The Rolling Stones release their 25th studio album, Foreign Tongues, today, so it seems like the right time to visit this classic interview with Keith Richards from April 1983. It was a good time for the Stones. As GP Editor Tom Wheeler wrote in his original intro (abridged below), "In most respects the Stones have few peers, and in terms of sheer durability they have none, having somehow survived at or near the top of the rockpile for the last two-thirds of rock and roll's entire history.

"They've gone the distance and still pack a heavyweight punch: Their latest albums (Tattoo You and the live concert LP Still Life) are among their most vital works, and their most recent tour was astonishingly successful – four million fans applied for the New York tickets alone." Who would have thought that 43 years later, they would still be doing it?

Back in 1964 when Lennon and McCartney wanted to hold your hand, Jagger and Richards were walkin' the dog. Constantly compared to the Beatles and often to The Who, the Rolling Stones staked out their original turf with gritty music and a don't-mess-with-me stance. The Beatles disintegrated a dozen years ago, and the Who say they've unpacked their road cases for the last time. The Stones are in the studio, and they're not about to bid farewell to anyone.

Keith Richards stands in the eye of the hurricane. Around him swirls a rock and roll empire with 20 years history and mystery, success and excess, acclaim and controversy. He and his mates have been called many things by discerning critics and impassioned fans. One description recurs: The World's Greatest Rock And Roll Band.

Some reasons for all this are apparent. First, Keith's confederates could hardly be more impressive: Mick Jagger, rock's most prominent singer; guitarist Ron Wood, already a star when he joined the group in 1975; plus a drummer Charlie Watts and bassist Bill Wyman, a powerhouse rhythm section revered the world over by fans and fellow musicians alike. Other strengths are equally obvious – the consistently fine Jagger/Richards compositions, the dynamic arrangements, the meticulous recording. Just as important is the way Keith Richards changes chords from G to C.

The band is built around a two-guitar sound, itself an extension of Richards' own uniqueness. He helped blur forever the line between lead and rhythm guitar, substituting a riffing technique in which melodic embellishments are grafted onto a vigorous rhythmic treatment of chords, partial chords, and low-register lines. He often employs a 5-string open tuning (with or without capo) that facilitates adding the melodic notes to a major chord--particularly the 4th, the 6th, and the 9th. Among many examples, "Brown Sugar" is a classic killer.

Keith's most obvious influence is Chuck Berry. The original "Carol" is a textbook of Berry's double-string licks and was covered on The Rolling Stones, the debut album. Keith has had a taste for Berry flavoring ever since. Perhaps his most highly stylized nod to the St. Louis rocker is his long solo in "Bitch," where Keith repeatedly turns the beat around, turns it inside out – weaving through the horns, sneaking up on the back-beat, making the style his own.

Chuck Berry adapted boogie-woogie piano techniques for the guitar's lower register, and this distinctive two-string rhythm pattern became another Stones staple. Richards made his mark on its development by sometimes slowing it down, piledriving the downbeat, and stoking up the tone to a grand raunch: a-ronk a-ronk a-ronk.

Richards' role in the group has been analyzed countless times. The consensus: Without Keith Richards there wouldn't be a Rolling Stones. Ron Wood explains, "In other bands they follow the drummer; the Stones follow Keith, and they always have." While some have even asserted that "Keith Richards is the Rolling Stones," the guitarist himself is the first to stress that any band member's indispensability is a two-way street: "The musicians are there to serve the band. All that matters is whether something furthers the overall sound."

Keith's vision is rooted in a keen awareness of the power of the guitar – acoustic or electric – not only as a rhythm or solo instrument, but as a musical paintbrush capable of immense sonic canvases. He conceives a complex sound and knows how to get it. And yet to him a piece of music, like a real band, is a living, breathing creature existing apart from his conception of it. So while a particular project may be planned, Keith's sense of the music's own inherent magic keeps him flexible and spontaneous, adjusting as he goes.

On many contemporary recording sessions, musicians are put in compartments to minimize leakage (one instrument "leaking" into another's microphone), and the result is a compressed sound that fills every niche. Stones records are virtual opposites, roaring with heavy artillery but airy and spacious as well. While every sound counts, the spaces, the holes, are no less important.

The band's raw materials may be the deceptively simple basics of rhythm and blues, but with the air crashing around like a cyclone, the effect is complex, even abstract.

Rough edges on doubled guitars may be as important as seamless overlaps. An "extra" guitar part – mixed far in the distance to work on subconscious levels – may be as essential as obvious elements. As co-producer (credited or uncredited) on virtually every record, Keith Richards has proved to be both a master of the bold stroke and a subtle colorist, evoking not only the thunder and lightning but also a sky to put it in. For the Rolling Stones, atmosphere is everything.

For many the sound and fury of the band is a transcendental experience. Although the musicians are gifted, the songs excellent, and the recordings finely tuned, the effect is not so much that of hearing sophisticated technicians processed through state-of-the-art technology. It's more like hearing the world's greatest garage band in the world's biggest garage.

Up in his hotel room (classic Keith Richards, it is part Versailles Palace, part blues dive), Keith's dad Bert is smoking a pipe, and his son Marlon – who could dial room service before he could read – is drawing. A cassette bag is crammed with rockabilly, early Dylan, reggae, unmixed Stones, the raunchiest R&B, and more. An old Everly Brothers hit is playing, and delighted Keith Richards identifies a distinctive lead guitar lick: "Chet Atkins!"

An hour later, Keith is in the corner playing piano like Ray Charles and singing ballads to himself in a voice cracked with emotion. He plays a wistful "Somewhere Over The Rainbow" and then launches into some Jerry Lee Lewis, his foot bashing the floor in tempo.

Ron Wood blows in and warmly embraces his partner-in-guitar. In minutes, the two old friends are plugged in, guitars barely in tune, jamming on a medium-tempo 12-bar blues in A. Keith leans over to the black Fender Deluxe Reverb and twists the volume knob from 2 to 6. Ron Wood grins and rips into a solo. The real Keith Richards goes a-ronk a-ronk a-ronk.

Chuck Berry was a major influence on your guitar style.

That's quite a left hand he's got there [laughs].

Are the reports true that he punched you in the face?

Yeah, a little while back he did. I came up behind him to say hello. He didn't know it was me and didn't want to be bothered, but I got a nice note from him a little later, actually.

The "Bitch" solo is in a Chuck Berry style...

Which I do every night.

...and the beat turns around several times. Was that completely spontaneous, or semi-planned?

Maybe listeners knew a year or six months later that the beat turned around, but at the moment I wasn't conscious of that. It comes so naturally, as it's always happened, and it's always given that extra kick when the right moment comes back down again.

That's what rock and roll records are all about. I mean, nowadays it's "rock" music. But rock and roll records should be two minutes, 35 seconds long, and it doesn't matter if you ramble on longer after that. It should be, you know – wang, concise, right there. Rambling on and on, blah blah blah, repeating things for no point – I mean, rock and roll is in one way a highly structured music played in a very unstructured way, and it's those things like turning the beat around that we'd get hung up on when we were starting out: "Did you hear what we just did? We totally turned the beat around [laughs]!" If it's done with conviction, if nothing is forced, if it flows in, then it gives quite an extra kick to it.

You turn the beat around often. There's the intro to "Start Me Up," where it turns around twice in the first ten seconds, "Little Queenie," where Charlie turns around the intro, and the end of the bass part on "Street Fighting Man," which you played yourself.

Right. You can do that in a band that's got enough confidence not to collapse when it happens. It can make things much more interesting, and it sounds great as long as nobody's fazed by it. You have to be able to keep it straight, thinking about what you're doing at the moment and also about where you're going to take it. I guess that just comes from 20 years, same location.

So many of the things you play, if you were to put them on paper and analyze them musically....

What a mess [laughs]!

For example, the opening of "Start Me Up" is a simple chord change, and yet it's recognizable as the Rolling Stones. The sound is so specific. Would altering anything about it – the echo, tone setting, string gauge – change the impact?

I just can't get the things to sound any different [laughs]. They always come out just about the same when it comes to recording, because without really thinking about it I shift slowly as I go. And no matter where I start, no matter what the guitar or the string, sooner or later I'll get to where the rest of the band is going.

It's sort of a trademark sound, but it's more than that because of the way I go about getting it, working it through with what's going on, rather than getting the sound first and then pushing it on the band. A lot of it is adjusting to Ronnie, and Ronnie to me, which brings a certain continuity as well as a certain flexibility.

You've often mentioned the two-guitar sound as a cornerstone of the band. On Still Life there's a different kind of interplay – probably tighter than ever.

Well, Ron's getting better [laughs]. I think that's due to the fact that Ron and I have been working together now since '75, and the more we play together the tighter we get it.

It sounds like you and he are two sides of the same coin, like you could almost change places.

We do [laughs]. If he drops a cigarette I'll play his bit, and we'll realize later that I've covered for him or he's covered for me. And you think at the time, "Oh, my God, what a gap," but when you listen to the tape, you find that it's been fixed right there at the moment, in a very un-thought-about way. We pick it up and cover each other so that sometimes you can't really tell who's playing.

When Ron joined in 1975, did the band have to make a change in the way you interact or rehearse?

No, that was the beauty of it. 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.

With Mick Taylor's style so well defined as a lead guitarist, there seemed to be a clear distinction between the two of you.

It was much harder to get a Rolling Stones sound with Mick Taylor. It was much more lead and rhythm, one way or the other. As fabulous as he is as a lead guitarist, he wasn't a great rhythm player, so we ended up taking roles. When Brian and I started, it was never like that. It's much easier than with Brian, personally.

But also with Ron, the basic way we play is much more similar, and this isn't in any way to knock Mick. I mean, he's a fantastic guitar player. But even if he couldn't play shit, I'd love the guy. But chemically we didn't have that flexibility in the band. It was, "You do this, and I'll do that, and never the twain shall meet." With Ron, if he drops his pick, then I can play his lick until he picks it up, and you can't even tell the difference.

Had you and Ron worked together very much before he joined the group?

Yes, for about 18 months. And I did a lot of work on Ronnie's first and second solo albums. He's never been the same since.

Have you found that your styles affected each other, now that you've been working together for several years?

Yeah, that's what's great about it. I neglect something, and he makes up for it. That's the great thing about two guitar players, because if you get it right, you know when to lift one of his licks, and vice versa, without thinking about it. He lifts more of mine than I do of his [laughs].

When the two of you are onstage, how much of your interaction is subject to change?

It depends on the sound system. If you're going to make a change, you need to hear what you're doing in the first place, so a lot of that gets down to technicalities of the stage monitoring. On our last tour in '81 we had those long ramps out to the sides of the stage. The idea of having that stage is to get out where most performers don't get with audiences of that size. Well, if the monitors aren't working out there, and you're just making signs at the sound guys instead of concentrating on your playing, then you forget it, just leave it. But if the sound's good and you can hear everything, then you tend to give it a bit more, adjust more to what's going on, change as you go.

Do you have much trouble communicating onstage at that volume?

It's all done by semaphore and eye signals. It's the only way you can really do it. But the thing is, there isn't that much need for communication or looking at each other, except when things go wrong. Otherwise the communication is just through the music. But if things are going wrong, then everybody's looking at me: "How's he going to get out of this?"

Your records have sort of an indoor sound, the effect of enclosed space. Are you happy with your outdoor concert sound?

Never totally satisfied with live things, no. If you were, you wouldn't keep trying to make it better. But I'm not disappointed with it. You just look forward to being able to do it better. You're always wondering about the people way at the back, what they're hearing. There are so many people and they're so far away – you have no idea what's being heard out there. You're hoping for the best and taking it for granted that the sound crew are doing the job for you and giving out the sound onstage as much as possible to everywhere in the place. But there's the one problem, always that nagging doubt there – they're not all getting it the way they should.

Your live versions of songs are often faster than their studio counterparts – for example, "Shattered" on Still Life. Is that intentional, to make it more exciting for the audience, or is it the adrenaline of performing?

It's the tempo of the whole gig, the adrenaline – especially the huge gigs. The show just takes its own speed from the start, and you go with it. It might be great or it might be terrible, but the tempos one night may be twice as fast as the night after. And you can always learn when you listen back, you see? You may find, "Wow, that should've been that tempo all along--we made the record too slow [laughs]!"

On the live version of "Just My Imagination," in the second half the guitar figure changes some notes and sustains others for a country feel, almost like a pedal steel feeling.

That's Ron and me doing the parts together, and you get that sustaining thing. We aren't using a pull-string or a lot of slide right now, but Ron plays pedal steel, a bit on "Shattered" and "Faraway Eyes." Country music's a part of the way we do that kind of thing, and it comes through even if it's done with straight guitars sort of pulling up against each other.

Isn't there some slide in "Neighbours" on Tattoo You?

No, but it sounds like it. Ron plays that solo, and a lot of his things on regular guitar sound like they're slide. He's wangled a way of playing it without them, because he keeps losing them [laughs]. At the start of that solo he's bending about four strings. Sounds like slide.

On Still Life's "Let Spend The Night Together," is that a 12-string doubling the vocal melody on the interlude, which ends with "keep on smilin' baby"?

That's one reason we haven't done that one a lot on stage – we could never figure a way 'round that middle bit. No 12-string – just the two run-of-the-mill guitars together, doin' it tight.

The mix of the two guitars on Still Life adjusts in places to the parts you're playing. Is that sort of detail up to your discretion?

Well, I listen for those things, but I may not be there for the first mix. Especially with live stuff, I'd rather let the guy who recorded it get his work into it. Then I get sent the dubs. From the whole tour you have several takes of each song to pick from.

The set opened with "Under My Thumb," and it's hard to get the right take, because you're playing right there early, when everybody's trying to get together and nobody knows what's going on. Every night it takes 15 minutes for the sound guys and the recording guys and everybody to fall in and get adjusted, so choosing the take for the first number requires a bit of work.

The endings, too. You always wish you could get a couple of takes of the beginning and ending of a show as good as it is in the middle. But every night it's a different problem – you're in a different place, so you see what happens when you get going and take it from there.

On recent tours you've taken occasional breaks from the outdoor arenas, getting into clubs. Do you miss the smaller venues?

Yeah, always. You hate to do the same thing all the time. I love playing the ballparks and the domes, you know. For the satisfaction of the band it gives you a terrific buzz – so many people. But by doing just one thing all the time you forget how to do anything else. You just become good at playing the domes and never learn anything else again.

I've always found that if you put in a few 3,000-seaters on the tour, and even 300, it gives the band itself a confidence quite apart from anything else. Then you can deal with 300 people or 90,000 and know how to play it. And probably the band feels that working in one of the nice old places like the Fox Theater in Atlanta is kind of more satisfying most of the time.

Because of the immediacy?

Yeah. The sound isn't dissipated totally, and you don't have to worry about the wind factor and things like that. It's much simpler and easier to get – it's just [snaps fingers] turn it up, get to it.

Didn't you change to Mesa/Boogie amplifiers on this last tour?

The '81 tour of the States was the first time we used the big Mesa/Boogie amp and speaker setups on the road, but we've been using Boogie amps in the studio since about '77, and on the stage since the '78 tour, slaving small Boogies through Ampeg cabinets.

Do you pay much attention to speakers?

No. I only think about them when I don't like 'em. If I plug in and to me it sounds like crap, then I ask a question, but otherwise, I leave it, because there are guys far more versed. I don't know what speakers are coming out every year. I find something and I stick with it for five or six years. It's like some of the gadgets I use. Guys who work with us and are close to us, will say, "You should try this: I think this is going to add to what you're doing." I might try it, although I don't go around looking at specifications and all that.

Were you using any effects onstage in '81?

An MXR analog delay on a few numbers, and a phaser on "Beast Of Burden" and on or two others.

How about the very unusual sound on "Shattered"?

That was the MXR phaser – the 100 model – and I damped the guitar. That's what gives it that sound on the studio version as well.

What kind of wireless systems were you and Ron using on the last tour? Can you get the right tones as easily?

We've been using Nady wireless things since '78, and the tone is a lot better, because cords get stepped on and knotted up and they start rattling a little bit, and you lose tone.

In the last few years there's been a new aspect of your tone – more distinct, with a slight click, almost like a slap bass in rockabilly. "Hang Fire" and "She's So Cold" are examples, and especially the last section of "Little T&A."

It's our equivalent of that rockabilly thing. I think you'll find that comes from using a lot of analog delay on Ron's guitar or my guitar or both of them, and I dampen it. That'll give you that ticka-tacka-ticka. I always use that green MXR analog delay. I'm told it's quite out of date now and old-fashioned, but I got it free and I forgot that time marches on and they make better ones or so they say. I don't know. I've worked very well with those MXR things, and they've been very reliable.

Which guitar are you playing for that sort of stripped-down rockabilly sound on "Little T&A"?

A Telecaster, a '57 set up in 5-string tuning. It's open G 5-string, without the heavy string. Right there from the bottom up it's: G, D, G, B, D. The whole idea of getting rid of the sixth string in the open tuning was having the root on the bottom.

The suspended chords in the verses of that song are typical of your riffing style.

That's just one of the things you can do with open tuning. You can get a drone going, so you have the effect of two chords playing against each other. One hangs on because you've just got to move one finger – or two at the most – to change the chord, so you've still got the other strings ringing. It's a big sound.

Mick was using an Ovation Adamas steel-string on the tour. Were you satisfied with the instrument's performance?

I think they're very nice-sounding guitars. A nice neck. But I can never get used to that shape, that... dish. They're probably the best way of amplifying an acoustic guitar and having it still sound like an acoustic. There's no doubt. Probably a million readers will write in and say the Stones don't use acoustic guitar that much onstage, so we don't know shit, but for what we need, for a couple of numbers, it's adequate.

How did you come about acquiring your new guitars?

Friends of mine introduced me to Doug Young, who built them. After seeing some of his things, I knew he was capable of exceptionally fine work, so I more or less commissioned him to build me a guitar. He ended up making me two – the red one is a gift for my girlfriend, actually. Basically, that's the lowdown.

Did you specify exactly what you wanted?

Not really. We didn't have to say very much about it. I was very impressed by the things I saw, and I wanted a similar guitar for myself. But it's also this patronage that players and builders can get involved with – Renaissance man, and all that, the old system of someone like me encouraging guys like Doug. His guitars are too good not to be given help.

So you didn't request a certain wood for the fingerboard, a certain pickup design?

Not too much, no. I said, "Make me a guitar." I figure that's the difference between working with an artist, as opposed to just anyone. I mean, if you want a suit made, you don't want to have to tell the tailor how to do everything. You want to find someone who doesn't need all that, you see? It's more, "I want to see what you can build for me." There are very few people like that. Most people, you have to sit on their ass and watch them: with Doug I just left him to it. I was in Paris for months, recording. I'd almost forgotten it was going on until I saw what he'd done.

Have you had a chance to play them in the studio yet?

Not in the studio, but I went out and banged on them a bit. I'll be back in the studio soon, and then we'll beat them into shape [laughs].

After playing hundreds of guitars, what quality in these instruments made you take notice?

It's a recognition you develop. I think, and I'm sort of instinctive about these things – sit down and play it, feel it. I knew that Doug was thinking along the same lines as myself, but far ahead, because I'm not technical. Only after the event of building it when I've got it in my hands, can I know what's right. I can't say, "Well, it was the magnificent electronics," or "the wonderful bonding of the woods," and each specific thing. It was simply a fine instrument. Lovely wood!

Can you judge the sound of an electric before you plug it in?

Maybe to a certain extent. If the neck and the action feel right, you're more than halfway home, even before hearing the electronics. Things like weight and the density of the wood indicate certain things, but you simply need to play it to really tell. And it doesn't take long.

On record you've used several very different types of guitars – Gibson Les Pauls and ES-335s, Fender Telecasters, and others. And yet a listener can tell right away that it's you, from stylistic clues, but also from the sound alone.

I use a whole load of different guitars, that's true, but they're not all that dissimilar in type. I mean, ninety percent are probably Telecasters, old ones, but more than that, you can't really separate style and sound, you see. People do separate them when they're talking about music, but all of that often misses the whole point.

You're suggesting that the style is the sound?

Yes, part of it, more than any particular tone setting or pickup or anything like that. I'll just adjust to the sound of the track as we go – the sound of the bass drum and especially Ronnie's guitar. The style is adjusting along with the sound. There's never a conscious effort to get that "Honky Tonk Woman" tone or a thing like that. You may get it or you may not. But that's not what you're thinking about. You're thinking about the track.

Some people were amazed to read in your first Guitar Player cover story that on "Street Fighting Man" there are no electric guitars.

Two acoustics, one of them put through the first Philips cassette player they made. It was overloaded, recorded on that, and then hooked up through a little extension speaker, and then onto the studio tape through a microphone.

You've paid quite a bit of attention to acoustic guitars in rock music.

Well, I started on acoustic guitar, and you have to recognize what it's got to offer. But also you can't say it's an acoustic guitar sound, actually, because with the cassette player and then a microphone and then the tape, really it's just a different process of electrifying it. You see, I couldn't have done that song or that record in that way with a straight electric, or the sustain would have been too much. It would have flooded too much. The reason I did that one like that was because I already had the sound right there on the guitar before we recorded. I just loved it, and when I wrote the thing I thought, "I'm not going to get a better sound than this." And "Jumpin' Jack Flash" is the same, too. That's acoustic guitar.

