Sticky Fingers

"Sticky Fingers" was recorded in fragments across more than a year, beginning with a session at Muscle Shoals Sound Studio in Alabama in December 1969 that produced "Brown Sugar" and "Wild Horses," and continuing through the summer and autumn of 1970 at Mick Jagger's Stargroves estate using the band's mobile recording unit. It was guitarist Mick Taylor's second full album with the group, and the first the Rolling Stones recorded without founding member Brian Jones, who had died in 1969.

Released on April 23, 1971, the album became the band's first to reach number one on both the UK and US charts. Critics at the time and since have described it as the Stones' most downbeat and drug-saturated record, threading addiction, heartbreak, and open-road longing through tracks like "Sister Morphine," "Wild Horses," and the closing "Moonlight Mile." It was later inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame and is routinely ranked among the greatest albums in rock history.

Much of the album's country-tinged material grew out of Keith Richards's friendship with Gram Parsons of the Flying Burrito Brothers, an influence most audible on "Wild Horses" and "Dead Flowers" and one that would carry forward into Exile on Main St. the following year.^[1] Reception on release was more divided than the album's later reputation suggests: one major newspaper openly questioned whether the band was still relevant, while another called it one of the best rock records of the year yet admitted finding it strangely unsatisfying.^[1]