rank the songs on STICKY FINGERS

I wish the outtakes on the new edition were better. It seems they put the best versions on the original album. (Imagine that!)

wild horses just gets me, i've heard it so many times but it's so beautiful - harmony chorus cannot be fucked with

also ~keef~ high harmony <3

you can hear Keith's voice clearly on the outtake of Brown Sugar with Clapton. Probably the best moments of the track.

spoilers man, i'm still stuck on disc 1 lol

keef on any harmony pretty much gives me life though, love him

fuck

i got the blues would be a top 3 song on another album but SF is such a monster it ends up second last on my list

how can that be

also i just redeemed for my vinyl sticky fingers

i have no working turntable rn but hey

salivate like a Pavlov dog

proposal: a group time travel excursion back to the roundhouse 71

i want to see them in concert once in my life but i also want to go back and see them like this

fuck

Veg, have you ever seen Ladies and Gentlemen, The Rolling Stones? Obviously not the same experience, but it's the same lineup (Stones + Hopkins, Keys & Price) live in a big hall in Texas on the Exile tour. Very cool.

i have!! <3 it

i want to go there too

This is due soon. Seems a bit on the short side (the CD is an e.p. fer fuck sakes), but hey more live '71 Stones.

i've watched some youtubes clips of this show, fierce as fuck
can't wait to see the whole thing

i think wild horses is maybe the only stones song that's ever made me tear up. not every time i hear it or anything, but it's definitely kind of an anomaly in their catalog.

mick's delivery sells it so hard. even the acoustic version on the bonus disc made me think, like...there could be zero music & i think it would still get me

yeah that is def one of his all-time greatest vocal performances. i don't think any other singer in the world could put it across quite the way mick does.

The account about how they cut it in True Adventures of... is--like the rest of the book--amazing. Richards pulling the chorus out and Jagger adding lyrics on the last day in Muscle Shoals simply because they had the time and inclination to cut "one more song"...Jim Dickinson being drafted to play piano because simply he was there, and then being mad about having to settle for a tack piano because the house grand wasn't in tune with the band.

If I remember correctly, Keith doesn't play on "sway", does he ?
Nowadays, my favourite track would be "knocking" or "dead flowers" but "Brown sugar" and "horses" are still amazing!
The only one I never liked is "you gotta move".

I think Keith plays on Sway. It's him in open G tuning and Taylor in standard tuning. You can tell Keith's part by the way he plays the root chord, F, way up on the 10th fret. Taylor adds the sus2 on the Bb when Jagger sings "Fiiiind."

The song features a bottleneck slide guitar solo towards the middle of the song and a dramatic outro solo performed by Taylor. Rhythm guitar performed by Jagger was his first electric guitar performance on an album. The strings on the piece were arranged by Paul Buckmaster, who also worked on other songs from Sticky Fingers. Richards added his backing vocals but provided no guitar to the track

Oh wow! I stand corrected.

It's an insular little advance, but Keith learning the open G tuning (from Ry Cooder, right?) was like the apple falling on Newton. So much of the greatness of this Stones run is due directly to open G (and the songs, of course). As a guitarist, there is little less fun than tuning into G and learning, like, 20 Stones tunes that are stupidly easy, but only in that tuning (and sometimes with a capo, too). I can only wonder what it was like at the time, or even in the '80s, when you were an aspiring guitarist trying to learn these not terribly difficult songs, and wondering why you never sound like Keith. "Jumpin Jack Flash," for example, as recorded, is maybe ... open E? Regardless, it's a mess of guitars and tunings, which is why even the Stones never played it the way the way they recorded it.

Hey, since we're talking about this era in general, too, anyone else notice a connection between "You Can't Always Get What You Want" and the Velvet Underground. Was Mick tuned in to the VU? Because it's a song about copping drugs that uses essentially the same repeating chords as "Heroin," iirc.

To this day, like in that Rolling Stone interview re "Moonlight Mile" published a couple weeks ago, Jagger sounds uncharacteristically wistful about the Taylor years. Note this response in 1995:

What about the contribution of Mick Taylor to the band in these years?

A: I think he had a big contribution. He made it very musical. He was a very fluent, melodic player, which we never had, and we don't have now. Neither Keith nor [Ronnie Wood] plays that kind of style. It was very good for me working with him. Charlie and I were talking about this the other day, because we could sit down – I could sit down – with Mick Taylor, and he would play very fluid lines against my vocals. He was exciting, and he was very pretty, and it gave me something to follow, to bang off. Some people think that's the best version of the band that existed.

What do you think?

