55 Years Ago: Rolling Stones' 'Sticky Fingers' Songs Ranked

The Rolling Stones had been silent for nearly two long years, but they'd been busy the whole time.

They'd worked through the departure and early death of Brian Jones and the violent tragedy at the Altamont Speedway. They'd finally split with a shady, overbearing manager – but not before losing their back catalog.

They'd established their own record label, after releasing a well-received live album to finish their run with Decca. They'd commissioned a one-of-a-kind album cover from Andy Warhol with an actual working zipper. Oh, and they'd been in the studio.

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Sticky Fingers arrived on April 23, 1971, with songs they'd been working on the whole time – and a few that dated back even further. The advance single, "Brown Sugar," was the Rolling Stones' first new single since "Honky Tonk Women" from the summer of 1969.

The song, like the album, topped the U.S. charts. Sticky Fingers went on to multi-platinum sales, as the Rolling Stones bolstered a career-making era with the addition of new second guitarist Mick Taylor. In keeping with its era of great change, the LP reaches into the past while charging forward.

The Mick Taylor-era lineup of the Rolling Stones. (Keystone, Getty Images)

"I Got the Blues," "Sway," and their cover of "You Gotta Move" spoke to their rootsy influences. (They'd cut bluesman Fred McDowell's "You Gotta Move," along with "Wild Horses" and "Brown Sugar," during a full-circle December 1969 visit to Muscle Shoals Sound Studio in Alabama.) "Sister Morphine" had actually been held over from sessions for Let It Bleed.

At the same time, however, the Rolling Stones found their true legacy. They move with swagger and abandon through tracks like "Bitch" and "Can't You Hear Me Knockin,'" confirming a grungy new paradigm. Some early versions of songs that appeared on 1972's landmark Exile on Main St. also emerged as the Rolling Stones recorded much of this LP inside a mobile recording unit at Mick Jagger's Stargroves estate.

These 10 tracks brought everything into a tight new musical focus, as Sticky Fingers spent five non-consecutive weeks atop the U.K. charts. Here's a ranked song-by-song look back:

No. 10. "Dead Flowers"

Unlike so many Rolling Stones songs that found their footing during in-studio collaborations, "Dead Flowers" arrived fully formed. Frontman Mick Jagger had been working on it for some time at home.

Such was his familiarity, in fact, that Jagger had set-in-stone ideas about how things should go: He demanded they play the country-infused track a step or two faster than the rest of his bandmates would have preferred. He also affected an over-the-top country accent.

The finished song tends to make a deeply vulnerable moment anything but. "I love country music, but I find it very hard to take it seriously," Jagger confided to Rolling Stone in 1995. "I also think a lot of country music is sung with the tongue in cheek, so I do it tongue-in-cheek." The setting, however, is actually note-perfect.

Keith Richards happily riffs against Jagger's hound-dog warble in the verses, while second guitarist Mick Taylor draws gorgeous lines through his chorus. The wounded backing vocals also make clear what's at stake, no matter how quickly Jagger tries to turn away from heartbreak. He later admitted that Richards might have been better suited to sing "Dead Flowers," the closest they ever get to a stumble on this album.

No. 9. "You Gotta Move"

The Rolling Stones' December 1969 visit to one of the Deep South's legendary studio spaces, Muscle Shoals in Sheffield, Alabama, perhaps inevitably led to an old blues. Appropriately enough, they landed on Mississippi Fred McDowell's languid hill-country update of the gospel favorite "You Gotta Move."

"We're down in Alabama, we're in Muscle Shoals – we gotta cut some Fred McDowell stuff," Richards said in the documentary Muscle Shoals. "If ever I'm gonna do it, it's gotta be here." But taping "You Gotta Move" was actually a long time coming.

The Rolling Stones had been jamming around the song for years, picking up on McDowell's version from a 1965 album of the same name. McDowell followed an arrangement in keeping with Walter Vinson's "Sitting on Top of the World," while retaining some more recent lyrical changes from the Rev. Gary Davis.

Same here. What takes this update out of the realm of the ordinary is Mick Taylor. "'You Gotta Move' was this great Fred McDowell song that we used to play all the time in the studio," Taylor later told Martin Chilton. "I used a slide on that – on an old 1954 Fender Telecaster – and that was the beginning of that slide thing I tried to develop with the Stones."

They actually started off the Alabama sessions with "You Gotta Move" before using it as the closer on Side One, rounding out things with a very unusual drum pattern from Charlie Watts, Jagger's rustic yowl and a rare turn on a 12-string by Richards.

No. 9. "I Got the Blues"

"I Got the Blues" isn't really a blues at all. Instead, the Rolling Stones approached this original with a feel – both in emotional import and musical build up – that recalls R&B classics like Otis Redding's "I've Been Loving You Too Long." Saxophonist Bobby Keys and trumpeter Jim Price create a sighing sense of heartbreak around everything, while Stones ace-in-the-hole Billy Preston adds a Stax-y Hammond gurgle.

