Music: Return of Satan's Jesters

A monstrous red tongue coils sadistically from the label of a new rock LP called Sticky Fingers. On the jacket, the waist-to-thigh portion of a man's jeans has been caught in a moment of rakish nonchalance. In the appropriate place, a working four-inch zipper hangs invitingly. Beneath the zipper lies another waist-to-thigh photograph, this one naked save for a pair of white jockey shorts and bearing the logotype of the noted dispose-all artist, Andy Warhol (see ART). As a record-store attraction, the album is positively too dreadful to ignore.

That can mean only one thing: the return of Satan's Jesters, otherwise known as the Rolling Stones. Just in time, too, to keep rock from losing its evil leer for good. After a fairly quiescent 18 months—the Altamont tragedy sobered a lot of people, the Stones included; four deaths will do that—Mick Jagger and his fellows are back with a new U.S. distributor (Atlantic) and their own label, Rolling Stones Records.

Sneers and Snarls. With Sticky Fingers, they are also at the most critical juncture of their career. During the last year and a half, while the Stones, have rearranged their corporate lives, and moved to the south of France, rock has changed drastically. Musically it is softer now and more lyrically inquisitive. With the Beatles having broken up for good, the age of the big group is at a historical turning point. Among the surviving groups, mediocrity and sheer greed abound to such a degree that Bill Graham, sick of it all, has announced the permanent closing of both the Fillmores West and East, two houses which greatly helped rock come of age in the '60s (TIME, May 10). Facing the Stones are as many unanswered questions as Mick Jagger has sneers and snarls. Is the milieu that nurtured the Stones—a young, despairing world of violence, ugliness, drugs and an unmistakable impulse toward self-destruction—still out there waiting for the anti-heroes of old? Will the tribes still gather to enjoy the Stones' personal exhortation to reduce civilization to pot-smoking ruins?

Old and New. For now the answer is "yes." Sticky Fingers has sold a half-million copies in its first two weeks. It also shows that the Stones are masters of much more than what British Critic Geoffrey Cannon calls "roaring white rock." Bitch and Brown Sugar, as irreverent, aggressive and sexually brutal as ever, will delight old-line Stones fans. Can't You Hear Me Knocking, by contrast, is a stylistic meeting place for old and new. It begins with that familiar buzzing, distorted guitar sound and inimitable druggy sentiments ("Yeah, you've got plastic boots/ Y'all got cocaine eyes Yeah you got speed freak jive"), then shifts suddenly into a long Latin-based instrumental coda that shows how well the Stones have been keeping up with the times in general, and Santana in particular.

Then there is Sister Morphine. Rarely has rock music invoked such an invitation to hell. An electric guitar quivers menacingly, like a poised cobra. Off in the distance somewhere, the piano groans a low, dark, mournful chord. Jagger, sounding like John Lennon baring his soul, speaks from a hospital bed of the mind: "Oh, can't you see I am fadin' fast/ And that this shot will be my last."