Sticky Fingers – Rolling Stones

Man I love this album. Yeah, I know that every hard core Stones connoisseur will tell you that Exile On Main Street is the album where the distillation of their garage, blues, country and rock n’ roll influences fused to create their finest recorded moment (and I love that album too), but my favourite Stones album is Sticky Fingers.

To be honest it’s hard to separate the incredible run of Stones albums from Beggar’s Banquet (68), Let It Bleed (69), Sticky Fingers (71), Exile On Main Street (72) and Goats Head Soup (73). That streak laid the foundation of the mother lode to the Stones’ canon and Sticky Fingers sits bang in the middle numerically and chronologically.

While the raw and dirty power of Exile may satisfy the purists over the more polished production on Fingers the latter’s advantage is that it delivers far greater diversity in the sound of the record – from full on belting brass (Bitch), smoking R & B (Can’t You Hear Me Knocking), junkie blues (Sister Morphine), rock (Brown Sugar), country blues (Wild Horses), trad blues (You Gotta Move) and the exquisitely beautiful ballad of Moonlight Mile.

The album opens with the salacious Brown Sugar, a meat and potatoes rocker that sounds like classic Keef, but was written by Mick while filming Ned Kelly in Australia in 69. According to Jagger he came up with the riff in the middle of a field near the rural NSW town of Braidwood after injuring his hand on set. With barely more than a title the rest of the lyrics were written in about 45 minutes in the studio at Muscle Shoals just before the Stones laid down the track. According to session keyboardist Jim Dickinson (who played on Wild Horses) watching Jagger writing those words as quickly as they came into his head was one of the most amazing things he’d ever witnessed. The inspiration for those lyrics appears to have come from Jagger’s secret squeeze at the time, actress Marsha Hunt, although Bill Wyman claims that backing singer Claudia Lennear was also a muse for the song (a claim also made by Claudia).

The blues groove of Sway was also written by Jagger with Keith not even appearing on the track. Richards was late getting to the session so Mick Taylor (on his first album as a full time member of the Stones) played lead on the track with Jagger on rhythm guitar. Jagger described the experience of playing with Taylor as being:

“another feeling completely, because he’s following my vocal lines and then extemporizing on them during the solos.”

Taylor’s melodic and fluid improvisation was a vastly different experience to playing with Keith who always took the lead with the rest of the band falling in behind. It’s interesting to note that a string section was used on the only two songs on Sticky Fingers that didn’t feature Richards on guitar – Sway and Moonlight Mile.

The lilting country blues of Wild Horses is one of the Stones most beautiful recordings. In Richards’ superb autobiography Life he says that writing Wild Horses on a twelve string gave the song “a certain forlornness”. Richards wrote the song after having to leave his newborn son Marlon to record the album and came up with the phrase “wild horses couldn’t drag me away”, but says that when he gave the song to Jagger to write the lyrics the intention of the song changed to reflect his breakup with Marianne Faithfull – who’d just left Mick for somebody else. When Jagger sings:

“I watched you suffer a dull aching pain 
Now you decided to show me the same 
No sweeping exits or offstage lines 
Could make me feel bitter or treat you unkind”

It’s that vulnerability in his vocal imbued with broken resignation that gives the song such emotive power.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yE2B_kCfvss

Can’t You Hear Me Knocking sets out on a dirty Richards riff before it morphs into an R & B groove that really sends the song into orbit. That groove was a totally unrehearsed jam with the congas first picking up the rhythm and Mick Taylor following on lead. Bobby Keys then takes over on sax and as he blasts away Taylor plays a stunning Santana inspired guitar line underneath. As the song gains momentum Taylor’s exquisite touch allows him to play some perfectly placed motifs, eventually building to some repetitive riffs that are pure jazz. The hypnotic run from Taylor increases in intensity as the rhythm section quickly builds behind him until every Stone joins the jam and the song finally reaches its climactic finish. It’s an inspired piece of intuitive ensemble playing – thank god the engineers left the tape rolling to capture it.

