While I have six other Rolling Stones albums on my Top 500, most of them academically fell somewhere between 250 and 500. Nothing other than Sticky Fingers cracked the top half of the Top 500 - and this album made it to the incredibly high #114. Why? The Rolling Stones were always more a band that I appreciated academically. I know they’re important to the history of rock and roll for many objective reasons. Learning about them is like reading Homer or Shakespeare, and I appreciate the talent and innovation they brought to rock as they helped shape it. But appreciation doesn’t mean it gets to my heart. Unlike every other Rolling Stones album, Sticky Fingers hits me emotionally. Along with L.A. Woman (#120) and Get Your Wings (#116), it’s one of those late night, boozy, jaded albums that feels like the dying days of youth - with one last supernova to send it all off. It’s completely an album of the 1970s, defining much of its weary grit and tone. When I listen to it, so many memories emerge: nights out drinking in grad school, late nights during the magic summer of 2002 in Boulder, Colorado, or the weddings I went to in 2005 that marked the end of my youth as I watched lifelong friends get married. Drinking, chaotic hilarity, and the feeling of slowing time down to enjoy moments with friends. That’s Sticky Fingers. For me, it’s also the Stones at their best - the way I imagined they would sound when I first got into them. Their legend never quite caught up with my listening experience except for this album. They sound loose, dangerous, weary, boozy, jammy, and even melancholy - with some of the most jaded ballads I’ve ever heard. Closing my eyes, the album sounds like partying going full blast at 2 a.m. in the morning - showing no signs of stopping. It also combines a lot of different styles that were impacting rock in the early 1970s: hard rock, blues, country, and even Santana-style jamming. The trick to rock and roll is that it works best when it sounds unplanned and spontaneous, even when it’s not. Sticky Fingers sounds like the Rolling Stones just made it up one drunken night on a whim. And that’s why it’s a masterpiece - and why it captures so many of my own memories.
“Brown Sugar” of course is an eternal classic rock song, and one I’ve heard that many folks who grew up in the 1970s got sick of. Because I didn’t live in the early 1970s, I have some distance from the song and can appreciate its definitive feel. It’s a song that doesn’t feel like the 1960s at all and helped establish the tone for the 1970s. It’s nasty, sleazy, and badass, with Mick Jagger snarling out vocals about God knows what and Keith Richards establishing yet another classic riff. The chorus is disgusting and yet rocks harder than nearly every other rock chorus ever, the vocals, guitars, bass, and piano all swirling together in decadence, the sax exploding out like cheers at a party, and Charlie Watts holding it all together. “Sway” presents an unusually slow-paced wistful feel. Neither a ballad nor a rocker, it feels like taking a self-aware breather in the middle of a late night party to acknowledge the fact that I feel young and alive - and that the time is now! It’s a song that only could have been written by young men who had yet to turn 30, as if this feeling would last forever. We then move into the stunningly beautiful “Wild Horses.” It’s another drunk song, but this time the kind of sad drunk moment where I’m feeling everything. I remember a few of these moments during the early 2000s, just sitting alone, watching magical moments transpire that I know would soon pass, and reflecting on loss and rejection in the midst of festivity. I’m outside, breathing in the cool night air, smelling cigarette smoke from those smoking outside. Perhaps riding in a car down some dark road, the song on the radio intertwining with my now sleepy eyes as I want to nod off. “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking” sounds unlike anything else in the Rolling Stones catalog. It starts off like a typical Stones song, and then the famous “accident” happens when the tape kept rolling and they caught a magnificent, one take jam for posterity. Bobby Keys first kicks ass on the sax, and then Mick Taylor plays a Santana-like solo that feels steeped in the early 1970s. I love this era when all of these different styles roiled together, with few rules and subgenres to corral rock into something identifiable and safe. One of the Rolling Stones’s most spontaneous, brilliant moments.
The rest of the album doesn’t match the brilliance of these first four songs but still keeps the mood and momentum going perfectly. “You Gotta Move” is faithful to Fred McDowell’s version and features the Rolling Stones playing masterful pre-1950s style blues. “Bitch” is one of my favorite hard rock songs of all time. It’s one of those definitive “Kevin songs” and not a coincidence that it inspired KISS’s song “Deuce.” The horns, riff, and drums all kick energy into the song like an injection, and Jagger again delivers dangerously obscene lyrics. “I Got the Blues” is one of those classic late-1960s flavored songs that sounds like an Otis Redding song. Slow, drawn out, and completely of its time, it’s a great late night song as the party begins to end. “Sister Morphine” is a sad song that reminds me of women who blazed early but ended up decaying fast due to drugs, alcohol, and too much partying. It’s the dark side of youth, the underbelly of youthful recklessness that I also saw back in the early 2000s. “Dead Flowers” is another song that doesn’t fit the typical Rolling Stones style but ends up as one of my favorites. It’s beautiful country rock but dark as hell. The line, “And I won’t forget to put flowers on your grave” gives the sense of a youthful imagination about death with limited knowledge but a lot of romantic wistfulness. The song serves as a precursor to my later interest in country rock but still fits into the late night feel of the other songs. Sticky Fingers ends with the enigmatic “Moonlight Mile,” serving as a farewell to the night before going (or collapsing) to bed. And not only for one night, but for youth itself. I’d be overstating it to say that this song or even the entire album had such an impact on me. It didn’t. But Sticky Fingers serves as one of a handful of albums that allowed me to capture, deal with, and say farewell to my 20s. It forever captures the feel of the mystery, drunkenness, and chaos of late nights where I’d let everything go. In those fuzzy, heightened, buzzed moments, everything feels perfect, like the party will never end. But it does end. That’s why I love how Sticky Fingers serves as a perfect snapshot of this feeling, forever captured in these ten songs. Perhaps other Rolling Stones get more acclaim, but I find that Sticky Fingers captures the band, the era, and the feel of late nights better than almost any other album.
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