It all unfolds in an unhurried tempo that's deceptively difficult to maintain. The tendency, never given into by the old Memphis greats, was to begin to rush – in particular as a song like "I Got the Blues" reaches its stirring climax. But Watts and Bill Wyman hold ever steady, allowing Jagger's barking pain to cut through.

There are a number of small moments on Sticky Fingers – this song chief among them – that seem to directly reference Jagger's difficult and drawn-out split with Marianne Faithfull. In some cases, as with "Wild Horses," he's specifically denied a connection. But Faithful's presence permeates "I Got the Blues," as Jagger picks at the scabs of a lost relationship dotted with scandal, drugs, a miscarriage and a suicide attempt.

No. 8. "Sister Morphine"

Lengthy contractual disagreements with mercurial manager Allen Klein screwed up the timeline such that this Sticky Fingers deep cut actually arrived after a single version by Faithfull. They're substantially similar, with the Jagger-Richards sessions also including Ry Cooder on slide and bass guitar and Jack Nitzsche on keyboards. (Jagger and Watts appear on Faithfull's version, too.)

Then there was a legal disagreement about composing credits: Faithfull's U.S. single version of "Sister Morphine" omitted her name as a co-writer; she wasn't initially credited on Sticky Fingers either. In fact, that didn't happen until the reissue campaign following a new '90s-era Rolling Stones deal with Virgin Records.

Jagger blithely dismissed the whole thing: Faithfull "wrote a couple of lines; she always says she wrote everything, though," he remembered in 2017's The Singer-Songwriter Handbook. "She's always complaining she doesn't get enough money from it. Now she says she should have got it all." He argued that the phrase "cousin cocaine" amounted to her entire contribution.

Faithfull recorded her version during sessions for Beggars Banquet, long before the dark pull of illicit drugs that moves through "Sister Morphine" became painfully true: She was an addict by the time the Rolling Stones' version appeared.

No. 7. "Sway"

Marianne Faithful wasn't the only one in a dispute over credits. Mick Taylor's career-altering departure from the Rolling Stones can be traced back to this song, the first recorded inside the mobile studio at Jagger's Stargroves home.

His five-year run included contributions to four albums, with 1972's Exile on Main St. as the centerpiece. But Taylor felt he was never given his due for creative contributions on tracks like "Sway," where his outro pushes a slow, drawling Jagger-Richards blues to soaring new levels.

"Let's put it this way: Without my contribution those songs would not have existed," Taylor told The Guardian in 2009, while threatening to lawyer up. "There's not many – but enough things like 'Sway' and 'Moonlight Mile' on Sticky Fingers and a couple of others. Mick had promised to give me some credit for some of the songs, and he didn't."

Taylor's simmering anger finally boiled over during sessions for 1974's It's Only Rock 'n' Roll, which the guitarist said included two songs ("Till the Next Goodbye" and "Time Waits for No One") with significant unacknowledged contributions. A sense of unfinished business would permeate his tenure, and that plays out in microcosm on "Sway."

The song fades before reaching the four-minute mark, presumably leaving some choice Taylor asides on the cutting-room floor. He later offered a scorching seven-minute version on Too Hot for Snakes, a 1991 live collaboration with Carla Olson. Taylor wouldn't perform "Sway" with the Rolling Stones until their guest-packed 50 & Counting Tour in 2013, after apparently patching things up.

No. 5. "Can't You Hear Me Knocking"

"Generally, I tried to bring my own distinctive sound and style to Sticky Fingers, and I like to think I added some extra spice," Mick Taylor said in 2013's 50 Licks: Myths and Stories From Half a Century of the Rolling Stones. "I don't want to say 'sophistication'; I think that sounds pretentious. Charlie said I brought 'finesse.' That's a better word. I'll go with what Charlie said."

Case in point: "Can't You Hear Me Knocking." As a lengthy instrumental segment begins at roughly 2:43, the session has become a rabble of interweaving, presumably song-closing sounds: Richards' grubby open-G intro has given way to an extended turn on sax by Bobby Keys, some eruptive conga work by Rocky Dijon and a tangled conversation with Mick Taylor. Then the room quiets.

Taylor doesn't so much kick down the door as slip in the back way at 4:40, playing with a serpentine, Carlos Santana-esque quiver. "Can't You Hear Me Knocking" then concludes with a metallic riff so infectious that soon his bandmates are rushing back in.

"Towards the end of the song, I just felt like carrying on playing," Taylor admitted in 1979. "Everybody was putting their instruments down, but the tape was still rolling and it sounded good, so everybody quickly picked up their instruments again and carried on playing. It just happened, and it was a one-take thing."

No. 4. "Moonlight Mile"

Another largely solo Jagger composition closes out Sticky Fingers, and – unlike "Dead Flowers" – it's an unfettered triumph. "As far as I can remember," Richards said in his autobiography Life, "Mick came in with the whole idea of that, and the band just figured out how to play it." It wouldn't be easy, as Jagger's novice-level guitar talents led him to what he once called "this vaguely Oriental guitar line."

