How The Rolling Stones' Unique Album Cover Became a Grammy-Nominated Disaster

On April 23, 1971, The Rolling Stones released their album Sticky Fingers. But the album is known for something even more famous than its hit single "Wild Horses" - its album cover.

Photographed by Andy Warhol (ever heard of him?), the cover was a close-up shot of a man's crotch. He wears jeans and a wide double-hole belt with the zipper exposed, while the band and album's names are stamped in the upper left corner. But the cover art didn't just generate buzz because it was risqué - it was interactive as well.

The 3D album cover contained hardware: an actual zipper. And it moved! If you unzipped the cover model's pants, it revealed a pair of underwear. When you open the cover's flap, it reveals another photo of the model in a pair of white briefs signed by Warhol himself.

Pretty cool, right? It was even nominated for a Grammy for best album cover. So what made it a disaster? Well, as anyone who has ever owned any pants or bags with zippers knows, they can cause lots of problems.

"I knew the back of the zippers, which had to be glued down by hand, could damage the record," Craig Braun, who designed the cover, told The New York Times. "So I decided to fold in a third panel."

"When you have a zipper pull, there's a round clip that holds the pull, and that's why I had those corrugated inserts made," Braun told Amateur Photographer. "What I didn't anticipate was they put something like 25 albums in each box and stack these boxes high in the trucks. A truck is riding hundreds of miles and these boxes are weighing heavily – the back of the zipper handle was damaging the Sister Morphine track on side two."

Needless to say, no one was happy about receiving a damaged record. "I was scared s***less," Braun said, worried the fiasco would ruin him. Instead, he conceived a solution: ship the record with the zipper pulled down so that it dents the center label of the disc rather than the actual vinyl.

"I put in my life, sweat and soul into it," Braun said.

This story was originally published by Men's Journal on Apr 23, 2026, where it first appeared in the News section. Add Men's Journal as a Preferred Source by clicking here.

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This story was originally published April 23, 2026 at 3:17 PM.