The Rolling Stone who's stony broke: Why Mick Taylor lives in a rundown Suffolk semi with a shabby car
By BOB GRAHAM

It is a curious effect of the passage of time that The Rolling Stones are now as much admired for their business acumen as for their rock and roll. Nearly half a century after their rebellious beginnings, the Stones remain the world’s highest-earning rock stars.
Their albums have made them £250million and their spectacular tours have grossed upwards of £1.8billion.
Mick Jagger, whose androgynous sneer was once so feared by The Establishment, is now canny Sir Mick with a £225million fortune and palatial homes on three continents.

Even guitarist Ronnie Wood, a relative newcomer who was only made a full member of the band in 1990, was estimated to be worth £70million during his recent divorce.
All of which is a source of bitter amusement to the shambling figure in a dark grey duffel coat, stopping to light his umpteenth cigarette of the day as he walks from his ramshackle cottage in rural Suffolk to the village shop.
Mick Taylor is Ronnie Wood’s direct predecessor and the musical virtuoso behind the Rolling Stones’ golden age.
When the band announced six weeks ago that it was switching record labels from EMI to Universal, much was made of the continuing selling power of classic albums such as Exile On Main Street, Let It Bleed and Sticky Fingers – all made in an astonishingly productive five-year period between 1969 and 1974, when Taylor was the Stones’ lead guitarist.

Taylor, who replaced the erratic Brian Jones, played guitar on Honky Tonk Women, Wild Horses, Angie, It’s Only Rock And Roll and a host of other classic tracks.
He was present at the height of the band’s decadent excess at Nellcote in the South of France in the summer of 1971 and on the legendary tours of America in 1969 and 1972-73.
Yet Taylor walked away from the band at the height of its musical powers.
And while Jagger, Keith Richards, Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts have become fabulously wealthy on the back of music he helped make, Taylor scrapes a hand-to-mouth existence by playing pub gigs and hasn’t seen a penny in royalties from the Rolling Stones since 1982.
For years, he has refused to discuss his time as a Stone and has brushed off the two questions that have dogged him ever since: why did he leave, and does he regret it?
Now, 61-year-old Taylor has broken his silence in an extraordinary interview with The Mail on Sunday.
It is clear that the scruffy, two-bedroom semi where he has lived for the past 20 years hardly fits the image of a former Rolling Stone. The tiny house in a Suffolk country lane is in serious need of repair and redecoration.
‘Yeah, I know it needs doing,’ he said dismissively. ‘I just don’t feel up for it right now.’
Even less edifying is the unopened stack of bills and threats to cut off the water, electricity and gas. The uncut grass, empty cans in the kitchen sink and the ancient car parked in the driveway with weeds growing through its wheels also tell a tale.
The thick-set Taylor has none of the dandyish elegance of Jagger or the outlaw chic of Keith Richards. His once-golden mane of hair is streaked with grey. He is jowly and far heavier than in his prime – the legacy, he admits, of years of drug abuse.
‘People are always asking me whether I regret leaving the Rolling Stones,’ he said. ‘I make no bones about it – had I remained with the band, I would probably be dead.

'I was having difficulties with drug addiction and couldn’t have lasted. But I’m clean now and have been for years.
‘My life is so much better now than being a drug-ravaged member of the Stones. So no, I don’t regret leaving.
‘But people who really know me ask another question – whether I regret joining the Stones. To me, that’s far more astute.’
In truth, Taylor has always been ambivalent about the Stones – a fact that explains in part why he has never pursued what he believes may be millions of pounds in unpaid royalties.
For all his undoubted virtuosity on the electric guitar, he was never a huge fan of the band and found their brand of bar-room rock and roll musically limited.