Early Everly Brothers records have huge acoustic guitar sounds. Were any of them influential?

Yeah, all of their records, and also there's the fact that the first major tour we ever did was supporting the Everly Brothers, Little Richard, and Bo Diddley. Plenty to learn [laughs] in a real short time, following those guys around. The Everlys came on with just their trio and themselves, and it was great. On their recordings there is a certain power in the steel-string.

It's a different instrument from electric – not that different in the way you play it, but in terms of the sound. There are times when an acoustic guitar will make a track. You'll be despairing, nothing working, hashing away, Take 43 on electric guitar, and somebody will say, "Why don't you try it on acoustic?" And you try it one time and you've got it.

What kind of acoustics do you like to use?

Old Martins – several types of them – and certain Gibsons, particularly old Hummingbirds.

Do you have a certain kind of room that you like to record in?

Yes, but it's hard to tell whether it'll work until we get in there. And when we find a room I hate to lose it. Over the years we've been through four or five or maybe more of these ace rooms. Sometimes you walk in and it just happens, but whether it takes a long time or not to produce the sound you want, you don't want to lose it.

We're still working in the same place now that we've been in since Some Girls, a good big room. Pathe Marconi is the name – it's EMI's studio in Paris. The room we use is what they consider their sort of storeroom for the orchestra, or a rehearsal place. It's not Studio A, B, or C. It doesn't even have a number.

How important is the sound of the room itself?

The room is as important as the band and the producer and the song and the engineer. The room is at least as important as all that to the total sound. You can't separate rock and roll music instrument by instrument. You destroy the whole structure of it. Rock and roll music can only be recorded by jamming the sound all together.

Once you've got something to work right in the studio, do you try to use all the same equipment onstage?

Yeah, pretty much, just a larger version. I've never found the Stones or anybody else made great records by using huge stacks in the studio and blasting away. You can get very powerful-sounding records playing very quietly, and with relatively small amps. Small amps turned way up have the tension you're trying to get anyway, and it sounds big. It also gets back to that recognition of the acoustic guitar and what it can do, and what you can get if you're thinking of the mix right from the beginning and all the way through the recording.

Years ago, the mixing technique on many of your records broke quite a few rules. Did you realize from the outset of your career that a new way of mixing would be necessary?

We knew we wanted it without knowing the way to get it. It was just what sounded right to us, and also because we were brought up in the era when a four-track was a rarity. We started recording at a point when the best sound you got was all air and all the room sound and everything was leakage and jammed together, and the vocal fought its battle with the rest of the instruments.

We tried it the usual way, but whenever we brought the vocals up we'd never like the mix as much. What always amazed me was that if the record was popular, most people would know the words – at least the key ones – within a few weeks, no matter how much the voice was buried. Years back, in the studio, I always thought about those other records where the voice was too far forward, so you never really got a sound. You just got a vocalist with some accompaniment.

Which wasn't what you were after?

Not for us, but you see, you've got to treat each type of music in the appropriate fashion. I mean, if you're mixing the Everly Brothers, then you've got those fantastic goddamn voices and you put them out front as much as you can! But even those guys never sacrificed the sound of the record for the sound of their voices. They had it all there, quite a light sound, but always very powerful as well, never wimpy.

Did record companies ever tell you or your producers and engineers that you should be mixing Mick Jagger like the Everly Brothers?

They'd try, but we set it up so there was no way they had anything to say about it. They'd complain, and we'd tell them to @#$%& off.

Do you ever splice takes, either rhythm tracks or solos?

Sometimes. Not so much on solos. We tend to record them real long – go on and on, but as long as I know that somewhere in that seven or eight or eleven minutes there is that two-and-a-half minutes that says it all, then I don't mind going on, because I'll ferret it out and find it.

Is it too soon to start talking about what's on the next album?

I can only report that it's going magnificently for us, so much stuff coming out and starting to sound real good. We've only been in the studio a little over two weeks, which is only like a warm-up, and we've cut about a dozen cassettes of tape already. Everybody's happy about it. When we're done, we'll start thinking about the next tour.

In the choruses of "Honky Tonk Woman" and "Start Me Up," the bass leaves huge holes for the guitars to fill. Does Bill Wyman get a lot of direction from you in that regard, or is that something he's always done on his own?

I would say in the late '60s, early '70s, Bill would be given more direction – not always the right direction [laughs] – but Mick and I would be more inclined to say, "Do this and that." Sometimes he comes and asks, but less and less. You know, relationships change.

But Bill, he's kind of like Charlie. He just keeps [long pause] amazing me. He just keeps getting better. He's not always what I'm expecting. I know he's good, and he's always there. But I kind of take his playing for granted. And then when I listen to what he's doing, I realize he's not always playing the same thing. He's much better than we think. You see, we're the world's worst Rolling Stones critics [laughs]. We tear the shit apart before anybody gets a chance to hear it.

Do you practice very much aside from band rehearsals for tours or recording sessions?

In a way I do, because the guitar is always there, and I always play it or the piano. I do it in bursts. You kind of wait for it. You can't force it and sit down and say, "Now I'm going to write a hit song."

You've recorded a lot of material on your own – just vocals with piano or guitar. Do you plan to ever release any of it?

No, not releasing it as such. I just do it because I like to play a lot of great songs for myself, and it helps me to write. The way I write songs is to sit down and play 25 great songs by other people and hope that one of mine drips off the end.

Have many of the songs that you've written for the Stones been composed on the piano?

Sometimes, yeah. I'm such an amateur on piano, and that can help. You play guitar every night and get to know it so well, and a lot of great songs are really accidents. On the piano, I may come across something I wouldn't have done on guitar.

You've sung lead on some of the band's hits, and sang "Little T&A" on the last tour, but none of your lead vocals are included on the album.

Well, if I sing the lead vocals, then what's he going to do [laughs]? There's quite a bit for each of us to think about already. And I do sing lots of parts with Mick, always.

For years Mick has been reported to be a proficient guitar player, and yet he only started to play a lot onstage during the Still Life tour. Why now?

I think he feels a little more confident about it. He's a fine drummer, too. And he's not bad on keyboards, in his own way – in the same way that I am, fiddling about to write and to get some interesting ideas.

One thing that's held Mick back with guitar onstage is that playing is one thing – knowing how to get an instantly good sound off the amp is another. That is something he's still got to work on. It keeps him back from doing so much, because if it doesn't sound good to him in the first six bars, he doesn't have the experience and the knowledge of dealing with the amplifier. He might be playing great, but he's got a shitty sound on the amp – and then he's got his singing to think about.

Are you playing much National or Dobro these days?

Not doing as much of that as I'd like – that goes with not living anywhere in particular. You need to sort of sit down every day and do that. I hate to travel with instruments like that. I think you just need a certain environment when you're playing like that, and since that's not the way we are able to live, and probably wouldn't anyway, I don't get as much of a chance. You know, some things you don't get as much of a chance to do as you wish you had.

For young guitarists who are into Chuck Berry or the Rolling Stones today, what do they face, trying to make records now? Compared to when you started, what's different?

24-track machines. Otherwise, not that much has changed from what we faced. There's all this stuff about new equipment and changing styles and all that, but the point is, you still face a lot of rip-off artists, and you face a lot of work.

You and Pete Townshend seem to have much in common, at least on the surface – the components of your styles, your use of the guitar, the way your bands are compared in the press. Do you feel any particular kinship with him?

You mean Trousers? Now let me see – one reason for that is probably that we started playing the same clubs almost at the same time. I never took credit for this, but apparently he said that he lifted that arm swing he does from seeing me. I don't recall doing it, but I guess if he says so, he did. It's something I've never been aware of. In certain respects, yeah, we're both coming out in the same place at the same time, more than anything else.

He was quoted as saying that there comes a time for a band to retire, to pass on the torch, so to speak, to younger bands.

I love Peter, but the time to stop is when you can't do it anymore, or when you're fed up. There's no passing on of the goddamn torches. Other people will pick them up anyway, and besides, that's not the point. I don't know if he was accurately quoted, but other people have said it anyway when they can't think of anything else to say.

You see, if rock and roll is what you do, then that's what you do, and that's all. You don't sort of say, "Oh, now I give up and I'll hand it on to this band who I think is quite good." You don't hand it on that way. Pete already handed it on, the same as we did, to some young guys that are playing now, the way we played Chuck Berry. It's not, "Here, I've got to hand you a document." It's the records that you've done that the younger players have listened to and grown up with and sat around learning.

What would you like to be doing a year from now?

Accepting a platinum record, for one thing [laughs]. I'd like nothing to change too much, just to do what we do, but be able to do it better.

After one of your court trials you commented on systems of justice and juries of your peers, and how that all related to being a musician.

Yeah, I was trying to make the point that when I am thrown in a court, or anybody like myself is thrown in court, the jury has got absolutely no experience in the musician's way of life, so they're not your peers. I know justice is often rough and so on, but they don't know what it's like to be on the road for 20 years, and I can't explain it to them now. So I was saying, give me a jury of my peers, with Chuck Berry, with Muddy Waters. And put Ron in there, too [laughs] – I mean, I can drop him a few bucks.

People keep calling you the world's greatest rock and roll band, and they have been for a long time.

It's embarrassing.

Are there any drawbacks to their saying that?

Yeah, you've gotta keep being it [laughs]! I've decided that every night there's another world's greatest rock and roll band, because one night somebody has an off gig, and some other shit band has a great gig. That's one of the great things about rock and roll – every night there's a different world's greatest band.

We've been maybe a little more consistent, for whatever reason, mainly when we're going together on a tour and also because we've managed to stick together. The chemistry – that's got nothing to do with musicianship. It's got to do with personality and characters and being able to live with each other for 20 years.

People have been predicting the end of the Stones...

...from the beginning [laughs]!

With the kind of life you seem to lead, longevity might appear to be the last thing you'd be able to gain. What's the secret?

The secret is, there is no secret. It's finding people that not only play well with you, but that you can get along with. There's no constant battle about who's Mister Big, none of those problems. When I see Charlie and Bill – I ain't seen 'em for a few weeks – it's like a pleasure. Ron says we're his closest friends. I guess that's the only secret.

Is that what it means to play in a band?

Most people don't know what a band is. People have heroes, and they copy them – I mean, we copied things very carefully when we started. But you don't get this picture and then do everything to fit it. You do what you do.

The musicians are there to contribute to the band sound. The band isn't there for showing off solos or egos. A lick on a record – it doesn't matter who played it. All that matters is how it fits. The chemistry to work together like that has to be there. You have to work on it, always – figure out what to do with it.

But basically it's not an intellectual thing you can think up and just put there. It has to be there. You have to find it.

This interview was originally published in the April 1983 issue of Guitar Player. The Rolling Stones' new album, Foreign Tongues, is out now.

When the Rolling Stones decamped to the south of France in 1971 to record what would become Exile on Main St., they created one of rock’s most celebrated albums. But while the record has since attained near-mythic status, Mick Jagger has never been quite as enamored with it as the critics and fans who helped turn it into a classic.

By June 10, 1972, Exile on Main St. had reached No. 1 in the U.K. and topped charts around the world. Over the decades, it came to be regarded as one of the Stones’ defining statements. Yet Jagger has long viewed the album through a different lens—one colored by memories of disorder, unfinished work and a recording process he felt largely fell on his shoulders.

“Exile is not one of my favorite albums, although I think the record does have a particular feeling,” Jagger said in 2003 (via Far Out).

“I’m not too sure how great the songs are,” he continued. “It has some of the worst mixes I’ve ever heard. I’d love to remix the record, not just because of the vocals, but because generally I think it sounds lousy. At the time, [producer] Jimmy Miller was not functioning properly. I had to finish the whole record myself, because otherwise there were just these drunks and junkies.

“Of course I’m ultimately responsible for it, but it’s really not good, and there’s no concerted effort or intention.”

Those are striking comments about an album now widely considered a masterpiece. Yet they also reflect the reality of the sessions that produced it.

The Stones had begun work on some of the material at London’s Olympic Studios during the Sticky Fingers era before relocating, as tax exiles, to Villa Nellcôte on the French Riviera. There, they converted the villa’s basement into a makeshift recording space and worked in conditions that were anything but conventional.

For Jagger, who was preparing to become a father and frequently traveled to Paris to be with his wife, Bianca, the lack of structure proved frustrating. The villa became a revolving door of musicians, friends, dealers and celebrity visitors.

“There were a lot of people who came to visit that I don’t remember,” guitarist Mick Taylor later told Classic Rock. “I don’t remember John Lennon and Yoko coming, but apparently they did.”

Keith Richards, meanwhile, was battling a serious heroin addiction. According to the band’s lore, he was often absent from sessions taking place in Nellcôte’s basement studio. The chaos that Jagger viewed as an obstacle was, for Richards, simply part of the environment.

“We didn’t start off intending to make a double album,” Richards recalled in According to the Rolling Stones. “We just went down to the south of France to make an album, and by the time we’d finished, we said, ‘We want to put it all out.’”

“The Stones had reached a point where we no longer had to do what we were told to do,” he added. “I was no longer interested in hitting Number One in the charts every time.”

Richards would later tell Guitar World that Exile represented a conscious move away from the pursuit of singles. “It was made for what it was,” he said. “It was an album.”

That difference in outlook lies at the heart of the band’s conflicting memories of the record. Richards remembers freedom. Jagger remembers trying to impose order on a situation that often seemed determined to resist it.

“I think Keith was pretty out of it for some of that period, which shouldn’t have helped, but maybe it did,” Charlie Watts once observed. “Maybe that was where the creative energies came from.”

The sessions were plagued by practical problems as well. The summer heat played havoc with instrument tuning, recording schedules were inconsistent and songs often took far longer to complete than anyone anticipated. When Richards failed to pay the dealers providing him with heroin, they sent their henchmen to the house to steal several of the electric guitars used on the sessions, including Taylor’s 1959 Gibson Les Paul, which is said to be at the heart of a dispute with the New York City Met.

What emerged from the sessions was less a carefully executed plan than a collection of performances assembled amid confusion and constant interruption.

Richards embraced that unpredictability. Jagger struggled with it.

“Mick needs to know what he’s going to do tomorrow,” Richards said in the 2010 documentary Stones in Exile. “Me, I’m just happy to wake up and see who’s hanging around. Mick’s rock, I’m roll.”

That tension between discipline and spontaneity has always fueled the Stones. On Exile on Main St., it was amplified by circumstance, producing an album that still divides its creators even as it unites listeners.

For all of Jagger’s reservations, Richards has remained unequivocal in his assessment.

“For a year or two, it was considered a bomb,” he said in 2002. “This was an era where the music industry was full of these pristine sounds. We were going the other way. Yes, it is one of the [Stones’] best.”

More than 50 years later, Exile on Main St. remains a testament to the strange chemistry that powered the Rolling Stones at their peak: one songwriter trying to impose order, the other embracing disorder, and a classic album emerging somewhere between the two.

The saying “Don’t meet your heroes” is one worth heeding, particularly if you’re in the creative arts. The pure feelings we harbor for artists when they’re afar often become tarnished by exposure to the all-too human qualities they exhibit in person, often to extremes.

Producer Rick Rubin writes in his book The Creative Act: A Way of Being, “Many great artists first develop sensitive antennae not to create art but to protect themselves. They have to protect themselves because everything hurts more. They feel everything more deeply.”

Mark Knopfler found out as much when he had a chance to produce his boyhood idol Bob Dylan in 1983. The album he was selected for was Infidels, a record that found Dylan returning to secular music following three albums of songs inspired by his experience as a born-again Christian.

Knopfler had helped out on one of those releases, playing guitar on 1979’s Slow Train Coming, the first disc in Dylan’s “Christian trilogy.” The album arrived shortly after Knopfler’s own ascendency to guitar hero status courtesy of Dire Straits’ 1978 self-titled debut and its hit song, “Sultans of Swing.”

“I was hugely influenced by him about the age of 14 or 15,” Knopfler told Dan Forte in an interview published in Guitar Player’s September 1984 issue. “I heard Bob Dylan from the very beginning, the ‘Hard Rain’ days, and went with him all the way up, and I'm still with him. I still think he's great. Blood on the Tracks is one of my favorite records.”

It’s a remarkable sentiment given that Dylan had put the guitarist through the ringer just one year before, while making Infidels. The former folk icon selected Knopfler to produce him after considering and rejecting David Bowie, Elvis Costello and Frank Zappa. Dylan felt inexperienced in the modern recording studio environment and needed someone who was up to speed with technology. His trio of rather bizarre choices suggests he was also looking to make a sea change in his musical approach and sound.

As it turns out, the songwriter had pretty much sewn things up on his own before Knopfler arrived and recording began at the Power Station in New York City, in April 1983. It was the first inkling Knopfler had that he would not be driving the sessions as much as navigating them, guiding the players through Dylan's temperamental fluctuations.

Dylan's choices for band members dictated Infidel’s strong rhythmic vibe and highly polished style. For the rhythm section he hired bass guitarist Robbie Shakespeare and drummer Sly Dunbar, a tandem better known as Sly & Robbie who found fame both as producers and as Island Records recording artists, where they also produced acts like Black Uhuru, Wailing Souls and Grace Jones.

Dylan had likewise selected former Rolling Stones lead guitarist Mick Taylor, possibly before choosing Sly & Robbie. The two had met the previous summer, and Dylan had begun showing him his new songs months before recording began.

Knopfler, for his part, brought in keyboardist Alan Clark and engineer Neil Dorfsman, who had worked on Dire Straits’ 1982 album, Love Over Gold, and Knopfler’s soundtrack for the movie Local Hero. As one of the album’s musicians, as well as its producer, Knopfler was paired with Taylor, who played slide guitar for much of the record.

The result was the sound of two virtuosos lending their fluid electric guitar chops to what many consider to be one of Dylan’s best albums from his later catalog. Combined with the strongly syncopated rhythms of Sly & Robbie, they helped Infidels achieve a remarkable, and successful, shift in style for Dylan, as exemplified by standout tracks like “License to Kill,” “Neighborhood Bully,” “Sweetheart Like You” and the stunning lead track, “Jokerman.”

“I suggested Billy Gibbons, but I don't think Bob had heard of ZZ Top,” Knopfler told Guitar Player. “It would have been great to have done that with Billy.”

As Knopfler would soon find out, working with his hero was anything but smooth. Dorfsman’s recollections of the sessions are vivid and excruciating.

“I don’t want to use the wrong word, here, but Bob was also a little bit of an agent provocateur, or he even had a little saboteur in him,” Dorfsman told Uncut. “If things were going maybe too well, in somebody else’s definition, he would consciously make an effort to make that stop.”

On one session, Dylan took the tinfoil wrapper from the sandwich he’d had for lunch and began flexing it, accordion style, into the microphone. ”It was just his way of saying, ‘I’m bored with this, I don’t want to do this particular song anymore,’” the engineer recalled.

Dylan also announced one night that he wanted to start recording a Christmas album immediately. “We all laughed, thinking, He’s just messing with us,” Dorfsman said. “But, of course, years later, he subsequently came out with a Christmas record. It was kind of intimidating, challenging, but also hilarious in its own crazy way.”

Tasked with keeping the sessions running smoothly, Knopfler found himself frustrated at how differently it was going from what he had initially imagined.

“I know that it really, really bothered Mark, that song choices were dictated a little bit, and were turning out to be different from the song choices he thought we were going in to do,” Dorfsman said. “I could feel the air just sort of going out of Mark a little bit, when he realized that the traditional role of the producer was not going to be in play on this record... I’m sure it was very frustrating to Mark.”

Knopfler admitted as much — albeit with admirable diplomacy — when speaking with Forte for Guitar Player.

“Was it difficult producing Dylan?”

“Yeah. You see people working in different ways, and it's good for you. You have to learn to adapt to the way different people work.

“Yes, it was strange at times with Bob. One of the great parts about production is that it demonstrates to you that you have to be flexible. Each song has its own secret that's different from another song, and each has its own life. Sometimes it has to be teased out, whereas other times it might come fast. There are no laws about songwriting or producing. It depends on what you're doing, not just who you're doing. You have to be sensitive and flexible, and it's fun.

“I’d say I was more disciplined. But I think Bob is much more disciplined as a writer of lyrics, as a poet. He's an absolute genius. As a singer — absolute genius. But musically, I think it’s a lot more basic. The music just tends to be a vehicle for that poetry.”

Regardless of the trials he endured, Knopfler maintained his love for Dylan’s work on the album, particularly the song “I and I.” He was particularly moved by the song’s first lines: “Been so long since a strange woman has slept in my bed / Look how sweet she sleeps, how free must be her dreams / In another lifetime she must have owned the world or been faithfully wed / To some righteous king who wrote psalms beside moonlit streams.”

“To hear the first lines of ‘I And I,’ that's enough to make anybody who writes songs want to retire,” Knopfler told GP. “It's stunning.

“Bob's musical ability is limited, in terms of being able to play a guitar or a piano,” he explained. “It's rudimentary, but it doesn't affect his variety, his sense of melody, his singing. It's all there. In fact, some of the things he plays on piano while he's singing are lovely, even though they're rudimentary. That all demonstrates the fact that you don't have to be a great technician.

