The hammer on anvil punch of the opening chords of Brown Sugar say this clearly. It's the kind of grinding groove that they'd been building since 19th Nervous Breakdown and Jumping Jack Flash but here it's meaner, a fat punch that crawls on strong legs to a dark grind with a tale intended to offend. Images of slavery, abuse and assault in almost every line. That much is not ambiguous. On the other hand, Jagger at his best is an arch lyricist and here at the dawn of the jet set incarnation of the group would have delighted in mixing up the imagery. But was it such a coup to get into the top 40 with a song so risque? If you take it as an extension of the sexual licence worn at the time to signify cultural enlightenment then, sure, stick it to the wowsers. But slavery. I am under no impression that Jagger advocated the violence depicted in the words but that he chose to use the imagery. Set any of that in the Belgian Congo and watch that wry grin go the way of the Dodo. Is it more like the movies Drum or Mandingo, then? No, because, as much as they pandered to that icky eagerness in their audiences both films were careful to clarify the distance between their purposes and those of their characters. But I don't think Jagger is trying to play both sides as much as play a character. He's no more a slaver here than he was Satan in Sympathy for the Devil. It feels far more like the same provocation as in Midnight Rambler which went as far as quoting Albert de Salvo's confession. Brown Sugar veers more towards the schoolboy snigger, though. So, does a verse that's more about his own sexual adventures cleanse it all? Not if the rest of it stops you listening. Maybe it's one of those songs that you can pretend is being sung in another language. That is a mighty Keith-led rock groove, after all. Up to you.
Sway begins with the rock band equivalent of a boulder falling from an outcrop. A big guitar bash on a blues scale before settling into a rolling guitar progression and Jagger's vocal entering soon after. A compelling lament for the narrator's life bound to his pleasures and those of departed friends. That old demon life has got him in its sway. The immediate contrast between the nudging wink of Brown Sugar and this compounds Sway's sincerity. To cap that Mick Taylor delivers a soaring solo of a kind that had never been part of a Stones song it plays into the fade as the memories of assignations and addictions swell in the distance. If you'd just heard Brown Sugar you might shrug at the attempt at bad boy posturing but if you listen long enough to hear this it will be like standing back from the frame to see the picture as it really is.
I said cap in that last paragraph. Well, I shouldn't have. It diminishes the power of Wild Horses with its impossibly gentle strum and the sound of Jagger's five hundred year old voice. He loves her though she puts him through hell and this he comes to understand is from her own suffering. The guitar interplay, two acoustics (one with Nashville tuning which sounds like a 12 string ... but isn't) waft like breezes as Jagger's heartfelt singing rises between them. Mick Taylor's electric playing is a lot gentler than in Sway but no less poignant for that. By the time the whole band has joined it feels like an intensification rather than simply added instruments. One of the Stones' most moving pieces.
Two laments in a row so it's time for something rockier. A dual guitar attack of crunchy riff on one side and a more fluid electric clean on the other. Boy lusts after girl and is trying to get into her house. No, not more assault, this one feels more a give and take consensuality with real wry humour from Jagger. The final harmony chorus is proof that this band did do a lot of that whicdh gets overshadowed by the cock rock bravado but here it's clear and shiny and powerful. The groove develops into a loose jam with softly jangling guitars and Bobby Keys's asphalt heatwave sax taken over by Taylor's slinky Les Paul playing. If anything gthey did in their first decade approached straight up jazz it's this song's coda. Actually, there's more than a nod to Miles's In a Slient Way.
You Got to Move is all sliding dobro and and humid delta afternoons. Jagger isn't quite singing in blackface here (the way he sang early country outings all houn' dawg) and rather than plain appropriation sounds more celebratory. It closes side one and encouraged anyone listening to go and find out more about this blues thang (even if almost all of them just got up to turn it over).
Side two opens with more provocation. Bitch begins as a full band riff and a growling vocal. The narrator is drunk, hungry and restless and that's about it except the joke of it is not that the woman he's singing to is a bitch, it's love itself that torments and drags him in. A full horns and brass onslaught of the riff is impressive and then the dual guitar workout that it becomes the extended fade of shouts, blasts and grinding chords. Not subtle nor was meant to be.
