Keith Richards explains why Mick Taylor got bored of The Rolling Stones: “It’s hard to keep their interest”
Most musicians who have been playing rock and roll for more than three days would love the opportunity to work with The Rolling Stones. Whereas The Beatles might be the more popular band to come out of the 1960s, The Stones have always been more friendly when it comes to guest musicians, usually approaching their songs as jams rather than the Fab Four’s meticulously crafted masterpieces. For a band that was as steeped in blues as they were, Keith Richards could normally understand when things were going a bit sideways as well.
Granted, any musician who’s ever played rock and roll had started in the same place Richards did. Those three chords that make up the blues are still the ethos of every single rock band that came after The Stones, and even if they weren’t the most proficient musicians in the world, it was always more about the vibe behind their songs rather than the most intricate solo on Earth.
That didn’t mean they didn’t have some thunder behind them. Charlie Watts had the same chops most people would find in a traditional jazz drummer, and outside of Richards being the glorified riff machine, Brian Jones could play almost anything he could get his hands on. But towards the end of the 1960s, Jones realised that his time with the band was running criminally short.
He had stopped having fun when everyone tried to push him out of the room, and while he would eventually be fired, Mick Taylor was the kind of virtuoso most only dream of. Jones may have had impressive chops, but Taylor’s phrasing was indebted to the heavy blues players, which meant that their songs could stretch out a bit more when working on their classic streak of albums like Let It Bleed and Sticky Fingers.
Although the actual songs got a bit heavier, some pieces never seemed to change. Richards could play as many riffs as he wanted, but there were only so many times that he could play those open-G riffs before everything started getting monotonous, and after one too many times playing the same fluid solo, Taylor realised that he had had enough and moved on to a solo career.
Anyone else in his position would have been called crazy for passing up one of the biggest groups in the world, but Richards remembered the whole thing being practical for Taylor, saying, “When he was with us, it was a time when there was probably more distinction between rhythm guitar and lead guitar than at any other time in the Stones. The thing with musicians as fluid as Mick Taylor is that it’s hard to keep their interest. They get bored – especially in such a necessarily restricted and limited music as rock and roll.”
But if Taylor was more interested in branching out, bringing in Ronnie Wood was the next best thing. Despite being the main man for Rod Stewart for years, Wood’s chemistry with Richards has always been perfect, usually acting as a cartoony foil to Richards’s bad-boy persona whenever playing their older tunes or cranking out tracks like ‘Start Me Up.’
A lot of what Taylor did may not have been as orthodox in rock and roll at the time, but nothing about The Stones was meant to be normal. They had the potential to take the blues and turn it into rock and roll, and while they became one of the longest-running acts in the world, Taylor will always be one of the essential chapters in their history.