‘When they asked me to come to the studio in 1969, I thought they just wanted me to play a session,’ he recalled. ‘I sort of liked them, but was never passionate about the Stones. In some ways I liked The Beatles more.
‘At the first session, I overdubbed the guitar on Honky Tonk Women, but I thought they were all a little bit vain and full of themselves.
‘After doing guitar parts on three songs, I said to Mick and Keith, “If you guys are just going to sit and mess around, I’m going home. I’ve got things to do.” I told them to give me a call if they wanted me to do anything else.
‘The next day, Mick called and asked if I wanted to join. He came and picked me up in his Bentley. I wasn’t impressed by all that and I think they kind of liked that attitude.
‘Part of the charm of the Rolling Stones, as far as I could see, was that they were not technically very good but were very raw and had great ideas.’
Taylor was always set apart from the rest of the band, who had already been together for seven years by the time he joined.
He was five years younger than his bandmates and a far more gifted instrumentalist, having toured for three years with the influential John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers.
Furthermore, as a fitter’s son from Hatfield, Hertfordshire, he was genuinely working class, while the Stones were middle-class boys pretending to be rough.
From January 1971, he also had a daughter, Chloe, to support from a short-lived marriage to his first wife, Rosie.
His first public appearance with the band was the Stones’ huge free concert in Hyde Park, which became an impromptu memorial for the band’s founder and original guitarist Brian Jones, who had been found dead two days earlier.
Taylor’s influence on the band was immediately appreciated by critics and fans alike for his brilliant, fluid guitar-playing. And climbing aboard the Stones’ rollercoaster gave him access to an extraordinary world he had never even dreamed of.
‘There was as much sex as you wanted,’ he smiled. ‘That was part of being a rock musician, especially in America. And they always had people around them telling them how great they were and to try some of this or that. I hated that.
'Keith in particular was surrounded by people telling him how great he was when he could hardly keep his eyes open.’
Taylor revealed that around 1972-73, Keith’s drug-taking became a serious problem.
‘Several times the band almost broke up,’ he said. ‘Keith had his own separate social scene and it was obvious there was a lot of drug-taking. There were also problems travelling to certain countries because of all the drug convictions.
‘When I left John Mayall I was a London musician with London friends. But because the band wanted to live in France to be tax exiles, I was forced to go along with them.
'I didn’t need to be a tax exile, I didn’t have financial problems to hide. It was all very well being with the Stones and apparently making all this money – although no one really knew how much because it was all on paper – but I was losing my friends and missing the scene in London.
'I began to realise how big an effect the Stones was having on my life.’
By now Taylor was also dabbling with narcotics. ‘It began as an occasional recreational thing,’ he explained. ‘I never thought I would get addicted. But by the time I returned to London in 1973, I’d become more and more dependent. I was using every day.
‘By 1974, I felt I’d gone as far as I could with the band. I didn’t think they’d stay together. The records were doing well but the band was falling apart – it was in chaos.
‘Mick and Keith weren’t talking or working together and it was taking longer and longer to make the albums. So as well as Keith’s addiction there was Mick’s frustration and my own disenchantment and disillusionment with them.’
And Taylor confided: ‘I was a bit impulsive back then. I had a reputation on stage of being quiet, but off it I wasn’t. We used to fight and argue all the time. And one of the things I got angry about was that Mick had promised to give me some credit for some of the songs – and he didn’t.
‘I believed I’d contributed enough. Let’s put it this way – without my contribution those songs would not have existed. There’s not many but enough, things like Sway and Moonlight Mile on Sticky Fingers and a couple of others.
'I took offence and that was a contributory factor in my departure. But I’d never seen being with the Stones as a permanent thing.
‘When I told the Stones’ office I was leaving, they asked for my gold Amex card. Mick tried to persuade me to stay, but I told him I was fed up and how my drug problems were beginning to worry me.
'Mick suggested taking six months off, but I’ve never been good at taking advice. Maybe I should have listened.’
Given all that, it is perhaps not surprising that it was not an amicable split. ‘When I left, they cut off my money for a year, just like that,’ said Taylor. ‘But I had to leave because
I was frustrated.
‘I had a creative relationship with Mick, but I was also bored for a lot of the time. I wanted more and they wanted to remain the same. I also wanted to deal with my drug problems. I believed if I removed myself from that situation I would sort myself out.’
But life outside the band was not easy. Taylor divorced Rose, sold his gold records, moved to New York and squandered most of his money on heroin and cocaine. ‘I was addicted then, using anything I could get,’ he said.
The downward spiral continued even when he flew back to Hertfordshire to sit at his father’s deathbed.
‘My father was dying of liver cancer and was in terrible pain in hospital,’ Taylor recalled. ‘He said he knew I’d been using drugs and asked if I would ask the nurses for stronger painkillers. I did and they gave him morphine. I sat there trying to balance the irony of the situation.
'My father needed morphine to ease his pain and there was me, addicted to the stuff for pleasure. I was so disgusted, I felt numb.’
Taylor moved to Los Angeles in 1990 and enrolled at a methadone clinic in Hollywood Boulevard.
‘I joined the line of junkies. I was a virtual down and out,’ he admitted. ‘My lowest time was in the clinic on Christmas Day. A nurse gave me a tumbler of methadone and said, “Have a nice Christmas.”
'I told her there wasn’t any Christmas for junkies. I decided to go back to England to find a cure, however painful.’
Since the end of his marriage to his second wife, an American called Valerie, Taylor has lived on his own and rarely sees his daughter Chloe, or Emma, a second daughter by a one-time backing singer with his band.
But he still plays music with friends, including former Jeff Beck keyboard player Max Middleton, ex-Manfred Mann guitarist Denny Newman and ex-Snowy White drummer Jeff Allen.
On the days he has some money, he roots through the stack of bills and pays the ones he can. When he doesn’t, which is often, he phones his friends and suggests they play a few gigs in local pubs and clubs, living out of the back of a Transit van.
But what about his royalties from the Stones? ‘In 1982 they stopped paying me. They’d signed to a different record company and had new contracts and were advised they didn’t need to pay me any more,’ explained Taylor with a shrug.
‘Until then, I’d had a contract with Rolling Stones Records which was licensed to Atlantic Records – the same contract as the rest of the band.’
The deal gave him an equal share of performing royalties, though Jagger and Richards shared the writers’ royalties. But when the Atlantic contract expired, the band’s management used a loophole in Taylor’s contract to stop all payments.
‘I should have got a lawyer,’ he said. ‘But instead I called them rude words and asked how they could just stop paying me. They all know it’s not right. In fact it is outrageous. They get all the money and I get the plaudits and praise, even from Mick.
‘I’ve tried to talk to Mick a couple of times, but I realise that hiring a lawyer is probably the only way they’ll take me seriously. But they figure I’m not going to do anything about it.’
Taylor thinks for a moment, then adds: ‘I’m going to do something about it because it’s morally wrong to cut my royalties for those six albums.’

