Blu-ray: The Rolling Stones – From the Vault: Sticky Fingers, Live at the Fonda Theatre, 2015

STUDIO: Eagle Rock | DIRECTOR: Paul Dugdale
RELEASE DATE: Sept. 26, 2017 | PRICE: DVD/CD $21.78, Blu-ray/CD $19.98, DVD/LP $40.19
BONUSES: interviews with band, bonus tracks
SPECS: NR | 102 min. | Concert | aspect | Surround Sound

RATINGS (out of 5 dishes): Movie  | Audio  | Video  | Overall

The latest edition to The Stones’ “From The Vault” series captures the band performing their revered Sticky Fingers in concert for the first time in their career. Celebrating the re-issue of the 1971 album, the May, 2015 show at L.A.’s Fonda Theatre served as a kick-off for the band’s North American Zip Code Tour that would take them across the country in the subsequent months.

All ten Sticky tracks are presented, though not in the original order they appeared on the album. As Mick Jagger puts it to the audience, that songs are offered “in the order of the 8-track tape.” Thus the rousing album opener, “Brown Sugar”—one of the band’s greatest singles and a perennial concert favorite—doesn’t pop up until the very end, following the sublime “Moonlight Mile,” the album’s last track. Leave it to the boys to mix things up a bit…

Everyone’s on point for the eclectic array of songs, from the usual live staples “Dead Flowers” and “Wild Horses” to the seldom performed “Sister Morphine” and “Sway,” to the heavy rock of “Bitch” and the primitive blues of “You Gotta Move” and “I Got the Blues.”

Peppered throughout the show are cutaways to interviews with band members discussing the album.  Mick points out that “Sticky Fingers is one of those albums that was spread out over a bunch of continents over different times,” the recording sessions dating back to Muscle Shoals Sound Studio in Alabama in December, 1969. Perhaps that’s why there’s such a distinct mix in the selection. As for the album’s many drug references, well, use your imagination…