We’ve written before about the Rolling Stones’ Some Girls (1978), an album that is both a dirtbag disco joint and a Bakersfield country classic. Beauty is grime, and grime beauty, that’s all we know. The whole performance raises questions. Among them: Can a total English-to-American conversion happen to someone, or even to an entire band? Well, can it?

The American impulse entails (but doesn’t often admit the coexistence of) exultation and failure, success and loss, clarity and muck, all of it in richly conflicted individual versions (we still call them citizens), which makes sense, given our roots in Calvinism and the slave trade, in both of which you’re either a blessed success or close to a deserved, preordained death. If we’re talking poetry, this is why Emily Dickinson, not Walt Whitman, is the Big Bang of modern American poetry (OK, OK, they split 60/40), because Whitman, for all his genius, only half-compromised in later, post-Civil War poems with the darkness.

Anyway, the Stones released their posh two-disc Deluxe Edition of Some Girls a while back, and it’s just great. The second disc emphasizes country-fried songs that didn’t make the final cut, including the scuffling, speedy track we’ve got here, “Claudine.”

The original public version has the masterpieces that became hits: “Some Girls,” “Beast of Burden,” “Miss You” (some Puerto Rican girls that’s just dyyyyin to meet-cha), “Shattered” (after which the 1980s’ best pop songs could happen). But the restored cuts on Disc 2 are almost as fantastic, because their pose is more artfully ragged. If you like that kind of setup. It gets grimy down there, son. The American impulse needs plenty of explaining, and sometimes English visitors and settlers can clarify things: Dusty Springfield, Christopher Hitchens, Martin Amis, the Men in Blazers, Aldous Huxley (who for better or worse nurtured Southern California’s mystical inclinations), Thom Gunn (more on him on this blog soon), Steve McQueen the director, Thomas Paine, Led Zeppelin.

Et cetera. Enjoy the weekend, y’all.