[www.dailymail.co.uk]

Pretty pathetic business practices by the bands management. Not to mention how Mick and Keith do nothing about it and live lifes of luxury.

"It's just some friends of mine and they're busting down the door"

That was an interesting (and rather sad) read, thanks very much for posting.

Very revealing article! People trash the Daily Mail but they publish some great stuff. What would be fantastic is if some lawyer read this article and offered to help Mick T for nothing, or for no money upfront.

Awhile back, there was another similar article about Mick, with a picture of him carrying a plastic bag from the supermarket.

On one level, the Stones are pure evil. They would certainly know that Mick T needs help. I have read that they have helped impoverished old blues musicians though.

>>Furthermore, as a fitter’s son from Hatfield, Hertfordshire, he was genuinely working class, while the Stones were middle-class boys pretending to be rough

Keith, Bill and Charlie certainly have working-class origins.

It is such a pity that for so long, he has allowed his own immense dignity to hold him back from claiming what should rightfully be his.

I must say it makes me sad. I think the band, all four of them, should look to their consciences, and make sure that Mick Taylor gets some kind of royalty, especially with all of the rereleased stuff, Ya Yas & Exile & Remasters, many of which have Mick Taylor's magic all over them.

"When the band announced six weeks ago that it was switching record labels from EMI to Universal"

If they cannot even get their facts straight, then how are we supposed to believe the rest of this article?

Drew



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2009-09-13 03:41 by drewmaster.

