“I hadn’t even played”: The bizarre way Wayne Perkins was denied a place in The Rolling Stones
Working with a band like The Rolling Stones is not for the faint of heart.
Even though the band have made some of the greatest riffs of all time courtesy of Keith Richards, the whole reason why another guitar player is there tends to come from them having the perfect foil to what Richards was doing whenever he locked in with Charlie Watts. There was a lot more room to mess around as a lead guitarist, but finding that common language with Keef tended to be near-impossible for anyone to put together correctly.
Hell, even Brian Jones didn’t seem to be on the same wavelength as the rest of the group, and he was the one who put the damn thing together in the first place. Jones had envisioned them as more of an eclectic rock and roll band, and when they started reverting back to the blues, no amount of instrumental knowledge was going to satisfy his need to play the music that he wanted every single time he made one of their records.
And while Mick Taylor was a fine guitar player during his time in the group, there was always a slight asterisk put next to the records he was on. Sure, those records include some of the greatest albums of all time, but when you think about his role in the whole thing, Richards even seemed to view him as a side character in the band. The Stones are such a tribal thing, so if you were going to join, you needed to let me know that you were playing on being in it for the long haul.
Since there was no chance that the band were ever going to be a four-piece, the hunt was on for someone new, and when listening through different guitar players, Wayne Perkins seemed to be a decent candidate. The band was just starting to get influenced by reggae music, and since he had worked on Bob Marley’s Catch A Fire, it wasn’t out of the question to bring in someone who could help them shift their sound around a little bit.
But from the first time that Perkins showed up at the studio, he noticed that everything would be fine up until it actually came time for the band to work together, saying, “I was talking to Keith when suddenly Jagger and Charlie Watts came up behind me, and they both stood right next to me, really close. I looked to each side and both of them are staring straight ahead like they’re posing for an album cover. Then they walked off without saying a word. They put me in the center of this portrait thing that they were doing, like a lineup. They wanted to see if I looked like a Rolling Stone, and I hadn’t even played a note for ’em yet.”
While the band certainly had a bit higher standards for what they wanted out of their replacement, it’s not like The Stones were a bunch of pretty boys, either. Their whole appeal was their ability to look badass, but since they already had to worry about Taylor not working with the rest of the group, chances are they didn’t want to go through that entire headache all over again.
Richards had said that Perkins was way too British to be considered a proper member of the group, but when you look at where they eventually went, they really nailed it with Ronnie Wood. No disrespect meant to Perkins by any stretch, but Wood was born to be a Rolling Stone, from the way that he walked to how he could be the perfect middle man whenever Richards and Jagger got into their occasional spats.
Perkins may have been capable of doing that in some capacity, but it wasn’t about whether or not Jagger and Richards liked him independently from each other. Sometimes getting the right guy seems easy, but even if you’re all friendly, it’s usually more about whether a person fits the vibe of what the music needs rather than whether or not they are talented enough to be in the band.