“It's the same old story: If something is played with soul, that's what's important. My favorite records, by and large, aren't wonderful technical achievements, with the exception perhaps of people like Chet Atkins. But generally speaking, all you've got to do is listen to a Howlin' Wolf album. That's just soul.”

New York City’s Met Museum is contesting claims made by former Rolling Stones guitarist Mick Taylor that he owns the “Keithburst” Les Paul that's set to star in its new 500-strong exhibition of vintage guitars.

In July, a source close to Taylor said the guitarist was “mystified as to how his property found its way into the Met’s collection,” having been stolen while the Stones were recording Exile on Main St. in France in 1971. Drug dealers took a total of eight guitars — including a Bigsby-loaded 1959 Gibson Les Paul Standard belonging to Taylor — from the Stones' villa, Nellcôte, after Keith Richards failed to shell out for heroin he'd scored off them during the recording sessions.

Richards himself owned the Les Paul in the mid 1960s and performed with it in the Stones' 1964 appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. He sold it to Taylor in '67 when the guitarist was performing with John Mayall's Bluesbreakers. The Les Paul returned to the Stones' stable when the band hired Taylor to replace founding member Brian Jones in 1969.

Prior to then, the guitar had been photographed with Jimmy Page and used by Eric Clapton, who borrowed it from Richards for an early Cream performance after his own "Beano" Les Paul was stolen in 1966.

Met officials contest Taylor's claims that he owned the electric guitar in their collection, and say the instrument was not among those stolen from Nellcôte.

The museum states that a man named Adrian Miller became the guitar’s owner in 1971, but doesn’t explain how he came to take ownership of it.

It’s believed that Miller ultimately sold the guitar to Heavy Metal Kids founder Cosmo Verrico, who, as per an interview with the New York Times, “can’t recall how Miller acquired the guitar.”

The guitar had first resurfaced at a 2004 Christie’s auction, where it failed to sell. Taylor made no claim of ownership when the guitar went on the block, and it was purchased two years later by Swedish producer and Cardigans guitarist Peter Svensson.

The Les Paul was next owned by Dirk Ziff, who loaned it to the Met in 2019 as part of its Play it Loud exhibition in 2019. It was among the more than 500 golden age guitars Ziff donated to the museum earlier this year in what the Met has called a “landmark gift.” Those instruments are set to be exhibited later this year.

Taylor’s camp is refusing to back down. The New York Times says his manager, Marlies Damming, has formally requested that the museum “make the guitar available so that we can inspect it, and confirm its provenance one way or the other.”

There’s plenty more mileage in this story, it seems, as the mystery of what happened to the guitar endures. Its ties to one of the Stones' most celebrated albums, recorded in Nellcôte’s basement, pepper the story with even greater interest.

“It's got a raw sound quality, and the reason for that is that the basement was very dingy and very damp,” Taylor told the Guardian of the Exile sessions in 2010. “The roof leaked, and there were power failures. We had to deal with all that and go with the flow.”

Musicians would come and go from the sessions. “You didn't know who anybody was,” recalls Rolling Stone journalist Robert Greenfield, who visited the villa to interview Richards. Drug use was rife, even with children present.

A drug bust forced the band to retreat once more, this time to America, where the tapes were reassessed and turned into the resulting double-album Exile on Main St. under the guidance of Stones' lead singer Mick Jagger.

Eric Clapton, Peter Green, Mick Taylor, John McVie and Mick Fleetwood are among the most famous musicians to emerge from Britain's 1960s blues scene. Remarkably, each of them rose from the ranks of John Mayall's Bluesbreakers.

Although he was never as celebrated for his guitar playing as he was for helping to launch the careers of his sidemen, Mayall was an undeniably key figure in the history of rock, blues and even pop — it was he who turned Paul McCartney on to the charms of the Epiphone Casino, a guitar that his fellow Beatles guitarists John Lennon and George Harrison adopted as well.

On the one-year anniversary of his death, on July 22, 2024, Guitar Player celebrates Mayall's life by republishing our classic interview with him from our December 1970 issue.

John Mayall was an elder statesman of English blues who'd been transported to a life in Los Angeles when Guitar Player caught up with him for an interview in the December 1970 issue. By then his group the Bluesbreakers had been the breeding ground for Eric Clapton, Peter Green and Mick Taylor, each of whom was among the most celebrated electric guitar players of the day.

Contributing editor Fred Stuckey, who conducted the interview and wrote it up for the magazine, noted the irony of Mayall’s position in that first year of the new decade.

“In the middle of 1969, while the rock world was spewing out countless copies of Eric Clapton and the Cream’s hard rock sound, Mayall dropped the organ and drums for the harp and guitar and a subdued, low-volume blues. He hired Jon Mark on acoustic guitar and Johnny Almond on flute, tenor and alto. The end product was a much lauded tour, two record albums — The Turning Point and Empty Rooms — and a hit single, ‘Room to Move.’”

Mayall's restrained sound at the start of the decade revealed a more thoughtful approach to the blues and a propensity to continue evolving his music's sound and style. At the time of the interview, he had released USA Union, on which he retained the format and music direction but changed up his band to include Harvey Mandel on guitar, Larry Taylor on bass and Sugar Cane Harris on electric violin.

Stuckey found Mayall a willing interview subject — “choosing his words carefully and pausing to formulate his thoughts” — and noted his modesty:

“By his own admission, Mayall lacks the technical mastery of the guitar shared so uncommonly by the musicians he has worked with in the past. But he plays with the unpretentious, spirited air of a man who knows his idiom. Mayall knows 12-bar blues as well as Renoir knew nineteenth century French impressionism. And Mayall, while not particularly a guitarist, has influenced blues guitarists as much as anyone else in music.” This interview has been edited for brevity.

How have you been?
Just fine. It is sort of strange that Guitar Player would want to interview me, because the magazine is usually reserved for people who play the guitar. I can hold one in my hands and pluck a few notes, but it’s very hit and miss. I have no knowledge of music, you know.

That doesn’t seem to bother your fans. How did you happen to get into the business?

I heard a lot of music through my father’s record collection. He was a guitar player, and most of his records were of people like Django Reinhardt. I started playing the piano and the guitar around the same time, around age 13.

You see, I’ve always had different bands on different occasions long before I went into London to do it with professional interest. I had a band in Manchester, and when the R&B boom hit London, I moved there. I formed a band of London musicians, and it was just the same as usual. You ferret around to see who is available, and if anybody knows anybody who plays such and such an instrument. You get in touch with the musicians, report to the gig, and start playing.

When did you do your first recording?

The first album I made wasn’t released in the United States. They might release it again at some later date, because I’m no longer with that label, and the usual trick is to release everything you’ve got. It was done with Decca about a year before we did the record with Clapton, which is generally thought of to be the first album in the United States.

The one with Decca was a loser. It sold a thousand copies over one year — five hundred the first six months and five hundred and two the second six months. It was a live recording done at a place called Klooks Kleek, which was one of the places where I used to work when I first came to London. It was called John Mayall Plays John Mayall Live at Klooks Kleek, a very ungainly title.

How do you explain a young Englishman’s interest in blues even before it was appreciated on any scale in the country of its origin?

I don’t try to explain that at all. Music knows no geographical boundaries. Records have always been the property of every country. It is through records that you come into contact with music.

Why is it that Europeans, and particularly Englishmen, picked up the blues while the bulk of Americans weren’t even aware of the tradition of that form of American music?

That was always the case, and that is probably why the whole blues revival as such seemed to come from England. We never had the direct contact with the music as it was being played. We only had the records. As a result, Europeans are much more into record collecting and the research behind records. There is just greater interest over there.

This is a big place, and you tend to miss things that are on your own doorstep. French radio in particular has always had a lot of programs on jazz. An illustration is the fact that bluesmen like Memphis Slim have ended up living in France, because they were better received in Europe, and they actually could get work there. American Black blues singers have gone over there to get a name and then bounced back over here.

I remember reading the liner notes of the Crusade album. You made a plea for greater recognition of Black blues artists.

Yeah. That was primarily based upon the situation in England at that time. A great many of the bluesmen were being missed even though there are a lot of blues fans in the country, but individually they felt they were a minority group. They didn’t feel that they were being acknowledged as an audience by radio stations or the papers. They didn’t feel they were a large enough audience to make their point.

That over-exaggerated, inflammatory stuff was put on the back deliberately to get them to write into the musical papers and ask to hear more about “so and so.” They did that and people started to wake up until it reached the point where Melody Maker had a blues page every week.

Do you think that circumstance has dealt a bad deal to American Black bluesmen?

You can say that. If you feel something for the music and your own particular favorites, you do tend to think they have had a bad deal. And a lot of them have.

But the thing I’ve learned is that you really can’t make anybody like someone. It’s a bit disheartening to realize that you can introduce somebody who you think is good, but if people won’t go to the clubs to support them and buy their records, even though they’ve had every chance, there is nothing you can do about it. What it means is that their music, their particular style, doesn’t appeal to as many people as you would like it to. You can’t just decide that people should like a particular guy; they just won’t. Everything really depends on the merits of the guy’s music.

Do you remember when black records were “race” records?

Oh yeah, up until the late '40s. You know the Presley era was really the start of the first black performers coming out — Little Richard, Fats Domino and the rest. You know that thing in part grew out of the Presley thing. He was influenced by Black records and Black artists and he even did their tunes, but people didn’t pay any attention to those records until the Presley thing.

Why is it that sometimes Black blues recordings are less exciting or less appealing than white, rock blues?

Because that in essence is what they do; that is them. There are exceptions like B.B. King, people who have a style of their own. But they themselves can limit their market if they don’t progress — if they don’t break away from doing the same old thing. Some of the Black blues players who have made it, say 10 or 15 years ago, play the same numbers that made them famous and think that doing that will make them a star forever. You have to change because the generations, the people who buy the records, turn over so fast.

Do you credit your survival in the business with the fact that you’ve been willing to change?

Probably. It’s part of my character anyway. I don’t really like to do the same thing all the time. Besides, I don’t really consider myself to be a part of the music industry in certain respects. I don’t go along with the way the music business is —all the jive, the hype, and the commercial aspect of the thing. I don’t regard myself as being a part of that. I can separate myself from it and think how meaningless it is.

The structure of the rock business stinks. But most of the performers in the business seem to like it that way, and fair enough. That’s good for them. I’m not exactly an unknown when I come onstage, but I sort of inwardly treat the whole thing like that — that they haven’t heard me, and I’ve got to prove myself onstage from scratch. If you do make a name, when you walk out onstage you get a lot of appreciation, and half of the time they don’t understand what it is they’re supposed to appreciate.

But you’re supposed to be good, and that’s that. It’s a help in my case because it gives me the confidence to try something new, knowing that it won’t hit them that cold.

How did you run across Eric Clapton?

I hadn’t heard of him before we got together. You see, all bands in London are known to each other, but perhaps not the individuals that play in the bands. The Yardbirds were more popular on the club circuit than I was. They came up with a hit record, "For Your Love," which put them on the front page and the top of the charts. But it wasn’t a blues record that did it. Eric was working with them, and I guess wanted to stick to blues playing. The Yardbirds weren’t blues musicians as far as he was concerned. He got fed up and walked out on a big money-making thing.

Around the same time I heard that Yardbird record, and on the other side was a title called "Got to Hurry," with guitar by Eric Clapton. I was looking for a more satisfying guitarist, so I got his telephone number, and rang him up, and asked him to join. He said yes, and that was it. He was with me for nearly a year.

You never made it to the States with Clapton, right?

Yeah, Peter Green was with me after Eric. The first time I came to this country was with Mick Taylor in 1968. The first time we played Winterland in San Francisco was with Albert King and Jimi Hendrix. The lineup of the band then was the same as on The Diary of a Band and Crusade albums, except without John McVie. What happened was that when we were over here for the first time, the Clapton album [1966's Blues Breakers With Eric Clapton] had just been released. There was a confusing time lapse of over a year. That album was released a year after he had left me, and he was already in the Cream by then. People who had heard of Cream then found about this other one. They bought it and probably became aware of me through Eric.

How do you feel about the Bluesbreakers With Eric Clapton album?

I feel about it like I feel about all the other albums. They’re just on wax or whatever. They’re just a representation of what the band was at the time. I like to listen to all of them. They all have good stuff on them. They show how the musicians played that I worked with, which is what I enjoy, otherwise they wouldn’t have been in the band.

Had Clapton reached a high point during the Bluesbreakers days?
He had reached a high point in comparison to his Yardbirds stuff. But I don’t think it’s anybody’s right to say that he is better or worse than what he did afterwards. It’s a matter of opinion. By the time he was finished with me he wasn’t playing very well at all, because he didn’t feel like it. He wanted to do something else. After a year with me he had developed his style to a point where he wanted to go still further but in another direction. His style was different with me than it was with the Cream, because he was responding to different sounds. He was influenced by different people.

That applies to most every musician. If you put them in with different people, they sound different because they’re playing different. The course of everyone’s development needs that. Otherwise, they go stagnant. I think that it’s really nice that you can get a musician who can be really satisfying in one band, and then he can develop in another band. You can hear another side of him. All good musicians are like that.

What do you think of the Eric Clapton album [Clapton’s 1970 self-titled debut featuring Delaney & Bonnie and Friends]?

To me it sounds like a Delaney and Bonnie album. That’s not to downgrade them; they do some nice things on records. And it’s not really surprising since Blind Faith was working with them. Even though the album is in his name, it’s really not his whole thing coming out. It’s got somebody else’s thing superimposed on it. He’s got a little outfit on the road now. And that’s the first time he’s taken it on his head to throw out all the superstar categories, get a band together, and play gigs for small money just for the sake of playing in small clubs. It is really commendable.

Clapton made the transition to a hard rock blues sound.

At that time Cream was totally original, so it was really an accomplished thing. But then everybody started to copy it, so everything you heard after that was a Cream copy. He couldn’t stand all that, being written about and everything.

Why didn’t you get into a harder sound?
I don’t want to get my ears blasted. I want to hear my musicians; I want to hear what they play. If you can’t hear who you want to listen to onstage, you don’t ask him to turn up; you ask everyone else to turn down. That way you get a listenable level. Just say that I didn’t want to join in. I took the risk and went the other way.

How did you run across Peter Green?

Peter is very funny. By the time Eric left we were getting known; the Clapton cult as such had started. So there were a lot of prospective guitarists. Actually, Eric left twice, so that was sort of a complication. He got the wanderlust. He went off to Greece with some friends of his to play over there. I had to find another guitar player. So I found one [Jeff Kribbett], and we were playing the same clubs, and it was known that Eric wasn’t with us anymore. The new guitarist wasn’t nearly as good, and he didn’t have that extra thing to make him a great guitarist.

Peter, this cockney kid, kept coming down to all the gigs and saying, “Hey, what are you doing with him; I’m much better than he is. Why don’t you let me play guitar for you. Why, he’s no good at all.” He got really nasty about it, so finally, I let him sit in. Peter worked about three gigs with me, and Eric came back. That really made Peter mad; he was just getting into it. Eric stayed another six months, and during that time Peter was in a band with Mick Fleetwood and Rod Stewart.

When Eric left again, I went straight away to Peter. But he didn’t really want to do it, because it had fallen through before. But eventually he did join. He really came in for a lot of bad things. At gigs people would say things like, "Where’s Clapton?" He had to have a lot of guts and determination to stick it out. He knew he wasn’t as good as Clapton, but he could be, you know.

How did Green happen to go his separate way?

The same way that everybody else did. They decide they’ve learned all they could or developed as far as they could in that structure, and it gives them the inspiration to take it further.

At that point, you found your third phenomenal guitarist, Mick Taylor.

Yeah, as it turned out. But at the time it really isn’t like that. You pick somebody you think is okay, and you go play clubs, and nobody pays much attention at first. It’s only a later turn of events that recognizes the talent there. The name comes later, and then it seems phenomenal that you could pick this winner out, you know.

Mick took a lot longer to develop his style than Eric or Peter. Mick is different than the two of them. Peter’s character is very pushy and he’s determined to prove himself. Mick was always a lazy person, not to knock him; he was just an easier-going personality. He took a lot longer to’ reach his peak, but he turned out to be phenomenal. [Like Clapton and Green before him, Taylor played a Les Paul Standard.]

What was it that you listened for when you first heard those three guitar players?

I don’t really know. I just need a guitarist, and I ask someone to do it in all good faith, hoping that they’ll be what I hope they will be. You put them in this loose environment, a very free thing where there are no arrangements and everybody gets to settle in and explore their own thing. Obviously, when you’re playing something different every night and it’s open to do that, then whoever it is is going to develop if he’s got the potential.

Did you direct them at all? Did you tell them what to play?

No more than I direct the musicians with me today. They look upon me as the bandleader, and it’s my responsibility if it goes wrong. They don’t have it hanging over their heads that it’s got to be good. All they’ve got to be concerned with is their own instrument. They’ve got this guy who points to them and says, “Okay, you take it.” And when they get that signal, they can do what they want. Then I’ll nod to someone else, or we will end it, or I’ll start singing.

So I have the control to direct a very loose thing. If something good happens that’s unexpected, or not what I meant, then I let it go that way. It’s really a nice surprise. On the other hand, if something is going on that is a total bore or a disaster, even though the audience might be liking it, then you bring it to a quick finish.

There are no arrangements of the tunes at all?

Not really, no. Sometimes there’s a theme. Mainly they know the key that I call out, and the kind of beat that it is. The tunes are all on a 12-bar structure so there’s no problem there. It’s just a case of how to end it. It doesn’t really matter as long as you play and people hear genuine music coming out. I don’t think audiences are really that much concerned whether it collapses in a disaster or not, as long as they know that you know that it’s a disaster and make the best of it. You know, take it or leave it, and they laugh, and we laugh, and that’s it.

Like in a set the other night, they all came off the stage saying that they thought so and so was supposed to do this and that. What happened was that one of the numbers —a 12-bar sequence —had a middle bit that was all one chord. To get back to the progression again, somebody has to lead it in with the preceding four bars. I was nodding over to Harvey and Larry, and Harvey took it to mean that I wanted him to solo. So it never got out of it, and Harvey’s solo was really good. I thought it was fantastic and we’d keep it going a bit longer because the audience didn’t know it was supposed to end there. Nobody knew because it was good.

Things like that happen all the time. That’s the interesting thing about it. From a situation like that you learn. Something that sounded good you will use the next time where it hadn’t occurred to you before it happened. There are no patterns; it changes all the time.

How committed are you to the blues?

All I’m committed to is playing what I want to play and making sure that it is different. I try to force myself into new areas that are a challenge. Blues is the only thing I know, so it would have to be through that.

Do you have any musical training?

No. I wish I could play musical instruments with a bit of technical ability sometimes. But I don’t think it’s really important. I can’t change it; I couldn’t learn music, you know. It’s the best that I can do, and the spirit is there.

From what you said earlier, you don’t seem to have much faith in the taste of audiences.

Oh, I do. What I said about audiences was that they don’t realize how unrehearsed and how dangerous it all is. They assume that what they’re hearing has been worked on and arranged. But actually it isn’t. I just get on the phone to somebody, and say that we start work on such and such a date, and I’ll see you at the gig. That’s all it is.

What about you as a guitarist? You’ve been playing a Gibson Les Paul. Is that your favorite guitar?

Well, no. I didn’t choose it. The guitar I had before that was a Fender, and it went out of tune. So I told my road manager to get me a new one. So he got me a Les Paul, because he could get one cheap or something. I don’t know anything about those things.

You don’t worry about strings and all that?

Just as long as they’re not rusty. If they’re rusty and you do a slide up the neck, you’ve got a torn finger. I don’t really worry about instruments, because they’re just tools. I’m not proficient enough on them to think that matters. Stick an axe in me hand and I’ll see what I can do with it. It’s as simple as that.

A 1959 Gibson Les Paul Standard stolen from former Rolling Stone Mick Taylor in 1972 has finally turned up — in New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The guitar, which Taylor purchased from Stones guitarist Keith Richards, was used on the group’s 1972 album, Exile on Main St., and was among a number of instruments stolen near the end of the album’s sessions.

It was included in the more than 500 guitars from the golden age of American guitarmaking given to the Met earlier this year in what the museum called a “landmark gift.”

The 1959 sunburst Les Paul, which featured an aftermarket Bigsby tailpiece, was originally played by Richards, who used it during the Rolling Stones’ first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, in 1964. He sold it to Taylor in 1967, when the then 18-year-old guitarist was joining John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers as a replacement for Peter Green, who left to form Fleetwood Mac with former Bluesbreakers John McVie and Mick Fleetwood.

Taylor joined the Stones in 1969 following the group’s firing of founding member Brian Jones. The 1959 Les Paul was among the electric guitars used on their celebrated 1969 tour of America, captured on the 1970 album Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out, where it was played by Richards; Taylor played his 1958 Les Paul Standard.

By the middle of 1971, the Stones were living in France as tax exiles, in a rented villa named Nellcôte, where they recorded Exile on Main St. The 1959 Les Paul was once again on hand for those sessions and was among the instruments stolen from the house one day. The theft was reportedly carried out by drug dealers from Marseille after Richards failed to reimburse them for the heroin he and others were consuming during their stay.

