With the hippie dream collapsing in the wake of Charlie Manson, Vietnam, and the failed student uprising of 1968, the Rolling Stones duly stepped in to provide the soundtrack in the form of the apocalyptic Let it Bleed, in particular its wistful, goodbye-to-all-that closing track, “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”. But the unmistakeable failure of the 68ers and their psychedelic, bearded, nature-worshipping, back-to-the-land free love utopia left open the question of what would come next. The answer, as suggested in the Ziggy Stardust review, was not provided by the rock’n’roll doyens of the 1960s, but by the otherworldly freaks of the 70s.
And yet the 60s luminaries continued to trundle on, churning out hairy sex-drugs-and-rock’n’roll, as if Space Oddity and the Oil Shock never happened. Judging by Sticky Fingers, they weren’t doing such a bad job – in fact, they were surpassing themselves. This is the Stones’ best album, for my money. Andy Warhol gathered himself from the Herculean effort required to ‘produce’ the Velvet Underground’s debut by designing the cover – rather than plumping for a gigantic banana, this time he made the equally Freudian choice of the crotch of some jeans; a trick repeated by, among others, Bruce Springsteen, Madonna, and Motley Crue. The message was clear; the in-your-face, phallic, unashamedly masculine exuberance of the 60s was alive and well in the dark, decadent, glitzy seventies.
Sticky Fingers reached number 1 in the UK and the US, and from what I can gather, everyone loved it at the time, and they still do, with some justification, because it’s rather good. In fact, it’s disconcertingly good, from the perspective of someone who came of age at the height of Britpop. As a youngin’, I never really bothered to go back and explore the luminaries of the 60s, aside from the obligatory brushes with their music on the radio or MTV. Until the age of about 25, in fact, I steadfastly refused to go back any further than Joy Division. Which is why listening to Sticky Fingers in its entirety is a bit discomfiting, because it raises the question – did rock music ever really evolve much beyond this? Was the rock that I grew up with, and took to be seminal, just a bunch of tribute acts to the founding fathers? After all, many of the 90s rock albums that I so loved don’t sound like much of a progression from Sticky Fingers. Either that’s a testament to the Stones’ ingenuity and impact, or it’s an indictment of Britpop, which increasingly appears as a Dr Frankenstein-esque attempt to reanimate the corpse of the 60s.
With that said, any suggestion that Sticky Fingers could be released today and sound current is compromised somewhat by the lyrical content of the opening song, “Brown Sugar”, which might represent a bit of a minefield in 2023. It’s seemingly about a torrid love affair – not necessarily consensual – between a predatory 18th century British slaver and a recently abducted African slave in the Americas. The hard, scything guitars point to the eviscerating glam rock sound of Slade or Aladdin Sane, while the lyrics are utterly amoral and decadent. There’s something fitting about a bunch of boys from London, who adopted African-American blues music and built a career on selling it back to a predominantly white audience, singing about the slave trade. After all, in their repackaging of Blues, the Stones touched on the enduring historical legacy of forced cultural exchange between enslaved blacks and middle-class whites that was underpinned by the commercial impulses of the Atlantic triangle. Maybe that’s what the term “brown sugar” really refers to…
Anyway, from what I can gather, Sticky Fingers’ opener is the only song here that detaches itself from the lived experiences of its writers. The rest of the album seems to be about tumultuous, psychologically unhinging romantic relationships. This is unusual for the Stones who, to my mind, usually brought a certain slyly ironic emotional distance to their work. But Sticky Fingers was, apparently, written at the time of some torrid developments in the lives of the Stones’ principal songwriters; Mick Jagger’s breakup with Marianna Faithfull, and the beginning of Keith Richards volatile love affair with Anita Pallenberg. Perhaps for these reasons, they let it all hang out on this album, with the songs fitting broadly into three different moods: sad, rather tormented romantic ballads; aggressively carnal rockers; and other tracks that are harder to categorise, but which are defined simply by a remarkable abundance of inner turmoil.
