In February 1971, Asha Puthli was sitting with Andy Warhol and friends at Max’s Kansas City, a New York club nightclub and restaurant, when the DJ played her new single. It was a cover of Marvin Gaye’s Motown classic Ain’t That Peculiar with Peter Ivers Group. Excited by what he heard, Warhol asked the singer who was going to do the cover art for the group’s forthcoming album. She had a risque concept: “A man’s zipper, which opens, and the album should come out with a pink inner sleeve. You know, like a prophylactic.”
That album never came to fruition, but months later, a strangely similar image hit the shelves: a person’s denim-clad crotch, zipper protruding, on the cover of the Rolling Stones album Sticky Fingers. It was a collaboration between Warhol and Craig Braun, which Vanity Fair called the “most notorious album art of 1971”. “[I thought] ‘What the fuck is Sticky Fingers?’” Puthli tells me. “I never thought of the Stones doing music that you can masturbate to. There is no song alluding to a sexual connotation [on that album]. Or did I miss something?”