Friends and visitors were able to freely come and go at Nellcôte at any hour of the day, making it easy for thieves to slip into the house. The crime was said to have taken place in broad daylight while the villa’s occupants were watching TV.

“That’s how loose and stupid it was out there,” former Rolling Stones bassist Bill Wyman said of Nellcôte.

In addition to Taylor’s Les Paul, the robbers took numerous guitars belonging to Richards, a bass guitar belonging to Wyman and a saxophone owned by Bobby Keys, a session player who appeared on numerous Stones recordings.

The New York Post first reported on the discovery of Taylor’s guitar in the Met’s collection. The outlet said Taylor’s business manager and partner, Marlies Damming, confirms the Les Paul is the one Richards sold to Taylor. A source told The Post, “Taylor says he never received compensation for the theft and is mystified as to how his property found its way into the Met’s collection.”

The Post said a rep for the Met did not immediately provide a comment, nor did it hear back from Dirk Ziff, the collector who made the donation.

Typical of guitars with clear or stained finishes, the Les Paul's unique woodgrain pattern acts as a fingerprint. In the case of this particular example, dark figuring near the cutaway, along the edge of the top’s lower bout, is a key to its identity.

Beyond its association with Richards and Taylor, the guitar has a storied history. Before Richards sold it in 1967, the Les Paul was played by Jimmy Page, who was photographed with it at a recording session for Stones manager/producer Andrew Loog Oldham.

In 1966, Eric Clapton borrowed it for a July 31 show with his new group Cream after his own Les Paul — heard on the Blues Breakers With Eric Clapton album — was stolen from a church hall where the group had been rehearsing..

In addition to its use on Rolling Stones albums, the 1959 Les Paul made an appearance during the group's infamous performance at the Altamont Free Concert in Tracy, California, on December 6, 1969. The show was plagued by violence perpetrated by the Hells Angels, resulting in the murder of concertgoer Meredith Hunter.

Mick Taylor left the Rolling Stones in 1975 and was replaced by Ronnie Wood, the third guitarist to play opposite Richards in the band.

Richards has commented on the comfort he feels performing with Wood, likening it to the interplay he enjoyed with founding guitarist Jones, where each player could easily move between rhythm and lead without much thought. Richards told Guitar Player in 1983 that while Taylor was a talented guitarist, he never connected with him in the same way.

“It was much harder to get a Rolling Stones sound with Mick Taylor,” he explained. “It was much more lead and rhythm, one way or the other. As fabulous as he is as a lead guitarist, he wasn't as great as a rhythm player. So we ended up taking roles.

“When Brian and I started, it was never like that. It's much easier than with Brian, personally, but also with Ron, the basic way we play is much more similar.

“And this isn't in any way to knock Mick. I mean, he's a fantastic guitar player. Even if he couldn't play shit, I'd love the guy. But chemically we didn't have that flexibility in the band. It was, ‘You do this, and I'll do that, and never the twain shall meet.’”

Taylor’s Les Paul is among just a few stolen guitars to resurface years after they disappeared. In 2021, an internet sleuth helped Randy Bachman find his Gretsch 6120 — famously used on Guess Who tracks like “Undun” and Bachman-Turner Overdrive hits like “Takin' Care of Business” — which had been stolen in 1976. Paul McCartney’s first Höfner bass was recovered in 2024 more than 50 years after it disappeared from a van parked in London’s Notting Hill neighborhood.

Keith Richards has shared guitar duties in the Rolling Stones throughout his more than 60 years with the group. But as he revealed to Guitar Player, one guitarist never felt to him like a comfortable fit.

From the very start, the Rolling Stones’ sound was built around two guitarists: Richards and Brian Jones. Together, they shared lead and rhythm work: Richards employing electric guitar licks and lines learned from Chuck Berry records, while Jones played slide guitar — a rarity among British guitarists at that time — and wove his rhythm work around Richards’ melodic fills.

By 1969, Jones was kicked out the group after his drug use made him unreliable and a pair of drug arrests in England made it unlikely he could perform in America for the group's 1969 U.S tour. His replacement was Mick Taylor, a young Les Paul–toting electric blues guitarist who made a name for himself with John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers after Peter Green departed to form Fleetwood Mac in 1967.

Taylor was a powerful addition to the Stones, bringing fluid blues licks and a muscular electric guitar tone that stood in stark contrast to Richards’ riffier rock-and-roll style. For many, this marked the start of the Stones’ greatest era, when they released landmark albums like Sticky Fingers, Exile on Main St., Goat’s Head Soup and It’s Only Rock and Roll.

But perhaps the best example of the Richards–Taylor tandem can be heard on the group’s 1970 live album, Get Yer Ya’s-Ya’s Out, where the guitarists trade off solos song by song, panned left (Taylor) and right (Richards), giving listeners a chance to hear each in his best element, particularly on “Sympathy for the Devil.”

But by 1975, Taylor was gone, replaced by Ron Wood, who remains Richards’ sidekick to this day. While some lamented Taylor’s absence, Richards is not among them. As he told Guitar Player in our April 1983 issue, he and Taylor were not the ideal team when it came to the Stones’ classic sound.

“It was much harder to get a Rolling Stones sound with Mick Taylor,” he explained. “It was much more lead and rhythm, one way or the other.

“As fabulous as he is as a lead guitarist, he wasn't as great as a rhythm player. So we ended up taking roles.

“When Brian and I started, it was never like that. It's much easier than with Brian, personally, but also with Ron, the basic way we play is much more similar.

“And this isn't in any way to knock Mick. I mean, he's a fantastic guitar player. Even if he couldn't play shit, I'd love the guy.

“But chemically we didn't have that flexibility in the band. It was, ‘You do this, and I'll do that, and never the twain shall meet.’”

On the other hand, Richards explained, Wood was a natural for the Stones. No rehearsals or changes of any kind were needed when he joined the band in 1975.

“No, that was the beauty of it. 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.”

Richards said the interplay between them was so easy that one would naturally fill in for the other.

“If he drops a cigarette I'll play his bit, and we'll realize later that I've covered for him or he's covered for me,” Richards said.

“And you think at the time, Oh, my God, what a gap, but when you listen to the tape, you find that it's been fixed right there at the moment, in a very unthought-about way. We pick it up and cover each other so that sometimes you can't really tell who's playing.”

Richards says that sort of easy interaction has a lot to do with his and Woody’s long partnership and the Stones’ continued longevity.

“A lick on a record — it doesn't matter who played it. All that matters is how it fits. The chemistry to work together like that has to be there. You have to work on it. Always. Figure out what to do with it.

“But basically it's not an intellectual thing you can think up and just put there. It has to be there. You have to find it.”

Guitarist Harvey Mandel wants credit for helping to bring two-handed tapping into rock guitar’s repertoire. Not only does he claim to have been performing the technique on electric guitar several years before Eddie Van Halen rose to prominence, but he has two well-known guitarists to back him up.

Ritchie Blackmore told Guitar World’s Mordechai Kleidermacher way back in 1991 that he’d first witnessed two-handed tapping when he saw Mandel perform in the late 1960s.

“The first person I saw doing that hammer-on stuff was Harvey Mandel, at the Whisky A Go-Go in '68," said Blackmore, who told Guitar Player in 2018 how he ended up with the world's loudest Marshall amplifier. "I thought, What the hell is he doing? It was so funny.” Blackmore claimed the sight was so odd that “even the audience stopped dancing. Obviously, Eddie Van Halen must have picked up a few of those things.”

More recently, in an interview with Rocket circa 2009, George Lynch claimed he and Eddie Van Halen were together when they saw Mandel perform the technique. “We both witnessed Harvey Mandel from Canned Heat do a neoclassic tapping thing at a club called the Starwood in Hollywood back in the 70’s,” Lynch revealed.

In a new interview with Guitar World, Mandel makes it clear he doesn’t want to be overlooked for his contribution.

“I was actually doing it way before Van Halen and way before almost everyone else did after him,” he says. “People heard my stuff and thought I was a jazz player!”

As Mandel explains, he picked up the two-handed tapping technique in the late ‘60s from Randy Resnick, his co-guitarist in the American blues-rock group the Pure Food and Drug Act.

“He did it in a very melodic but simple way,” Mandel says of Resnick, adding that he was able to figure out the technique on his own after watching Resnick.

“Unfortunately, when I was doing the tapping, I wasn’t with a known band,” Mandel says, “as opposed to Van Halen, who had a hit record, so he did it, and the world got to hear it. When I did it, the audience that got to hear me do it was much more limited.”

While Ace Frehley has claimed Van Halen took the concept from him, Mandel believes the guitarist was inspired to perform two-handed tapping after seeing him do it at the Starwood.

“I was playing at the Whisky and the Starwood, and George Lynch, Van Halen and a couple of different people saw me doing it,” he says. “Next thing I know, he’s using it all the time, and he took it off into his own world.”

Mandel makes it clear that he has no beef with Van Halen. “He played great; I can’t say anything bad about Van Halen,” he explains. “He was a great player! But he was more of a gymnastic player.

“I still did the fast tapping and everything, but I tried to make it more musical, and parts of the melodies of the songs and stuff, as opposed to just going crazy and showing off with it.”

For a good listen to Mandel's tapping in action, check out his 1973 album Shangrenade. "Every song, every note of guitar you’re hearing on that record, except for the rhythm playing, I’m doing finger tapping," Mandel told Guitar Player in an excellent 2022 interview with Bill Milkowski for his most recent album, Who's Calling. "All those melodies, everything I did is total finger-tap style. And everything wasn’t about doing the real fast thing like Eddie Van Halen did. It’s more slow melodies, some soloing, but still going back and forth from one hand to the other, totally tapping. It’s all fingertips."

As for Van Halen, he told Guitar World in 2008 that he got the idea from Jimmy Page. "I think I got the idea of tapping watching him do his ‘Heartbreaker’ solo back in 1971,” he told the magazine. “He was doing a pull-off to an open string and I thought… I can do that, but what if I use my finger as the nut and move it around?"

The origins of two-handed tapping on guitar go back well before Mandel or his bandmate Resnick. As just a few examples, pickup designer Harry DeArmond used the technique to demonstrate his pickups’ sensitivity, and his friend Jimmie Webster not only put it to use but also described it in his 1952 guitar instruction book Touch Method for Electric and Amplified Spanish Guitar. Barney Kessel employed it as well, as did Italian guitarist Vittorio Camardese, who demonstrated two-handed tapping in 1965 on an Italian television show.

Mandel has had quite a diverse career, having performed with Charlie Musselwhite, Graham Bond and John Mayall, among others. He began working with Canned Heat in 1969 and played with the group at Woodstock that year.

Following Mick Taylor’s departure from the Rolling Stones, Mandel was invited to perform on their 1976 album Black and Blue. As he tells Guitar World in his new interview, he believes he would have been invited to join the group were it not for Keith Richards’ friendship with Ronnie Wood, who became — and remains — Keef’s co-guitarist.

This interview with the late Andy Johns was originally published in the May 2010 issue of Guitar Player.

By 1972, producer/engineer Andy Johns already had a hall of fame caliber resume, having worked with Free, Blind Faith, Jethro Tull, Led Zeppelin, and many others. But it was then that he began work on a record that would come to be regarded as a milestone for everyone involved, the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main St. Now, with the reissue of Exile dominating the music biz, Johns looks back on the wild times of making that record.

What were some of the guitar rigs that Keith and Mick Taylor used?

“The majority of the time in the south of France they had these Ampegs that were very high wattage, I remember someone saying they were 300 watts, which seemed crazy to me because they were 2x12 combo amps, but they were jolly loud. I thought they were fantastic and I’ve never seen them anywhere else. At the time, the Stones had an endorsement with Ampeg. Some of the tracks on Exile were left over from previous sessions and those would have Fender Twins. 

“Stop Breaking Down was a Fender Twin for both of them. 80 percent was the Ampeg setup. Keith had a very nice Tele and Mick would play a Gibson ES-335 and a Les Paul. He also had an Epiphone; I guess it was a Casino. Then we had a week off when Bianca Jagger was having a baby and when we got back all the guitars had been stolen – every last one. So Stu [Rolling Stones pianist Ian Stewart] went out and got some more. So, take a song like Rocks Off; the two rhythm guitars are a ’55 or ’56 Telecaster – a very good sound.”

What do you recall about the tracking the guitars on Tumbling Dice? How did those sessions go?

“The recording for Tumbling Dice went on for about two weeks. I had 40 or 50 reels of tape. Trying to get everyone in the same room at the same time in a good mood was very tough. The arrangement was being changed around a lot. It was tough to get a groove on that one and it was tried in various different formats. 

“I remember Keith sitting in his chair playing the refrain over and over again for two or three hours without moving. That was in the afternoon before anybody got there. He was trying to lock in the hypnotic part of the vibe. Keith was relentless. You could tell when you had a great take but it was Keith who had to say, ‘Yeah, that’s it.‘ He was sort of running the music.

“In the end we got a very good take up until the breakdown. Charlie had a bit of a mental block about the breakdown and outro section, so we did an edit section and Jimmy Miller played the ending. I suggested that we double track the drums. Charlie said, ‘Well I’ve never done that before.‘ I said, ‘Let’s just give it a shot to thicken it up.‘ So he played the double-tracked drums up until the breakdown and then Jimmy Miller doubled his drums in the end. That one went on and on and on. 

“I think Rocks Off took a bit of time, too. It wasn’t so much that we’d work for 12 hours and not have anything to show for it. It was more about getting everyone in the room at the same time willing to work without any distractions.”

What tune was the easiest to record from a guitar standpoint?

“Probably All Down the Line. Happy was also pretty easy. I think we got that the first day.”

What can you say about the interplay between Mick Taylor and Keith Richards?

“Mick would play the top lines. Keith would write the songs most of the time, Mick [Jagger] would come up with the lyrics and melody, and Mick Taylor would just play around whatever they came up with. There was a little bit of tension from time to time. I remember once, Keith said, ‘You play too fucking loud. I can’t work with you in the room right now,’ which is a great line coming from Keith. That was just band politics that evening.

“The thing that astonished me about Mick Taylor is that he would come up with something different every take and it was usually just faultless. Intonation on slide can be a little tough, but he would jump two, three octaves, and the note was always spot on and his vibrato was excellent. I had a very joyous time listening to him. 

“Mick had the technique of having a bottleneck on his little finger and then he would play chords with the other three fingers. He would play live on everything – he didn’t do overdubs. He would play exceptionally well on every take. And Keith, well, he came up with those magical rhythm parts that the songs were based upon.”

What was it like when they were all playing together?

“In those days you knew you weren’t going to get anything good until Keith started leaning over and looking at Charlie and then Bill got up out of his chair. They could play really shabby. Then, over the course of five minutes, it would turn from fairly shabby into magic. It was my job to capture those magic moments.”

What involvement have you had with the Exile reissues?

“I did a voice over on the DVD part of the package. I’ve done tons of interviews. But I haven’t had any musical involvement. I talked to Keith about the reissue a couple of months ago. I said, ‘Shit man, I should be doing that because I know more about it than anyone.’ I said, ‘I should send you the new Steve Miller that I’m working on, it’s Chicago blues.’ He said, ‘You send me yours and I’ll send you mine,’ and of course I sent it to him and he never sent me anything. So they didn’t let me put my hands on it, which is a drag.

“I think it has something to do with me turning Mick Jagger down years ago. I had shaken hands with Les Dudek on a Wednesday. We were in the workshop at the old Record Plant. Les asked me to do his record and I said yes and he said let’s shake on it, so we did. The next day Mick calls and asks if I want to come to Paris to do an album. I said, ‘Fuck, of course I do but I can’t. I shook hands with somebody yesterday.’

“I should have just called Les Dudek and said, ‘Listen mate, you’re going to have to wait,’ but I was trying to be honorable. And Mick said, ‘I don’t understand.’ I don’t think he’s ever forgiven me for that.”

Did you have any sense at the time that Exile would come to be regarded as such an important album?

“I knew that from my end it was the most important thing that I had ever worked on, and I had worked on Sticky Fingers, and worked with George Harrison, Paul McCartney, Jethro Tull, Free, Clapton, and, of course, Led Zeppelin. But for me this was the most important project that had come down the pike and I was fixated on it.

“I think I knew more about what was on the tapes than anybody else because I was concentrating so hard. I knew what all the details were and that’s why in the end Mick said, ‘Here are the tapes, go mix the bloody thing. You’ve got three days. Goodbye.’ Everyone else was sick of the damn thing.

“It was as important a part of my life as anything had been. It was like going to school in a way because I learned about perseverance. I also learned that there was another way to live, beyond the norm as it were, because there was some behavior that was… I don’t know. It was all good fun.

“It was an epic production. It went on for a very long time. I’d never worked in that fashion before, living in the south of France on the Mediterranean with the Rolling Stones. And at that time you’ve got to remember that the Beatles had broken up and the Beach Boys weren’t doing much – the Rolling Stones were the center of the bloody universe for rock and roll. And rock and roll back then meant a little bit more than it does now. 

“It had social significance, breaking down the establishment and all that. It represented the way a generation felt about things. It had more meaning than it does now. Now it’s just, ‘Oh I like that music, I’ll buy it or download it.’ 

“Back then it was almost like a bloody religion and the Stones were at the center of everything. So if you could put yourself in my shoes, you’re at the center of the universe, you’re working with the Stones in the south of France, you’re working at Keith Richards' house, you’re getting paid really well, and you’re only 21 so you have your youth, and the music is just fabulous. What is there to complain about?”

On this day, in 1964, the Rolling Stones made their historical debut on The Ed Sullivan Show. The band kicked off their appearance on live national television to rapturous applause with a rendition of Chuck Berry’s Around and Around (originally the flip side to his 1958 Johnny B. Goode single).

Later in the show, the Stones performed their Time Is On My Side single. It was already creeping up the Billboard Hot 100 charts by the time the band appeared. It eventually peaked at number 6 the following month. It was the Stones' first hit on American soil as the British Invasion got underway following the Beatles’ record-breaking appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show earlier in February that year (when an estimated 73 million Americans tuned in to watch). 

As is obvious from the video, the audience struggles to contain themselves and Sullivan has to ask for quiet several times when trying to introduce them. In fact, CBS got many complaints after the broadcast and Ed Sullivan is said to have declared: “I promise you they’ll never be back on our show. It took me 17 years to build this show and I’m not going to have it destroyed in a matter of weeks.” 

The Stones’ manager tried to change Sullivan’s mind, but Ed wrote back before he would even consider booking them again, "I would like to learn from you, whether your young men have reformed in the matter of dress and shampoo.” 

But for guitar players, The Rolling Stones’ appearance is most notable for Keith Richards’ use of a 1959 Gibson Les Paul Standard. According to Gibson’s Head of Product Development, Mat Koehler, this was “the shot heard around the world,” that eventually brought the now iconic ‘Burst to the fore of the electric guitar world.

GP spoke to Richard Henry, a UK-based guitar dealer who has traded numerous ‘Bursts over the years, including the famous ‘Greeny’ Les Paul Standard. Now owned by Metallica’s Kirk Hammett the same guitar once belonged to guitar heroes Peter Green and Gary Moore.

He has also crossed paths with the infamous ‘Keith ‘Burst’ – a guitar that has passed through the hands of many a guitar legend over the decades…

Speaking of Richards’ old axe Henry told us: “The previous owner was a guy called John Bowen, who traded it in at Selmers [music store in London]. Keith bought it from there and famously used it on The Ed Sullivan Show in ’64.

“Later [in 1966] Clapton used it at the Windsor Jazz and Blues Festival. Jimmy Page also used it in the studio. Ian Stewart, the Stones’ Road Manager, sold it to Mick Taylor who used it with the Bluesbreakers. Taylor brought it back into the Stones’ camp when he joined the band. There’s footage of him playing it at Hyde Park [in 1969.]

The rumors are it either got stolen at the Marquee [Club in London], or it got stolen in France at Villa Nellcôte. It then eventually ended up in the hands of Cosmo Verrico from the Heavy Metal Kids. He had it for a short while and then sold it to [UFO and Whitesnake guitarist] Bernie Marsden.

“Bernie had it for about a week and flipped it. Later it went to a guy called Mike Jopp who owned it for many years. Dave Brewis at Rock Stars Guitars sold it for Mike to an American investor. I think it currently resides in a private collection in New York.

“Someone asked me what I thought was the most historically important ‘Burst. I said it’s not Jimmy Page’s. It’s not Peter Green’s [Greeny]. It’s not Mike Bloomfield’s. It’s not Eric Clapton’s. And it’s not Jeff Beck’s. It’s Keith Richards’ because he was the first pop star to use a ‘Burst.”

Elsewhere on the show, Brian Jones plays a prototype Vox MK III “Teardrop” guitar  and Bill Wyman plays his trusty Framus Star Bass. 

Keith Richards is interviewed in the current issue of Guitar Player, onsale now and available to buy here.

The following appeared in the November 2020 issue of Guitar Player.

Mick Taylor’s 1958 Les Paul Standard isn’t the most famous example of that model, but as the ’Burst that Charlie Watts is holding aloft on the cover of Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out!, it’s one of the most seen.

