The Rolling Stones – Far Away Eyes

The Rolling Stones put their disco No.1 on one side of the single and a Bakersfield country drawl on the other, and listeners are still arguing over whether the B-side was a joke.

The single the Rolling Stones released from Some Girls in 1978 held two records that could hardly have been further apart. One side carried Miss You, the disco-built groove that took them to No.1 in America. Flip it over and Mick Jagger was drawling through Far Away Eyes, a slow country song about a Sunday-morning drive through Bakersfield, complete with pedal steel and a radio preacher. Listeners have argued ever since over whether the B-side was a joke at country music’s expense or a tribute to it. The Stones meant it as both, and the song works because it never picks.

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The band recorded it in Paris, at Pathé Marconi Studios, during sessions for Some Girls that ran from October to December 1977. The surrounding album was a city record, shaped by the speed of punk and the pulse of disco, and Jagger and Keith Richards set this one in another country entirely. Jagger explained in 1978 that the song was “really about driving alone, listening to the radio.” The lyric follows its narrator through Bakersfield on a Sunday morning, tuned to a gospel station, as the preacher’s promises drift toward the hope of finding a girl with far-away eyes.

Bakersfield was no random detail. The California oil town had given country music a harder, anti-Nashville sound through Buck Owens and Merle Haggard, and the Stones had been steeped in country records since the 1960s. What they added was Ronnie Wood’s pedal steel guitar, which carries the track, and a Jagger vocal that slides between a sincere country croon and an exaggerated drawl. Wood’s range across Some Girls, from this to the album’s harder rock songs, did much to establish him as a full member of the band rather than a stand-in for Mick Taylor.

Disco on one side, Bakersfield on the other

Rolling Stones Records released it as the B-side of Miss You, and the pairing turned the record into a statement about range. The A-side drew accusations that the band had sold out to disco. The B-side was harder to argue with because it was harder to read. Jagger and Richards produced both sides under their Glimmer Twins credit. Onstage, the band played Far Away Eyes at every concert of its 1978 American tour, and the concert film Some Girls: Live in Texas ’78 captures a version with the Cajun fiddler Doug Kershaw.

Michael Lindsay-Hogg directed the promotional clip, a performance of the band playing the song. He had been filming the Stones since the late 1960s and also directed their Miss You promo, so the two sides of the single reached television through the same director. The clip now sits on the band’s official channel, labeled as the official promo.

The song has long outlived its B-side status. Rolling Stone ranked it No.73 among the band’s 100 greatest songs, and the Stones have brought it back sporadically for decades. On June 17, 2015, during their Zip Code tour, they played it at LP Field in Nashville, carrying a song about California country into the city that the Bakersfield sound had defined itself against.

That is the argument the record makes, and why the debate over its intent never settles. Far Away Eyes is affectionate enough to work as a country song and arch enough to work as a Rolling Stones song, and Jagger sings it so that both readings hold at once. The band put it behind their biggest disco hit and let listeners decide which side was the real Rolling Stones. Nearly fifty years later, the honest answer is still both.