An inspired image designed to drive parents mad
The Rolling Stones displayed a strong grasp of image from their very beginning, reflected in many striking album covers. Both Keith Richards and Charlie Watts attended art college, while Mick Jagger had a spell studying business at the London School of Economics. Early Sixties sleeves were standard portrait photographs yet starkly modern and stylish, with a surly aspect projecting their rebellious persona.
As they grew in confidence, they worked with top artists and designers on clever graphic concepts. Their
Satanic Majesties Bequest (1967) featured a 3D lenticular photo, Beggars
Banquet (1968) was styled as an elegant invitation card after a graffitied lavatory wall was rejected by the record company, while a young Delia Smith baked a surrealist layered cake for Let It Bleed (1969). This innovative approach continued into the Seventies, with iconic covers for Exile
on Main St. (1972) by photographer Robert Frank, and cut-out faces for
Some Girls (1978). But one cover in particular defined their brand as the bad boys of rock and roll.
What is it?
Released in 1971, Sticky Fingers was the Rolling Stones’ ninth album, the first of a new decade when their image would shift from rock’s devils incarnate to something more like jet set playboy outlaws. Designed by pop artist Andy Warhol, the cover is a life-size close-up black and white photograph of a man’s denim jeans clad crotch, which (on original pressings) featured an actual working zip. If you pulled the zip down, it revealed an inner sleeve of bulging underpants. The back sleeve was the view from behind. As Dr Warren Zayne of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame has observed, it “was an album cover sure to drive parents mad. At last! Everyone could get into Mick’s pants!”
The story behind the cover
They are not Jagger’s pants at all. The title came from the band, with designer Craig Braun first proposing a concept involving cigarette papers. But when Warhol suggested the idea of a working zipper to Jagger at a party in 1969, they quickly changed tack. The great pop artist designed over 100 album sleeves during his career, beginning with stylish drawings for jazz records in the Fifties. His landmark 1967 removable banana sticker for The Velvet Underground was among Warhol’s most daring, and he continued the cheekily phallic theme with the Stones.
Warhol never revealed who the model was, possibly because he wasn’t sure. One day at his Factory premises in Union Square, New York, Warhol and collaborator Billy Name photographed several actors and friends from the waist down. It was long-rumoured Warhol superstar Joe Dallesandro was the well-endowed cover star but likeliest candidates are make-up artist Corey Tippin on the front and Interview magazine editor Glenn O’brien on the inner sleeve. “I knew it was me, ’cause it was my underwear,” he told the New York Post in 2015. “I got paid $100. Not bad for 20 minutes’ work.”
The actual artwork was assembled by Braun, creative director of Sound Packaging Corporation. There were practical problems to overcome. The zipper had to be glued in place by hand, and when albums were stacked for shipment, it was found that the fly tab dented the disc on top, scratching the vinyl grooves for Sister Morphine (third track, side two). Braun came up with a hasty solution. “I got this idea that maybe, if the glue was dry enough, we could have the little old ladies at the end of the assembly line pull the zipper down far enough so that the round part would hit the centre disc label. It worked, and it was even better to see the zipper down.”
At some point in proceedings, the lettering migrated from its original position on the belt to a more dynamic red rubber stamp over the jeans. It added to a deliberately grimy feel. According to the artist’s manager, Paul Morrissey, Warhol used “a cheap camera and cheap film” to convey “a realistic attempt at selling sex and naughtiness.”
The inner sleeve also featured the first appearance of the Stones’ famous lips and tongue logo. Jagger commissioned it from London art student John Pasche, based on an illustration of Hindu deity Kali. According to Pasche, Jagger wanted the simplicity of “an image that could work on its own, like the Shell Petroleum logo”. It was conceived as a protest symbol, “the kind of thing kids do when they stick their tongues out at you.” Viewed in conjunction with the cover of Sticky Fingers, however, it took on altogether more salacious connotations. Pasche was paid £50 for a logo that has been at the heart of the Stones’ billion-dollar business ever since.
The album sleeve is a fantastic work of graphic art, a rude, funny, inventive and instantly memorable image that marked a shift by the Stones from band to brand, lucratively commodifying rock and roll decadence.
What is the music like?
The sound of Sticky Fingers is as dirty and raw as the cover suggests. Recording started at the famous Muscle Shoals Sound Studio in Alabama during the Stones’ 1969 US tour and was completed at Jagger’s Hampshire manor house Stargroves (where Led Zeppelin would later record Houses of the Holy). The way the silvery lead guitar of Mick Taylor – officially replacing Brian Jones – intertwines with the riffs and chord phrasings of Keith Richards is rock and roll alchemy.
The band lock into burning grooves on Bitch and Can’t You Hear
Me Knocking, counterweighted by tender, introspective ballads Wild
Horses, Sway, Dead Flowers and Moonlight Mile. Jagger’s vocals unwind with sleazy conviction on songs of sex (Brown Sugar), drugs
(Sister Morphine) and the Blues (You Gotta Move). Produced by Jimmy Miller, with wonderful contributions from Bobby Keyes on saxophone, Billy Preston on organ and Nicky Hopkins on piano, it presented the Stones at their most unapologetically louche, presaging a decade when they were less associated with rebellion than self-indulgence.
And what is its legacy?
The cover was banned in Franco’s Spain, where it was replaced with a frankly more disturbing image of female fingers emerging from a can of sticky treacle. When it eventually came out in Russia, in 1992, it featured a Soviet hammer and sickle belt buckle. The cover has been imitated by many artists including Madonna, Motley Crue, Wishbone Ash and Eagles of Death Metal.
The Stones continued to create bold graphics until Tattoo You in 1981, but latter-day covers have been unimpressive, either trying too hard or not hard enough (possibly a fair reflection of their musical content). I’m not sure which is worse, the garish, awkward band pose of Dirty
Work in 1986 or clumpy Assyrian lion on Bridges to Babylon in 1997. But one thing we have learned over 56 years is that you can’t write the Rolling Stones off. Last week’s lockdown single,
Living in a Ghost Town, is really rather tasty, and a new album (their 24th) is on the way.
If you pulled the zip down, it revealed an inner sleeve of bulging underpants.