Sticky Fingers – The Rolling Stones
In 1969, the Rolling Stones toured America after a three-year hiatus. Sam Cutler their tour manager acted as MC and on the first night, introduced the band with the phrase “Ladies and gentlemen, the greatest rock & roll band in the world — the Rolling Stones.” Mick Jagger asked him not to be so bold to which Cutler replied, “Well you either are, or you aint. What’s it gonna be?” In fact, in 1970 the Rolling Stones were the greatest rock & roll band in the world.
The 1960s were over. The Beatles were dead. The revolution was on. The world was turning and whatever the vanguard was going to be, the Rolling Stones knew they were in it. The documentary of that tour, Gimme Shelter, shows just how they bristled with energy; the satin scarves, velvet hipsters, feline waists, the wry quips to the press, the snakeskin books, rotten teeth and the cocaine eyes. You can see them wandering through America like princes, like their feet don’t even touch the ground.
There’s a scene where Jagger, Richards and Gram Parsons are hanging around yet another hotel room. Richards plays a rough mix of “Brown Sugar” and the room comes alive – he and Jagger just falling into their serpentine moves as casually as breathing.
For those years – ’68 to ’72 — the Rolling Stones were continuously either in the studio or on stage. In that time they produced five of their best albums (Beggars Banquet, Let It Bleed, Get Yer Ya Yas Out and Exile on Main Street). In a sense it’s all one masterpiece — tracks that were recorded for Let It Bleed came out on Exile. But if you have to pick one LP then Sticky Fingers represents the peak.
There were two key elements to the Stones’ heyday — producer Jimmy Miller and guitarist Mick Taylor.
Miller, a former drummer and an American in London came on board with Beggars’ Banquet. “A great producer who, for the first time, the band actually listened to,” said bass player Bill Wyman. “Jimmy was able to stand up to us. Everybody knew that we had to get back to our roots and start over. That’s why we got Jimmy Miller as a producer and came out with Beggars Banquet and those kinds of albums after, which was reverting back and getting more guts – which is what the Stones are all about.”
Mick Taylor replaced original guitarist Brian Jones during Let It Bleed. Taylor’s concise lines complemented Keith Richards’ open-tuned sweeping chords. Richards’ also saw Taylor as a potential threat and lifted his own game lest he be shown up. “He made it very musical. He was a very fluent, melodic player, which we never had, and we don’t have now,” Jagger said of the new guitarist. “He was very good for me working with him … He was exciting, and he was very pretty, and it gave me something to follow. Some people think that’s the best version of the band that existed.”
“The rough edges came off a bit,” said Miller. “Mick Taylor started putting on the polish that became the next period of the Stones out of the raw rock and blues band.”
The line-up was further extended by the semi-permanent addition of horn players Jim Price and Bobby Keys and pianist Nicky Hopkins. “I was staying with Mick for a brief period of time, and they were working on Sticky Fingers,” said Keys. “Otis Redding and the Memphis sound was big on everybody’s minds at the time and the Stones wanted to do something that had horns on it. Jim Price and I were available; we did a couple tracks, and then they said, Let’s do a couple more. One thing led to another.”
The first recorded track on Sticky Fingers predated this new line-up. “Sister Morphine” was written by Jagger and Richards and Marianne Faithfull for her to record. In March 1969, Jagger suggested cutting a Rolling Stones version. Opening smoothly with Richards’ acoustic guitar and Jagger’s dispassionate vocal the track just gets nastier as it goes. Charlie Watts waits two minutes before coming in on the kick drum with spectacular playing off the beat and then finally the piano accelerates this vortex of paranoia.
The horrors of addiction would haunt the Rolling Stones for a decade — more than a dozen members of the band and inner circle would die or be mutilated by drugs. But, in 1970 they thought they were indestructible. The next track, “Dead Flowers” is a jovial country rave up featuring “a needle and a spoon and another girl to take my pain away”.
Drugs notwithstanding, they squeezed recording dates into the touring schedule, spending a week at the legendary Muscle Shoals Studio in Alabama. “It worked very well,” recalls drummer Charlie Watts. “It’s one of Keith’s things to record while you’re in the middle of a tour and your playing is in good shape. We cut some great tracks – ‘You Gotta Move’, ‘Brown Sugar’ and ‘Wild Horses’. The Muscle Shoals Studio was a great studio to work in, a very hip studio, plus you wanted to be there because of all the guys who had worked in the same studio.”
“Brown Sugar” is a signature Stones song – salacious, politically incorrect and powered by a biting riff. It was the first song Jagger had written entirely by himself. He penned it during downtime in Australia where he starred in the film Ned Kelly. Richards was primarily responsible for “Wild Horses”, inspired by his having to leave his newborn son Marlon in the UK.