Taylor revealed that the guitar had an aftermarket Bigsby B7 vibrato when he purchased it, but he fitted the guitar with a factory-stock nickel-plated stop tailpiece, which is how it appeared during his tenure in the Rolling Stones, from 1969 to 1974.

The guitar had its original Kluson keystone tuners at the time, but these were later changed out for Grovers.

As it happens, that isn’t the only modification Taylor made. Apparently, he swapped out its double-black PAF pickups at some point.

The guitar, which is now one of many Stones guitars in the collection of Hard Rock International, has been thoroughly inspected by Hard Rock guitar tech Kip Elder, who confirms the pickups currently in the guitar are not original.

“We got a 10.2k-ohm reading for the bridge pickup, which typically registers about 8.5k,” he told VintageGuitar.com.

The guitar was frequently confused with the 1959 Keith ’Burst over the years, but Elder confirms that the first digit of its serial number is an eight.

Taylor played the guitar at the Stones’ Altamont Speedway concert on December 6 and can be seen performing with it in a video for “Love in Vain,” from the group’s 1972 tour. (It can easily be identified by the screw holes left from the Bigsby.)

Taylor still owned the guitar when Guitar Player interviewed him in the early 1980s, but Jeff Nolan, Hard Rock’s director of memorabilia, says the company purchased it from him around that time.

The finish has faded to a beautiful lemon ’burst since the guitar’s heyday, but as Nolan attests, “It’s an absolutely gorgeous example. I see so many ’Bursts in my job that I wanted to dislike this guitar. But it’s so, so good.

“It’s incredibly resonant, and the action is still perfect, even after all these years of not being in use.”

Keith Richards may not be renowned for the liquid blues improvisations that so many Les Paul players can boast, but he was unquestionably the first British rock star to embrace the then-discontinued Gibson solidbody.

Richards was first seen using his ’Burst in 1964 on the Rolling Stones’ second U.S. tour.

More Les Pauls were added to his arsenal during the decade, only to be replaced with Telecasters in the 1970s, once he was fully into his bluesier style.

Richards bought this 1959 ’Burst second-hand in London, in the latter part of August 1964. “It was my first touch with a really great, classic rock and roll electric guitar, so I fell in love with them for a while,” he told Guitar magazine in 1997.

The original owner, John Bowen, purchased the guitar – serial number 93182 – new in 1961 and had it fitted with an aftermarket Bigsby vibrato.

The guitar is easily identified by dark figuring near the cutaway on the top’s lower bout.

Jimmy Page was photographed with the guitar at a session for Stones manager/producer Andrew Loog Oldham, either checking it out or using it for the recording.

Likewise, Eric Clapton borrowed the ’Burst when Cream played at the 1966 Windsor Jazz & Blues Festival.

These appearances led some to speculate, erroneously, that the guitar had been owned by all three men.

Richards parted with the ’Burst in 1967, when he sold it to future Stones guitarist Mick Taylor, then performing with John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers.

The guitar re-entered the Stones’ world in 1969 when Taylor joined up, and it appeared on the 1969 American tour, where it was used for slide work, tuned to open G for “Honky Tonk Women” and open D for “Street Fighting Man.”

The guitar was among the haul of instruments stolen during the making of the Rolling Stones' 1972 album, Exile on Main St. Thieves took several guitars owned by Richards, Taylor and bassist Bill Wyman after Richards failed to pay drug dealers for the heroin being consumed at Nellcôte, the French villa where Exile was recorded.

The New York Post reported in July 2025 that the guitar has shown up in a collection of vintage guitars gifted to New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art in May 2025.

I find it hard to imagine 1972 was 50 years ago.

This is in large part due to the fact that I was born on June 5th of that monumental leap year. What? You didn’t know 1972 is the longest year by the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) standard? With the added day, plus two seconds, the six-string purveyors of the day took full advantage of the extra time on both electric guitars and acoustic guitars.

As this new decade was still revving its engines, rock and roll was expanding in 1972. With the guitar at the forefront, there was glam rock, shock rock, prog rock, southern rock and even jazz rock. What’s more, there was the further development of soft rock and heavy metal alongside the burgeoning reggae and country rock genres.

Also on the rise was a reverence for the album format. Thanks to my older brother Louis and his well-fortified stereo system, our Jersey Shore home was consistently shaking at the rafters with all the rock 1972 had to offer. I soaked it all in from my very beginnings.

All things considered, it’s safe to say I was born into this collection of essential guitar moments from 1972.

Let There Be Rock

By the second year of the tumultuous 1970s, the world of rock had expanded into subsets that celebrated everything from platform shoes and glitter to fake blood and guillotines, and even included electrified southern-fried country and blues.

This trifecta of disparate approaches garnered a worthy collection of guitar moments, starting with David Bowie’s fab The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars. 

Bowie’s brilliance is matched by the prodigious playing of guitarist Mick Ronson.

Ex. 1 shows something similar to Ronson’s opening salvo in “Ziggy Stardust,” where open chords and arpeggiation patterns combine to make the prototypical glam-rock arena riff.

Shifting to the dark side, Ex. 2 takes its cue from the title track of Alice Cooper’s School’s Out, highlighting the vibe of the incendiary E Dorian riff played by shock-rock stalwarts Glen Buxton and Michael Bruce.

Completing the trio is an iteration of the Am riff of “One Way Out” (Ex. 3), from the Allman Brothers Band’s quintessential southern rock album Eat a Peach, courtesy of Duane Allman and Dickey Betts.

All three original tunes are as celebrated today as they were in 1972, from arenas to local watering holes.

Opening Lines

The ’70s was the decade of Detroit Iron, when nearly everyone drove a hot rod. If they weren’t cranking an eight-track, they were listening to an FM rock station, which was in the beginning stages of a transformation to the album-oriented rock (AOR) format.

Nothing had you leaning over to pump up the volume faster than a great guitar intro. Elliott Randall’s opening A major pentatonic licks in the Steely Dan FM staple “Reelin’ In the Years,” from Can’t Buy a Thrill, was a top contender.

Ex. 4 is inspired by and loosely based on this classic intro solo.

Ex. 5 brings to mind the dreamy relative major and minor arpeggios and modulating bends immortalized in that track.

Another classic is the unforgettable opening of the Bowie-penned glam-rock anthem “All the Young Dudes,” recorded by Mott the Hoople.

These are just two of the many songs that reeled you in from the first notes and entertained every type of rock apostle, both young and old, as they cruised America’s highways.

Hammer of the Gods

Two of the three bands considered the creators of heavy metal released records in 1972. With Led Zeppelin between Led Zeppelin IV and Houses of the Holy, the void was filled by Black Sabbath’s Vol. 4 and Deep Purple’s Machine Head.

Ex. 6 closely illustrates what Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi laid down on Vol.4’s “Snowblind,” with his signature power chording and speaker-melting gain in check.

As for Deep Purple’s Ritchie Blackmore, he was in his creative prime at the time that the group dropped its magnum opus, Machine Head. Much like Zep’s fourth outing, Machine Head featured timeless tunes that have proven their longevity to this day, including the venerable “Smoke on the Water.”

While the opening riff has ascended into a ubiquitity for rock guitarists the world over, Ritchie’s fiery solo over a power chord backdrop in the key of G minor showcases such signature Blackmore-isms as pre- (or “ghost”) bends, adjacent-string rolls and 16th-note linear flurries.

This is all on display in Ex. 7, which presents a reworking of some key licks from this solo.

Though in its infancy at the time, metal began with these pioneering bands and with albums and moments like these.

Everyone is Experienced

But 1972 wasn’t all about high-gain licks and riffs. The influence of Jimi Hendrix, who died in 1970, was felt across the guitar pantheon. Indicative of the time were a pair of low-gain opening riffs from two different worlds but in no less capable hands.

Ex. 8 is patterned after a moment from one of prog rock’s most endearing releases, Close to the Edge, where perpetual ambassador Steve Howe threw down biting Hendrix-like chordal comping ideas in the key of E minor at the top of “Siberian Khatru.”

Ex. 9 offers a taste of the kind of dynamic-duo guitar work of the Doobie Brothers’ Tom Johnston and Patrick Simmons on the endearing hit “Listen To the Music,” a moment that still motivates muscle-car drivers of yore to turn up the volume at the first hammer-on into that E/G# triad.

Groove Collective

But cleaner tones and booty-shaking grooves were also heard in 1972, thanks to the impact of a Jamaican film called The Harder They Come, which starred musician Jimmy Cliff. While the movie was released to much fanfare (on the very same day I started my journey to 50), it was the film’s soundtrack that made history, as it’s widely regarded as the world’s introduction to reggae.

Ex. 10 is inspired by the infectious opening groove heard in the Cliff classic “You Can Get It If You Really Want,” which features hallmark reggae rhythm guitar approaches with its tightly voiced top-string triads, anchored to the upbeat and treated with some staccato phrasing.

Back on the mainland, James Brown and Al Green were creating some of their most significant works. The Godfather of Soul put Hearlon “Cheese” Martin’s lock-tight precision into the limelight with “Get On the Good Foot” from the album of the same name.

An homage to Martin’s hypnotic single-note staccato phrasing is paid in Ex. 11.

Adding to the title tracks explored, the beloved gem from Al Green’s Let’s Stay Together features the sultry guitar of work of Mabon “Teenie” Hodges perfectly nested between Green’s enthralling vocal performance.

Looking at Ex. 12 reveals a remodeling of four bars from this treasured work.

Unplugged

Although the era of the chimerical Les Paul/Marshall monster had fully arrived by 1972, it didn’t quell the acoustic guitar’s substantial presence, which had solidified in the 1960s.

In fact, acoustic guitars were behind some of the most successful single releases of the year, including Paul Simon’s controversial “Me and Julio Down By the Schoolyard,” America’s mesmerizing “Ventura Highway” and soft-rock troubadours Seals and Crofts’ irresistible “Summer Breeze.”

The main themes of all three songs have been reinterpreted in Examples 13–15.

Aside from Simon’s syncopated voice-led triads, the other two riffs make ample use of the acoustic guitar’s penchant for open strings.

Not to be outdone by his American counterparts, Canadian-born Neil Young released the best-selling record of the year with Harvest, which boasted the number one hit “Heart of Gold.”

A rendition of the perfectly sparse presentation of Em and D chords is found in Ex. 16.

Outro

With countless guitar moments still to gush over, it’s important to note that 1972 was also brimming with superbly constructed albums that had massive impact and further bolstered the emerging AOR radio format.

The year delivered classics that featured now-mythic guitarist pairings, including the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main St. (Keith Richards and Mick Taylor), Jethro Tull’s Thick As a Brick (Martin Barre and Ian Anderson), Genesis’s Foxtrot (Steve Hackett and Mike Rutherford), and the Eagles’ self-titled debut (Bernie Leadon and Glenn Frey), which helped bring country rock to prominence.

Before the year was out, Deep Purple went on to release the Made in Japan live album, and Stevie Wonder released his own pair with Music of My Mind and the seminal Talking Book.

The latter gave the world the funk-rock classic “Superstition,” which features a punchy Hohner Clavinet keyboard riff that has been appropriated by guitarists in countless cover bands.

If all these moments and genre births are any indication of the benefits to an augmented leap year, I say bring on the next one UTC.

On his sixth studio album, 2020 Visions, maverick guitarist Stephen Dale Petit has created a blues record unlike any other.

For one thing, it’s a concept record. For another, it presents a dystopian view of society, America in particular, with themes of factionalism, tribalism and alienation, all through the lens of someone gazing into the not-too-distant future.

In this case, that someone is an expat (Petit moved to England from California in the mid ’80s) who penned much of the material back in 2017 but is only now seeing his album – and a good many of his prescient predictions – become a reality.

 “I guess it’s pre-dystopian, to make up my own term,” Petit says in a distinct British accent.

“Having not lived in America for so long, I’m kind of imagining what it must be like for a parent who arrives home after a trip. You walk into the house and the kids are going crazy, the rooms are all torn apart, and you go, ‘What have you done to the place?’ The son says, ‘She did it,’ and the daughter says, ‘He did it.’

“That’s my feeling about the polarization in America and how savage and how indoctrinated ideologically everything seems to be.”

Petit traveled to Nashville and cut 2020 Visions with producer Vance Powell back in 2017, and if various, unforeseen circumstances had not upended his plans, he would have released the album the following year.

A cancer diagnosis – Stage 4, as it turned out – threw his world into a tailspin, and for much of 2018 he had to curtail most professional activities while dealing with treatment.

“It was a chemo and radiation regime every day for two months,” he says. “Brutal stuff. I’m all clear now, thank goodness, but it takes a while for you to get back up to speed.

“I did a couple of shows during that time, and it was strange, because I experienced this sort of artificial energy while performing, almost like a weird caffeine kick or something. But that drops off and your body’s completely reeling. Basically, it put me out of action for a good year.”

Once his doctors gave him the go-ahead to proceed with his normal life and career, Petit was set to release the album in late March of 2020 when the COVID pandemic threw a wrench into that idea.

A tour to support the album was nixed, and while he waited for lockdown to be lifted, he decided to release the record digitally.

“We finally got physical copies out in the fall of 2020, once brick-and-mortar stores began to open up again,” he explains.

“The whole thing was this crazy double-whammy. First I had my own health issues to sort out, and then this global pandemic knocked out the rest of the world. In a way, the second thing wasn’t so hard on me because of what I’d just gone through, but it was a really insane time.”

He laughs. “Is this where I say, ‘All’s well that ends well?’”

Another thing that distinguishes 2020 Visions from most other blues albums is its sound, a unique and revolutionary sonic approach that owes as much to art rock, emo, punk, metal and even jam bands as it does to traditional blues.

On the nine-minute space-age epic “The Fall of America,” Petit exorcises demons as he explores every possible shattering cry and wail his guitar can emit.

In an equally virtuoso performance on another extended track, “Zombie Train,” he goes for broke, firing off supersonic, freak-out solos and shards of psychedelic lines while leading his ace band – bassist Sophie Lord and drummer Jack Greenwood – on a slinky, cosmic and soul-drenched jam journey.

“Sputnik Days,” co-written with his legendary friend (and quasi-mentor) Mick Taylor, is a sublime yet exhilarating dream that offers Petit a showcase for celebrating the lyrical power of bent notes and harmonics.

And those are just some of the highlights. There’s also incendiary re-workings of classics like “Steppin’ Out” and “Long Tall Shorty,” on which the guitarist goes full throttle, summoning the spirits of blues greats while fearlessly claiming the songs as his own.

“Blues is the essence of what I do, but I don’t let it dictate where I can go,” Petit notes. “I just let my instinct guide me. Otherwise, I’m just re-creating what’s been done before, and what’s the point of that?

“It’s like people doing ‘Caldonia,’ which is a great song that’s been a blues standard for 50 years. On any given day, there’s a hundred bands playing it, and I think, Why would they do that, especially if they’re not going to do something new with it?

“I try to take various essences, flavors, colors and styles, but I want to bring them into the present. I want to sound like today. There’s enough people stuck in yesterday, and that’s just not for me.”

As a teenager in California, you hung out with some early metal stars of the day, including Randy Rhoads and George Lynch. Were you much of a shredder?

Not really, no. I more or less decided that I would never develop those kinds of chops. For a good while, I sat on my parents’ sofa, playing my guitar and pondering.

I’d just seen B.B. King – I even got a chance to meet him. There was something about the blues that had touched me deeply, because it’s a cry of the soul. It felt so authentic, especially when compared to the phoniness that was around at the time.

I considered all that stuff out of L.A. contaminated by the ethos of Hollywood, and I didn’t want to be a part of it. On top of that, George Lynch tried to steal my girlfriend.

Oh, well, that would sure turn you off metal.

[laughs] It didn’t help. But yeah, prior to that, I was playing lots of rock covers like everybody else – “Rocky Mountain Way” and stuff like that.

After the revelation of seeing B.B. King, how did you do your homework and absorb the blues?

It actually started with Chuck Berry. My parents listened to the Beatles and the Stones, who both name-checked Chuck. They covered him and talked about the debt they owed him. They celebrated him.

I went out and bought Chuck Berry Is on Top, which was on Chess Records, and from there I started checking out other people on the label: Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Little Walter. It happened really quickly.

I imagine you felt like an outlier in L.A. Everybody was getting into the Sunset Strip shred-metal scene while you’re digging into older stuff.

I was very much out of anybody else’s orbit. I just didn’t participate in their scene. But it was a conscious decision. At first I felt a bit awkward, but the magnetic pull of the blues was too strong.

Now, you did a bit of reverse engineering. You went to the U.K. because you were inspired by their blues players, but those were the same people who revered American blues artists.

You’re absolutely right. I was getting the echo of the echo, so to speak. But the way that it was marketed, whether it was Cream or Hendrix or even the Beatles, it was all about appealing to youth. I was young – a generation out, perhaps, but I was still a youth.

How do I put this? I just thought of England and Europe as angular, whereas America was square. There was something coming out of England that felt like a way in. To me, a player like Mick Taylor was a revelation in the beginning, more than even somebody like Peter Green. Hendrix was immediate.

I was hearing all this stuff long after it was released by listening to friends’ older brothers’ records. It all just started to percolate and simmer.

But yeah, I decided to go to England because I just wasn’t thrilled with what I was getting in America.

You became friends with Mick Taylor. How did you two meet?

I went to a show of his, and then it turned out that I knew his manager. Also, I had spoken to somebody in a restaurant adjoining the club who turned out to be his best friend. She had a dog named Roxie, and my dog was named Roxie.

The stars aligned, basically. It was fate. Mick and I met up and hit it off. He was such an important player to me in terms of understanding overbends. We all started doing two-and two-and-a-half-step overbends from hearing Crusade [by John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers, 1967], specifically the song “Oh, Pretty Woman.”

Mick was 17 at the time, and I started listening to it when I was 17. I was like, Oh this guy did this at my age. Incredible!

Did Mick take you under his wing?

He did. I think he was expecting a Stones freak initially, so he was pleasantly surprised that my interest was more in the blues stuff and the John Mayall records. He toured with me as a special guest, and I think he’s on three of my albums.

The way “The Fall of America” came about is interesting: Mick was living with me. I’d just come back from a trip to L.A., where I’d seen the Kills. The band’s guitar player, Jamie Hince, is fond of hooking the thumb over the neck to make chords – an old bluesman’s trick. I thought, Wow, yeah, I should try some more of that.

I started to noodle around, and Mick came into the room; actually, he was sort of lingering in the doorway while going to make some tea or whatever. He would listen to me sometimes, but he wouldn’t say anything.

So this one time he was listening, and I knew he was there. I was playing around with this riff, and finally he said, “That’s so powerful. It’s really intense and hypnotic.” Then he left to go into another room but not before saying, “It needs to go to E.” And that’s why it goes to an E at the end.

I was inspired by seeing the Kills, but Mick, to his credit, knew not to interrupt me till the right time. He could sense something was being born.

You also became friends with Eric Clapton. That must be pretty remarkable.

Oh yeah. We met through mutual friends. In the beginning, it was like a dream coming true, and you can’t quite believe it – you’re hanging with one of your heroes.

Then it changes and you’re dealing with a human being, and through that process, when you’re actually becoming friends, it goes through phases and you get closer and closer. All of that stuff happened.

Any preconceived notions I had of what he was like went out the window pretty early. He was nothing like what I expected.

Do you two sit down and play together?

Oh, no. No, no, that’s not happened, at least not yet.

He’s commented on your playing and has been quite complimentary.

Yeah, that’s brilliant, isn’t it? It’s mind-blowing, really. You hope for it, but you tell yourself not to expect it.

What kind of impact did Eric have on your playing?

Oh, a lot. [laughs] In my journey, I got my head around overbends, so I went back to the people who started it. Albert King did overbends left, right and center. I would listen to him, but I couldn’t figure him out. This was all before YouTube. I had to do it by ear.

Now, if you overbend by two steps, the note has a different tone than if you just fret honestly on the neck. It’s not dishonest – it’s just got a whole different thing. The tone is different; the timbre of the way the string vibrates is different.

With Eric, I heard the solo he did on Cream’s “I’m So Glad,” and he’s doing different things. I was knocked out.

That and the “Steppin’ Out” solo – I was literally speechless. I know that’s an overused figure of speech, but that’s how I felt. My whole foundation was rocked. Just when I thought I might be getting somewhere with the guitar, I heard this and thought, Holy shit!

You’ve put out some terrific albums, but 2020 Visions feels like a breakthrough. The electric guitar sound is wild, trippy and dramatic, and it’s not typical of how most blues guitarists sound. And you have more than one sound.

I’ve spent years thinking and working on this. To me, tone and textures are every bit as important as what you’re playing. I don’t want to sound like anybody else, and I don’t understand why other people would want to.

What I’m seeking is some sort of a sonic texture that’s unique. It’s not quirky or weird, like it’s a novelty or gimmick; rather, it’s related to what the music is addressing. It’s a style. It’s a sonic style as opposed to a musical style.

It’s easy to say, “I want to sound unique.” It’s quite another thing to pull it off.

It is. One big thing that’s helped me was getting an original Marshall JTM45. It’s part of the toolbox that enables me to do this. I hate to say that, because the amp was stupidly expensive.

I didn’t want it to be true, but the way those amps were designed with the negative-feedback loop, it stacks harmony when you’re sustaining a note. It’s more of a musical instrument than just an amp.

