FEATURE:
Wild Horses Couldn’t Drag Me Away
The Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers at Fifty
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I wanted to mark the upcoming…
IN THIS PHOTO: The Rolling Stones in 1971/PHOTO CREDIT: Peter Webb
fiftieth anniversary of one of the greatest albums of the 1970s. The Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers arrived in the middle of a golden period for them. Following 1968’s Beggars Banquet and 1969’s Let It Bleed, the band would follow Sticky Fingers with, arguably, their greatest album in 1972’s Exile on Main St. Not only was their consistency stunning. The fact they were releasing such strong albums so regularly is astonishing. I want to bring in articles and reviews about a truly stunning album. Before that, it is worth bringing in some background and basics regarding Sticky Fingers:
“Sticky Fingers is the ninth British and eleventh American studio album by the English rock band the Rolling Stones, released 23 April 1971 on their new, and own, label Rolling Stones Records after previously having been contracted by Decca Records and London Records in the UK and US since 1963. It is Mick Taylor's second full-length appearance on a Rolling Stones album (after the live album Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out!) without contributions from guitarist and founder Brian Jones, who died two years earlier. The original cover artwork, conceived by Andy Warhol and photographed and designed by members of his art collective, The Factory, showed a picture of a man in tight jeans and had a working zipper that opened to reveal a pair of underwear. The cover was expensive to produce and damaged the vinyl record, so later re-issues featured just the outer photograph of the jeans.
The album featured a return to basics for the Rolling Stones. The unusual instrumentation introduced several albums prior was absent; most songs featuring drums, guitar, bass, and percussion as provided by the key members: Mick Jagger (lead vocal, various percussion and rhythm guitar), Keith Richards (guitar and backing vocal), Mick Taylor (guitar), Bill Wyman (bass guitar), and Charlie Watts (drums). Additional contributions were made by long-time Stones collaborators including saxophonist Bobby Keys and keyboardists Billy Preston, Jack Nitzsche, Ian Stewart, and Nicky Hopkins. As with the other albums of the Rolling Stones classic late 1960s/early 1970s period, it was produced by Jimmy Miller”.
I will come on to the iconic cover photo for Sticky Fingers soon. In terms of the albums of The Rolling Stones, Sticky Fingers is right up there with my favourites. With classics like Wild Horses and Brown Sugar, it is an album where the band really hit their stride. Fifty years after its release and Sticky Fingers sounds both thrilling and timeless. It is both raw and tender. Its range and quality led to the album being included on many lists of the best albums of all-time. I want to bring in an article from Albuism. They looked back on Sticky Fingers on its forty-fifth anniversary in 2016. They discussed the challenging path The Rolling Stones faced in the lead-up to their eleventh album:
“Every great band has a defining, signature moment in which they let the universe know that they are going in a very different direction. The Beatles' Revolver was our tour guide to Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. The road to Exile on Main Street was hand-delivered to us by Sticky Fingers, the ninth British and eleventh American studio album by the Rolling Stones.
This transitional phase was not an easy one. Let's go back to March 1969. During the recording sessions for Let It Bleed, Brian Jones' erratic behavior had taken a severe toll on the band. His multiple drug arrests made it almost impossible for the band to tour the United States. He was in such a bad state that he only contributed to two songs, playing autoharp on "You Got the Silver" and percussion on "Midnight Rambler.” On June 9th of that year, he was fired from the band that he had formed. Keith Richards played all of the guitar parts on the rest of Let It Bleed.
IN THIS PHOTO: The Rolling Stones in 1971/PHOTO CREDIT: Peter Webb
The opening riff on "Brown Sugar" was all Keith Richards, but the unsung star of this album is Mick Taylor, the newest member of the band. His contributions on the tracks "Can't You Hear Me Knocking" and "I Got the Blues" are clear evidence that a new era for the Stones was being ushered in. Sticky Fingers manages to pull off the difficult task of simultaneously offering a loving nod to the Stones' bluesy past and a foreshadowing of their hazy drug-fueled future.
Sticky Fingers is a night out on the town with an old friend whom your significant other kind of likes, but knows will get you very drunk and render you useless the following day. Your night starts out at a very cool bar in New York City (the old, really cool New York City, not the one that exists today). You've already told yourself that you’ll have just a couple, but then you're heading straight home.