The traditional spiritual You Gotta Move closes side one, with the Stones inspired by Mississippi Fred McDowell’s version from the early 60’s. It’s Mick doing that southern drawl thing that he does so well with Keith playing acoustic slide on a National guitar and Mick Taylor playing lead on a 50’s Fender. Jagger said of the Stones’ take on the song: “Fred McDowell’s version is full of emotion, but I think we managed to pull it off on this occasion. I wouldn’t say that every occasion (laughs). You make it your own. All the lines are very similar to Fred McDowell’s lines but we put something else into it.”

Side two opens with the strutting swagger of Jagger on Bitch. It’s one of those songs that scared the pants off the conservative mindsets of radio programmers when the album was released (Bitch was also the B side of Brown Sugar) because audiences might perceive it to be a misogynistic rant about a woman, but one look at the lyrics confirms Jagger’s take on love itself, that it’s a bitch. Although once classic rock formats took off on FM nothing was going to stop them from playing it. That fat groove charged with those honking horns makes it one of the Stones’ great rock songs. Bitch had a difficult birth as engineer Andy Johns explains:

“When we were doing Bitch, Keith was very late. Jagger and Mick Taylor had been playing the song without him and it didn’t sound very good. I walked out of the kitchen and he was sitting on the floor with no shoes, eating a bowl of cereal. Suddenly he said, Oi, Andy! Give me that guitar. I handed him his clear Dan Armstrong Plexiglass guitar, he put it on, kicked the song up in tempo, and just put the vibe right on it. Instantly, it went from being this laconic mess into a real groove. And I thought, Wow. THAT’S what he does.”

The horns were added later, recorded in an apartment upstairs at Stargroves, Jagger’s country house in Hampshire where later other bands like The Who and Led Zeppelin would also record.

The slow burning waltz of I’ve Got The Blues is very much in the vein of Otis Redding with Billy Preston’s organ cameo along with the soaring horns of Bobby Keys and Jim Price giving it a classic soulful feel. Nice bass lines from Bill Wyman too.

Marianne Faithfull claims that Mick and Keith stole the lyrics of Sister Morphine without her permission, but Mick counters that she only wrote part of the lyric and that she was given a songwriting credit, although early pressings of Sticky Fingers left Marianne’s name off the credits – even though Faithfull recorded the song two years before the Stones did. How convenient. It’s a harrowing song made all the more gritty thanks to Ry Cooder guesting on slide guitar. Keith’s rhythm on the acoustic guitar captures the mood evocatively while Charlie’s drumming holds the piece together brilliantly.

There always seems to be a sly mocking tone to Jagger’s vocal when the Stones play a “straight” country song (did they ever really play anything straight?) and Dead Flowers is no different. Undoubtedly it’s Gram Parsons’ influence on Keith at work here, although Mick does his best to undermine the lyric with a satirical slant on his vocal. It’s been covered by a heap of country artists, but I’m betting none of them could carry it like Mick with his lack of conviction and yet still make it work. That’s the beauty of the Stones.

Finally there’s the ethereal beauty of Moonlight Mile, a dreamy song of longing with a distinct Eastern influence. The song was written by Mick Jagger with Mick Taylor reworking an earlier piece of music by Richards called “Japanese Thing” into the guitar part. Richards doesn’t appear on the song at all and Jagger wasn’t convinced that it was really a song in the first place, thinking: “this isn’t worth recording, this is just my doodling”. The song came together late one night at Jagger’s house with Taylor on guitar and Charlie Watts on the kit.

One aspect of Moonlight Mile I love is that it was recorded at a time before Jagger got into his full blown falsetto vocal later in the 70’s. If the song had been recorded a decade later it would have sounded vastly different, but in this instance his vocal range wavers between a bluesy, country croon and an aching higher register that’s used only sparingly to create the song’s distinctive phrasing. In this way his voice creates far more emotional depth by varying the pitch of his delivery and in doing so adds to the Eastern influence of the melody. Paul Buckmaster’s lush string arrangements are sumptuous, while Charlie’s drumming rumbles through a quiet thunder to the beat. It’s such a stunning piece that builds in intensity to a crescendo before trailing off and falling away to its eventual finish. Moonlight Mile is one of the most glorious finishes to an album in the history of popular music – one that you never want to end and then when it does makes you want to flip that vinyl and start all over again. No wonder I play it more than any other Stones album.