The Rolling Stones – Sticky Fingers: #690 of best 1,000 albums ever!

Why is The Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers on my best 1,000 albums ever list?

Yeah, when you call my name I salivate like a Pavlov dog.

What does The Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers mean to me? What does it make me feel? Why is it exciting or compelling?

In the ongoing debate – and may its end never come – over “The Rolling Stones versus The Beatles,” I am vocally, wildly, and enthusiastically in The Beatles’ camp, forever and ever more. But even so, there’s much in The Rolling Stones’ vast catalog that I like a great deal.

And, as it happens, “Brown Sugar” and “Bitch” off of Sticky Fingers are two of my most favorite Stones songs of all time. I truly believe that the first 30 seconds of “Brown Sugar” are a perfect blast of blues rock, a perfect opening to a classic rock song, and more broadly sets the stage for 1970s rock n’ roll generally. And Mick Jagger has never sounded better. Now, the lyrics on “Brown Sugar” are something else entirely, and I won’t even try to interpret them.

“Bitch” is also another exceptional fusing of blues rock and hard rock, with an all timer of a hook and great backing horns to help give the song depth and heft.

I want to use the word “actually” in what I’m about to state, though I really shouldn’t. There’s… an incredible (even harder) cover of “Bitch” by the Goo Goo Dolls on the (absolutely insanely good) No Alternative compilation album.

Sticky Fingers includes a bunch of slower songs, some focused on the ravages of drug abuse, such as “Sister Morphine.” And some songs even have a country influence. The best of these is “Wild Horses.”

Pop culture stuff that’s somehow related to The Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers

One of the ingenious and innovative aspects of The Howard Stern Show was (and, I’m sure, still is) how everybody related to the show and the inner circle of the program became grist for material and show content. Song parodies were also a staple of the show’s comedic output.

Put those two things together, and one of the more memorable Stern Show bits I recall howling with laughter at while either driving around Long Island or commuting to Manhattan from Astoria, Queens involves The Rolling Stones’ “Brown Sugar.” But put through the Stern Show world view, it becomes “Brown Fingers,” paying homage to Scott the Engineer’s (long a show punching bag caricatured as a persnickety, bumbling audio engineer) smoking habit.