Sticky Fingers
Sticky Fingers is the ninth studio album by the English rock band the Rolling Stones. It was released on 23 April 1971 on the Rolling Stones' new label, Rolling Stones Records.
The Rolling Stones had been contracted by Decca Records and London Records in the UK and the US since 1963. On this album, Mick Taylor made his second full-length appearance on a Rolling Stones album. It was the first studio album without Brian Jones, who had died two years earlier. The original Grammy-nominated cover artwork, conceived and photographed by Andy Warhol, showed a picture of a man in tight jeans, and had a working zip that opened to reveal underwear fabric. The cover was expensive to produce and damaged the vinyl record, so the size of the zipper adjustment was made by John Kosh at ABKCO Records. 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, with most songs featuring drums, guitar, bass, and percussion as provided by the key members: Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Mick Taylor, Bill Wyman, and Charlie Watts. 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 late 1960s/early 1970s period, it was produced by Jimmy Miller.
Sticky Fingers is widely regarded as one of the Rolling Stones' best albums. It was the band's first album to reach number one on both the UK albums and US albums charts, and has since achieved triple platinum certification in the US. "Brown Sugar" topped the Billboard Hot 100 in 1971. Sticky Fingers was voted the second best album of the year in The Village Voices annual Pazz & Jop critics poll for 1971, based on American critics' votes. The album was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame and included in Rolling Stone magazine's "The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time" list.
Background
With the end of their Decca/London association at hand, the Rolling Stones were finally free to release their albums as they pleased. However, their departing manager Allen Klein dealt the group a major blow when they discovered that they had inadvertently signed over their entire 1960s American copyrights to Klein and his company ABKCO, which is how all of their material from 1963's "Come On" to Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out! The Rolling Stones in Concert has since been released solely in America by ABKCO Records. The band later sued for their return but without success, settling in 1984. The band would remain incensed with Klein for decades for that act. Klein died in 2009.When Decca informed the Rolling Stones that they were owed one more single, the band submitted a track called "Cocksucker Blues", correctly assuming that this would be refused. Instead, Decca released the two-year-old Beggars Banquet track "Street Fighting Man" while Klein retained dual copyright ownership in conjunction with the Rolling Stones of "Brown Sugar" and "Wild Horses".
Recording
Although sessions for Sticky Fingers began in earnest in March 1970, the Rolling Stones had been recording at Muscle Shoals Sound Studio in Alabama in December 1969, where they cut "You Gotta Move", "Brown Sugar" and "Wild Horses". "Sister Morphine", cut during Let It Bleed's sessions earlier in March of that year, had been held over from that release. Much of the recording for Sticky Fingers was made with the Rolling Stones' mobile studio in Stargroves during the summer and autumn of 1970. Early versions of songs that would eventually appear on Exile on Main St. were also rehearsed during these sessions.Music and lyrics
Sticky Fingers originally included 10 tracks. The music has been characterised by commentators as hard rock, roots rock and rock and roll. According to Rolling Stone magazine, it is "the Stones' most downbeat, druggy album, with new guitarist Mick Taylor stretching into jazz and country".Artwork
Standard version
The artwork emphasized the innuendo of the Sticky Fingers title, showing a close-up of a jeans-clad male crotch with the visible outline of a penis. The cover of the original vinyl LP featured a working zipper and perforations around the belt buckle that opened to reveal a sub-cover image of white briefs. The vinyl release displayed the band's name and album title along the belt; behind the zipper, the underpants were seemingly rubber stamped in gold with the stylized name of American pop artist Andy Warhol, below which read "THIS PHOTOGRAPH MAY NOT BE—ETC." The artwork was conceived and photographed by Warhol, and the design by Craig Braun. Billy Name is sometimes accredited as the photographer, however, Braun believes Warhol shot the Polaroid photos for the album, and the Factory associates who were involved in the photo shoot have claimed that Warhol took the photos. Braun and his team suggested wrapping the album in rolling paper – a concept later used by Cheech & Chong in Big Bambu – but Jagger was enthused by Warhol's concept. Warhol duly sent Braun Polaroid pictures of a model in tight jeans.Fans assumed the cover photo of the crotch to be Jagger, but he revealed that it was one of Warhol's "protégés". Jagger said it was Jay Johnson, but the general consensus is that Warhol used his lover Jed Johnson as the model for the cover. It remains uncertain exactly who appears on the cover because Warhol photographed several men and never publicly revealed which photos he used. Braun thought it was Jed Johnson on the cover, but he later said Warhol's business manager Fred Hughes told him it was makeup artist Corey Tippin, with which Tippin concurs, saying "I know my anatomy." Warhol superstar Joe Dallesandro also claimed to be the model on the cover, but Braun is sure it was not him.
