The inevitable pinhole burns.
It occurs to me that, despite all the love showered on Exile on Main St. (which has had a recent uptick thanks to Robert Greenfield's recent book Exile on Main St.: A Season in Hell with The Rolling Stones), Sticky Fingers has a better claim for being The Stones' best all-around album, for good or ill (no way to get around the gleeful sexual racism of "Brown Sugar", after all; which doesn't seem to have drawn much fire from the mainstream media as that found in The Stones' "Some Girls," possibly due to the multiple transgressions that can be discerned in “Brown Sugar”’s lyrics).
It also seems to me that if Sticky Fingers has a leitmotif, it's drug addiction, specifically heroin addition. I mean, you've got "Sister Morphine," the smack-head's fall-back drug (co-written by notable singer/songwriter and then-heroin addict Marianne Faithfull, who gets my vote as the best lady Sir Mick Jagger ever hooked up with, for what it’s worth), but also "Dead Flowers" and "Moonlight Mile," which closes the album; the fact that the latter was used on the soundtrack to Episode 12 of Season 6 of The Sopranos -- the ep in which Christopher bags the woman that Tony was interested in and they both proceed to ride the white horse again (Episode 77: “Kaisha”) -- should seal its place as the junkie love ballad of choice (with The Velvet Underground's “Heroin” remaining the junkie anthem). But hell, even “Brown Sugar” is a slang term for low-grade H, and drugs aren’t exactly strangers to the rest of the songs on the album either (“Can’t You Hear Me Knocking,” for instance).
Granted, I’m a long way from having heard all of The Stones’ discography, even all of their studio albums; but at this point, I think it’s rather unlikely that they’ve made a better album than Sticky Fingers.
It also seems to me that if Sticky Fingers has a leitmotif, it's drug addiction, specifically heroin addition. I mean, you've got "Sister Morphine," the smack-head's fall-back drug (co-written by notable singer/songwriter and then-heroin addict Marianne Faithfull, who gets my vote as the best lady Sir Mick Jagger ever hooked up with, for what it’s worth), but also "Dead Flowers" and "Moonlight Mile," which closes the album; the fact that the latter was used on the soundtrack to Episode 12 of Season 6 of The Sopranos -- the ep in which Christopher bags the woman that Tony was interested in and they both proceed to ride the white horse again (Episode 77: “Kaisha”) -- should seal its place as the junkie love ballad of choice (with The Velvet Underground's “Heroin” remaining the junkie anthem). But hell, even “Brown Sugar” is a slang term for low-grade H, and drugs aren’t exactly strangers to the rest of the songs on the album either (“Can’t You Hear Me Knocking,” for instance).
Granted, I’m a long way from having heard all of The Stones’ discography, even all of their studio albums; but at this point, I think it’s rather unlikely that they’ve made a better album than Sticky Fingers.