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.
