Remember When Mick Jagger Steered The Rolling Stones to the Disco Floor in 1978?

The Rolling Stones’ artistic trajectory can be viewed as a blow-by-blow of the power struggle between Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. That push and pull created some of the most memorable rock music in history, as well as some serious friction between Jagger and Richards.

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In 1978, the album Some Girls found Jagger’s hands firmly at the tiller while a distracted Richards largely retreated. That’s probably why the album headed to the dance floor with the first single and reflected some of the fire and vigor of the growing punk movement.

Keith’s Calamity

It’s always dangerous to boil down musicians as talented as Mick Jagger and Keith Richards to general assumptions. But you can simplify The Rolling Stones’ two leaders’ tendencies down if you wish to this: Jagger liked to modernize the band’s sound, while Richards preferred to strengthen the band’s ties to traditional roots music.

At times, that struggle boiled over to open warfare. In the mid-80s, for example, the band came perilously close to breaking up. But the first signs of it came in the mid-70s. Jagger started inserting dance-friendly tracks like “Hot Stuff” into the mix, songs Richards likely would have just as soon left on the cutting-room floor.

In early 1977, Keith Richards was arrested in Toronto on drug charges. Early on in the process, authorities threatened to tag Richards with trafficking. That was a much more serious charge than he’d previously faced, one that could have landed him in prison for several years.

Mick Takes Charge

But The Rolling Stones’ train had to keep rolling. While Richards waited for more than a year and a half in 1977 and 1978 for the case to be fully adjudicated, the band pressed forward. And that meant that Mick Jagger largely took charge of the artistic direction for the band’s 1978 album Some Girls.

Some Girls was a crucial album for The Stones. It was the first that would completely include the contributions of Ronnie Wood, who had first appeared on a few songs on Black And Blue in 1976. The band had also been lacking a consensus critical success since the release of Exile On Main St. in 1972.

Jagger, who was spending a lot of time in New York while composing songs for the album, brought the city’s musical flavors into the material. The most obvious influence was disco on lead single “Miss You”. But the full-throttle fury of punk also made its presence felt on attacking rockers like “Lies” and “Respectable”. You could practically smell NYC’s sewers on the grindingly funky “Shattered”.

The Aftermath

To be clear, Keith Richards fully participated in the recording process for Some Girls. But because he was still dealing with his legal issues, he subtly ceded ground to Jagger in terms of the direction of the album. His main contributions included the intertwining guitar approach he developed with Wood and the irreverent outlaw anthem “Before They Make Me Run”.

Some Girls rang out as an unmitigated triumph for The Stones. It gave Jagger the impetus to push the band further away from rock on the 1980 album Emotional Rescue.

By that time, Richards, having escaped serious punishment for his drug offense, wanted to exert his influence on the band again. And so, the eternal struggle between the Glimmer Twins for the soul of The Stones began anew.

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