1971 was a fertile year for rock music. And not just any rock; new, experimental types of fusions happened within musicians and bands that already had their name safe and sound when it came to the music business.
One of those examples is, obviously, Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers. Released in April, the album is considered one of the group’s masterpieces – containing major hits like Brown Sugar, Wild Horses or Sister Morphine , immortalized by Marianne Faithful – and was recorded between UK and the States in several small studio sessions.
With an album cover designed by Warhol himself, Sticky Fingers was the first Stones’ album not to contain any Brian Jones material, and marks not only the beginning of a new decade for Pop music but also a drug-influenced maturity that mingles softly with unchanted ballads, creating a connection between both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.
Dead Flowers, Wild Horses and I Got the Blues sound like mourning songs for the recently disappeared teen idols – Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Brian Jones himself -, working in a numbful, comfort-seeking basis instead of a rebellious one.
Not a Stones’ specialist myself, I can only state an opinion based on the emotional side; it is, however, undeniable that Sticky Fingers illustrates major American influences suffered by the Stones when it comes to composing and the so-called desperate teen-attitude that the end of the sixties gave birth to. Three months later, the mourning would be extended to Jim Morrison and the revolution would seem to be further than it had ever been before; so long, flower children – adulhood has arrived.
Rolling Stones’ Wild Horses (Sticky Fingers, 1971)