I Got the Blues opens in big Memphis style with a huge double guitar arpeggio with rising brass as Jagger gives a big performance at the mic. This is the closest the band get to anything of their early albums but this outing is bigger and richer and more sophisticated, almost as though this is what they heard in their heads as the well-meaning Andrew Oldham puzzled over how to get the sound bigger. Here, the magnitude comes from the space between the guitar band, the sad brass chorus and Billy Preston's effortlessly soulful keyboards.
Sister Morphine is as creepy as the title sounds. The narrator whine's about his strung out pain from his hospital bed. The opiating nurse never comes around enough, ever. The doctor has no face but doesn't need one. This song is all disorder. After all the big production of the rest of the album this song starts so quietly it sounds like studio chatter. Slide guitars are as much effects as instruments. The reverb comes and goes as the pain builds or subsides and the mix is kept tantalisingly uneven; all the bits you want loud are buried and the constant pleading of the junkie is forever. The workout to fade is with a snidely insistent slide (courtesy of Ry Cooder) and a tinny piano rattles with a tight , disorientating echo to the fade. In addition to the usual Jagger/Richards credit we see the extra name and life experience of Marianne Faithful whose life was not the happiest at the time of writing (which was during the previous album but works here).
Dead Flowers begins with the same arch country sound that songs like Country Honk or Factory Girl but, while the humour is still there it's far more attuned to the kind of traditions it evokes. The girl thinks she's too good for him, keeping him pining while she slums it among the actvists and bohemians. It's ok for her to keep sending him the dead flowers. He won't forget to put roses on her grave. For the first time the Nashville feel is approached without self-consciousness (although the references to smack instead of Bud do add a little of that). Fun.
The thing to know about Moonlight Mile if you're unfamiliar with this record is that (like Sawy) this is a guitar led song that was done without Keith. Keith was not fit for duty for those (though he did sing backing on Sway) so Mick Taylor stepped in with this shimmery wonder with its pentatonic melodies, easy acousting strum and whimsical lyrics of travel under open skies. This was a jam at the end of weeks of Jagger noodling the Eastern toned figure on an acoustic guitar. The album's only string section enters without sounding inappropriate for a moment and manages to be both lush and restrained. More of an atmosphere than a song but a lovely breezy way to close.
With the two ground breakers Beggar's Banquet and Let it Bleed behind them, a refreshed career in front of crowds massively bigger than anything in their initial touring years and a reputation for being naughty tramps in lurex The Rolling Stones came to this thrid chapter in the big four albums that came to define them despite the decade they'd already fashioned. After this, every one of their albums would follow the pattern with varying degrees of conviction and this is the moment that seems to have felt exactly right.
While Banquet and Bleed both feature more adventurous approaches there is an overall arc discernable when listening to these records in chronological order. By the time Sticky Fingers comes along the production is of the strength that added to the standard of all high profile act's releases at this time and is still considered standard. And this is what is really meant when people who revere these records mean when they describe them as timeless: they aren't out of time as much as occurant at the time when this presentation was consolidated. This is the thing that gets to me when I think of listening to this record and it's the one that will bid me scroll to something else. The slickness of sound that stretched over the decades (do not kid yourself that the nineties added anything more than better electronics) is here in these grooves and there to stay. It's also in The Eagles, the couples version of Fleetwood Mac, The Doobie Brothers, Meatloaf and anyone else whose records sounded perfect before they sounded compelling. I'm not blaming the Stones or this record, just saying, this is when they, too, bought in. You can stretch that easily to the Andy Warhol cover that made the title so champagne risque.
But after all that goes through my mind, if I go ahead and choose it, I listen to the end, from the atrocity of Brown Sugar to the painkilling float of the last song's fade. It works. It waits there, whether or not you pick it, and will pour into your ears and reward you the same as the first time.
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