“Wild Horses” and “I Got the Blues” slot into the first category, representing the Stones at their most limerent. The former is a declaration of utter devotion, as well as profound turbulence. A toxic relationship indeed and, as it happens, Jerry Hall’s favourite Stones song – further evidence of her impeccable taste. Its equally doleful counterpart, “I Got The Blues”, is another melancholy monument to unrequited love, from the perspective of someone who’s already been left. I’ll be honest, I didn’t realise that Mick and Keith had it in them; I thought they were all leather-clad, drug-dealing bravado, which just goes to show what I know. Anyway, these are great songs – the sad, majestic trumpet at the end of “I Got the Blues” is especially rousing, but Jerry is right; “Wild Horses” aura of utter defeat is special.
But as much as I enjoy all this moping about, it’s a Rolling Stones record, so animalistic sex appeal and depravity are contractually obliged to play more prominent thematic roles than emo-ish simping. The seven minute “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking” sees Jagger prowling the streets, knocking on the window of his drug-addled girlfriend’s room, and asking her to throw down the keys. It ends with an, apparently, impromptu jam that developed its own momentum during the recording session, and which the band elected to retain on the album, to capture some of the song’s “raw energy”. Probably it also represents a musical rendering of Jagger’s simian loss of self-control once he actually gained access to his – no doubt delighted – lover’s boudoir. The ravenous and sneering “Bitch”, meanwhile, is one of Sticky Fingers many highlights; it starts with Jagger recounting what are surely amphetamine withdrawal symptoms, and then sees him insistently growl to, presumably, his beloved that, when she calls his name, he is wont to dribble like one of Pavlov’s dogs. Is the bitch referred to in the song’s title Marianna Faithful, or the Pavlov dog? We’ll never know.
Either way, all of this sex, drugs, and obsessional love is strikingly male – the man that your daughter disappears into the nightclub toilets with, as opposed to Paul McCartney, who she brings home for Sunday lunch, if you can stand to listen to him prattling on about his accountant. Personally I’d rather endure Jagger in a pool of his own vomit. Astonishingly, however, we haven’t yet covered the album’s darkest moments. The first of these is “Sway”, a power rock and blues ballad rolled into one, perhaps even one of the first grunge songs, not least because of the tormented lyrics. The tone of “Dead Flowers” is very different – it’s a jaunty country song, tongue firmly in cheek – but the lyrics are telling, as Jagger disdainfully accepts dead flowers from his love interest, and promises to put roses on her grave. The album’s grimmest moment is “Sister Morphine”, a harrowing reflection on death, a man badly injured in a car accident begging for narcotic relief even as he lies prone in his hospital bed, his life flashing before his eyes.
So, overall, a thoroughly charming panoply of desperate lovesickness, intense sexual needs, emotional turmoil, and various kinds of drugs, mainly stimulants, unless you’ve just been involved in a car accident and you’re dying, in which case you get “Sister Morphine”. Mercifully, though, the closing song on Sticky Fingers is altogether more hopeful and comforting. The lush and operatic “Moonlight Mile” is apparently about Mick Jagger’s homesickness while he was on tour, but really, it’s a song for anyone who finds themselves far from home and missing it, but who is heading back, slowly but surely. It’s a gorgeous closer, driven by the kind of anthemic strings that Britpop-era bands would spend their careers shamelessly plundering – to the point of copyright infringement, in the case of Richard Ashcroft, who, come to think of it, even nicked his leather-clad and emaciated look from Jagger, didn’t he?
Yes he did. And in my opinion, as much as Britpop was constantly accused of being in debt to the Beatles, it was in fact the Stones, and especially such albums as Sticky Fingers, which provided the blueprint for their hard, raucous, down-and-dirty, not particularly experimental musical style. While the Beatles were busy with 30-minute psychedelic medleys about men with elephants’ heads, the Stones were delivering ten track albums of concise rock songs. But whereas the Gallaghers were somewhat one dimensional in their brash, “rock’n’roll star” swagger, Sticky Fingers offers a surprisingly vulnerable and tormented album. Heartbreak, inner-turmoil, and drug addiction are the main themes – it’s not a comfortable listen, but that only gives them more depth than some of their progeny.
8/10
Highlights: “Sway”, “Wild Horses”, “Moonlight Mile”