Sticky Fingers - Go On, Unzip It

The Rolling Stones · Cover Stories · No. 02

Most album covers ask you to look.

Sticky Fingers dared you to touch.

A close-up of a man in tight jeans, shot in denim blue and brass, with the outline of everything left to no imagination at all. And then the part nobody had done before — a real, working zipper, stitched into the sleeve. Pull it down and you found a pair of cotton briefs printed underneath, rubber-stamped with Andy Warhol's name like he'd signed his own underwear.

It was a joke, a come-on and a piece of pop art all at once.

The idea was Warhol's. He floated it to Mick Jagger at a party — a real trouser zip on a record sleeve — and Jagger, who understood provocation better than anyone alive, said yes on the spot. This was 1971, the first record on the band's own label, the Rolling Stones at the absolute peak of their powers and their decadence. The cover had to match.

Here's the bit everyone gets wrong.

That's not Mick Jagger's crotch. It never was. Warhol shot various models from his Factory circle and never said which one made the cut, so to this day nobody can agree whose jeans you're looking at. Half of New York has claimed it. The truth went with Warhol.

And the zipper? A nightmare.

The metal teeth scratched the vinyl to pieces in transit. The covers arrived dented from the zip pressing into the next sleeve in the box. The fix was almost as good as the cover itself — pull every zipper halfway down before shipping, so the tab landed in the hole of the record and did no damage. The most outrageous sleeve in rock, saved by a man on a production line tugging zips to half-mast.

Later pressings quietly dropped the working zip and just printed the photo. Cheaper. Safer. Nowhere near as good.

Because that was always the point. Most sleeves want to survive the journey to your shelf.

This one wanted to get its hands on you first.