How Sticky Fingers captured that live-in-the-studio feel with drop-D 'Brown Sugar' and Mick Taylor's slide on 'Moonlight Mile'

The Stones wanted Sticky Fingers to sound like a band in a room—so they split the recording between Olympic Sound in London (with its big, live-sounding stone room) and Muscle Shoals in Alabama, where they set up in a circle facing each other to bleed into one another’s mics. The basic tracks were cut live, then overdubbed minimally, which gives the whole album that wired, slightly loose energy. At Muscle Shoals they even placed a piano in the corner of the same live room, not isolated, so you hear the room swallowing Bobby Keys’ sax on “Brown Sugar.”

“Brown Sugar” is a weird tuning story. Keith plays it in open G (5-string, low E removed) like most of his Stones work, but the famous riff actually starts with a ringing open D in the tuning—the song’s key is C, not D, which is why the open strings clang against the chords. Mick Taylor, meanwhile, tuned his Strat to a standard drop-D for his slide work on “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking” and the coda of “Moonlight Mile.” On “Moonlight Mile,” Taylor’s slide never touches the fretboard—he laid the guitar flat on his lap, using just a glass bottleneck and vibrato arm, letting the notes microtonally slide against the tape echo from Olympic’s old EMT plate reverb. The whole track was recorded live to 16-track, with Jagger singing in the control room while the band played in the studio, the bleed of his voice off the mic giving it that weary, late-night shimmer.