The Run That Back series is a deep dive into some of music’s most popular or underrated projects. Whether it's been 5 years or 50, there’s never a wrong time to "run that back."
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Salacious, offensive, over the top. You know the album cover we’re talking about, the one with the zipper. However you want to describe it, it certainly caught your attention. Today, that album celebrates its 50th anniversary.
The Rolling Stones released Sticky Fingers on April 23, 1971 and it became an album that gained as much notoriety for its cover art as it did for its music.
Sticky Fingers is the band’s eleventh American album and marked the first Stones record to reach number one on both the UK and US albums charts. Since its release, the album has gone triple platinum with over three million units sold.
Sticky Fingers best encapsulates what drew fans to The Rolling Stones, their ability to blend different musical styles into a distinctly unique sound.
You have tinges of country with “Wild Horses,” “You Gotta Move,” “Sister Morphine,” and “Dead Flowers.” Swaggering rock in “Bitch” and “Brown Sugar,” a jazz infused groove of “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking," masterful songwriting of “Moonlight Mile,” and the fusion of blues/soul/gospel in tracks like “Sway” and “I Got the Blues.”
The music stands out as some of the finest the Stones have put out, but it's the album artwork that drew an equal amount of attention.
The notorious album cover shows the outline of a jeans-clad male crotch with a working zipper that was able to be undone to reveal an image of cotton underwear.
The artwork was originally conceived by Andy Warhol as his name was emblazoned with a gold stamp on the briefs.
While the imagery certainly caught the public’s attention, it also proved to be a costly move for the band. The cover was expensive to produce and wound up causing damage to the vinyl record. Later re-issues of the album feature just the photograph of the jeans.
50 years later, Sticky Fingers sounds as fresh as it did the day it was released. It provides one the best front-to-back listening experiences in rock and continues to make a claim as one of The Rolling Stones’ best albums of their storied career.
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