THE ROLLING STONES Sticky Fingers Live In LA
A classic, played and pondered
FRoM the look of him, it’s been a long time since Mick Jagger even thought about cake. At this 2015 show, though, he has it and he eats it. With one hand celebrating the Stones’ illustrious legacy with that heritage-rock staple, a “classic album” show. And with the other, sending up the whole business, his stage banter oddly dismissive of that status – even as this club crowd lap it up. It’s an interesting position that the interview segments in this no-nonsense film also bring out rather nicely. In a genial and unspectacular way, the band give a little background to the album (Keith: “It felt like we’d grown up…”) and the songs they’re going to be playing.
As we know, Sticky Fingers is in our top three Stones albums. It’s a fluid, spacious work that spans cultural moments from Altamont to Warhol, runs from Muscle Shoals to olympic, taking in heroin, desperation and Latin jazz. Mick is keen to stress that just because it took two years to make didn’t mean that they were in the studio the whole time. Ronnie Wood confesses he has worries about taking on “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking”, which on the original album is a showcase for Mick Taylor’s sensitivity and virtuosity. He hints that, these days, the band are policed by Jagger from veering too far off course instrumentally. Harmonica solo? “People don’t wanna hear that.”
Jagger, it turns out, likes much the same things about the band that we all do (“I like The Rolling Stones when they go somewhere unexpected, and pull it off…”), but onstage he’s that same captain of a tight ship. Rather than hearing the album’s songs in tracklist order and blowing their “Brown Sugar” early, Jagger has devised an intelligent solution. So the band bound on to their crowd of affluent old men and considerably younger women and give us “Start Me Up” – which after all is “Brown Sugar” with an irregular heartbeat. As the show develops (Mick: “We’re playing it in the order of the original eight-track tape…”), there are some nice things like Keith playing slide on “You Gotta Move” and some more interesting dalliances with history.
The doc meets both Corey Tippin and Joe Dallesandro (who both claim to be the cover crotch model), and dwells fleetingly on absent friends. Sax player Bobby Keys (who died in 2014) is fondly recalled by Keith as “the man who could relax quicker than anyone I knew”. Mick Taylor, without whom Sticky Fingers would not be Sticky Fingers, is mentioned only in passing.
The show reaches its “Brown Sugar” moment, to the delight of all, though the closing “Jumping Jack Flash”, rich in period detail, takes things unexpectedly higher. Fifty years on have taught Mick Jagger a thing or two – people do want to hear that.