Let’s talk about some of the songs on the album. The title track is blues, but it’s got a very pronounced punk rock side to it.

Sure, sure. I mean, I’m playing blues licks, no doubt, but it’s got another thing. You know, I never really used to like Iggy Pop until I read that he went to Chicago and tried to be a blues guy for, like, six months. Then I kind of understood.

The guitars on the song are trashy and reckless. It’s like they collide off each other.

As well they should. The guitars on the chorus are just driving and out of control, but there’s the call-and-answer guitar to the vocal. It’s got a bluesier, warmer sound. But I’m purposely trying to smear notes, bitter to sweet.

You’re very rough with your guitar on “The Fall of America.” Every riff, power chord and solo is brutal. It’s not festival-tent blues.

It’s designed not to be that at all. There are people who can do that beautifully and brilliantly, and my hat is off to them. It’s just something that doesn’t interest me. I guess I take my sensibilities from the British musicians of the ’60s and ’70s. They were making new art.

That sounds pretentious, but they weren’t just making an archive of what was happening in the room. They were using all the tools of technology to create something unique in that moment, and it was as far from field recordings as you could get.

At nine minutes long, the song is epic. For much of it, it seems like you’re having fun exploring tones.

Oh, I am, I am! Yeah, we went on for a bit, but hey, America’s a big country. [laughs] The subject of what’s going on is a big subject. I’d never written a nine-minute song before, but it went where it wanted.

“Roxie’s Song” is altogether different. It’s a tight, beautifully constructed instrumental.

Yes, Roxie was my miniature schnauzer, and she died. With this record, there was a musical concept. I wanted it to be an honorific homage to the bent note on the guitar.

“Roxie’s Song” has a really long bend, which is the sad part. Obviously, I was gutted that my dog was dead, and I was missing her like nothing else.

But what about the happy times? So there are middle bits where it’s sort of like in summer grass and how she had to hop around to be seen. There are fun bits and moments of exhilaration, like how you play chase with your dog, or how they go crazy when you walk in the door.

How did you and Mick Taylor collaborate on writing “Sputnik Days”?

That was another one of those times when he heard me working on something, but rather than lingering in the doorway, he felt compelled to pick up a guitar.

He co-wrote it with me. It sums up what I aspire to: It’s rooted properly in deep blues while living in the present and being aware that we have tomorrow to look forward to.

One song that is very reverential to the blues is the very short instrumental “On Top.”

Yeah. That’s Sophie Lord playing bass and doing some serious chording – lovely tone clusters as the bedrock. I don’t mind going there – you know, the reverential thing – but it’s why it’s short as well.

“Zombie Train” has a bit of funky soul to it. It’s got a bit of a ’70s feel, but again, it sounds very current. And it’s a great showcase for everybody in the band.

Oh, yes, for sure. That’s another one on which Sophie is front and center. It was sort of showcased for the bass. Both Sophie and Jack Greenwood play brilliantly throughout the record.

“Zombie Train” is this spoken-song verse, and I really loved being able to stretch out on the guitar solos. It’s another long one, and it’s closer to us being a jam band or something.

You have all these Beatles connections. Ringo Starr does a spoken intro on the song “The Ending of the End,” the album’s artwork was done by Klaus Voormann, and you’re photographed by Pattie Boyd.

Yeah, it’s something. Actually, Pattie photographed me for two album covers. You know, my parents played the Beatles; they were part of my musical journey.

When I met Jimmy Page the first time, we talked through it and he agreed. He said, “Well, yeah, they’re rooted in the blues.”

The Beatles are like blues songs with pop choruses. “Can’t Buy Me Love” is a blues progression, and so is “She’s a Woman,” “Lady Madonna,” “I Feel Fine” and on and on.

“Yer Blues,” obviously.

Sure. That was a great one.

You recently started playing the Gibson Custom Modern Flying V.

I did. That’s a whole different experience because it’s so lightweight, and it kind of folds into you. You’re almost wearing it. It’s an insane guitar, and I love it.

On 2020 Visions, I mostly played a cherry-red [ES-]355 reissue. It’s the star of the record. It’s like the Cadillac of guitars. It’s semi-hollow, and it just feels like a proper guitar. I grew up hating 355s. I thought solid-body guitars were the only real guitars. Lately, I’ve done a complete turnaround.

Is there anybody in the current crop of blues guitar players who stands out to you?

There’s some great players. Connor Selby, Toby Lee – those are two off the top of my head.

It’s hard for me to criticize anybody, because I think anybody doing it should be applauded. If they’re out there and playing, they’ve already accomplished so much.

At the same time, so much current blues has become formulaic – the sounds and just the concept of what a blues record in the modern age should be.

A lot of that has to do with people being concerned about airplay. I’m unsure how it all happens. Is it the artist? The producer? These people can be great players, but it’s hard for me to listen to another blues song that’s produced the same way or with the same approach.

Sometimes I can’t get past it, but that’s a personal problem. It’s got nothing to do with anybody else.

Order Stephen Dale Petit’s 2020 Visions here.

Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood’s musical partnership is one of the longest enduring high-profile guitar pairings in the history of rock ‘n’ roll.

As a former member of the Jeff Beck Group and Faces, Wood had already established a name for himself by the time he was recruited by the Rolling Stones in 1975.

Filling the shoes of guitarist Mick Taylor (who joined the Stones in 1969 in order to replace founding member Brian Jones) Wood quickly fell into a groove with Richards.

The pair had previously established a musical connection while working together on Wood’s star-studded 1974 debut solo album, I've Got My Own Album to Do, and it’s follow-up, 1975’s Now Look.

Wood had also previously collaborated with the Stones on their hit single "It's Only Rock 'n Roll (But I Like It),” playing acoustic guitar alongside Richards' electric guitar parts on the recording.

Following major contributions to the Stones’ 1976 LP Black and Blue and his participation in the band’s Tour of the Americas '75, Wood was eventually announced a fully-fledged member.

Blurred Lines

The Rolling Stones is built around a two-guitar sound, itself an extension of Richards' own uniqueness. He helped blur forever the line between lead and rhythm guitar, substituting a riffing technique in which melodic embellishments are grafted onto a vigorous rhythmic treatment of chords, partial chords, and low-register lines. 

Richards' role in the group has been analyzed countless times. The consensus: Without Keith Richards there wouldn't be a Rolling Stones.

"In other bands they follow the drummer,” explained Wood, “The Stones follow Keith, and they always have."

While some have even asserted that "Keith Richards is the Rolling Stones," the guitarist himself is the first to stress that any band member's indispensability is a two-way street: "The musicians are there to serve the band. All that matters is whether something furthers the overall sound."

Back in the early '80s, Guitar Player spoke to Richards about his unique musical chemistry with Wood. The following interview extract originally appeared in our April 1983 issue…

You've often mentioned the two-guitar sound as a cornerstone of the band. On Still Life there's a different kind of interplay – probably tighter than ever.

Well, Ron's getting better [laughs]. I think that's due to the fact that Ron and I have been working together now since '75, and the more we play together the tighter we get it.

It sounds like you and he are two sides of the same coin, like you could almost change places.

We do [laughs]. If he drops a cigarette I'll play his bit, and we'll realize later that I've covered for him or he's covered for me.

And you think at the time, "Oh, my God, what a gap," but when you listen to the tape, you find that it's been fixed right there at the moment, in a very un-thought-about way.

We pick it up and cover each other so that sometimes you can't really tell who's playing.

When Ron joined in 1975, did the band have to make a change in the way you interact or rehearse?

No, that was the beauty of it. 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.

With Mick Taylor's style so well defined as a lead guitarist, there seemed to be a clear distinction between the two of you.

It was much harder to get a Rolling Stones sound with Mick Taylor. It was much more lead and rhythm, one way or the other. As fabulous as he is as a lead guitarist, he wasn't a great rhythm player, so we ended up taking roles.

When Brian and I started, it was never like that. It's much easier than with Brian, personally. But also with Ron, the basic way we play is much more similar, and this isn't in any way to knock Mick. I mean, he's a fantastic guitar player. But even if he couldn't play shit, I'd love the guy. But chemically we didn't have that flexibility in the band.

It was, "You do this, and I'll do that, and never the twain shall meet." With Ron, if he drops his pick, then I can play his lick until he picks it up, and you can't even tell the difference.

Had you and Ron worked together very much before he joined the group?

Yes, for about 18 months. And I did a lot of work on Ronnie's first and second solo albums. He's never been the same since.

Have you found that your styles affected each other, now that you've been working together for several years?

Yeah, that's what's great about it. I neglect something, and he makes up for it. That's the great thing about two guitar players, because if you get it right, you know when to lift one of his licks, and vice versa, without thinking about it. 

He lifts more of mine than I do of his [laughs].

When the two of you are onstage, how much of your interaction is subject to change?

It depends on the sound system. If you're going to make a change, you need to hear what you're doing in the first place, so a lot of that gets down to technicalities of the stage monitoring.

On our last tour in '81 we had those long ramps out to the sides of the stage. The idea of having that stage is to get out where most performers don't get with audiences of that size.

Well, if the monitors aren't working out there, and you're just making signs at the sound guys instead of concentrating on your playing, then you forget it, just leave it.

But if the sound's good and you can hear everything, then you tend to give it a bit more, adjust more to what's going on, change as you go.

Do you have much trouble communicating onstage at that volume?

It's all done by semaphore and eye signals. It's the only way you can really do it.

But the thing is, there isn't that much need for communication or looking at each other, except when things go wrong. Otherwise the communication is just through the music.

But if things are going wrong, then everybody's looking at me: "How's he going to get out of this?"

Browse the Rollings Stones catalog here.

The Rolling Stones' 1969 U.S. Tour might have been the first rock 'n' roll tour of any real consequence.

“In 1969, they listened,” the former Stones bassist Bill Wyman says. “It was the first time that the audiences had actually listened to us.” 

Woodstock may be the musical event of 1969 that defined a generation, but the Rolling Stones’ 1969 American tour set the standard for the future of rock 'n' roll concerts.

On November 27, 1969, the Stones played a show at New York’s Madison Square Garden, followed by two more the next day. Recordings curated from all three concerts soon made their way onto the band’s 1970 release, Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out! The Rolling Stones in Concert.

This classic album was the first live LP to reach the number one spot in the Stones’ native U.K. and is rumored to have been released in response to the popular Live'r Than You'll Ever Be bootleg recorded just weeks earlier in Oakland, California.

While ABKCO Records released a Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out! box set containing 3 CDs and 1 DVD back in 2009, many Rolling Stones fans feel that this remastered version along with five previously unreleased tracks (including footage) from the second evening concert, plus performances by opening acts simply isn’t enough.

Consequently, super-fan Scott Sigel has organized an online petition requesting recordings from all three Madison Square Garden concerts be released.

A statement written by Sigel reads:

“We in the Stones fan-base community have longed to hear all three MSG shows (minus the excessive vocal/instrumental overdubs & extraneous editing) released in excellent quality in order to experience a true representation of being at a Rolling Stones concert in 1969!”

Meanwhile, rumors abound concerning the availability of video footage from all three concerts, with bootleg audio recordings promising distinctive performances from each.

“In conclusion,” continues Sigel, “what a better time to honor the 60th anniversary of the Rolling Stones as a working band by releasing the Madison Square Garden shows in their entirety when the band was playing at its zenith.”

If you want to jump onboard and sign the petition then simply head on over to change.org

Buy Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out! The Rolling Stones in Concert here.

Carolyn Wonderland hails from Houston, Texas. Besides being a great singer, she is an amazing guitarist and multi-instrumentalist who is also proficient on trumpet, accordion, piano, mandolin and lap steel.

When she’s not on tour with her own band, she’s out walking in the footsteps of giants like Eric Clapton, Peter Green, and Mick Taylor while touring and playing lead blues guitar with British blues legend John Mayall.

Wonderland released her first album, Groove Milk, in 1993, and issued her latest, Moon Goes Missing, in 2017. Having recently signed to Alligator Records (the "first female guitar hero" in the label's 50-year history) Wonderland's forthcoming long-player, Tempting Fate, is due out on October 8.

When did you first pick up the guitar?

[Early on] I didn’t play a whole lot in front of people. I’d play rhythm, but I had Little Screamin’ Kenny [Houston guitarist Kenneth Blanchet] playing guitar in the band, and he was one of my favorites, so I kind of thought I was superfluous. But then there’d be gigs where we’d be missing a guitar player, and so I was like, 'Well, okay, I can play the tunes I wrote ’cause I know how they go.' 

Eventually, it came to be that I had a tour but no guitar player, and I wasn’t gonna cancel it, so I just learned really quickly.

Did you have any musical history in your family?

Oh, yeah. Pretty much everyone on my mom’s side plays. My grandma was a steel player, and my pop played ragtime and big-band piano stuff. My mom sang, and she played acoustic guitar in a band called Badlands. So there were always guitars around. I started playing piano when I was about five, and I started writing songs when I was about eight.

You’re known and marketed as a blues artist, but you also touch on a lot of styles in your playing, and you seem to draw a lot of creative inspiration from your political and world views. How do you bring that all together?

I play a lot of blues and rootsy stuff as well as soul, gospel and a little country. There’s also experimental rock and roll, like my [2003] song “Bloodless Revolution.”

A lot of my stuff’s been really political, just ’cause that’s what’s going on and that’s what’s been speaking to me. My songs of peace are not necessarily just about peace between countries but about peace between folks. I’m trying to find hope or a solution, instead of just pointing out the problems.

The bottom line is, there’s no “us and them.” We’re all us. Even the folks who you think you detest. They’re your children, they’re your brother, they’re your father. They’re all of it. So I guess I’m just trying to find a way to be more loving myself.

*** After touring the world with John Mayall the past few years, Wonderland has recently signed to Alligator Records and has a new album – Tempting Fate – and tour on the way. Visit carolynwonderland.com for more information ***

Watching this clip of Mick Taylor performing “Sympathy for the Devil” at Hyde Park – filmed 52 years ago today – evokes infinitely more sympathy for him than it does for the fallen angel himself. Complete with diabolic tuning and a supporting cast of Hells Angels, all hell breaks loose when hysterical fans begin invading the stage. Taylor, having now officially joined The Rolling Stones, was out of the proverbial frying pan and into the fire.

Barely in his 20s when he was recruited to replace The Rolling Stones’ ailing guitarist Brian Jones, this performance at Hyde Park was to be Taylor’s live debut with the band. It was, however, overshadowed by founding member Jones’ death just three days prior. 

Nevertheless, it was decided the show must go on, and as a tribute to their fallen comrade, a vast number of white butterflies were ‘released’ on stage. Unfortunately, rather than joyously fluttering from the confines of their boxes, many of those poor creatures simply flopped to the ground overcome by heat and exhaustion. 

It was not a good omen...

Added to the pressure of this being Taylor’s first public performance with The Rolling Stones was the fact that he found “the greatest rock ‘n’ roll band in the world” to be shockingly under-rehearsed. “They sounded like a typical bunch of guys in a garage playing out of tune and too loudly,” he once remarked. Indeed, they had not performed in public for over two years. The estimated 250,000-500,000 attendees at Hyde Park probably did little to settle his nerves. 

Us guitar nerds will notice Taylor’s Bigsby-equipped Cherry Red SG-style early-‘60s Gibson Les Paul Standard. Taylor used the guitar on The Rolling Stones’ American tour later in the year before it was stolen in the early-'70s from the band's house in France.

Several other electric guitars disappeared during the theft, including this Gibson Flying V belonging to Keith Richards.

52 years after the event, this highly repeatable film shows a turning point in the band’s historical career, while its "Sympathy for the Devil" climax seems to distil the organised chaos of The Rolling Stones into one hugely entertaining clip. Despite everything, it’s hard to look away.

Rent and purchase the full-length film on DVD and Blue-ray here

It might have been the first rock and roll tour of any real consequence. Today, if it’s remembered at all, it’s usually for the body count left in its wake.  

But Bill Wyman recalls the Rolling Stones’ 1969 American tour for a different reason. “In 1969, they listened,” the former Stones bassist says. “It was the first time that the audiences had actually listened to us.” 

Woodstock may be the musical event of 1969 that defined a generation, but the Rolling Stones’ 1969 American tour set the standard for the future of rock and roll concerts. Launched in November of that year, a little more than two months after Woodstock, the cross-country jaunt isn’t regarded with the same reverence as the festival. 

Fans know it as the tour captured on the 1970 release Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out!, the Stones’ second live album and a favorite concert album among those who have sunk a needle into its grooves. 

But the group’s U.S. hitch not only changed how rock and roll shows were presented – it also showed a new way to finance them and make a profit, opening the door to the barnstorming extravaganzas launched by artists like Led Zeppelin, Yes, Elton John and others in the 1970s and the decades that followed.

It was, as Wyman notes, the start of a new time, when the fans stopped screaming and began to listen, as well as turn on and become immersed in the live-music experience.

Anyone who witnessed the British Invasion first-hand knows all too well how awful rock and roll concerts could be in the mid 1960s, when primitive sound systems were unable to project a band’s music above the noise of the crowd.

As a budding guitarist looking forward to a show from your favorite players, you’d have strained to hear their instruments, whose frequency range was well matched to that of the screaming girls.

You’d probably have trouble seeing the band too. Under the glare of stage lights or spots, acts played with little to no staging – no set, no props, no lighting effects. As performances went, it was as rudimentary as it could be.

After sitting through three or four opening acts, the band you’d shelled out your hard-earned allowance to see came onstage and played its hits for 20 to 30 minutes before abruptly departing. The Rolling Stones certainly knew the drill.

Their previous U.S. tour, in 1966, in support of their album Aftermath, opened in Lynn, Massachusetts, where 17,000 fans packed the Manning Bowl for the evening’s entertainment.

The outdoor show opened with the Mods, a local act who had won their spot through the promoter of a battle of the bands contest. They were followed by the McCoys, then riding high on their hit “Hang on Sloopy” and the Standells, the L.A. act whose breakthrough hit, “Dirty Water,” celebrated Boston, Lynn’s neighbor to the south.

The Stones’ set, consisting of a mere 10 songs, lasted just over 30 minutes. That was short enough, but the Manning Bowl show ended early when a rainstorm broke out. Teens stormed the stage, and the police responded with tear gas.

The Stones escaped to their limos and fled. “It was a bit of an outdoor crazy,” Mick Jagger recalls. ”It wasn’t well secured. A few people got a bit drunk. There were a few cops, and that was the end of it.”

“Things got a little blurry in the ’60s,” Keith Richards says. “Tear gas – that was the other continuous smell of the ’60s. I can’t say I miss it.”

But by the decade’s end, much had changed in music and the youth movement. Those screaming teens had grown up. Many were now out on their own, burning their draft cards, marching to protest the Vietnam War, experimenting with drugs and defining their own place in society.

Rock and roll had evolved as well, with bands like the Beatles introducing elements of spirituality in their music, while groups like the Stones met social and political issues head on.

Their 1968 hit “Street Fighting Man” had been embraced by youths in France, who fought in the streets of Paris that May for social reforms, and by young Americans protesting the Vietnam War at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago that August. Older and radicalized, rock and roll fans went to shows, smoked weed, or took something stronger, and actually listened to the music.

Unfortunately, the new arenas and civic auditoriums that began dotting the U.S. landscape in the latter half of the 1960s weren’t suited to rock shows. Vast, with seating for 10 to 20 thousand attendees, they were ill-equipped to handle musical events, their underpowered public-address systems designed for sporting events rather than sold-out concerts.

Fans furthest from the stage weren’t only deprived of the music – the performance itself looked like a distant skirmish under the floodlights.

Remarkably, England’s Rolling Stones would provide the solution to this uniquely American problem. By 1969, nearly three years had passed since the group’s 1966 tour, their last in the United States. At that time, they, along with the Beatles and Bob Dylan, made up pop music’s Big Three.

But the Beatles had stopped performing and were in the midst of breaking up, while Dylan was a recluse in Woodstock. Somehow, the Rolling Stones were still standing, and with a new guitarist in tow – John Mayall’s young blues protégé Mick Taylor – they were ready to claim the field for themselves.

This time they wanted a spectacle – a show that was bigger and louder than before, with proper sound reinforcement and set design. 

They hired lighting designer Chip Monck – who lit Monterey Pop and as Woodstock’s emcee warned the festival’s flower children away from the “brown acid” – to create a set that they would haul from stage to stage. They brought their own P.A. system and mixing board, and drafted recording engineer Glyn Johns to run sound and record the shows.

They didn’t trust local promoters, so they chose their own opening acts, bringing along English guitarist and vocalist Terry Reid, and booking a trio of show-stopping American acts: the Ike & Tina Turner Revue, B.B. King and, a guitarist who was like a god to them, Chuck Berry. Significantly, the Stones booked every show themselves, eliminating middlemen and ensuring themselves maximum profits.

Above all, they wanted to perform. No more 30 minutes of hits. The 1969 American tour saw the Rolling Stones play for an average of 75 minutes each show, with many concerts lasting past midnight. 

Everything was designed to draw the audience into the act. Monck designed a proscenium stage backlit with lights that changed color to suit the songs’ moods, and concealed the speaker towers by draping them in grey cloth. 

