Walking in Central Park, Singing after Dark

330. ROLLING STONES, "Miss You"
Produced and written by Mick Jagger & Keith Richards (aka "The Glimmer Twins")
Rolling Stones 19307 1978 Billboard # 1

This is a ghost story, pure and simple, and the spirit in question is a love that's going or gone, quite possibly because of the singer's own actions. If you want to be narrowly biographical about it, it may be about the slow dissipation of Mick's marriage to Bianca, which would still technically last two more years after the single was released. If you want to wax musicological, it may be about the slide from discotheques to disco, fed by a beat that Billy Preston allegedly passed on to Charlie Watts during the Stones' dates at El Mocambo in 1977; about how, even if you frequent 54, you can still wish you were going to a go-go the way you used to back when. But personally I've always thought that this is a song about New York, as so much of Some Girls is about that city in the odd cultural twilight of the 1970s. When Mick and Keith chose it as one of the two songs they sang at the Concert for New York two months after 9/11, I was even more convinced. This is a song about remembering what used to be, what should be, but secretly wanting to revel in the dirty truth of what is. And if that doesn't describe New York City in the late 1970s, then I don't know what does.