Although only three tracks were cut in that session, the Muscle Shoals feel permeates the album – especially in the contributions from Price and Keys. The Stones’ attempt at a soul torch ballad is “I Got the Blues”. A steady roiling track that ebbs and swells with the horns and Billy Preston’s organ. It’s far and away the best pure R&B track that the Rolling Stones ever recorded.
“Can’t You Hear Me Knocking” started out as a straight up R&B track gliding on Keith Richards’ funk groove. This is Richards at his best; slipping and sliding around Charlie Watts. Three minutes into the song the song is about to end when Mick Taylor and Bobby Keys hijack the tune into four minutes of improvisation. In the end it has become one of the few showcases of the band’s musicality.
As 1970 unfolded and work on Sticky Fingers continued, Keith Richards’ heroin habit steadily grew and he began, like Brian Jones, to miss sessions. Longtime Stones insider Jo Bergman said, “I never noticed anything about Keith particularly ‘til 1970 … I didn’t think Keith was going to live through the ’70 tour of Europe.” “Was I even there for the last sessions of Sticky Fingers?” the guitarist asked Robert Greenfield in a 1971 interview. “When did they finish it? I was very out of it by the end of the album… We were all surprised at the way that album fell together. Sticky Fingers – it pulled itself together.”
In fact Mick Jagger and the rest of the crew pulled it together, much of the time recording at Jagger’s estate with the Rolling stone mobile studio. “We made (tracks) with just Mick Taylor, which are very good and everyone loves, where Keith wasn’t there for whatever reasons…,” said Jagger. “All the stuff like ‘Moonlight Mile’, ‘Sway’, These tracks are a bit obscure, but they are liked by people that like the Rolling Stones. It’s me and (Mick Taylor) playing off each other – another feeling completely, because he’s following my vocal lines and then extemporizing on them during the solos.”
“The house that we used, Stargroves, was ideally suited because it was a big mansion and a grand hall with a gallery around with bedroom doors and a staircase. Big fireplace, big bay window – you could put Charlie in the bay window. And, off the main hall there were other rooms you could put people in. We did ‘Bitch’ there, and you can hear ‘Moonlight Mile’ when Mick is singing with the acoustic, it sounds very live, because it was! Four or five in the morning, with the sun about to come up.”
“Moonlight Mile” is a companion piece to “Wild Horses” — another melancholy song about distance and being lost on the road. “Moonlight Mile” has a defiant aloneness to it that’s amplified by the lavish orchestration by Paul Buckmaster. It’s quite unlike anything else in the Rolling Stones’ canon.
Finally there’s “Sway”, the best cut of all, buried between the singles “Brown Sugar” and “Wild Horses”. Jagger makes his debut on guitar here. “Mick started playing the guitar a lot,” Watts recalled. “He plays very strange rhythm guitar . . . very much how Brazilian guitarists play, on the upbeat. It is very much like the guitar on a James Brown track — for a drummer it’s great to play with.” The circular groove here is magnificent with Charlie Watts playing off Taylor and Hopkins. Backing vocals came from the Who’s Pete Townshend and the Faces’ Ronnie Lane.
“The thing about Mick Taylor was that he was a brilliant musician and probably the best musician in the band during the years he was there,” said Bill Wyman. “I’ve always loved those albums more than any of the others because, to me, that’s where we were playing at our very best.”
Sticky Fingers was the first album on the Rolling Stones’ own label. With full creative control Mick Jagger chose pop artist Andy Warhol to design the sleeve — a well-endowed man in a pair of jeans. As was no doubt intended, several retail chains refused to stock the album and in some countries the cover was completely banned. Meanwhile the metal fly that ran down the front of the original pressings upset retailers because it damaged the other stock.
Nonetheless, Sticky Fingers proved to the Rolling Stones’ biggest hit album to date.
Typically, Charlie Watts was bemused by the whole thing. “[I’m] not amazed that the band is still going, just amazed they get anything together,” he said at the time. “That’s our claim to fame, you know. Carry on lads, regardless. Should be the title of our next film. We’re a terrible band, really. But we are the oldest. That’s some sort of distinction, isn’t it? Especially in this country. The only difference between us and Westminster Abbey, you know, is we don’t do weddings and coronations.”
From the Book: The 100 Greatest Albums of All Time by TobyCreswell & Craig Mathieson published by Hardie Grant
The Rolling Stones Sticky Fingers
Producer Jimmy Miller
Released 23 April 1971
Highest Chart Position: #1 (USA, UK, Australia)