Permanent Records is an ongoing closer look at the records that matter most.
If rock ’n’ roll was the offspring of country music and rhythm & blues, country was the kind of high-strung hardass parent who kicks their kid out of the house for hanging out with the wrong crowd. In this case, that crowd would include the folky hipsters and foppish Brits who hijacked the genre after its first wave, chock full of Southern white boys, crashed. As rock became increasingly urbanized and entangled with the burgeoning counterculture, the styles’ estrangement grew more intense, and country’s identity became steadily more defined by a reactionary conservative worldview and the aggressive, shit-kicking Bakersfield sound, which combined to produce such notorious era-defining anti-hippie hits as Merle Haggard’s “Okie From Muskogee” and “The Fightin’ Side Of Me.” (Country’s relationship with black music, meanwhile, was equally dysfunctional.)
Like a lot of people with fractured relationships with their parents, rock still sought country’s approval even as it rebelled against its values, and despite country’s condemnation of their music and their lifestyle, rock musicians repeatedly returned to its influence throughout the ’60s. The Beatles used twangy guitars and country songwriting tropes well into their acid phase. The California psychedelic scene kept the Old West musical mythos alive even as country-western abandoned it, and got enough out of hand to produce a brief but intense fad for jug bands (including one that eventually metamorphosed into The Grateful Dead). And Gram Parsons spent his tragically truncated life and career trying to get rock and country to reconcile over their mutual interests in old-fashioned romance, soft-libertarian individualism, and substance abuse.
Parsons found an enthusiastic partner in this mission when he fell in with Keith Richards in the summer of 1968. Both musicians were in a state of transition at the time. Parsons had recently split with The Byrds over his objections to a planned South African tour and a deep-seated disagreement with Roger McGuinn over his role in the band. Richards was struggling to figure out The Stones’ next move after a chaotic period of escalating problems with drugs, police, and internal conflicts that culminated in the hacky Sgt. Pepper’s knockoff Their Satanic Majesties Request. Parsons and Richards had both independently decided that the way out of their situations was a retreat away from the excesses of the psychedelic scene and into the rootsy authenticity of country music, and had already made progress in that direction by the time they became best buds—Richards had Beggars Banquet in the can and Parsons already had the basic concept for The Flying Burrito Brothers sketched out in his head. By the time The Stones began working on Sticky Fingers in earnest nearly two years later the Parsons-Richards partnership had crystallized. Their shared goal had expanded from reconnecting rock with its country roots to somehow synthesizing all of Southern music–not just country and rock ’n’ roll, but also soul and blues—and injecting it with the glammed-up hippie drug-freak persona the pair had been diligently developing.
According to Ben Fong-Torres’ Parsons biography Hickory Wind, Mick Jagger felt threatened by Parsons’ friendship with Richards, as well as the outsider’s growing musical influence on his creative partner. (Although he did admit that Parsons was “one of the few people who really helped me to sing country music. Before that, Keith and I would just copy off records.”) Whether it was jealousy or just his innate hamminess, Jagger’s contributions to the Parsons-inspired dive into all things Southern walked a precarious line between homage and flat-out parody. His outsize vocal impression of a country singer’s twang on “Dead Flowers” would have gotten him punched if he’d tried it in a Bakersfield bar; on a cover of Mississippi Fred McDowell’s version of the gospel standard “You Gotta Move,” his attempts to twist his vowels to sound like a delta blues singer ends up sounding like no actual accent on earth. The Grand Guignol horror show of intersectional stereotypes that comprises the lyrics to “Brown Sugar” never makes it clear whether it’s supposed to be taken as a cutting critique of deep-rooted Southern hypocrisy or a disturbingly glowing airbrushed portrait of old-timey institutionalized sexual exploitation.
Upon its release in April 1971, Sticky Fingers was initially met with bewilderment. The Stones’ more focused exploration of Delta blues and their appropriation of the au courant soul sound of the Muscle Shoals studio (where the album’s recording sessions started) seemed like a logical next step for the band, but their embrace of country music (which was, after all, the sound of the counter-counterculture) and the seemingly contradictory impulses in the way they used those influences perplexed listeners, especially critics, and especially those of a political bent. No less a Stones superfan than pioneering pop writer Ellen Willis—whose mash notes to their music in The New Yorker are among the most heartfelt works of the era’s emerging rock-crit movement—called the record disappointing. She intimated in print that she was among a movement of “erstwhile loyalists” contributing to a “perceptible anti-Stones reaction” at the time. Still, the album sold well, “Brown Sugar” went to No. 1, and the feelings of erstwhile loyalists did little to disrupt the momentum that was taking the band into their second decade of dominance over the rock ’n’ roll scene.