The album is often regarded as one of the Stones' best, containing songs such as the chart-topping "Brown Sugar" and the folk-influenced "Wild Horses", and achieving triple platinum certification in the US.
Front cover Back cover
Inside cover (right behind the front cover; the top of the picture can be seen when "unzipping" the front cover)
With the end of their Decca/London association at hand, The Rolling Stones would finally be free to release their albums (cover art and all) as they pleased. However, their leaving manager Allen Klein dealt the group a major blow when they discovered that they had inadvertently signed over their entire 1960s 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 come to be released by ABKCO Records. The band would remain incensed with Klein for decades over the act.
When Decca informed The Rolling Stones that they were owed one more single, they cheekily submitted a track called "Cocksucker Blues", which was guaranteed to be refused. Instead, Decca released the two-year-old Beggars Banquet track "Street Fighting Man" while Klein would have dual copyright ownership, with The Rolling Stones, of "Brown Sugar" and "Wild Horses".
Side A Side B
Although sessions for Sticky Fingers began in earnest in March 1970, The Rolling Stones had recorded at Muscle Shoals Studios in Alabama in December 1969 and "Sister Morphine", cut during Let It Bleed's sessions earlier in March of that year, was held over for this release. Much of the recording for Sticky Fingers was made with The Rolling Stones' mobile studio unit in Stargroves during the summer and autumn of 1970. Early versions of songs that would appear on Exile on Main St. were also rehearsed during these sessions.
The album's artwork emphasizes the suggestive innuendo of the Sticky Fingers title, showing a close-up of a jeans-clad male crotchwith the visible outline of a large penis; the cover of the original (vinyl) release featured a working zipper and mock belt buckle that opened to reveal cotton briefs. The vinyl release displayed the band's name and album title along the image of the belt; behind the zipper the white briefs were seemingly rubber stamped in gold with the name of American pop artist Andy Warhol, below which read "THIS PHOTOGRAPH MAY NOT BE--ETC." While the artwork was conceived by Warhol, photography was by Billy Name and design by Craig Braun.
The cover photo of a male model's crotch clad in tight blue jeans was assumed by many fans to be an image of Mick Jagger, but the people actually involved at the time of the photo shoot claim that Warhol had several different men photographed (Jagger was not among them) and never revealed which shots he used. Among the candidates, Jed Johnson, Warhol's lover at the time, denied it was his likeness, although his twin brother Jay is a possibility. Those closest to the shoot, and subsequent design, name Factory artist and designer Corey Tippin as the likeliest candidate. Warhol "superstar" Joe Dallesandro claims to have been the model.
After retailers complained that the zipper was causing damage to the vinyl (from stacked shipments of the record), the zipper was "unzipped" slightly to the middle of the record, where damage would be minimized.
The album features the first usage of the band's "tongue & lips" logo, which was originally designed by Ernie Cefalu. Although Ernie's version was used for much of the merchandising and was the design originally shown to the band by Craig Braun, the design used for the album was illustrated by John Pasche.
Spanish 1971 cover Russian 1992 cover
In Spain, the original cover was censored and replaced with a "Can of fingers" cover, and "Sister Morphine" was replaced by a live version of Chuck Berry's "Let It Rock". This version was released on the compilation album 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 colourized 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.
The very first pressings of the original album had "DIST. BY ATCO, DIV. OF ATLANTIC RECORDING CORP., 1841 B'WAY, N.Y., N.Y." (set in Futura Bold, in a relatively large, i.e. readable, type) as the perimeter print. About a year afterward (some time after the release of Exile on Main Street), they switched to smaller perimeter print with the text "ROLLING STONES RECORDS, TM MUSIDOR B.V., DIST. BY ATLANTIC RECORDING CORP., 1841 BWAY, N.Y., N.Y." A few LP pressings have Musidor B.V. as the holding company following the move of Atlantic's H.Q. to 75 Rockefeller Plaza in 1973, but before the year's end the Rolling Stones Records' holding company was changed to "PROMOTONE B.V." (Probably because Musidor was too similar to the name of the Musicor label, no?) Naturally, the Warner Communications logo came on board in 1975, as it did with the other Atlantic labels. So there were four label perimeter print variations of this seminal album before the (w) logo was added.
Track Listing
All songs written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, except where noted.
Side one
| ||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
No.
|
Title
|
Length
| ||||||||
1.
| "Brown Sugar" |
3:48
| ||||||||
2.
| "Sway" |
3:50
| ||||||||
3.
| "Wild Horses" |
5:42
| ||||||||
4.
| "Can't You Hear Me Knocking" |
7:14
| ||||||||
5.
| "You Gotta Move" (Fred McDowell/Gary Davis) |
2:32
| ||||||||
Side two
| ||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
No.
|
Title
|
Length
| ||||||||
6.
| "Bitch" |
3:38
| ||||||||
7.
| "I Got the Blues" |
3:54
| ||||||||
8.
| "Sister Morphine" (Jagger/Richards/Marianne Faithfull) |
5:31
| ||||||||
9.
| "Dead Flowers" |
4:03
| ||||||||
10.
| "Moonlight Mile" |
5:56
| ||||||||
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