Rolling Stones - Honky Tonk Women (taped for TOTP on July 3, 1969, hours after Brian Jones died, and broadcast July 10)

[highplainsdem]

2. My impression, from what I've read, is that most of their fans would agree with you.

https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/how-mick-taylor-revolutionised-rolling-stones/

When Mick Taylor joined, the Stones went through arguably their greatest phase of musical creation and produced their most critically acclaimed albums such as: Let it Bleed (1969), Sticky Fingers (1971), Exile on Main Street (1972), and Goats Head Soup (1973). As Keith Richards notes in his book Life, “Mick Taylor being in the band on that ‘69 tour certainly sealed the Stones together again. So we did Sticky Fingers with him. And the music changed — almost unconsciously.

“You write with Mick Taylor in mind, maybe without realising it, knowing he can come up with something different. You’ve got to give him something he’ll really enjoy. Not just the same old grind.” It’s the mark of a serious guitarist that, firstly, you gain the respect of Keith Richards and secondly, that he thinks you may get bored of the riffs he was writing.

Richards continues to go on and say at a different time, “we did the most brilliant stuff together, some of the most brilliant stuff the Stones ever did. Everything was there in his playing — the melodic touch, a beautiful sustain and a way of reading a song.”

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Richards has said that he added Taylor to the Let it Bleed tracks here and there for prosperity’s sake. Of course, that would prove to be a wonderful and powerful thing, as it did end up doing a lot of good. On the single that would precede Let it Bleed, and while not included on the album, a country version of ‘Honky Tonk Women’ was added instead. Richards credits Taylor for influencing the track: “the song was originally written as a real Hank Williams/Jimmie Rodgers/1930s country song. And it got turned around to this other thing by Mick Taylor, who got into a completely different feel, throwing it off the wall another way.”

Classic Rock magazine on Mick Taylor's influence on this song:

https://www.loudersound.com/features/rolling-stones-honky-tonk-women-story-behind-the-song

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That said, Honky Tonk Women is more than anything an emphatic indication that there’s been a changing of the guard at the Rolling Stones. Until Jones’ replacement, 20-year old ex-John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers whizz-kid guitarist Mick Taylor, got his hands on it, Honky Tonk Women was an unremarkable Gram Parsons-influenced tribute to (or perhaps more accurately a self-conscious parody of) Nudie-suited classic country.

Honky Tonk Women started out life as Country Honk. It was December ‘68 and Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithful, along with Keith Richards and Anita Pallenberg were on their way from Lisbon to Rio, with the ship-born leg of the journey complete and the Mato Grosso on the near horizon.

“We lived for a few days on a ranch, where Mick and I wrote Country Honk sitting on a veranda like cowboys, thinking ourselves in Texas,” remembers Keith Richards. “It was written on acoustic guitar, and I remember the place because every time you flushed the john these black blind frogs came jumping out”. How very Rolling Stones.

Once in the hands of Mick Taylor, Honk was reinvented, and as a consequence the entire modus operandi of The Rolling Stones shifted ever so slightly further from roots-angled pop toward raunch-wrangled rock. Where Brian might have thrown a marimba into the ring or blown an opium-scented wheeze into a recorder, Taylor provided the wiry, six-stringed musculature of a well-matched sparring partner for Richards, and as they locked gin-soaked guitar necks and weaved for the very first time, magic happened.

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