mix tries to lock down that moment in an enduringly satisfying, album-like way.
I messed with the typical setlist order of the tour, so that all the “Some Girls” material is grouped together. The mix leads and closes with older tunes.
- Hound Dog
- Starfucker
- All Down the Line
- Honky Tonk Women
- Miss You
- Beast of Burden
- Shattered
- When the Whip Comes Down
- Lies
- Just My Imagination
- Far Away Eyes
- Respectable
- Love In Vain
- Tumbling Dice
- Jumping Jack Flash
Important caveats:
- I compiled this in 2010 and did not tag my selections with dates/locations. Subsequently (2011), The Rolling Stones released a full 1978 show from Fort Worth, Texas. I am sorry I can’t tell you which, if any, tracks come from that show.
- This mix was originally (and is still) posted as a Save Your Face virtual boxed set that includes two discs of curated studio outtakes from the “Some Girls” era. It’s one of several such multi-disc sets on the SYF blog. Since this live disc has more mass appeal than the half-finished outtakes, I thought it might make sense to break it out. (And I felt like making a cover image!) Choose your own adventure.