The notoriously tight-arsed Stones have finally started to loosen up with the contents of their sizable archive. Long-awaited gems from their prime years, like the 1972 concert film Ladies And Gentlemen The Rolling Stones, a handful of Exile On Main Street and Get Your Ya Yas Out outtakes, even a tiny bit of the notoriously unreleasable Robert Frank documentary Cocksucker Blues have all seen release in the last few years, albeit some of them only as part of extra-pricey box sets.

The results of their latest dip into the vault is not too shabby – an unreleased film of a complete show from the Some Girls tour, which despite its later vintage, contains moments that blow all that stuff away. For one thing, it’s surprisingly well-shot, a much better visual portrayal of an entire band than Ladies And Gentlemen, which gave 95% of the camera time to Jagger. But mostly it’s indispensable for capturing the Stones at their final peak, their last moment of true potency.

You can hear the Stones’ response to punk in the relentless riffs of “Respectable” and “When The Whip Comes Down”, and the lyrics, which bring the depraved manor lord of “Live With Me” and “Stray Cat Blues” down to Taxi Driver-era New York and teach him multiculturalism. Their vision of punk seems more Lou Reed than Ramones, but the result is undeniably tighter and harder than the handful of albums that precede it, a step up for a band that had looked to be in decline. Of course, they’d slide right back into that decline a year later with the vapid Emotional Rescue, but for a moment, they sound re-energized, as if they have something to prove for the first time in God knows how long. They sound determined to rock more completely than these snotty teenagers that dare question their elders ever could, and do it in the big room.

For the accompanying tour, captured for this release on a brilliant night in Fort Worth, they ignored most of the expected crowd-pleasers and all their ballads, and put together a show built around the new album, with a smattering of numbers from the catalog that fit the groove – “Star Star”, “All Down The Line” and so forth. Mostly short, fast, sharp songs, the ballsiest and juiciest of their repertoire. Jagger sets the tone by announcing to the crowd, “We love being in Texas. If the band’s a little bit lacking in energy tonight, it’s because we spent it all last night fuckin’.”

Well, if that’s what it takes to get them to play like this, I say, let them do that EVERY night. Yeah, yeah of course I know – they do. They’re the Rolling Stones, after all. But they’re also human beings, and had, just two years earlier, proved themselves capable of giving a flabby, unfocused performance if they felt like it (see the highly underwhelming Love You Live for proof). The Stones practically invented the English manner of loose-but tight, but by then they’d clearly loosened it a little too much. Maybe it was all that time hanging with mellow Jamaicans, trying to project a relaxing glow instead of fighting in the streets. They really did sound like a band that had done a little too much fuckin’ the night before at that point, and even the drooling core audience that’ll pay good money for any old thing they put out doesn’t JUST pay them to get laid.

But by ’78 they’re back to working for it. Loose-but-tight becomes tight-but-loose, as they blast through the fast ones hovering an inch off the ground. The version of “Shattered” pumps it up to almost double the original tempo, Charlie Watts busting out a shifty backbeat at lightning speed, Woody asserting himself with some of the best playing he’d ever do. Not even those ealier films from the Mick Taylor era convey the level of energy shown by the entire band here. The pace only slackens for a handful of new songs, the disco-slinky “Miss You” and “Beast of Burden”, the country yarn “Faraway Eyes”, and a slow-grooving cover of “Just My Imagination”.

This tour was the last time the band would offer a new vision of themselves, one the fans hadn’t seen before. While it’s a short show, slim on big hits and not at all balanced, it’s overall more satisfying than any of the films of their later tours, in which the essence of the Stadium Stones doesn’t really change. The latter-day shows are still pretty good, well-planned to cover every facet of their long career, including just enough new stuff while focusing on the songs you grew up with. But if this is the tail end of their evolution, they seem determined to go out with a bang.

Some Girls Live In Texas ’78 will be screened in theaters for one night only, this Tuesday October 18 at LA Live and other locations, see the NCM Fathom website for all locations. CD, DVD and Blu-Ray versions will be released on November 21 by Eagle Rock Entertainment.

In the late 1970s, the Rolling Stones could have been swept away by disco and punk. They answered with Some Girls.

A never-before-seen concert film of a Fort Worth show from the era gives a hint at what a redefining moment it truly was.

"They were exploding (to a new level), and they wanted to make sure that they were the No. 1 band in the world," said concert promoter Jack Orbin at Stone City Attractions, who staged the band's Cotton Bowl shows three years later.

Released in June 1978, Some Girls generated hits (Miss You, Beast Of Burden) and controversy (from the appropriated images on its album cover to its lyrics about black girls). Through history's lens, it also can be viewed as the last of the legendary band's great reinventions.

Don't forget, they'd had their ya-ya's out - and more. By then, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and company were rock royalty, albeit elegantly wasted jet-setters approaching middle age.

Led by the devilish "Glimmer Twins," Jagger and Richards, the Stones had outlasted the Beatles, survived the death of guitarist Brian Jones and the debacle at Altamont, and even redefined their sound with Jumpin' Jack Flash, Honky Tonk Women, Brown Sugar, Tumbling Dice and It's Only Rock 'n' Roll (But I Like It).

