"I was in awe sometimes listening to Mick Taylor," Keith Richards wrote in his memoir. "Everything was there in his playing – the melodic touch, a beautiful sustain and a way of reading a song." Taylor was only 20 when the Rolling Stones recruited him from John Mayall's Bluesbreakers as the replacement for Brian Jones in 1969. His impact, on masterworks such as Exile on Main Street and Sticky Fingers, was immediate. The down-and-dirty slide on "Love in Vain"; the jaw-dropping precision on "All Down the Line" (where his playing brilliantly mimics the sound of a harmonica); the extended, Latin-jazz-inflected coda on "Can't You Hear Me Knocking" – it's no accident that Taylor's stint coincided with the Stones' most consistently great recordings. "He was a very fluent, melodic player... and it gave me something to follow, to bang off," Mick Jagger said of Taylor, who left the band in 1974. "Some people think that's the best version of the band that existed."
Rolling Stone Magazine
"Amazing player. I think we did our best music with Mick."
Charlie Watts
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