"Brown Sugar" is that song that makes your ears perk up once you hear that opening guitar. It brings you to a familiar place and you're at ease. "Sway" and "Wild Horses" is that point in the evening where your friend, this free spirit whose life, free of responsibility, you sometimes envy, tells you about the person who's captured his heart. Once you're over the shock that your friend even has a heart, you can’t help but say to yourself "damn!” By the time "Can't You Hear Me Knocking" rolls along, your friend manages to convince you to down three shots of Jameson's. At this point, you know you're in for the long-haul. "You Gotta Move" and "Bitch" is that inevitable conversation you have about lovers long gone.
Sticky Fingers is that old friend you miss dearly. You love hearing the stories. You don't mind knocking back a few and feeling like you're living on the edge for a little bit with the full knowledge that you can return safely to the world you enjoy now. Thank you Sticky Fingers, my troubled yet brilliant friend. For the past 45 years, you've never let me down”.
We do not see it much these days, but a great album cover can almost court as much press and popularity as the material within. The Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers is one of the most popular and discussed cover ever. In this article from 2018, we learn more about the creation and legacy of a classic cover:
“No other Stones album cover would express the band’s decadence so well. According to 100 Best Album Covers: The Stories Behind the Sleeves by Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey Powell (themselves legends of album cover design), Warhol suggested the idea of using a real trouser zipper to Mick Jagger at a party in 1969. Jagger, intrigued, asked Warhol to do the design.
Warhol’s former manager Paul Morrissey was quoted in 100 Best Album Covers thusly: “Andy was sensible enough to know not to be pretentious when doing album covers. This was a realistic attempt at selling sex and naughtiness. It was done simply and cheaply, without the pretensions that seem to go with other covers.”
The stark black-and-white close-up of a man’s crotch captured the cheap, simple approach. “It was a cheap camera and cheap film,” said Morrissey. “I have no idea what brand.”
The red rubber stamp design of the album title and band’s name added to the gritty look.
Artist Craig Braun was responsible for translating Warhol’s design into a functional album cover. As told in a 2015 New York Times article, Mick Jagger insisted that the zipper needed to work, and it had to reveal something when you pulled it down.
“[The Rolling Stones] knew if they put jeans and a working zipper that people were going to want to see what was back there,” Braun said.
Braun obtained a photo of the Andy Warhol model in his white underwear to slip behind the zipper. (Contrary to popular belief, it’s not a close-up of Mick Jagger’s crotch you see when you pull down the zipper.)
Realizing Warhol’s vision was a chore. The zipper damaged some of the initial pressings when the albums were stacked and shipped to record stores. The zipper literally dented the vinyl inside the sleeves pressed against it. Removing the zipper would ruin its effect. The solution was for each zipper to be manually pulled down just far enough that the tip of the zipper would no longer rub against the vinyl of any other albums in shipment. As Braun told Joe Coscarelli of the New York Times:
“I got this idea that maybe, if the glue was dry enough, we could have the little old ladies at the end of the assembly line pull the zipper down far enough so that the round part would hit the center disc label,” he said. “It worked, and it was even better to see the zipper pulled halfway down”.
I think it is worth concluding my bringing in a couple of reviews. Sticky Fingers is considered one of the greatest albums ever and it has gained praise from critics since its release in 1971. In their review of 2013, this is what AllMusic reported:
“Pieced together from outtakes and much-labored-over songs, Sticky Fingers manages to have a loose, ramshackle ambience that belies both its origins and the dark undercurrents of the songs. It's a weary, drug-laden album -- well over half the songs explicitly mention drug use, while the others merely allude to it -- that never fades away, but it barely keeps afloat. Apart from the classic opener, "Brown Sugar" (a gleeful tune about slavery, interracial sex, and lost virginity, not necessarily in that order), the long workout "Can't You Hear Me Knocking" and the mean-spirited "Bitch," Sticky Fingers is a slow, bluesy affair, with a few country touches thrown in for good measure. The laid-back tone of the album gives ample room for new lead guitarist Mick Taylor to stretch out, particularly on the extended coda of "Can't You Hear Me Knocking." But the key to the album isn't the instrumental interplay -- although that is terrific -- it's the utter weariness of the songs. "Wild Horses" is their first non-ironic stab at a country song, and it is a beautiful, heart-tugging masterpiece. Similarly, "I Got the Blues" is a ravished, late-night classic that ranks among their very best blues. "Sister Morphine" is a horrifying overdose tale, and "Moonlight Mile," with Paul Buckmaster's grandiose strings, is a perfect closure: sad, yearning, drug-addled, and beautiful. With its offhand mixture of decadence, roots music, and outright malevolence, Sticky Fingers set the tone for the rest of the decade for the Stones”.
