Daniel Weizmann on the Stones' "Sticky Fingers" (1971), Record Collector News, May-June 2015, Issue 47. Part of a feature commemorating the newly expanded and remastered Sticky Fingers release.
"In the same way 'Like A Rolling Stone' marked the spiritual launch of the Sixties, Sticky Fingers is the first rock album to have a totally seventies sensibility - decadent, insular, and cynical in a whole new way......the knowing, street-smart pessimism that would become common parlance for the oncoming decade.
Over a year before Ziggy Stardust, they were already singing about satin shoes, plastic boots, cocaine eyes and speed - freak jive. Even the album cover vibes a comic sarcasm that is way ahead of it's time -- packaged lust and zippers to nowhere. It could have been a punk album cover eight years later. Part of this new tone -- and part of the way the seventies came to define itself -- comes from the burst bubble of counterculture dreams. 'Love is the way they say is really strutting out,' Mick sings on 'Sway,' but from his worn and torn bed of sorrow, he himself doesn't sound convinced. Brian Jones was dead, the Beatles were gone, the Utopian decade was finished, and with Sticky Fingers, the Stones let you know they intended to survive, to ride out the moonlit mile without illusions.
My older brother Moshe bought a copy of Sticky Fingers at Platterpuss Records on Sunset Boulevard. It seemed contraband, almost like a Playboy Mag or a 'lid of grass' -- like something you'd instinctively hide from your parents. At the time I couldn't figure out why, but now I get it. This was music against innocence."
[Edited on 7/2/2015 by robslob]