At the center of it all, on a purple carpet with a white starburst center, Mick Jagger led the Rolling Stones – Richards, Taylor, Wyman and drummer Charlie Watts – through the set like a ringmaster, dressed in black trousers with silver buttons down the legs, a metal-studded belt, a black scoop-necked jersey with a white Leo glyph on the chest, a flowing red scarf, and a red, white and blue Uncle Sam top hat.

The 1969 American tour didn’t just reassert the Rolling Stones as a powerhouse rock and roll band – it also changed expectations of what a rock and roll show should be, how it should be run, and the production standards required. 

It’s here that the modern music concert tour began. And it’s here that the Rolling Stones’ legend as “the greatest rock and roll band in the world” – as tour manager Sam Cutler introduced them each night – begins. 

But getting to this point wasn’t easy. By the time the tour launched on November 7, in Fort Collins, Colorado, one of the Stones’ own would be in the grave. The jaunt itself would see Jagger and Richards slip further into hard-drug use. And when it was over in early December, a cloud of death hung over what should have been a celebration. 

The Rolling Stones had always been one of rock and roll’s most exciting live acts, but by 1969, they were rarely seen onstage anymore. Since the group’s 1967 European tour, they had made one public appearance, at the 1968 NME Poll Winners Concert, not including their own Rock and Roll Circus concert from December 1968 before an invitation-only audience. The reason was down to drugs.

Jagger, Richards and Stones co-founder Brian Jones had all been charged with offenses. But whereas Jagger’s three-month sentence for possession of amphetamine tablets was reduced to a conditional discharge – essentially an order to “keep your nose clean” – and Richards’ conviction for allowing pot to be smoked on his property was overturned on appeal, Jones was not nearly so lucky.

Police had discovered cannabis and hard drugs at the multi-instrumentalist’s home during a raid in May 1967.

The following May, while still on probation, he was arrested again after a second raid at his flat turned up hash. Jones was found guilty, but the judge, believing the jury prejudiced, refused to jail the guitarist and instead fined him £50, about $890 today.

Though Jones had avoided jail, his second drug bust made it impossible for him to get a U.S. work visa, dashing the Stones’ hopes of touring in America. But his days with the group were already numbered. 

Though he had been the band’s original leader, Jones’ authority diminished once Jagger and Richards became a successful songwriting duo. As his drug use increased and his mental state became more fragile, Jones missed gigs and recording dates.

A few years earlier, he and Richards had been among the tightest of guitar tandems.

“Brian and Keith had this guitar thing like you wouldn’t believe,” Ian “Stu” Stewart, the band’s co-founder and behind-the-scenes keyboardist, told Stanley Booth, author of The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones. “There was never any suggestion of a lead and a rhythm guitar player. They were two guitar players that were like somebody’s right and left hands.” 

But at least since the Stones’ psychedelic-rock opus, 1967’s Their Satanic Majesties Request, Jones had played guitar less frequently.

On the group’s followup, 1968’s Beggar’s Banquet, he contributed slide and acoustic guitar, Mellotron, tambura and sitar, leaving Richards to perform all the other guitar parts. By the time the Stones began recording 1969’s Let It Bleed, they didn’t even expect Jones to attend the sessions.

He showed up for the recording of “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” asking Jagger, “What can I play?” “I don’t know, Brian,” Jagger replied. “What can you play?” “I enjoyed his company, and I tried incredibly hard, in 1966, to pull him back into the group,” Richards told Rolling Stone in 2010. “He was flying off. But my attempts to bring Brian back into focus were a total failure.” 

While the Stones could work around Jones in the studio, they couldn’t do without a second guitarist onstage. They briefly considered replacing him for the U.S. tour with Eric Clapton, but in the end, the Stones faced up to the inevitable.

On June 8, Jagger, Richards and Watts drove to Jones’ home, Cotchford Farm, the former estate of Winnie the Pooh author A.A. Milne, to deliver the news. “Mick and I didn’t fancy the gig,” Richards wrote in his 2010 memoir, Life. “But we drove down together and said, ‘Hey, Brian… It’s all over, pal.’”

By then, the Stones had found his replacement: 20-year-old Mick Taylor. Despite his youth, Taylor had already distinguished himself in John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, taking over from Peter Green, Clapton’s successor, in 1967, at the tender age of 18. A fine blues guitarist, Taylor was blessed with a jazzman’s sensibilities, his remarkably melodic lead work streaked with shades of modal playing.

It was Mayall and Ian Stewart who suggested Taylor to Jagger and Richards. Certainly, Richards knew Taylor – he’d sold him his 1959 Les Paul Standard back in 1967 when Taylor had joined the Bluesbreakers.

The Stones had taken the young guitarist onboard even before they let Jones go: Though many sources pin the date to June 1969, Taylor’s first recording with the Stones was on “Live With Me,” which was recorded May 24, two weeks before Jones was fired.

“‘Live With Me’ was the very first track I ever played on,” Taylor recalls, “when they were putting the finishing touches to Let It Bleed. We actually recorded that the night I went for my audition at Olympic Studios, or maybe the night after.

“I remember [producer] Jimmy Miller jumping up and down in the control room and getting all excited about how good it sounded, having two guitars playing off each other. Because I think they’d missed that with Brian Jones in the two-year hiatus since their last live performance.

“The Stones actually hadn’t played together for a long time, so when I joined them it was like a new beginning. It was a new phase in their career. A new chapter.”

To kick it off, the Stones had agreed to play a free concert in London’s Hyde Park on July 5. The timing was good: Their new single, “Honky Tonk Women,” featuring the lead guitar work of both Richards and Taylor, was scheduled to be released the day before.

The Hyde Park concert would be an opportunity to show off their new lineup and put some publicity behind the song. But the Stones’ previous chapter was still being written.

Sometime around midnight on July 2-3, Brian Jones was found dead in the swimming pool at Cotchford Farm. Before the sun had risen, the news made its way through the Stones’ camp and into the morning news. Richards recalls that the band members were in the studio when they heard about it.

“There exists one minute and 30 seconds of us recording ‘I Don’t Know Why,’ a Stevie Wonder song, interrupted by the phone call telling us of Brian’s death,” he wrote.

Mick Taylor’s arrival in the Stones marked the start of a new era and sound for the Rolling Stones. Though Jones was a talented guitarist, soloist and multi-instrumentalist, Taylor was in a different league.

His muscular lead-guitar style fit their new blues-rock direction and brought a level of bravura to their ranks at a time when guitar virtuosity was on the rise in rock and roll. 

“I was in awe sometimes, listening to Mick Taylor,” Richards wrote. “Everything was there in his playing – the melodic touch, a beautiful sustain and a way of reading a song.” Taylor’s melodicism proved a perfect counterpoint to Richards’ own recently adopted style. 

In March 1969, during the making of Let It Bleed, the group had recorded “Sister Morphine,” a track destined for 1971’s Sticky Fingers, with Ry Cooder playing slide. Richards was taken with Cooder’s use of open-G tuning and adopted it as standard for his guitar work, eliminating his low E string in the process.

“I met Ry in 1968, when he was hanging around with Taj Mahal and Jesse Ed Davis,” Richards told Guitar. “Ry was using open G for slide. I saw him and thought, That’s a really nice tuning. It restricts you so much: five strings, three notes, two fingers… one asshole!”

With their reconstituted lineup and tough new guitar sound, the Stones were eager to get back onstage. The fans were clamoring for it. Seven years into their career, the Stones sounded better than ever. Just as important, they were still relevant.

As rock and roll’s bad boys, they had always had an element of danger about them, but it was more overt on their newer material, like “Sympathy for the Devil,” the Beggars Banquet opener, on which Jagger adopted Satan’s persona to implicate humanity in the world’s sins, placing the weight of social responsibility on the shoulders of the Stones’ young radicalized listeners. 

On the album’s flipside, “Street Fighting Man” offered a model for how to effect the change necessary to liberate a world stuck in the ways of the past and running headlong to its own destruction.

The Stones had won the love of politically minded youths with those songs, but Jagger glimpsed what was to come as early as 1967, when they played Warsaw, Poland, bringing rock and roll to Communist Eastern Europe.

“Teenagers are not screaming over pop music anymore,” he told Stanley Booth. “They’re screaming for much deeper reasons. When I’m onstage, I sense that the teenagers are trying to communicate to me, like by telepathy, a message of some urgency. Not about me or about our music, but about the world and the way they live. And I see a lot of trouble coming in the dawn.”

In September, the Stones began making plans for their month-long jaunt across America. Following an off-circuit gig on November 7 at Colorado State University’s 8,745-seat Moby Gymnasium, the tour would commence in earnest.

The itinerary would take the show from Los Angeles up to Oakland, across to Phoenix, down to Dallas and over to Alabama, before heading north to Chicago and east to Detroit, Philadelphia, Baltimore, New York City and Boston, the final stop.

As shows sold out in the larger cities, the Stones added second shows, though Mick Jagger, ever cautious about the cost, warned, “We won’t play if there’s a single empty seat.”

The Rolling Stones wanted to control everything, from signing up and paying the opening acts to designing the production. “There was one minor problem, though,” said Ronnie Schneider, the tour’s manager. “We had no money, nothing.”

The William Morris Agency had signed on to book the tour, but the Stones’ preeminence made its role moot. In the end, William Morris put up just $15,000 “to finance a half-million-dollar tour,” Schneider says. “To pay for the construction of the set, the stage, the lights, to guarantee the acts, to do everything. It was a very funny moment.”

But Schneider came up with a solution that was revolutionary. In his scheme, the Stones – or rather, their new company, Rolling Stones Promotions – would receive, upfront, 50 percent of each venue’s gross box-office receipts, which would be used to fund the tour.

Jagger’s insistence on sold-out shows wasn’t about ego but to generate demand for future shows to keep the tour running. For the scheme to work, they’d need to sell out the first five dates. “Any problem with any of them and the shit was hitting the fan,” Schneider said.

Not only did the gambit work – it changed how bands financed tours, allowing them to launch ever-greater spectacles. Schneider also led the way by taking over managing rights related to all aspects of the tour, including posters, T-shirts and programs, eliminating freelance merchandisers and greatly improving the Stones’ finances.

But all was not well in this new world of mega shows. Soon after the tour was announced, fans began to complain about the size of the venues and ticket prices. Rolling Stone noted that tickets for the Los Angeles Forum show ranged in price from $5.50 to $8.50, whereas the same arena had charged $3.50 to $7.50 for Blind Faith and $3.50 to $6.50 for the Doors.

Writing in The San Francisco Chronicle, Rolling Stone founding editor Ralph Gleason took the Stones to task for asking fans to pay more to see them perform in less-intimate settings. 

“Paying five, six and seven dollars for a Stones concert at the Oakland Coliseum for, say, an hour of the Stones seen a quarter of a mile away...says a very bad thing to me about the artists’ attitude towards the public,” Gleason wrote. “It says they despise their own audience.” 

Gleason’s words stung the band. Confronted about the matter at the tour’s first U.S. press conference, Jagger left the door open to playing a free concert when the jaunt was over. 

Weeks later, in New York City, he confirmed the group would headline a free show in the San Francisco area. Why San Francisco? 

“Because there’s a scene there,” Jagger replied. “And the weather’s nice.” 

From London, the group flew to Los Angeles in October to begin rehearsing and preparing for the tour. Immediately, the members split into different residences. 

Bill Wyman and his wife rented a home, while Charlie Watts, with his wife and child in tow, stayed in a large hotel-like home on Oriole Street – dubbed Oriole House – where the group’s entourage of staff members and handlers oversaw preparations for the tour. Jagger, Richards and Taylor found privacy at Stephen Stills’ house in Laurel Canyon.

The abode gave Jagger and Richards a place to work on tunes for the group’s next album, and afforded Richards and Taylor a chance to work out their arrangements for the songs selected for the tour. The home’s cramped coffin-shaped basement also doubled as the band’s practice space.

“We did some rehearsals,” Wyman recalls. “We didn’t do a lot. You know what the Stones are like. It was mostly party time.” Mick Taylor, new to this world, was shocked to find the Stones’ sound so “ragged.”

“I thought, How do these guys make such great records when they’re so sloppy and spontaneous? But it was because they had this great chemistry.”

Developing the set list proved more difficult than they’d imagined. While the stylistic differences between the new guitar duo made for some great interplay – Richard’s jagged double-stop riffing against Taylor’s sinewy blues lines – it made playing most of the old hits impossible without some degree of reinterpretation.

From the Stones’ deep back catalog, only three songs – “Under My Thumb,” “I’m Free” and “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” – were dusted off and recalibrated for the new lineup. Mostly, the band focused on their latest hit singles – “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” and “Honky Tonk Women” – and cuts from Beggar’s Banquet and the still-unreleased Let It Bleed.

The bluesier country stylings of those albums gave Taylor plenty of room to stretch out and play bottleneck slide, something Jones was also adept at, though not with the same burning intensity. 

For good measure, they tossed in a couple of Chuck Berry standards – “Carol” and “Little Queenie” – to showcase Keith’s driving double-stop riffs. Unfortunately, Stills’ basement was too small to hold rehearsals with full gear.

Through their connections, the Stones secured an unused soundstage at Warner Bros. studio lot. The building chosen for them had served as the main set for director Sydney Pollack’s 1969 Depression-era drama They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, starring Jane Fonda and Michael Sarrazin as a couple who compete in a grueling dance marathon for the chance to win $1,500. 

Though filming had been completed, the film’s elegant 1930s-style ballroom set was still up when the Stones arrived. Above it hung a large scoreboard that, in the film, shows how many hours have elapsed in the marathon and the number of couples still standing. 

“How Long Will They Last?” read a legend at the top of the board. For the Stones, binging on drugs and rushing headlong into a tour for which they were unprepared, the question was perversely appropriate.

For the short tour, Richards and Taylor were well equipped with guitars and amps. According to gear expert Andy Babiuk, Richards’ main guitars were his prototype Ampeg Dan Armstrong Plexiglas and a 1958 Gibson Les Paul Custom he’d purchased earlier that year. His other guitars on the tour included his 1969 Gibson ES-355TD-SV stereo electric and the 1959 Les Paul Standard he’d sold to Mick Taylor in early 1967.

In addition, Richards brought a 1930s National Style O resonator, which he used when performing “Prodigal Son” and “You Gotta Move” with Jagger in the show’s short acoustic set, and a Martin D12-20, a dreadnought-sized 12-string, fitted with a DeArmond soundhole pickup.

As for Taylor, he mainly used his Cherry Red 1961 Gibson Les Paul SG, whose “sideways” tremolo unit he’d replaced with a Bigsby B-5. He also occasionally used the ES-355TD-SV and his ’59 ’Burst for slide, as well as his 1958 Les Paul Standard. For amps, both guitarists were provided an arsenal of Ampeg’s new prototype SVT – Solid Vacuum Tube – amps. 

The Stones had shipped their Hiwatts from England, but the amps were damaged after they arrived stateside. Ian Stewart, who recalled that the group had used an Ampeg B-15 Porta-flex “flip-top” amp in its early recording sessions, contacted the manufacturer in New Jersey, and the company quickly sent along a truckfull of SVT prototypes, along with some ST-42 4x12 guitar cabinets from Ampeg’s solid-state line.

Designed as bass amps, the SVTs put out a whopping 300 watts, prompting Ampeg to place a warning label on early models. A dozen prototypes were built, most of which were loaned to the Stones.

The Ampegs were first used when the group moved to the Warner Bros. soundstage, although photos from those sessions show Taylor using several Fender Twin Reverbs. On tour, he, like Richards, performed before an impressive wall of SVTs.

Unfortunately, the prototype SVTs hadn’t been field tested, making Richards and Taylor unwitting guinea pigs in the amp’s development. Ampeg sent a pair of techs to maintain them, along with five additional backup units.

Not only were the amps not designed for electric guitar but Richards and Taylor were using two or three simultaneously. The techs would sit onstage, behind the amps, and watch the tube plates for signs of overheating, then swap out an amp before it blew. They weren’t always successful.

At the Oakland Coliseum on November 9, the second date of the tour, Richards’ amp failed during the intro to “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” the second song of the show.

He and Jagger quickly switched to the acoustic portion of the set while the situation was remedied, but when Richards plugged back into the amp, it blew again, causing him to smash his Les Paul Custom in anger.

The Grateful Dead, who were working with the Stones on arranging the free concert in San Francisco, came to the rescue by loaning their amps for the remainder of the show.

The tour was well received by fans and the press throughout its run, although critics noted early on that the opening acts – particularly B.B. King and the Ike & Tina Turner Revue – were remarkably more polished than the Stones.

“At the beginning of the tour, the band was rusty,” Sam Cutler told photographer Ethan Russell for Let It Bleed, Russell’s photobook of the tour. “When I first called them ‘the greatest rock and roll band in the world,’ I meant it sarcastically. In a way, the slogan made them work harder right from the start.”

By the time the circus rolled into New York City’s Madison Square Garden for the November 27 and 28 dates, the Stones were deadly. It’s from these performances that the group culled the tracks for Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out!, with one song – their affecting cover of Robert Johnson’s “Love in Vain” – taken from the November 26 show at Baltimore’s Civic Center.

The Stones’ tough new sound and attitude are evident right from the album’s opening cut. “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” was the hot hit the band would have toured on had they been on the road when it was released in the summer of 1968. More than a year later, it was a hard-wearing fan favorite.

The band plays it faster on the live album, and in the key of B, whereas the single sounds slightly flat of the key of B flat. And while, on the studio version, Bill Wyman holds down a pedal point on the verses, he plays along with the guitar riff on the live cut, eliminating the single’s hip-swinging groove and making the song a foot-stomping blues-rock number, a genre shift underscored by Taylor’s delicious climbing lead lines on the song’s chorus.

Taylor mostly lays back on the next track, Berry’s “Carol,” giving Richards room to display his classic rock and roll chops. Though he mostly shadows Richards’ rhythm work, the young guitarist steps out on the song’s signature riff, playing bluesy descending lead lines that add interest. 

He gets a chance to show his stuff on “Stray Cat Blues,” squeezing fast, stinging lead lines from his guitar during the song’s numerous instrumental breaks. This funky Beggar’s Banquet cut gets new life here. 

Taken at a slower and bluesier pace, and with a less busy arrangement, the live version draws much of its power from Jagger’s sexually charged vocals. His singing on the studio version is loose and strung out, but on the live album he taunts, pleads, threatens and reprimands as he expounds on his proposition, imbuing it with a menacing authenticity the studio version lacks. 

The fact that the song is about seducing a child – 15 years old on Beggar’s Banquet, reduced to 13 in concert – makes his aggressive performance all the more disturbing. Taylor’s first big moment in the spotlight comes on “Love in Vain,” where he switches to his 1959 ’Burst and takes up his slide.

The Stones recorded this Robert Johnson track for Let It Bleed earlier that year, adapting it as a country blues, complete with mandolin, but here it takes on a worn-in urban melancholy, demonstrating how far they’d already progressed as interpreters of classic blues. 

The sessions for that album were not far behind them, but on this November 26 evening in Baltimore, they sound like they’ve endured miles of hard road.

The next night, backstage at Madison Square Garden, Jagger would learn that his girlfriend was leaving him and his lover was pregnant with his child, but in Baltimore he sings the tune as if he’s had a vision of the trouble ahead.

Richards’ lovely, arpeggiating guitar work sets the mood for the singer’s lament, but it’s Taylor who expresses the song’s loss and anguish in his slide work, each perfectly chosen and articulated note dancing along its nerve. Simply stellar, “Love in Vain” is one of the best representations of the Rolling Stones’ power as a live act at this stage in their career.

From there, it’s on to what has to be the definitive version of “Midnight Rambler.” The song was unknown to audiences at the time, but at Madison Square Garden they responded reflexively to its shifting moods and momentum, demonstrating how completely the Stones had them in their hands. 

Mid-song, the band breaks down the beat, giving Richards and Taylor an opportunity to trade-off licks while Jagger scats. The crowd is amped up, howling, needing an outlet for its agitation. 

And it comes: “Well, you’ve heard about the Boston,” Jagger snarls, and the band slams the downbeat, prompting one amazed fan to cry out, “God-damn!”

During the song, Jagger would take off his studded belt and use it to whip the stage, “The moment you saw the belt fall, you could actually hear the crowd go, ‘Ahhh!’” Chip Monck recalls. “That’s when you know you got it. That’s when it’s real.” The song rides out on Taylor’s insistent riffing, and by the time it’s over, nine minutes after it began, the exhausted audience is roaring for more.

As with “Midnight Rambler,” a crowd member gets a cameo on “Sympathy for the Devil,” with a stoned female fan calling insistently for an oldie but goodie. “‘Paint It Black’! ‘Paint It Black,’ you devil!” she demands in vain as the Stones kick into their Beggar’s Banquet hit. 

The sinewy Latin feel of the original is abandoned for a boogie-rock rhythm that’s more in keeping with the show’s road-worn vibe. Richards plays his lead lines with a cocaine-fueled itch, relying on nerves and muscle memory as he builds the song to its first peak. 

From there, Taylor steals the show, testing the water with country-blues riffs before cutting loose, to the obvious satisfaction of Jagger, who yells his approval and relinquishes the spotlight to the young guitarist. Taylor has one of his finest moments on “Sympathy for the Devil,” lifting the song to new heights.

