How Ronnie Wood's Audition for 'Black and Blue' Forged a New Guitar Dynamic with Keith Richards

Ronnie Wood’s late-1975 “audition” was less a sit-down tryout and more a live recording test that became the album Black and Blue. The band essentially invited him to play on sessions in Rotterdam and Munich, and the tracks that stuck – especially “Hey Negrita,” “Crazy Mama,” and “Hot Stuff” – were the ones where his guitar work locked in with Keith Richards without stepping on him. That was the whole point: after Mick Taylor’s departure, the Stones needed a rhythm player who could weave his own lines through Keith’s open-G churn, not over it.

Wood brought slide guitar and a loose, almost boogie-woogie feel that gave the songs a different kind of greasy momentum. On “Hey Negrita,” his slide slides right into the same register as Keith’s riffing, but instead of doubling or clashing, the two guitars split the frequency spectrum like a pair of hands clapping together. Keith later said Wood “could play the left-hand piano part on guitar” – meaning he instinctively found the spaces between beats and chords that a second guitarist should fill. That integration became the core of the Stones’ sound for the next four decades.