Former Interview magazine editor Bob Colacello said, "When the album came out, Glenn O'Brien|Glenn was certain that it was he on the inside and Jay Johnson on the outside, but Andy would never say exactly whose crotch he had immortalized." O'Brien, who was an editor for Warhol's Interview magazine, was "100 percent certain" he was the underwear model: "I knew it was me because it was my underwear!" O'Brien initially stated that Jed Johnson was the model for the cover, but he later claimed that it was Tippin. He added that Warhol might not even have known who he selected. "He probably took these Polaroids, put them on the table, and picked ones he liked. I don't think it mattered to him ," said O'Brien.
For the initial vinyl release, the album title and band name is smaller and at the top on the American release. For the UK release, the title and band name are in bigger letters and on the left. Reportedly, when retailers complained that the zipper damaged the vinyl, the zipper was "unzipped" slightly to the middle of the record, where damage would be minimized.
Sticky Fingers earned a Grammy nomination for Best Album Cover at the 14th Annual Grammy Awards in 1972.
The album introduced the tongue and lips logo of Rolling Stones Records, designed by John Pasche in 1970. Jagger suggested to Pasche that he copy the out-stuck tongue of the Hindu goddess Kali. Pasche felt that would date the image to the Indian culture craze of the 1960s, but seeing Kali changed his mind. Before the end of that year, his basic version was faxed to Craig Braun by Marshall Chess. The black and white copy was modified by Braun and his team, resulting in the popular red version: the slim one with the two white stripes on the tongue.
Critic Sean Egan wrote: "Without using the Stones' name, it instantly conjures them, or at least Jagger, as well as a certain lasciviousness that is the Stones' own… It quickly and deservedly became the most famous logo in the history of popular music." The tongue and lips design was part of a package that, in 2003, VH1 named the "No. 1 Greatest Album Cover" of all time.
Alternative version and covers
In Spain, the original cover was censored by the Franco regime and replaced with a "Can of fingers" cover, designed by John Pasche and Phil Jude, and "Sister Morphine" was replaced by a live version of Chuck Berry's "Let It Rock". This track was later included on the CD compilation Rarities 1971–2003 in 2005.In 1992, the LP release of the album in Russia featured a similar treatment as the original cover; but with Cyrillic lettering for the band name and album name, a colourised photograph of blue jeans with a zipper, and a Soviet Army uniform belt buckle that shows a hammer and sickle inscribed in a star. The model appears to be female.
Release and reception
Sticky Fingers was released on 23 April 1971 and reached number one on the UK Albums Chart in May 1971, remaining there for four weeks before returning at number one for a further week in mid June. In the US, the album hit number one within days of release, and stayed there for four weeks. The album spent a total of 69 weeks on the Billboard 200. According to Billboards Top 200 list, it was one of the albums that topped the German chart that year.In a contemporary review for the Los Angeles Times, music critic Robert Hilburn said that although Sticky Fingers is one of the best rock albums of the year, it is only "modest" by the Rolling Stones' standards and succeeds on the strength of songs such as "Bitch" and "Dead Flowers", which recall the band's previously uninhibited, furious style. Jon Landau, writing in Rolling Stone, felt that it lacks the spirit and spontaneity of the Rolling Stones' previous two albums and, apart from "Moonlight Mile", is full of "forced attempts at style and control" in which the band sounds disinterested, particularly on formally correct songs such as "Brown Sugar". Writing for Rolling Stone in 2015, David Fricke called it "an eclectic affirmation of maturing depth" and the band's "sayonara to a messy 1969". In a positive review, Lynn Van Matre of the Chicago Tribune viewed the album as the band "at their raunchy best" and wrote that, although it is "hardly innovative", it is consistent enough to be one of the year's best albums. Writing for Slate, Jack Hamilton praised the album in a retrospective review, stating that it was "one of the greatest albums in rock 'n' roll history."
Sticky Fingers was voted the second best album of the year in The Village Voices annual Pazz & Jop critics poll for 1971. Lester Bangs voted it number one in the poll and said that it was his most played album of the year. Robert Christgau, the poll's creator, ranked the album 17th on his own year-end list. In a 1975 article for The Village Voice, Christgau suggested that the release was "triffling with decadence", but might be the Rolling Stones' best album, approached only by Exile on Main St.. In Christgau's Record Guide: Rock Albums of the Seventies, he wrote that it reflected how unapologetic the band was after the Altamont Free Concert and that, despite the concession to sincerity with "Wild Horses", songs such as "Can't You Hear Me Knocking" and "I Got the Blues" are as "soulful" as "Good Times", and their cover of "You Gotta Move" is on-par with their previous covers of "Prodigal Son" and "Love in Vain".