The Rolling Stones has seen plenty of members come and go but Keith Richards wished just one of them had been permanent. Brian Jones, Mick Taylor, and Bill Wyman were all members of the band until death or retirement came for them. Some have returned and temporary members drafted in, but just one has made Richards wish they stuck around.
Speaking about the constant rotation of band members in The Rolling Stones, Richards says he had hoped the return of Taylor would have led to something permanent. Richards told MOJO Magazine that Taylor’s return to the band for a series of 50th anniversary tour dates should have gone further than it did, but that the veteran guitarist seemingly had no interest in returning for a long-term stint.
Richards explained: “I wanted to see if it would blossom into something else, like a three-guitar band. I realised that was just a hope, an idea. The Stones are a two-guitar band, and I know that, really. But Midnight Rambler over the last year or so [with Mick Taylor guesting] has been amazing. He’s a lot looser than he was the first time around. He’s got a lot more mileage under the belt – and a better sense of humour about it all.”
Taylor wouldn’t play with The Rolling Stones after the Midnight Rambler guest spots, and the band has since lost further members. Charlie Watts died in 2021, leaving the core of the group just Mick Jagger, Richards, and Ronnie Wood. The band has toured constantly since their founding in 1962, with the Forty Licks tour proving most troubling of all for Richards and Wood.
While the band were keen to lean into their old material, a show to kickstart their Forty Licks tour in the early 2000s was, according to Jagger, disastrous. The frontman said: “When we played at the Palais Royale in Toronto as a warm-up for the Forty Licks tour, the rest of The Rolling Stones were incredibly nervous. I had never seen them so nervous.
“I tried to calm them down because they were so intense. ‘It’s going to be great guys, we sound great.’ And they made tons of mistakes, tempos flying everywhere, which was the result of nerves, but you’re thinking, ‘How many times have we rehearsed this tune?’
“It was very ragged, but I guess that Keith and the rest of the band hadn’t been on stage in a long while. I do find it useful when we have time off between tours to go and walk onto someone else’s stage and do a couple of numbers with them, with somebody like Lenny Kravitz – it helps take the edge off the feeling that you haven’t been on stage for four years.”
Despite the troubles of the tour, the band has managed to keep themselves fresh over the last sixty years. Speaking in the interview compilation book, According to The Rolling Stones, Richards outlined how the band keeps their tour fresh. He said: “Each song is a coat-hanger, and every night you can put a different shirt on it. I have still not discovered all the myriad possibilities of Midnight Rambler or (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction, so I never have that feeling of, ‘Here we go again, what a grind’.
“I could play Jumpin’ Jack Flash all night if my hand would bear it. the songs are flexible enough to play them in a subtly different way every single night. Maybe only the band will recognise how a particular version differs, but it is enough to keep us guessing – though at the same time you’re thinking, ‘I wish I’d put that on the record!'”
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