A: They're all interesting periods. They're all different. I obviously can't say if I think Mick Taylor was the best, because it sort of trashes the period the band is in now.

He can't bring himself to admit his true feelings, although, also out of character, he admits that Taylor wrote the music for "Moonlight Mile" (and got no credit).

Yes. It was actually Stray Cat Blues that was a nick off Heroin, though.

xp Josh

Same '95 interview:

A: We made records with just Mick Taylor, which are very good and everyone loves, where Keith wasn't there for whatever reasons.

Which ones?

A: People don't know that Keith wasn't there making it. All the stuff like "Moonlight Mile," "Sway." These tracks are a bit obscure, but they are liked by people that like the Rolling Stones. It's me and [Mick] playing off each other – another feeling completely, because he's following my vocal lines and then extemporizing on them during the solos.

Sway
Moonlight Mile
Wild Horses
Bitch
Can't You Hear Me Knocking
Sister Morphine
Brown Sugar
You Gotta Move
Dead Flowers
I Got the Blues

My favourite Stones album, without a doubt.

Took me forever to recognize "Dead Flowers" as a drug reference. Ever passive aggressive, interesting to note the number of Jagger lyrics this era calling out folks for heroin use. "You Can't Always Get What You Want," "Dead Flowers" (mocking Gram Parsons?), "Monkey Man" ...

Taylor wrote Midnight Mile too? Now I know that one is in open G, which would point to Keith. On the other hand it is very melodic, which would point to Taylor...dang

"Sway" has the best drumming on any Stones song. Which is to say, some of the best drumming on any song.

from the April 1989 issue of Spin's "Great Moments in Recording Studio History":

In the middle of the Rolling Stones' "Brown Sugar" session, piano player Ian Stewart stopped things dead, and told Charlie Watts that his tom-toms were out of tune with the bass guitar.

"I never tune my drums," Watts told him blankly, and they started playing again. But a bit later, Stewart stopped everyone again and looked at Watts.

"What do you mean you never tune your drums?"

"Why tune something I'm just gonna go and beat the shit out of?" Watts answered. "I'll hit them for a while and then they'll be in tune again."

I just listened to the Clapton take of Brown Sugar...there's no way those are Jagger vocals from the period. He did this too on the Exile outtakes.

and on a couple of the Some Girls outtakes. It's glaringly obvious. Way too many singers do this late-career overdubbing thing (Springsteen, Jagger, Gabriel, Daltrey) and it's never a good idea.

I thought Jagger did a good job on Plundered My Soul from Exile. Salvaged the song for me at least

No excuse for not tuning drums though Charlie, sorry

yeah, Plundered My Soul is the only one that remotely works for me

Naw -- the Some Girls outtakes included in 2011 ("Claudette," my beloved ""Do You Think I Really Care?" in particular) are as good as anything on the album

^^Co-Sign. Much of the new/old Some Girls stuff was choice. I like to joke that it was the best Stones since Some Girls, but ya know...

well yeah

Weren't you at the coke convention back in 1965?

Not that I can afford either at the moment, but my local record shop had both the standard vinyl reissue and the double vinyl with the bonus tracks, for a difference of about $7. I don't usually care about bonus tracks, particularly when they are just different versions of songs I already know, but only the double vinyl has an actual zipper on the album cover. I'm torn.

YOU ARE TORN AND FRAYED

i have a nice original copy at the store right now. sounds awesome.

Listening party

xp Yeah buy an original for ten bucks, it'll sound great and have a zipper.

i'm trying to remember the moment when the stones ceased to be an enjoyable classic rock band that i had listened to since i was a little kid and always liked singing along to and became some sort of SUPER GENIUS musical force where i would just marvel at how they made albums and songs. i can't remember the moment. it might have been when exile finally clicked for me. which was late in life. the same thing happened to me with beatles of course. childhood faves all of sudden become: omg, how and why did they do that nobody did that it's like majik! stones had same majik. it's still a mystery to me. they all seem like pretty normal people with normal interests. but nobody does that shit today. not in the rock world that's for sure. or in a lot of other worlds.

You could argue that at no point has Keith been the best guitarist in the Rolling Stones

xpost scott otm

Seconding that xpost, I had a long period where I just thought I was sick of them as a kid, though, because of CLASSIC ROCK RADIO. Discovering their albums, man... well I don't wanna use the word "revelatory" but.

i was into the stones as a teen but only cursorily - it wasnt til i hung out with 30-something postgrads after college that i learned exile even existed & started on the album freakdom that i now live in

btw i bought a sticky fingers tshirt today
full rabbithole