The guitarist Keith Richards always wanted in The Rolling Stones: “No doubt”
To Keith Richards, being a member of The Rolling Stones meant so much more than being able to play an instrument.
Yes, anyone who ever set foot on that stage was going to need to know their parts backwards and forwards whenever they came up with the right part, but it also came down to the kind of people who had the best vibe for what the band were supposed to be. And while Richards could make any song better by cranking out the riffs, it was a bit more complicated trying to get everyone else on the same page sometimes.
For one thing, Mick Jagger seemed to be focusing on everything but the blues when they started to become one of the biggest bands in the world. He didn’t want to concern himself with sticking in one genre the rest of his life, and half of the greatest tunes that the band would ever write usually came when they went outside their comfort zone anyway. But Richards wanted to have someone who would truly understand what the band was supposed to be.
Which is probably why Gram Parsons fit so well into The Stones’ oeuvre at the time. He was never a member of the band by any stretch, but his rootsy approach to music and his almost inhuman ability to trace back every single piece of Americana music were what Richards was after in a musical partner. But they didn’t really need yet another guitarist when they had someone like Mick Taylor.
Brian Jones had completely checked out of the band months before he was let go, and having someone like Taylor gave them the opportunity to jam a little bit. Taylor could weave the perfect lines together every single time he played, but Richards felt that some of the biggest parts of their sound didn’t always fit with what Taylor had to offer. He wanted the chance to make something with the right guitarist, so bringing in Ronnie Wood was the next best thing when he was available.
But note the end of that sentence: WHEN HE WAS AVAILABLE. Richards had originally wanted Wood in the band for a while, but after a few nasty spats with different members of The Faces, it was made abundantly clear that Wood was just fine where he was, thank you very much. Time can change a lot of things, though, and Wood seemed to fit right at home when he worked with the rest of the band throughout the late 1970s.
The band didn’t need to have hits at this point anymore, but when looking at their interactions onstage, Richards felt no one came close to what Wood did in terms of his presence in the band, saying, “He was already so familiar with our stuff. After Mick Taylor left, we rehearsed for about six months with a lot of good guitar players from all over the world. And we could work with them, you know; they could work with us. But when Ronnie became available and suddenly walked in, that was it; there was no doubt. It was easy.”
And a lot of that came from how well-versed Wood was in the blues. There was no doubt that if Richards said that he wanted one of their songs to sound like some of the old blues records that they heard as kids, Wood would know exactly what he was talking about and be able to play off of him in the right way, even if it meant only strumming a handful of chords in the background of the tune.
Because as much as Wood could play some brilliant slide licks throughout his career, the entire point of being in a band is being in the right place at the right time. No one really needed to play the most notes to be the best guitarist in the world, and if Wood knew when not to step on Richards’s toes, he was going to do just fine no matter what he was doing.