Some Girls broke from the past.

The Rolling Stones: Some Girls Live in Texas presents the inspired concert delivered at Will Roger Centre in Fort Worth on July 18, 1978. The restored film is being promoted nationally as a one-night-only screening.

A DVD of the concert film and a deluxe reissue of the album will arrive in stores in November.

There is some mystery about the film, which was "found in these old tins in their London warehouse," said Dan Diamond at National CineMedia Fathom Events, a digital theater broadcast network and technology company.

"It's never been seen before. It's sort of like the lost files. This is one of the greatest tours in Stones history."

Jagger agrees.

"Yeah. I think the album really stands up; it's a great album," he says in a 20-minute interview that will screen with the concert film. "We'd played quite a lot of it on this show, and it was really new and fresh."

"We hadn't done it, obviously, more than a few times, and so you see it just starting to take shape. So I think it's really interesting."

The film finds Britain's original punks showing solidarity with the new punk rebellion. One example is Jagger sporting Vivienne Westood's famous "Destroy" swastika T-shirt - the same one sported by the Sex Pistols, who had broken up six months earlier.

"He probably wore the same outfit every show," joked pianist Ian McLagan of the Faces, who played on the Some Girls album and the entire '78 tour.

The band initially had tried to use Peter Tosh's pianist.

"I was a last-minute addition. They thought it'd be simpler just to get me and teach me some reggae," said McLagan, a friend of "the blues cover band" since '62.

Rehearsals took place in Woodstock, N.Y.

"I didn't know every song the Stones had ever recorded, and suddenly we're playing anything they fancied," he said. "It was a loose jam in lots of ways."

But McLagan recognized the Stones had reached a new plateau with Some Girls. At sessions in Paris, he played on Miss You, Just My Imagination and Start Me Up, which wouldn't be released until Tattoo You three years later.

"I think it was an amazing turnaround for them," he said.

"They hadn't met the punks. I hadn't met the punks, none of us. We were kind of in another world. All I read about the punks was that they hated previous generations, which was us. But they didn't hate the Stones or the Faces, they hated all the prog rock."

Onstage in Fort Worth, the Stones showed where their loyalties stood, opening with Chuck Berry's Let It Rock and including his Sweet Little Sixteen. But for Some Girls, it was a virtual greatest-hits trip. In the background, sixth Stone Ian Stewart was on keyboards, too.

By this point, Jagger was less James Brown and whirling dervish and had clearly entered his aerobic-exercise mode (fueled by a Rudolf Nureyev obsession), prancing, vamping, mugging, tip-toeing, shadowboxing, cheerleading - and blowing kisses and occasionally spanking guitarist Ron Wood.

Fiddler Doug "The Ragin' Cajun" Kershaw appears in the film playing on Far Away Eyes. The Stones had caught his show in New Orleans and invited him.

"Let me tell you, I've only been nervous three times in my life," Kershaw said. "The second time was doing The Ed Sullivan Show. The third time was doing the Rolling Stones."

Kershaw, whose latest album is called The Clash Of Musical Cultures, says he meshed perfectly with the Stones. No clash there.

"They just brought me backstage to the dressing room and showed me the song," he said. "I'd never heard it. 'Here's the song. Do your thing.'

"They're a bunch of pros. Bill Wyman and I became quite good friends. He loved western swing. He brought me to his room and played me so many Bob Wills records. The Stones are one of my favorites. They're very nice guys. When they kick back, they kick back. That's my kind of people."

NCM

A reminder: Tonight and tonight only is that big-screen screening of The Rolling Stones: Some Girls Live In Texas, shot during the band's Will Rogers Auditorium stopover on July 18, 1978, under the moniker the "London Green Shoed Cowboys." It will screen simultaneously on 300 screens nationwide before going international, then making its way to home-video release in conjunction with the re-release of a souped-up Some Girls in November.

But here's a little-known fact -- little known, because it's not mentioned once in publicity materials dispatched in advance of the nationwide one-off tonight: Some Girls Live was directed by Dallas documentarian Lynn Leneau and her all-local crew of shooters, among them Phillip Thomas, the man holding the hand-held that was in Mick Jagger's face for the entirety of the show. Thing is, none of them knew the film was finally being released till, oh, three weeks ago.

"Not even then, really," says Leneau. She tells Unfair Park today she first heard about the film's release when a reporter from a New Zealand newspaper called to find out if she's the Lynn Leneau who shot the movie in 1978. She said yes, of course she was. "But why do you want to know?" she wondered.

"Because there's a rumor it's being re-released," he told her.

"And I told him, 'It's never been released,'" she recalls now, laughing.

The question is: Why not? Well, actually, that's just one of the questions surrounding a movie whose makers had no idea it was being released till days ago. Another question: Are they getting paid for it all these years later?

"No."

That's the short answer given by Jack Calmes, who, in 1978, was Leneau's husband -- and the man who made the film happen in the first place.

