This digg item got me thinking about Mick Taylor, and about the experience of seeing him first with John Mayall at the Whiskey, then with the Stones at the Forum. Taylor's playing was so jaw-droppingly intense, even as a teen prodigy who succeeded the might Peter Green with the Bluesbreakers. At the Whiskey, her was barely older than I, but fully formed. (Like me, he seldom moved with the music, saving his energy for the music. I was vindicated again-another awesome lead guitarist who saw no need to jump around like a spinning top!) Hed had a great feel for the blues, treating the songs with respect but not as museum pieces. That's not easy with the occasionally too-reverent Mayall, but Taylor pulled it off. Blues is supposed to be fun too. He had the widest, truest hand vibrato; it sounded almost as if he was playing slide, and his actual slide playinf was flawlessly in tune and creative, going beyond the usual cliches. His long notes hung and swung. His playing was always limpid and to the point. no rococo filigree for him. He came out of the same Buddy Guy/Pee Wee Crayton/Hubert Sumlin school as Clapton, but he got that a single note could sometimes stand alone and invite you in. No need to encircle every note with a protective riff.
(By the way, where were these skinny English guys getting all those great old sunburst Les Pauls? We could barely find them here and we spent every Saturday scouring the pawnshops and general stores. Someone was getting them, but not us.)
Not that he couldn't, and can't, wail with the best, which is clearly what the Stones needed and got from Taylor. On "Get Your Ya-Yas Out" he owns the rock solo style. Keith is tough, and a true original, but the Stones have always needed, and seldom had, someone who could just stand there and fuckin' play a single-string guitar solo. Taylor did, and the band has never and will never sound as good, but he obviously didn't fit the image as well as Ron Wood, who was a pretty fair soloist himself in his Faces/Gasoline Alley days, but has apparently decided as a Stone to take the (drug) money and run. Taylor's post-Stones career has exactly caught fire in a big-time way, but it's not clear that's what he was really after anyway. The records he made with Carla Olson are tasty, as are his solo albums, they're just not big-deal rock and roll records. That's not necessarily a bad thing, either. Better to make a perfect miniature, I think, than simply another large empty canvas.
