How the Velvet Underground’s raw junkie aesthetic shaped the Stones’ 'Sister Morphine'

The Velvet Underground’s 1967 debut tore down rock’s romanticism with songs like “Heroin” — no metaphor, just the needle going in. By the time the Stones entered Muscle Shoals to cut Sticky Fingers, that same unflinching junkie lens had clearly infiltrated the room. “Sister Morphine” doesn’t nod to the Velvets through chords; it borrows their permission to describe a drug experience without redemption, just clinical horror: the morphine drip, the unanswered plea for more, the slide guitar that sounds like a slow vein collapse.

The song’s co-writer, Marianne Faithfull, was a direct link. She’d been in Warhol’s Factory orbit, dated Mick Jagger,