The 1971 album Mick Jagger said had no bad songs: “You don’t get bored”
If every band were forced to abandon their ‘filler’ material, concerts would average at 15-minutes long, and albums would be abandoned in favour of short-form EPs and singles. Even some of the greatest albums of all time are guilty of having one or two tracks that nobody would miss if they were deleted, although Mick Jagger claims one Rolling Stones record is an exception to that rule.
Even the mostly blindly faithful devotees of The Rolling Stones must surely admit that their discography is not ‘all killer no filler’. After all, the blues rock progenitors have been around for over 60 years, and over 30 studio albums – inevitably, they were going to run low on ideas and inspiration at various points over the course of that career. Still, nothing can take away from the unparalleled output of The Stones during their golden period, back in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
That was the time when Mick Jagger and the gang truly came into their own. While they found their mainstream breakthrough years prior, with their rock and roll sound indebted to American blues and R&B, it was during the later part of the decade, with records like Beggars Banquet, that the group struck upon the kind of sound that would keep them on the upper echelon of rock and roll forevermore.
For his part, Jagger has always been a little more critical of that period than most, going so far as to decry the pioneering psychedelia of Their Satanic Majesties Request, an effort best forgotten. Taking into account the fast-paced, hedonistic, rather destructive lifestyle the frontman was immersed in at that time, the fact that he looks back upon the period with a degree of regret is perhaps to be expected.
It does, however, make his declaration that Sticky Fingers is perhaps The Stones’ greatest record all the harder to argue against. Jagger can, of course, find the merits of almost every Stones record, given that he was the one to spearhead the majority of them, alongside Keith Richards.
Sticky Fingers is unique, however, in that it is totally void of any filler material, owing to the prolific songwriting talents of the Jagger-Richards partnership of the early 1970s.
“A lot of these tunes have a specific mood or an attitude,” he said of the album upon its release. “Each one is different and/or appropriate for the song. So ‘Sister Morphine’ has this very doomy mood, ‘Wild Horses’ is very emotional… Yet somehow they’re together. They all hold up. There’s no filler in it. It’s compact enough to be listenable, and each track is different. Maybe that’s why you don’t get bored.”
Jagger has certainly been vindicated in that view, given that over half a century on from that quote being given, he still cites Sticky Fingers as the cream of the crop when it comes to Rolling Stones records. It is easy to see why, too: not only does the LP contain some of the group’s most distinctive, instantly recognisable efforts, but it also features an unsuspectingly wide breadth of sonic influences, from the acoustic vulnerability of ‘Wild Horses’ to the drug-fueled melancholy of ‘Sister Morphine’ and the out-and-out blues rock of ‘Brown Sugar’.
In many ways, the album captures the entire spirit of The Rolling Stones and their 32 studio albums in one neat little package. Hence, it has aged far more gracefully than some of the group’s subsequent efforts, and a great deal of the tracklist still forms a crucial part of the ageing rockers’ live shows.
