Shaun Richman

“Sticky Fingers” is a dark record that finds the Rolling Stones in the mother of all transitions. Freed from both their contract with Allen Klein and London Records and their rivalry with the Beatles, who, upon their break-up, left the Stones as “the World’s Greatest Rock-n-Roll Band.” The record features the official debut of their new guitarist, Mick Taylor, the young blonde blues virtuoso from the U.S.A. who replaced Brian Jones as lead guitarist before Ron Wood claimed that position as his birthright. It also features the debut of Rolling Stones Records, the tongue-and-lips logo and Mick Jagger as consummate businessman.

Fortunately, Keith Richards had not yet fully succumbed to the junk dependency that ultimately claimed Brian Jones and was able to keep Mick Jagger in check and ensure that the Stones remained musically vital and interesting (at least until “Goat’s Head Soup”). Nevertheless, “Sticky Fingers” is the druggiest record the Rolling Stones ever released. It’s one of the druggiest records of all time. In between the album’s opener, “Brown Sugar” (among other things, a euphemism for heroin) and its closer, “Moonlight Mile,” with the singer’s “head full of snow,” at least half of the record’s songs directly reference hard drugs. When they’re not singing about a drug overdose, as on “Sister Morphine,” or about getting over a heartbreak “with a needle and a spoon and another girl to take my pain away,” as on “Dead Flowers,” Jagger and Richards still don’t hide their (mostly Keith’s) drug problems too well.

The album’s second track, the bluesy, druggy “Sway” poetically says “It’s just that demon life has got me in its sway,” but it sounds an awful lot like “It’s just that needle, it’s got me in its sway.” And on “Bitch,” one of “Sticky Fingers'” two great riff rockers, they liken love to being “juiced up and sloppy.”

On its surface, “Bitch” seems like just another of Mich Jagger’s misogynistic songs, but the “bitch” here is not a woman but the feelings of love and lust that she conjures. It’s the man in the song who is reduced to an animal, a horse kicking the stall or one of Pavlov’s salivating dogs. Like “Satisfaction,” the song is built around a Keith Richards riff written for horns. Unlike “Satisfaction,” however, the Rolling Stones of 1971 can actually afford a horn section, which gives the song a lift and a majesty that earns that title of “the World’s Greatest Blah, Blah, Blah…”

The album’s other great riff rocker is its classic opener, “Brown Sugar.” Now here’s a song that employs classic Mick Jagger misogyny along with a distressing racism. Those of you who were too busy headbanging to Keef’s clarion guitar might not have noticed that the song’s lyrics are about an American plantation master having sex with his young slaves (the song, for those of you who are trivially-minded, was originally titled “Black Pussy;” at least Mick remembered some semblance of taste). What makes a good little Labour Party member go so bad? It has to be distance. It’s the same distance that compelled Prince Harry to wear that ridiculous Nazi uniform to a party recently. To the Brits, the Nazi’s were those guys who dropped bombs on London. Wearing their insignia has been a wonderful way to rebel since the earliest days of punk. The Holocaust, with its wholesale slaughter of Jews and European Gypsies, queers and commies has no immediacy to them because it wasn’t their people who were slaughtered. Likewise, the British outlawed slavery long before their rebel colonies, and their slavery was not so pervasive and hereditary. So, to Mick Jagger, it has no immediacy. It holds no immediate connection or shame. It’s camp.

Country music is also treated as camp by Jagger. By this time, Keith Richards had struck up a profound and influential friendship with Gram Parsons, the former Byrd and founder of “alternative country.” Rock-n-Roll’s basic chemistry is one part blues and one part country. The Stones had long embraced the former, but Parsons convinced Keef that country was beautiful and primordial. He had also influenced their earlier hit, “Honky Tonk Women,” but on “Sticky Fingers” the Stones turn in two bona-fide country ballads. One is “Dead Flowers,” which marries its drug references and spiteful lyrics about an ex-girlfriend who thinks she’s the “queen of the underground” with a steel pedal guitar and Mick’s sarcastic affected drawl. It is a touchstone for much of what is ironic and self-conscious about today’s “alternative country.”

Far more beautiful and sincere is “Wild Horses,” for which Mick plays it straight. The song was a rare instance (and perhaps the last) of Jagger and Richards allowing another artist, in this case Parsons’ Flying Burrito Brothers, to record one of their songs before the Stones. The Flying Burrito Brothers play the song straight-forward and sincerely, probably inspiring the Stones to do the same. It was a fitting gift to Gram Parsons. The only other gift he got from Keef was a taste of his super-human tolerance for drugs, which was too much for Parsons, who died three years later.

“Wild Horses” was a Jagger/Richards composition, although Marianne Faithful has recently claimed that she co-wrote the song. This is a plausible claim, since Faithful wrote “Sister Morphine” all by her lonesome, only to watch her own recorded version of the song make no dent in the charts and then have Keith Richards and Mick Jagger (by then, her ex-boyfriend) claim co-songwriting credit on the Stones’ rendition of the song, which has become a classic. However, it seems “Wild Horses” was composed by Keith Richards as a lullaby for his kids. Jagger sang it at Faithfull’s bedside after an overdose (perhaps the one that inspired “Sister Morphine”). When she awoke, she told Mick “wild horses couldn’t drag me away,” but this was just a sub-conscious memory from her coma.

The album’s cover artwork is classic Andy Warhol: a black-and-white close-up of a blue-jeans-clad crotch. Inside the album, the same crotch is stripped to the underwear, an erect cock evident. It makes explicit what Warhol’s cover to “The Velvet Underground and Nico” made implicit. Like the V.U.’s “peel slowly and see” banana, “Sticky Fingers'” cover was interactive: the original pressings of the l.p featured a fully functioning zipper. It’s artistic touches like this that we will miss when recorded music makes the final leap to digital downloads. We’ll also miss fully-realized albums like “Sticky Fingers,” which is an essential component for any argument in favor of rock-n-roll as a long-playing album medium.