Theories, rants, etc.
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ONE MONTH AFTER MICK TAYLOR JOINED
The Rolling Stones, Mick Jagger gave a measured assessment of his new guitarist’s skills to Melody Maker. “I had him down to a session and he was quite good,” Jagger praised, faintly. “Then he came to another and he was very good. I don’t know Mick so well I can say he’s as good as Eric Clapton, but anyway, that’s not what The Rolling Stones are all about.”
What the Stones were all about with Brian Jones, of course, and what they became during Mick Taylor’s five years in the band, are slightly different things. “I read in all the newspapers that Brian was our lead guitarist,” Jagger continued, “well, I don’t think he was.” Taylor was a lead guitarist, though, if not quite a conventional one in the Clapton mould. “Mick Taylor was extraordinary,” engineer Glyn Johns confirms to us this month, as we wind the clock back to 1969, to the last days of Brian Jones, and to the Stones 2.0 that emerged with Taylor and Let It Bleed. “[He] brought a whole new colour to the band that wasn’t there before.” What also ensued was chaos, tragedy, a ruthlessly unsentimental drive to take care of business in spite of everything, and some of the most astonishing rock’n’roll music ever made. The Stones’ imperial phase, in all its troubling complexity, starts here.