Richards turns in his signature riffing and lead work on “Live With Me,” the standout Let It Bleed track that marked Taylor’s debut with the group. The Stones attack the song with fury and efficiency, driving its irresistible rhythm with a solid performance that goes straight for the jugular. 

From there, it’s onto the second Chuck Berry song of the night, “Little Queenie,” a fun, midtempo rocker that the Stones dispatch with druggy punk attitude. Watts has trouble finding the “one,” and Richards’ can’t seem to shake off the riff nagging in his fret hand. 

Ian Stewart’s boogie-woogie piano lines and Jagger’s playful delivery carry the song aloft, but it’s an otherwise uninspired turn. Likewise, “Honky Tonk Women,” the Stones’ most recent hit and certainly a standout moment in the band’s 1969 set, is played too strictly to the original recording, and too slow at that. 

The same can’t be said of the album’s thunderous closing track, “Street Fighting Man.” Like “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” it’s stripped of its pop pretensions and flayed with proto-punk fury, the Stones riding it like a tank over enemy lines and flattening everything in its path.

Throughout the show, Glyn Johns sat in a rented Hertz truck three floors below Madison Square Garden, at ground level, capturing every moment of the shows on tape. 

“I was in the truck,” he recalls, “and at one point – probably at the end of the show – I thought there were people stomping on the roof, because the whole bloody truck was bouncing up and down. “So I jump out and I look around. But there’s nobody on top of the truck. The whole building, all of Madison Square Garden above me, was moving. I was petrified.”

Had the Rolling Stones headed home after the tour wrapped in Boston, the furor over ticket prices likely would have died down, snuffed out by the release of Let It Bleed one week later, on December 5. Instead, they spent their last week in America making nice with their fans and recording tracks for their next album at Muscle Shoals. 

The first stop was the West Palm Beach International Music and Arts Festival, on November 30, in Jupiter, Florida. The Sunshine State’s attempt at a Woodstock-style event, the festival featured Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin, Sly and the Family Stone, the Byrds and several other rock groups, with the Stones scheduled as the closing act.

Rain and a badly timed cold front made the event uncomfortable for fans, and transportation issues delayed the Stones’ arrival by 11 hours. They finally took the stage at 4 a.m. From Florida, the group headed to Muscle Shoals Sound Studio in Sheffield, Alabama, hoping to capture some of their newfound fire on tape. 

Over three days, they cut three tracks – their new songs “Wild Horses” and “Brown Sugar,” along with the traditional Black spiritual “You Gotta Move” – all of which were destined for their next studio album, 1971’s Sticky Fingers. And then it was onward to San Francisco and the Saturday, December 6 free concert they’d been railroaded into headlining. 

From the start, the organizers had trouble finding a location. San Jose State University’s practice field, the site of an earlier three-day free festival, was selected, but the city, still reeling from that event, refused to issue the necessary permits. 

Golden Gate Park was up for consideration, but an NFL football game at Kezar Stadium, situated in the park, on the same day made the location unsuitable. 

Sears Point Raceway, in Sonoma, was selected, but the venue’s owner, the television and film production company Filmways, Inc., wanted the Stones to put up $300,000 cash as a deposit. The company also demanded distribution rights for a concert film of the event.

On December 4, with just two days to spare, the Altamont Raceway, in Tracy, 70 miles east of San Francisco, was selected. The festival would open with West Coast groups – Santana, Jefferson Airplane, the Flying Burrito Brothers, the Grateful Dead and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young – while the Stones served as the closing act.

With memories of Woodstock still fresh, the organizers anticipated a peaceful concert, which is perhaps why no one thought it a bad idea to hire members of the Hells Angels motorcycle club to help out.

The Jefferson Airplane and Grateful Dead had suggested having them on hand, and the Stones concurred. It probably helped that they had enlisted a British group of motorbike fans called the Hells Angels to provide security the previous June at their Hyde Park show, where Mick Taylor made his official debut as a member of the band. 

For the promise of $500 in beer, the Hells Angels agreed to keep fans from climbing onto the Altamont’s makeshift stage, which was just one meter high, and provide assistance to attendees, such as giving directions to bathrooms and medical tents. 

The concert started out fine, with Santana turning in an inspired set. But as the day progressed, the Angels got drunker, while the young attendees grew more stoned and unruly. The bikers frequently waded into the throng, swinging fists, pool cues and motorcycle chains, to drive back fans or take down flailing, strung-out revelers.

When Jefferson Airplane’s Marty Balin attempted to break up a scuffle, one of the Angels punched the singer, knocking him out. The Grateful Dead had been scheduled to play between CSN&Y and the Stones, but when they arrived and learned what had happened to Balin, they panicked and fled.

By the time the Stones went on, darkness had fallen and some 5,000 fans were swarming the front of the stage. Jagger, who’d been punched in the face by an attendee when he first arrived, implored the crowd to “cool out.”

They began playing “Sympathy for the Devil” but stopped when the Angels launched another skirmish. “The violence was incredible,” Richards recalls. “I thought the show would have been stopped, but hardly anybody wanted to take any notice.”

The Stones continued to play, having little recourse and hoping the performance would keep the crowd from becoming more chaotic. They launched into “Under My Thumb,” but as Jagger began singing, another fight broke out. 

A young man in a lime-green suit was seen tangling with some Hells Angels, when he suddenly pulled a revolver from his jacket. The bikers descended. Hells Angel Alan Passaro reportedly stabbed the man five times with a large knife, while the others stomped him and left him to die. 

Attendees carried his limp body to a medical tent, but 18-year-old Meredith Hunter succumbed to his injuries, one of four people who died that day at Altamont.

After the shock of Altamont, the Rolling Stones had given little thought to releasing an album from their U.S. jaunt. But in December, shortly after the tour’s conclusion, a bootleg of their troubled November 9 Oakland Coliseum show began making the rounds at head shops and independent record stores. 

Titled Live’r Than You’ll Ever Be, it was one of the earliest commercially sold bootleg albums, along with Kum Back, featuring session recordings from the Beatles’ yet-unreleased Let It Be project, and Great White Wonder, offering uncollected recordings of Dylan’s performances from 1961 through his 1967 sessions with the Band. 

The Stones’ bootleg sold very well, which may have influenced the group to release a concert record of its own. Ethan Russell, the tour’s trusted photographer, was hired to shoot its cover. 

He created a still life consisting of Jagger’s Uncle Sam top hat and various other elements of his stage costume, along with his passport and odds and ends. Prominently positioned on the hat’s brim was a fat white joint. Jagger, still smarting from the band’s drug busts, looked at the photo in disbelief. “Didn’t you shoot any without the joint?” he asked. Russell had not.

In early February, Charlie Watts was dispatched to a section of the M6 motorway in Birmingham, England, along with a donkey and pieces of the Stones’ gear, including Keith Richards’ Ampeg Dan Armstrong guitar and Mick Taylor’s 1958 Les Paul ’Burst.

He was photographed in his white stage clothes, wearing Mick Jagger’s top hat, and leaping into the air while holding the guitars aloft. Shot by David Bailey, the photo was inspired by the line “Jewels and binoculars hang from the head of the mule,” from Dylan’s “Visions of Johanna.”

On Watts’ T-shirt, an image of a woman’s bare breasts provided a visual reference for the album’s title, itself derived from the Blind Boy Fuller tune “Get Your Ya Yas Out,” though in Fuller’s song, ya yas is a euphemism for ass. 

The Stones, as always, had no qualms about pushing the limits. Released on September 4, 1970, Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out! quickly became a hit, reaching Number One in the U.K. and Number Six in the U.S., where it eventually went Platinum.

Critics praised it, with Rolling Stones’ Lester Bangs saying, “I have no doubt that it’s the best rock concert ever put on record.” 

But for all its success, Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out!, along with the tour that gave birth to it and the innovations the Rolling Stones brought to rock and roll’s live music scene, lie in the shadow of what Keith Richards called “the terrible murder going on in front of us.”“Altamont,” he said in 1971. “It could only happen to the Stones.”

Stephen Dale Petit's 2020 Visions has been a long time coming and now that it's here, and now that 2020 has shown its hand, he's allowing himself a wry smile as to its prescience.

“The mood of the album is a perfect fit for what we are actually living through right now,” he says from his home in West Hampstead, north-west London. It sounds like he can't believe his luck. Maybe that's true, but not in the way we might imagine.

Tracking started in 2017, ready for a summer release the following year when Petit was diagnosed with cancer and everything was put on ice. Now, mercifully, having had the all-clear for over a year now, the record was scheduled to hit shelves in the last week of March, before lockdown happened and everything shut down. 

Dates were pulled, we all hid away, and all that was left was to tell the story how we got here. “Whilst it was devastating to have all the dates disappear, the album launch, and all the things that went with it, it wasn’t my first go-round on this rodeo because I have had to pull things for health reasons," he says. “Different context!“

SDP can't take credit for predicting a global pandemic but 2020 Visions does an exemplary job in articulating this febrile, combustible moment on planet Earth. And maybe it just happens to exorcise some of the anxieties that Petit has had to live in recent times.  

“There are a few overriding themes that I wanted the album to contain,“ says Petit. “One, I wanted it to be kind of a tribute to the bent note on a guitar. I spoke with the band and the producer a lot to hopefully come up with the sound experience that was fresh.

“My hypothetical was, ‘What was it like to hear “Satisfaction“ for the very first time?’ Like we are so used to it, and it is such a familiar sound, but when it came out nothing had ever sounded like that before that record. It’s easy to forget how, sonically speaking, how revolutionary that was."

As Petit explains here, everything on the record is born of the blues, but it doesn't necessarily stay blues — throughout, he finds little pockets of inspiration, permission to take it somewhere else.

These moments just happen, as on tracks such as “Zombie Train,” which was captured in one live, jam-band go-for-it take on which producer Vance Powell fished keyboardist Daniel Ellsworth out of his Nashville Rolodex to sit in and complement Petit's trio.

“I am seriously so pleased with capturing that,” he says. Petit is joined on the recording by bassist Sophie Lord and drummer Jack Greenwood. There are other guest performances — the brilliant Shemekia Copeland sings on “Soul of a Man” — but having a trio as the core allowed each of them to stretch out and play with the boundaries of blues.

It even goes (almost) metal; only for 20 seconds but that's very much of a piece with the spirit guiding the record. On 2020 Visions, Petit lets the songs chase their own logic. Petit, for his part, was just trying to stay on good terms with his JTM45 and appeal to the better angels of its nature. A skill that takes some mastering...

We talk about you as a blues artist, and everything flows from the blues, but you take it to different places. Tell me about “The Fall of America.”

I had been to see the Kills, the band, and Jamie Hince does quite a lot of things where he is fretting — like blues — with his thumb, and he has some cool things going on. I saw them at the Brixton Academy. I thought, ‘Well I never want to copy…’ But I did! I hooked my thumb around the low E and just started to see what happened, and an hour-and-a-half later the riff has been born. 

It was inspired by the moment. Mick Taylor — the Rolling Stone, Bob Dylan and Jack Bruce guitar player — was living with me at the time, and he was in another part of the house. He had gone away to get tea and he came back, listening the whole time. The mere act of the music going through his ears and being filtered by his brain changed the molecules of the music in the air somehow.  

Just by his very presence?

I don’t know why it felt like that but it did. It was almost like he was a human piece of high-end kit. [Laughs] I’m not making this up! It was a very distinct, visceral experience. His only contribution to this, other than that was to say, ‘Well I think it has to go to E at some point.’ And it goes to E at the end.

How come he was living in your house?

Well he just came and lived at my house whenever he was in London. I don’t know, we are just pals!

Did he contribute anything else?

He wrote “Sputnik Days” with me in a similar sort of fashion, but on that particular occasion he felt strongly enough about it, and there was a guitar to hand, so he picked it up and we just finished the song that way.

That track has some great tones going on.

Yes, love the tone. That was Vance Powell, an absolute sonic genius and one of the best. He’s in the top five recording men on the planet, the Sam Phillips or Tom Dowd of his age, and he loves tape delays. The guitar sound on that would have been the 355.

I’m not sure if I was using the Varitone, but certainly middle position on the pickup toggle switch, and to get that sound you are just dialing in the volume of the two pickups to what seems to work. Something we must touch on is the contribution that my amp made, which is a JTM45 that was manufactured in 1965, and so the way the guitar feeds back on this album is quite special for me.

I just can’t get enough of how the amplifier behaves when you are sustaining notes and feeding back. They morph and shift, and the harmonics are so varied. I think there is one note on the very top end of “2020 Visions” where it goes through seven iterations. It’s the same note but the harmonics feed back and then it goes to the actual note and then, yeah! It’s a force of nature.

Harmonics can be a strange phenomenon, like an accident of science.

Yeah, and I hate to say it, because it is a very expensive piece of kit, but there are not many modern amps that can do it. I mean, you can get a modern amp that will get you two or three permutations but that Marshall you could easily go through 10 if the music allows the note to resonate that long. It will just shift forever.

Because of how it was made at the time.

Yes, absolutely. And you can get into proper geekery but it is down to the Radiospares transformers. This one has all Radiospares for the choke and the power and the output stage. I had it authenticated before I spent the money. There is a guy at Marshall whose only job it is vintage certification.

It sounds great. You have to spare a thought for today’s amp builders. They’ve got the knowledge, but access to parts is another thing entirely.

Yeah, absolutely. You can still get great sounds but I was really interesting in chasing the results in what this amp offers. You have to work with it. When I first played with one, it was really upsetting because I had been told about this mythic amp, and the first time I played through one it was a combo. They knew I would be salivating, so they really hyped it up.

I was looking forward to this session for like a month, and I went in, and I was so discouraged! And so upset! Because I was used to modern amps, where if I hit a note and sustain it, it behaves kind of predictably.  This thing wouldn’t cooperate. You had to work. 

I thought I was going to be like a kid in a candy shop; it was a really hard day of work. You’d hit a note, try and sustain it, and it would stop dead. Other times it would sustain in a way that you didn’t expect it to, or wanted it to. 

When did you change your mind on it?

When I went back that night and listened to the monitor mixes. If you think about it there is a commonality with, say, Hendrix’s first album, Beano, the early Cream, and even Mick Taylor on Crusade, which is ’67, there was a commonality with how the bent notes would sound, the way that they sort of arc, and the reverberations out of a bent note, have a very peculiar characteristic.

There are commonalities, as much as they are all different. Also Peter Green, on the John Mayall stuff... They are all playing through '60s Marshalls. And I heard it in that monitor mix. I could hear that tone, the tone! It’s insane.

And it made sense?

Once I understood, I asked for another bout, a rematch. [Laughs] Because it did feel like a fight. It was really nothing like I was expecting. So then I learned. Okay, this is what it does and this is what it doesn’t do. In terms of sustaining notes and so forth, the feedback, it would coax you out onto a branch and then break the branch off.

Now, if you knew that was going to happen you could fly, but the first time I was falling flat on my face. When you begin to get a handle on how it behaves, then all of a sudden you are flying. Wow! That’s how it is, and that’s how I ended up getting this amp.

An amp like that is like breaking in a horse.

Yeah, and you don’t wanna tame it too much.

Do you use rely on your guitar's tone and volume controls to rein it in?

Yes, certainly with the Marshall. You have to have it six or above for it to function properly, all those components I was talking about. They don’t really come into play until you’re cranked up to a significant degree — and I think that, as they say in America, everything should be dimed. Everything on 10.

I also tend to go for the middle position on the toggle switch and play with the two volumes, before I even touch a tone control. I’ll play with the volumes to get something that’s interesting, or that makes sense for the section of the song.

And you have got the Varitone on your ES-355...

I use the Varitone on the 355. It’s gorgeous. Again, it is something that at first seems really odd and clunky, and weird, and why only five positions on an EQ? It’s very savage, but I think it is beautiful on that guitar; you can get some really clear bell-like tones. 

Everybody talks about the Peter Green mistake and the rewiring of the pickup that gave him his famous tone, but I don’t know. These discussions are myths really, and what any guitar player from that period remembers, in 1973, and then what they remember when they are asked 30 years later, who knows? 

I think he was just chasing B.B. King and he had a Les Paul. It made more sense if you are trying to drive around the neighborhood of that tone, to get a 355 with a Varitone because that’s how B.B. King did it, and sure enough it is very similar to the legendary Peter Green out-of-phase pickup tone.

What were you using on “On Top”?

I was using the 355. I wanted to have something that was that vintage of blues, and I just loved the idea of using it as an intro to something as rough and ready as the song that follows it, “Long Tall Shorty,” which has got some savagery about it. 

Back in the day, the top line of “On Top” would have probably been played by horns or clarinet and then Sophie came up with a genius bass part, harmonically covering the territory of a horn section, piano and bass all at once by chording the whole song, including shifting note clusters and counterpoint melodies, which any guitarist will know, is insanely difficult on bass. 

Was that through the Marshall?

Through the Marshall, but dialed back. I also use an Ernie Ball volume pedal, and in the studio, that’s probably not used as much as it is onstage, but I would definitely would have had the middle toggle position and favoring the neck pickup in terms of volume, and neither of them much beyond eight, seven-and-bit, and maybe dial down a little bit of tone.

It sounds so sweet. 

It is sort of cheeky. I definitely like the juxtaposition. Stylistically there might be a bit of tension but in terms of the content of the music it is exactly the same.

The risk with an audience is that they can second guess things, and that can be very difficult in blues. You really go for it with those dynamics on “Long Tall Shorty.”

Sure. I guess to go for something stylistically like they were doing in the ‘20s and ‘30s and ‘40s, and then try and create what they would be trying to do in 2030, but with the same blues DNA. Everything is born of the blues. 

I just think the bass groove that Sophie lays down at the top of the song is so sexy, and raw, and badass, and moody with it — it sets the mood and then the drums come in and right then you’ve got the template for the whole song, and then this guitar comes over the top and just slices through. That was a Les Paul. 

That again is a different mood to something like “The Fall of America,” which is all kinds of antsy, anxious.

“The Fall of America” was written around the riff; that’s how it was born, and I wanted it to sound otherworldly, and to sound ominous and threatening. Anxiety for sure. We worked hard to get the drum beat that felt right, we tried all kinds of different feels  and it is actually really similar to the old-style marching band blues shuffle from the ’30s. It just ended up being that. I was really chuffed. The lyrics were something that I at first thought, “I can’t go **** there, can I?” But, sure enough…

When you find yourself asking the question, “I can’t go there, can I?” the answer is invariably yes.

Well! And you just hit upon part of the guidelines for making this, which was, yes, everything is born of the blues but any time a song felt like it wanted to expand and not stay in its lane, I didn’t stop it. To let the song have its own head, so to speak. The end of “The Fall of America” is kind of just like metal.

Change the guitar tone, the tempo, and it could be Iron Maiden, almost. 

Yeah, and I just thought, “Fine!” I mean, I know that Black Sabbath started out as a blues band. Does that matter? I don’t know. Is their fifth album in blues? No, but it makes sense. I am fine with that, and we were just passing through anyway — that section only lasts 20-odd seconds and then it goes into something else… A band simultaneously exploding and imploding into itself...

Tell us about “Soul of a Man.” When you have a vocalist such as Shemekia Copeland, does that change your playing?

Sometimes, yes. In this instance, no. Because you’ve got “2020 Visions,” “The Fall of America,” and “Zombie Train” that are specifically dealing with kind of an alienated, post-dystopian approach to what it is like to live life in that atmosphere — which we are all getting an experience of now — it was another of those songs that needed to be where it was. 

“Soul of a Man” was there because it is right there in the words: it was asking a really important question. It's trying to address, factionalism and tribalism, who shouts the loudest.

Like you said, “Roxie’s Song” needed to be where it was, to have something calming and soothing, a ray of sunshine. Even though it is a song about loss, it has a lot of really joyful moments in it, and the majesty of when you bond with people, or any creature on the planet really, there is a lot of magic. It is a song of mourning but I also wanted to celebrate the magic on “Roxie’s Song.” 

This is an exceptional situation, but there have always been pressures on venues — with rents, property developers, etc. I wanted to ask you just how important music venues are to the music? We talk amps, pedals, transistors 24/7, but the physical spaces we perform and experience music in are just as crucial.

That’s a great question and you sort of answered it in the question because it is exactly like those particular components in an amp, or a personality. Even though it is bricks and mortar, a venue is a living, breathing entity and so, up and down the country, there are venues that are super-massively special. The Astoria? It’s insane that is gone. The 100 Club exists. I’ve had an affinity with that place ever since I moved to London, a long time ago, decades… 

But there are other places up and down the country. There is the Picturedome in Holmfirth. I don’t want to name some and then others get left out but, yes, massively important. I don’t know what resources and forces and influence can be brought to bear to make sure that the decimation of the number of places to perform live music that has already occurred in the last decade doesn’t continue. 

I don’t think that live music and people’s need for it is going to be stopped. It might be that other venues need to have to open up. I do not think streaming from your settee in your front room or anywhere is the answer. It’s great for the moment. It has helped enormously. But it is certainly never going to replace people being in the same room with molecules of music moving about.

• Stephen Dale Petit's 2020 Visions is out now via 333 Records.