Why is The Rolling Stones album called ‘Sticky Fingers’?
The Rolling Stones are no strangers to controversy and have courted it throughout their 60 years in the limelight. The release of their 1971 album Sticky Fingers is a case in point. It was advertised with a double-page spread of the Stones posing naked from the waist down, covered only by the album’s racy artwork.
Andy Warhol’s front cover design, which features actor Joe Dallesandro wearing tight jeans with a pullable zipper exposing his underwear, soon caused the band’s desired uproar and was subsequently banned from release in Spain. As much as they continued to play up their rebellious attitude and sexual exhibitionism, though, most fans were more interested in hearing what the new Stones record had to offer musically. Particularly as it was the first studio album they’d recorded without any input from Brian Jones, who’d died almost two years before its release.
They weren’t left disappointed, as the nine tracks on Sticky Fingers don’t let up for a second. It’s 46 minutes of full-frontal rock and roll, from the moment Keith Richards opens ‘Brown Sugar’ with one of his most iconic riffs to the final sinews of piano and strings on ‘Moonlight Mile’. In between, we’re treated to all-time greats in the Rolling Stones canon, from the ethereal single ‘Wild Horses’ to live set staples ‘Can’t You Hear Me Knocking’ and ‘Dead Flowers’.
Nowhere in the lyrics of these songs, however, do we get any indication as to the reason for the album’s title. It’s safe to assume, given the overtly sexual imagery used to promote the record, that “Sticky Fingers” is a euphemistic reference to some bodily fluid or other. But the phrase is also a common idiomatic expression, which allows it to serve as a clever double-entendre.
So, what’s the second meaning?
The expression “sticky fingers” refers to someone who’s known to steal things. It’s most commonly used in relation to skilled pickpockets capable of taking valuables from someone’s person undetected or to a compulsive thief who can’t help but help themselves to others’ belongings. As an album title, it feels similar to the Stones’ 1968 LP Beggars Banquet, which utilises an oxymoronic expression to downplay the record’s content ironically.
Nevertheless, the purpose behind naming an album Sticky Fingers isn’t as clear, and none of the Stones has ever made it clearer. Although the glove fits when it comes to sexual innuendo, there aren’t any obvious references to stealing on the record. Nor does there appear to be any metaphorical ‘theft’ implicit in the title, as from a musical perspective, it’s the most original Stones creation they’d released up to that point, which hasn’t directly lifted anything from compositions that went before it.
Soon after its release, Keith Richards disappointed those attempting to discover some hidden meaning in the album’s title when he told an interviewer, “Sticky Fingers was never meant to be the title. It’s just what we called it while we were working on it.” As a working title, the phrase likely had far less thought put into it than a title that was conceived consciously before or after the fact, if any thought at all.
Perhaps the band just liked that it has an assonant quality that trips off the tongue, as well as its sexual connotations. And once they’d said the phrase enough, there was no getting rid of it. As Richards observed, “Usually, the working titles stick.”