In 1978, Calmes was president of Showco, the famed lighting and sound company that brought rock and roll into the arenas for the likes of Led Zeppelin, the Who, ZZ Top, Van Halen and the Stones. Showco designed the stage for the Some Girls tour -- very film-noir, says Calmes, "very Dashiell Hammett." He thought it would make for one hell of a movie. That, and "I thought Some Girls was far and away the band's best record."

Back then, Calmes and Mick Jagger were tight, so much so that when the band got into Dallas for its Fort Worth gig, Calmes met Jagger at the Fairmont. They had plans: Bobby "Blue" Bland at the Longhorn Ballroom.

"We were the only two white guys in there," Calmes says. "I introduced Mick to Bobby and Al 'TNT' Braggs. Then we went back to the Fairmont, and pitched him on the film. In those days, no one let cameras in close positions Bands didn't let them onstage. It was a rock-and-roll taboo. They were all afraid of stuff getting pirated. I said to Mick, 'But you know all of us, this is a safe environment, and I've got the best guys together to do this.' And we also owned a 24-track recorder, so it was in sync with all five cameramen. All pros."

Six hours before showtime, Jagger finally agreed to let Calmes's crew shoot the show at Will Rogers. Theirs was a handshake deal. No paperwork was ever signed.

"And this will go down as the best one they ever did," Calmes said. "The show was just so ... unpretentious." He laughs."Mick was so hungover and fucked up from having been up with me all night till the next day, when he finally said yes."

There were a few details to be worked out, chief among them getting Jagger to let Thomas shoot him center-stage, from mere feet away. Jagger hated the idea of a camera in his face. He scoffed. He moaned. He said no many times.

"Jack spent all night trying to talk Mick into letting me be there," says Thomas, who served as the film's director of photography. "Lynn says she did it. Jack says he did it. But nonetheless, part of the agreement came down to: If I was hand-held, then he'd let me be there. There was a little runway that came off the stage -- 20 to 30 feet long, six-feet wide. I was standing right on the first row, and he was four, five feet away from me. I'm looking straight up at him."

Leneau then spent the next few months editing footage. She and Calmes, who divorced long ago, screened the film in Dallas a few times. Then they took a cut featuring five songs to Los Angeles, where ads promoting the film began appearing in trade mags and on billboards.

"We had a screening in a sound stage in old Hollywood, which was the first time I even talked to Mick," Leneau says. "He was concerned. It was one show. It wasn't like where you shot five concerts and picked the best from each one. And I heard they thought they looked too old. But I told him we could clean some stuff up if they gave me more time."

Eventually, she and Calmes say separately, one of the Stones' reps told them: Hand over the film. It's going on the shelf. Forever.

"I just felt if they gave me a little more time ..." Leneau says. "Because it was good."

Decades passed. Calmes's Showco morphed into Syncrolilte; he still works with the Stones, matter of fact, lighting all the band's tours. He and Lynn split; 15 years ago, she gave up filmmaking and editing and started her own landscaping business. Thomas continues to work in the film business. Everyone had given up on the film ever being released. They forgot all about it. Till, that is, a few weeks ago.

When Calmes got wind of it, he reached out to the Stones via email. He wanted to make sure his ex and her crew were properly credited. He also wanted to make sure they were all getting paid, because far as anyone recalls, maybe they made a collective $1,000 for their work in July 1978. (Calmes says the Stones also reimbursed him for renting the film equipment -- $10,000, if that.) Calmes says he's heard from Jagger that they'll get some kind of credit; money remains an entirely separate issue.

"It's called rock-star amnesia," Calmes says. "And I heard back from Mick: 'We'll give you some kind of credit.' But there's no excuse for them not remembering. This wasn't a situation where you'd forget, even if you're a rock star. I worked on him relentlessly for a long time to let us shoot this film."

Calmes isn't out to bad-mouth his old friend, but "I didn't do this for my health," he says. "I thought it would be a great piece of work, and really wanted to make something of it, but the deal was if he didn't want to do it, it was his call. I told Mick [via email], 'As I remember it, it was a handshake deal. If something happened in the future we'd discuss it.' And something happened -- 34 years later. And that's a long time. But you don't forget something this monumental."

Leneau and Thomas and others who worked on the film are planning on attending tonight's screening at the Cinemark West Plano off the Dallas North Tollway; so too is Calmes's former partner Angus Wynne and old friends who attended the small show. Thomas is excited to see it.

"They shelved it because they looked old," he says. "Now, of course, they actually look old, and they went back and saw how bitching and bad-ass and cool they were back then and said, 'Wow, we don't have baggy eyes, gray hair, and we're skinny as shit.'"

Leneau, though, she's a little more ... apprehensive. Because she doesn't even know what her movie looks like anymore. "I could go to parties while I was editing and had Mick Jagger down," she says. "People cheered. And I listened to all the music over and over again." But she hasn't seen it in decades. And she's not even sure whether the film that screens tonight bears any resemblance to her cut.

"I have heard my name is on it," she says. "I heard that from Jack. We have a friend who saw it in London. And this is fun. I'm glad it happened finally. It'll bring a bunch of people together at one time who haven't seen each other in a long time. All these people will be together tonight to see it, and that's what is important. And I have the other side of me that wants it to be good, that doesn't want it to be MTV-ish. I just want it to be like it was."