Sticky Fingers vs. Who's Next: Synths, Experimentation, and Cohesion in 1971

Here’s the funny thing: “Brown Sugar” has absolutely no synthesizer on it, while “Baba O’Riley” is basically built around one. Pete Townshend fed a Lowrey organ’s internal marimba preset through a Vox amp and got that pulsing, minimalist pattern that sounds like early Kraftwerk crossed with a teenage rampage. The Stones, by contrast, were still working with horns, slide guitar, and that greasy Muscle Shoals rhythm section. The only electronic trickery on Sticky Fingers is the 3D zipper on the album cover—the music itself is deliberately unspacy. So when people compare these two 1971 giants, the synth question is almost a non-starter.

That said, Who’s Next is the more experimental album overall, no contest. “Baba” and “Won’t Get Fooled Again” use the Lowrey to create entire song structures; “Bargain” layers a Moog over acoustic strumming. Sticky Fingers experiments in a different way—with lyrical sleaze, tape echo on vocals, and a rawer production that felt radical for a band that used to sound like a blues cover group. But it’s not a synth album. The Who’s risk was in building pop songs around repetitive electronic loops; the Stones’ risk was in stripping down to the point where any mistake left in felt intentional.

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