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Keith Richards on the difference between every Stones guitarist
Besides the legendary Keith Richards, The Rolling Stones have had three highly influential lead guitarists over the decades: Brian Jones, Mick Taylor and Ronnie Wood, who has held the role longer than anyone else. With all three of them, the band recorded albums that became essential parts of their discography and achieved enormous success.
Each guitarist made a unique contribution to the band’s sound, although fans naturally have their favorite eras and players. Over the years, Keith Richards has spoken about all three of them, explaining what made each guitarist different and how the Rolling Stones’ sound evolved with each one.
Keith Richards on the difference between every Stones guitarist
“I never found it tricky to play with Ronnie. (It’s) different, because I mean, (if) you play with any other player it is different. Mick Taylor is a spectacular lead player, before that, when I worked with Brian Jones, we were more interlocked. It was more rhythm and lead, he wasn’t that separation. With Mick Taylor there was more separation between rhythm and leads, at least live.”
“Not so much on record but on live and quite rightly so, because he was a beautifully fluent player and it also gave me a chance to sit down on those riffs, you know. And those, I love to do, I love a good riff to sit on (laughs). I mean, Ronnie is kind of a mixture of the two, Ronnie had a lot of the same qualities that I worked with Brian Jones, which is a sort of more interlocking way of playing.”
“But he also has some nice bottlenecks and lead style as well. So Ronnie is in between Mick Taylor and Brian. I mean, I just sit there and hammer out the chords (laughs) and try to give them a push. After all, I wrote them (laughs),” Keith Richards said in an interview for “The Rolling Stones Bootleg Series” in 2013 (Transcribed by Rock and Roll Garage).
Brian Jones was the band’s first lead guitarist, serving as a member from 1962 until 1969, when he was fired. Mick Taylor joined the band later that year and remained until deciding to leave in 1974. Ronnie Wood replaced him and has remained with the band ever since.
Keith said Mick Taylor had a lovely sound and was a soulful guitarist
Keith has always spoken fondly of Mick Taylor’s time in the band, as most of his favorite Rolling Stones albums came from that era. He believes Taylor is a soulful player who opened “beautiful possibilities” for the band. “Taylor opened up some beautiful possibilities. Especially in recording because I would just lay down 3 or 4 different rhythm guitars. Mick was very much a solo player. Incredible melodic and sensitivity about his playing. Most of those early Stone records, you know, the big ones.”
“He’s probably 6, 7 maybe 8 sometimes, guitars on these tracks. But you wouldn’t know that. When I play guitar I wanna play with another guy. If he is providing the other side of the coin, if I’m laying down that rhythm then the complements that come from the other guitar then will be moving into the rhythm guitar.,” Keith Richards said on his Youtube channel in 2017 (Transcribed by Rock and Roll Garage).
Keith Richards continued:
“Everybody was looking at me, because I was the other guitar player. But my position was, I’d play with anybody. We could only find out by playing together. And we did the most brilliant stuff together, some of the most brilliant stuff the Stones ever did. Everything was there in his playing—the melodic touch, a beautiful sustain and a way of reading a song.”
“He had a lovely sound, some very soulful stuff. He’d get where I was going even before I did. I was in awe sometimes listening to Mick Taylor, especially on that slide. Try it on ‘Love in Vain.’ Sometimes just jamming, warming up with him, I’d go, whoa. I guess that’s where the emotion came out. I loved the guy, I loved to work with him. But he was very shy and very distant,” Keith Richards said in his book.
Why it was impossible to keep Brian Jones in the band according to Richards
“I enjoyed his company, and I tried incredibly hard, in 1966, to pull him back into the group. He was flying off. But my attempts to bring Brian back into focus were a total failure. After that … [long pause] He did some despicable things. The man was failing. He had been a strong man, but he was wiping himself out. Brian demanded, you have to understand. And in a band like this, you also have to be supportive and giving.”
“Having to deal with his jealousy, with Mick and me writing the songs, when you’re working 300-odd days a year — it becomes intolerable, and you can get really nasty about it. I tried to be fair to him. But to be honest, he was a bit of a bastard. And it doesn’t surprise me that he came to a sticky end,” Keith Richards told Rolling Stone in 2010. The musician tragically died a few weeks after being fired, at the age of 27. When asked about his final days with the band, Keith said there was no stopping the path the late musician was on.
He said:
“Brian, you know, when I think about Brian, when we were slogging away with no recognition, just doing what we’re doing, quite enjoying. You know, with no great ambitions or anything, he was a great guy, but within very short amount of time, another guy was coming out and this guy got bigger and bigger as the years went by and also became more self-destructive. Now I’m the one to talk about that, right? But I’m still here, you know. Brian went all the way and once he was down that path man, there was no stopping,” he said in an interview to BBC in 2003 (Transcribed by Rock and Roll Garage).
Despite all the different eras the band has gone through over the past six decades, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards have remained its leaders, as they are the band’s main songwriters and two central figures. With an extensive discography and millions of records sold worldwide, the Rolling Stones have become one of the biggest bands of all time.
