This is not a question about Rolling Stone magazine covers, but a question of Rolling Stones album covers.
I have never had the chutzpah to unzip the zipper on the Sticky Fingers record. What’s behind it?
Sweet Basil
A picture of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards dressed like butchers and covered with broken dolls and pieces of meat.
Cardboard. Since that is what the sleeves that held vinyl was (and is) made of.
Yer pal,
Satan
http://homepages.go.com/~cmcinternationalrecords/devil.gif
TIME ELAPSED SINCE I QUIT SMOKING:
Three weeks, 19 hours, 36 minutes and 10 seconds.
872 cigarettes not smoked, saving $109.08.
Life saved: 3 days, 40 minutes.
The original cover – by Andy Warhol, BTW – had a banana behind the zipper. As time when by, that was eliminated.
Read into that what you will.
I don’t know how many of you are joking, but behind the zipper is the appropriate section of jockey briefs. BTW, the photo on the cover is not Jagger, but a male model.
Also, the Warhol banana was for a Velvet Underground cover. AFAIK, Warhol had nothing to do with Sticky Fingers.
Andy Warhol did indeed design the cover. The male model on the cover was just a hanger-on who happened to be at his Factory that day.
The copy I had (since given away in the great Satan vinyl purge of… Oh, I think '88, when I started replacing things with CDs) had nothing but cardboard underneath. Also, it was a stiff (har de har) zipper, with both sides glued down, so even though the zipper was finctional, you couldn’t open it apart that much even when it was fully unziipped.
It is certainly very possible that the version that I saw was a later pressing which did not have things which were on earlier pressings, however, I can only report on what I owned.
Yer pal,
Satan
http://homepages.go.com/~cmcinternationalrecords/devil.gif
TIME ELAPSED SINCE I QUIT SMOKING:
Three weeks, one day, 2 hours, 31 minutes and 40 seconds.
884 cigarettes not smoked, saving $110.52.
Life saved: 3 days, 1 hour, 40 minutes.
Okay. No hard feelings, Satan? 
Like the famous Beatles butcher cover? I think Cecil had an article about that once, that included a link with all the photos from that session. Pretty disgusting. No wonder it was such huge cotroversy…
Perhaps someone less lazy than myself can provide a link to that article??
Sweet Basil
Ps- thanks for all the replies! I always wondered…