How Mick Taylor’s Slide Guitar and Jazz Sensibility Reshaped the Rolling Stones’ Sound on Sticky Fingers and Exile on Main St.

When Mick Taylor joined the Rolling Stones in 1969, the band moved away from the blues-punk rawness of the Brian Jones era into something more fluid and dark. Taylor’s background in John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers gave him a melodic, almost jazz-inflected touch, and his slide guitar work became the secret weapon on tracks like “Sway” and “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking.” He added a sophistication that let Keith Richards pull back into rhythm without losing the bite.

On Sticky Fingers, Taylor’s influence is immediate. The twin-guitar interplay on “Brown Sugar” is deceptively simple, but it’s his sinuous solo on “Wild Horses” that gives the ballad its aching lift. The album’s country-blues songs — “Dead Flowers,” “Moonlight Mile” — get a shimmering pedal-steel-like quality from his fingers, something Brian Jones had aimed for but couldn’t sustain live. Taylor’s presence also let the rhythm section loosen up, which paid off huge on Exile on Main St.

That looseness is the whole story of Exile. Taylor’s guitar weaves through the murk of “Tumbling Dice” and “Rip This Joint” like a ghost, never stepping on the vocal or the groove. His solos are economic but memorable — the stretched, buzzing bends on “All Down the Line” feel almost like a second vocal line. But tension grew: Taylor wanted more space for his ideas (he co-wrote “Sway” and “Winter” but got few credits), and the Stones’ increasingly Keith-driven boogie was squeezing him out. He left in 1974, but those five years gave the band its richest, most cohesive sound.