He was finally convinced to show the others how "Moonlight Mile" went, after first feeling that the unusual structure and lonesome lyric weren't appropriate for the Rolling Stones. Listening as they rode inside a first-class railway compartment on the way from London to Bristol, Taylor quickly followed Jagger's musical train of thought – then built on it.

In fact, Taylor said a subsequent riff that he'd developed inspired the unresolved string arrangement from Paul Buckmaster that billows up to give "Moonlight Mile" its remarkable power. Watts adds to the spooky atmospherics by switching to mallets, adding a rich and subtle rhythm.

Continuing a theme, the Rolling Stones' second guitarist would be given no credit on the track. Still, the results became "a real dreamy kind of semi-Middle Eastern piece," Jagger told Rolling Stone. "Yeah, that's a real pretty song – and a nice string arrangement." Somewhere, Mick Taylor might be smashing a perfectly good Gibson Les Paul Standard right now.

No. 3. "Bitch"

This track was going nowhere despite multiple late-night takes across sessions at both Olympic Studios in London and at Jagger's Stargroves estate. They finally nailed it with a late riff contribution from Richards. "Jagger and Mick Taylor had been playing the song without him, and it didn't sound very good," Sticky Fingers engineer Andy Johns admitted in 2016's All the Songs: The Story Behind Every Track.

"I walked out of the kitchen, and [Richards] was sitting on the floor with no shoes, eating a bowl of cereal. Suddenly he said, 'Oi, Andy! Give me that guitar,'" Johns said. "I handed him his clear Dan Armstrong Plexiglass guitar, he put it on, kicked the song up in tempo and just put the vibe right on it. Instantly, it went from being this laconic mess into a real groove. And I thought, 'Wow, that's what he does.'"

Parts by Keys and Price were overdubbed at Stargroves. As with so much during a period of creative wonder, this was pure happenstance. "It's a guitar song, but it's also somewhat dependent on the horn lines; there's a very heavy horn line on it," Jagger later remembered. "There was an upstairs apartment in my house, and we put them up there. I don't know why, but there they were, and they did the part over and over."

No. 2. "Wild Horses"

Keith Richards had a melody, and the title. Mick Jagger did the rest, walking a fine lyrical line that kept the melancholy country lope of "Wild Horses" from slipping into the banal. "I like the song; it's an example of a pop song," Jagger told Rolling Stone, adding that he was proud of "taking this cliche 'wild horses' – which is awful, really – but making it work without sounding like a cliche when you're doing it."

They actually finished composing the song in the studio bathroom at Muscle Shoals, Richards said in Life, because they were unsatisfied with the way "Wild Horses" originally ended.

"If there is a classic way of Mick and me working together, this is it," Richards later ruminated. "I had the riff and chorus line, Mick got stuck into the verses. Just like 'Satisfaction,' 'Wild Horses' was about the usual thing of not wanting to be on the road, being a million miles from where you want to be."

It immediately attracted the attention of one of music's great wanderers: Gram Parsons was around during the Alabama sessions and ended up releasing his own version of "Wild Horses" on the Flying Burrito Brothers' Burrito Deluxe album before the Rolling Stones original arrived as the second Sticky Fingers single more than a year later.

No. 1. "Brown Sugar"

"Brown Sugar" boasts more triggers than Butch Cassidy's Wild Bunch. This is undoubtedly the best-known song about drugs, rape, cunnilingus and slavery. Everything about its genesis happened in the blink of an eye.

The Rolling Stones recorded "Brown Sugar" during a remarkably productive three-day session on Dec. 2-4, 1969, at Muscle Shoals, with Jagger completing the lyrics over a 45-minute span – then quickly stepping up to the mic. They debuted it two days later on Dec. 6 at the infamous Altamont Speedway show.

But 1969's Let It Bleed had just arrived on store shelves, and the band was descending into legal wrangles with its soon-to-be former manager. So "Brown Sugar" didn't arrive as the lead single from their long-awaited follow-up LP, Sticky Fingers, until April 1971.

The track shot to No. 1 in the U.S. and Canada, while hitting No. 2 in Britain and Ireland, but hasn't gotten any less controversial. Along the way, "Brown Sugar" has been called "something out of a dystopian horror film or a tale of 19th century-era evil," one of the most racist songs in music history, and a moment that "gleefully backstrokes through toxic waters."

It's complicated. "God knows what I'm on about on that song," Jagger admitted in 1995. "It's such a mishmash. All the nasty subjects in one go." So, some editing has taken place over the years.

He'll change the line "just like a black girl should" to "young" girl in concert – though that's somewhat problematic, too. He'll also apologize when the subject comes up: "I didn't think about it at the time," Jagger told Rolling Stone. "I never would write that song now. I would probably censor myself. I'd think, 'Oh, God, I can't. I've got to stop.'"

Like "Bitch," however, a filthy groove pushes past it all.