We are sure to see new articles and retrospectives about a huge album from one of the world’s most influential and popular bands – one that, nearly six decades after their formation, are still together and touring (or they will be post-pandemic). I think that Sticky Fingers is one of their greatest and most enduring works. I want to wrap up by sourcing from a Pitchfork review of 2015:
“By this point, the Stones were so convincing playing rootsy American music it made little sense to compare them to their British peers. Musically at least, the Rolling Stones of 1971 had more in common with the Allman Brothers than they did the Who. Along with the barrelhouse piano, pedal steel, and Stax-like horns, Sticky Fingers was also only the second album to feature the guitar work of Mick Taylor, and his clean, fluid, and highly melodic leads bear a strong resemblance to Duane Allman's playing from this period.
But ultimately, this is Mick Jagger's album, the same way Exile is Keith's. Of all the iconic vocalists in '60s and '70s rock, Jagger remains the hardest to imitate, at least without sounding ridiculous. That's partly because he himself never minded sounding ridiculous, and he turned his almost cartoonish swagger into a form of performance art. Jagger's voice never sounded richer or fuller than it does here (Exile mostly buried it, to artful effect), but he's doing strange things with it, mimicking and exaggerating accents, mostly from the American South, with an almost religious fervor.
When the Stones were coming up, the line on British singers is that they sounded American because they grew up listening to those records; on Sticky Fingers, Jagger pushes that kind of mimicry to places that run just short of absurd. His twang on "Dead Flowers" is obviously played for laughs, but "You Gotta Move" is harder to get a bead on, partway between homage and parody and delivered with abandon. "I Got the Blues" is utterly sincere, with Jagger flinging every ounce of his skinny frame into it. Wherever he stands in relation to the material, Jagger is selling it, hard, and by extension selling himself as a new kind of vocalist. "Sister Morphine" and "Moonlight Mile" are the two songs that stray furthest from American music reverence, and they are highlights, showing how well the Stones could convey weariness and a weird kind of blown-out and wasted beauty.
With reissue culture in overdrive, we're seeing which classic bands kept the most in their vaults. The Stones, like Zeppelin, didn't keep much. The 2010 version of Exile on Main St. pretty much cleaned out the vault as far as music from this era, so what we have here are alternate mixes, an inferior but still interesting different take of "Brown Sugar" with Eric Clapton, the one true rarity that has long circulated but never been officially issued. There's also, depending on which version you get, a good deal of vintage live Stones, which is the main thing to get their fans excited. Selections from two 1971 gigs, both recorded well, capture the band in a peak year.
To my ears the Stones' live prowess has never quite translated to recordings. The best live records are about more: more heaviness, more jamming, more crowd noise, more energy. And their music didn't necessarily benefit from increasing any one of those things. Their songs were about a certain amount of balance between all of the elements, which is why their recordings sound so platonically perfect. With their live records, you can focus on the grooves and the riffs and the collective playing, but it's easier to notice moments of sloppiness and mistakes. Still, as far as live Stones on record, the material here is about as good as you will get.
The Stones entered the '70s still young and beautiful, but they'd have their share of problems just like everyone else; they got into disco and then in the '80s they dressed like they were on "Miami Vice" and then finally they fully understood what nostalgia for them was really worth and they discovered the power of corporate synergy. Given the weight of history behind it and its centrality to the story of both the Rolling Stones and rock music as a whole, it can be difficult to put on Sticky Fingers and try and hear it for what it was: the highly anticipated new album from one of the biggest bands in the world, a group that at the time hadn't released a new one in two years (in 1971, that was an eternity). They were called the World's Greatest Rock'n'Roll Band for entirely too long, but if that designation ever applied it was here”.
On 23rd April, we will mark five decades of an utterly superb and important album. No matter where you place Sticky Fingers in your list of the best albums by The Rolling Stones, I think most can agree that their 1971 album is an exciting and contrasting album where the band created something sensational (according to Acclaimed Music, it is the fifty-third most-celebrated album in popular music history). I know that Sticky Fingers will get a lot of passionate appreciation…
ON its fiftieth anniversary.