rank the songs on STICKY FINGERS

"Knockin'" was a highlight of the last time I saw them. Iirc Ron had recently stopped drinking again, and he was sharper and more alive than he'd been in years. He took the solo, and he absolutely nailed it.

Someone should've written a song called "He Recently Stopped Drinking (Again)" for George Jones.

Sounds a wee bit more like a Gary Stewart song, but yeah.

the Knockin solo is a good one to learn if you’re a beginner player. Tasty, restrained, full of pretty standard hot licks

Sway sounds like it was recorded at about 10 am after a quick breakfast of toast, OJ, and coke

Lol

ha for real, it’s an ultimate hangover song yeah?

That rhythm guitar pounds away at ya

hard to think of a more perfect "songwriter tells you who they are" lyric than

Ain't flinging tears out on the dusty ground
For all my friends out on the burial ground
Can't stand the feeling getting so brought down

One of the things I find honestly pretty relatable about Jagger in this era is the way he's so clearly upset by the way his friends keep getting addicted to heroin and/or dying, but he's also someone with limited emotional bandwidth for dealing with this shit so at a certain point it stops registering as grief and just comes across as irritation.

that is SO well ptu

"put" too

Brown Sugar is such a jam, but I've always had some trouble with the lyrics, and recently playing/singing it with some friends we kind of had this simultaneous realization that we just did not feel good at all belting out stuff like "sold in a market down in New Orleans." And I think it's kind of dead for me now, unfortunately.

xp good insight, lily

You see that ambivalence too in something like "Heartbreaker", too, Jagger's outraged but there's a coldness about it.

well ptu is the new grebt

Writing a song about police brutality and child drug addicts and then titling it "Doo Doo Doo Doo Doo"; mixed messaging.

"ACAB ACAB ACAB" doesn't sing as well.

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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3N0A2b7nbdM

Live Hot Bitch

I guess Keith played lead on this track

morphine and wild horses are the two I’d probably toss. like I get why WH is a hit and central to RS “lore” (or whatever—Gram, etc) but yeah, those two I skip past.

I’d add I Got the Blues to that list but I saw em do it live in ‘99 and it was pretty cool.

Bitch is the most Memphis shit

like ‘02 Jack Oblivian doing a session at ‘68 Stax

Can't You Hear Me Knocking is one of Charlie's true moments of absolute drumming genius. The one-bar-late change is absolute godhead, and nobody knew when do to it like Charlie knew.

That Bitch live clip, wow. What a fucking band

Yeah, makes me not rmde at the "Greatest R&R Band" stuff.

the only reason to skip wild horses is bc you already know it completely in your bones.

it was randomly playing on shuffle the night we drove home after my father in law passed away three years ago & now i cry every time i hear it

;_;

sorry for bringing you down VG

not at all!

honestly, in a weird way, I kind of like that it made me connect with the song differently?

played at my friend's funeral so same vibes here

the scene in gimme shelter where they are in the studio listening to the playback of wild horses is all-time. song rules and I pity people who have heard it too much to enjoy it.

Wild Horses has associations with death for me as well. It came on the radio right after I found out a friend of mine died in an accident. It tears a hole in me ever since.

They played Nashville last night, so for the 'Internet Vote' song the ballot was limited to Country-style tracks, and interestingly "Dead Flowers" beat "Wild Horses".

On record, I prefer "Wild Horses," but I think "Dead Flowers" usually is the better one for them to perform live.

Lately I have been listening to Sticky Fingers and realizing how little I know it as an actual album. It's such a weird mix of great songs I've heard a million times, great songs I don't hear enough, and songs I never need to hear again that it's very rare for me to just put it on and let it play. But I listened to the first half a while back and now I'm kind of obsessed with the sequencing that puts Wild Horses right after Brown Sugar and Sway and right before Can't You Hear Me Knocking.

Like, you start out with two songs that are intentionally noisy and opaque and messy; Jagger slurring his lines on Brown Sugar, howling on Sway; there's that sense that you often get with Stones songs of the signal just barely making it through the noise. Sway, in particular, feels like it's very much about that, just this scream of frustration at the messiness of life & the persistence of shit coming down on you that you have to care about.

Set against that, what I notice most about "Wild Horses" is how clear it is, and how careful. Each moment in the song, whether it's the musical accompaniment or a line of verse, has a little island of quiet around it, as if Jagger is waiting to make sure you've got the message before he goes on. There's a feeling of handling something fragile, a feeling of going line by line through a compact between two people, a feeling of emotion held in check - even in the final verse, every word is clear and deliberate. It all adds up to a sense - and I can't believe I'm saying this of Jagger, but it's what I get from the song - of "this isn't about me."

And then you get to "Can't You Hear Me Knocking," and the noise closes in again. And the more I listen to the songs in that order, the more striking the sheer amount of silence in "Wild Horses" seems. Stones songs of this era often seem to me, like I said, to be the signal trying to make it through the noise. And I love that about them. But "Wild Horses," in this sequence, comes off to me as something different: Jagger holding off the noise for just long enough to say something he needs to say.

Do you hear the same "quiet" in "Moonlight Mile"? Or "Sister Morphine" for that matter?

Now I kinda want to switch the track listing around. I think it might work better this way:

SIDE A
1. Brown Sugar
2. Sway
3. Wild Horses
4. Bitch
5. I Got The Blues
6. You Gotta Move

SIDE B
7. Can't You Hear Me Knocking
8. Sister Morphine
9. Dead Flowers
10. Moonlight Mile

“Knocking” is barely a song and has terrible production

the what?

the hell you say

Lily Dale otm.

And the production throughout is by far the clearest and most vivid of any Stones record up to this point. If you told me Watts wasn’t sitting next to me when he kicks in on “Knocking,” I’d call you a damn liar. And whether or not it’s a “song” (how are you defining that, calstars?) is irrelevant, since “song” isn’t qualitative.

I have bought into the stones myth for most of my life. But the truth is these guys are just not that good. They had access to recoding equipment and distribution and that’s the biggest reason they are revered by so many

I love the first few minutes of “Knocking,” but not so much when it turns into a stiff, noodly jam… :/

But the truth is these guys are just not that good.

Of course they are: they’re good at being the Stones. Sometimes, they’re great at being the Stones. What other yardstick (imagined or otherwise) could one even measure them by?

yeah that's a weird conclusion to reach

I must agree that the first part of Knocking >>>> the second part of Knocking

May the ghost of Bobby Keys fart in all y'all haters direction.

Aww

There’s nothing stiff (the presence of Watts and Dzidzornu makes stiffness impossible) nor noodly (ditto Taylor and Keys) about “Knocking.” It’s focused, there’s nothing the least bit tentative about it, and of all the Stones songs Scorsese has used, “Knocking” is the only one (I think?) that he lets play through to its completion.