May 22, 1971: Rolling Stones’ ‘Sticky Fingers’ Hits Number 1

While this is astonishingly never spoken of, in the Stones’ early years of the 60s, with Andrew Loog Oldham producing, it’s evident from the musical precision of many of their recordings that studio players were employed, especially on their hits. With the advent of Jimmy Miller as producer, Miller employed a much more cut and paste style to their recordings, so the Stones’ actually sloshy playing could be used in pieces and stitched together to make songs, actually giving the recordings kind of a unique sound in the bargain. If you doubt this listen closely to “Street Fighting Man” and tell me if you can find one stream of instrumental sound that goes through the record. The same can actually be said, to a lesser degree, for “Brown Sugar.” And if you read the accounts of the Stones recording at Muscle Shoals (or any account of them recording actually, you’ll get the picture that they were a freakin mess in the studio — so much booze and drugs along with enough money and fame as to burn studio time listlessly, with no one to say anything about it. Those few studio players , such as Ry Cooder, and various keyboard players, who were actually credited with playing on Stones’ records will absolutely never reveal what they played or what their level of involvement actually was, and that’s the one’s who we actually know about. The really obvious indicator to this claim is the Stones’ records themselves, after Miller was no longer producing, and was replaced by Mick and Keith producing Stones’ records. These records starting in the mid seventies forward find the band’s sound and recorded creation of their songs, for the most part, to be the sloshy, loosely structured Stones we’ve gotten used to for so many decades since. Songs that are largely just punctuated by Charlie Watts turnarounds, rather than the actual shifts in song structure or musical dynamics that we heard in their records for the first 10, or so, years, when they actually had a producer who was “somehow” making them sound more cohesive. Go back and listen to “19th Nervous Breakdown” or “Get Off My Cloud.” Do you think this garage type band who created more or less the non-descript recordings of the 80s forward could actually play with the precise musicianship heard on those early recordings? And this was supposed to have been when these guys were almost kids, and relatively new to their instruments. They’ve never attained that level of musicianship, much less done it when they’ve only been playing for a few years, Bottom line is the Stones’ producers are responsible for creating all those great recordings that made them famous. How they did it, we may never find out. But at least they did have the world’s greatest R&R vocalist to work with.