The Rolling Stones (Sticky Fingers Tour), Ike & Tina Turner Revue  6/12/1971
The Forum, Seat: n.a.

Sticky Fingers was released in 1971, while the band was still more-or-less at its all time peak, and remains one of their very best albums ever. It was a notable album at the time for several reasons. First, it was Mick Taylor's first studio album with the band (Taylor first appeared on Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out in 1970, a document of the Stones' 1969 tour). Second, it was the first studio album from the Rolling Stones after the Altamont fiasco, which gained them some negative publicity and a stain on their image, traces of which still linger to this day. Third, Keith Richards was palling around with country-rock legend Gram Parsons during these and the Exile sessions. All three factors inform this album. While Taylor had a blues-rock pedigree as impressive as Brian Jones', his real strength was as a boogie guitarist, and this is one of the only albums from the Stones to feature room for stretching out. "Can't You Hear Me Knocking" is a steller jazzy hard rock extended number with a great jam featuring dueling Taylor/Richards guitar and sax from Bobby Keys. Altamont isn't addressed, except for perhaps "Dead Flowers" something of an epitaph for hippidom, something the Stones never really had much use for. "Dead Flowers" and the exquisitely lovely and sad "Wild Horses" (written for Marianne Faithfull, who OD'd and almost died at the time) showcase the Gram Parsons influence (Parsons covered "Wild Horses" with the Flying Burrito Brothers a year prior to this album's release). "Brown Sugar" and "Bitch" are classic Stones hard rockers. "Moonlight Mile" is another piece of tortured beauty, given arguably the best strings on a rock song ever by Paul Buckmaster. "Sway" is a mellow groove with plenty of Taylor guitar; instead of toning things down after Altamont, Jagger sings "It's just that evil life has got me in its sway". Rock 'n' roll, no "only" required.

There was a time when the Ike and Tina Turner Revue was one of the hottest, most durable, and potentially most explosive of all R&B ensembles. Fronted by Tina, with one of the rawest, most sensual and impossibly dynamic voices in Black music, the Ike And Tina Revue was an ensemble that dripped musical discipline while manifesting nearly unbearable tension, eventually giving way to wave upon wave of catharsis. The Ike and Tina Turner Revue were rivaled only by James Brown and The Fabulous Flames in terms of musical spectacle.