"The deal gave him an equal share of performing royalties, though Jagger and Richards shared the writers’ royalties. But when the Atlantic contract expired, the band’s management used a loophole in Taylor’s contract to stop all payments."


Classy.

I didn't know Taylor got on the clinic.
So I wonder how the R&R HOF induction ceremony came about.

– a fact that explains in part why he has never pursued what he believes may be millions of pounds in unpaid royalties.

I doubt that any unpaid royalties would add up to millions of pounds. Even if he got partial credit for some of the publishing on a few songs, and artist royalties for actual playing plus performing rights royalties from the respective collecting societies, I can't see that coming close to millions of pounds.

He said he was going to do other things when he quit and now, or whenever this article was done, he says he's going to do something now.

He has yet to do anything about it.

Cry me a river.

"The wonder of Jimi Hendrix was that he could stand up at all he was so pumped full of drugs." Patsy, Patsy Stone

>> a fact that explains in part why he has never pursued what he believes may be millions of pounds in unpaid royalties. <<

>> I doubt that any unpaid royalties would add up to millions of pounds. <<

true; and i don't see how ambivalence over the Stones "explains" why he hasn't pursued his due royalties - but anyway!
the last time this was discussed, wasn't it established that he has been getting his due Decca/ABKCO royalties?
(which of course doesn't make it okay for anyone to withhold his non-ABKCO royalties)

anyway the article makes him sound pretty pitiful - i'm sorry if his living situation is so messed up
and if he feels so bitter about his choices. of course he should pursue what he feels is his due -
i hope he does that, finally, and that it does him some good.

>> Awhile back, there was another similar article about Mick, with a picture of him carrying a plastic bag from the supermarket. <<

smile: if there's something pitiful about that, i'd like to know so i can whimper about it :E



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2009-09-13 09:54 by with sssoul.

similar article about Mick, with a picture of him carrying a plastic bag from the supermarket

Geeeeeeeez some people collect the weirdest things ..........



ROCKMAN

Jagger, and the rest of them, are f-ucking @#$%& for not paying him his royalties. It's not the management, it's them, they could fix it if they wanted. Bastards.

Mick suggested taking six months off

Could have worked, never heard this before.

Asked the boss for a 6 month break twice a year once .....



ROCKMAN

Did MTDLAcey-DuceyDiddle-Diddle write that article? Honestly, it reads like complete BS and a bashing of Mick & Keith. MT has an active gigging career, and if he were truly having rough times there's a number of his old buddies that would help him out. This comes from the same mold of bloggery nonsense that claimed Charlie quit the band.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2009-09-13 10:31 by bassplayer617.

Sad story, but interesting. Thanks

-------------------
Keep On Rolling

Very sad read. I'm a bit surprised by some of the comments here. I find it absolutely inapropriate to use irony and try to make bad jokes on Mick Taylor's behalf. That's definitely not the level of dignity or compassion I expect on this board.
We mustn't get to the point where our blind loyalty to the band, and in particular - its founding members - makes it ok for us to step on others. People who have obviously been done wrong. And I sincerely hope we are still able to see that even our beloved Stones have done some pretty immoral and unethical things to people who've worked for and with them. Mick Taylor is, unfortunately, one of them.
I hope, from the bottom of my heart, that justice will prevail. Prefereably that the Stones think through their former conduct, and help him out financially - with money that are rightfully Mick Taylor's - or that he gets his act together and teams up with a sharp lawyer.

I know they've been generous (Keith in particular) to other friends and blues musicians in particular, when they've been down and out and full of cancer or in need of heart surgery, and I dare say Mick Taylor deserves their attention and care.
Some people might find this illoyal of me - that doesn't worry me at all. Too many people around them tell them about their genious and level of coolness. I think they're well aware of what they've done and how good - or bad - it is. They need someone to say: Listen, gentlemen - what the hell is this? And what are you going to do to make it right?! I'm sure that's what Stu would have done.

Quote
bassplayer617
Did MTDLAcey-DuceyDiddle-Diddle write that article? Honestly, it reads like complete BS and a bashing of Mick & Keith. MT has an active gigging career, and if he were truly having rough times there's a number of his old buddies that would help him out. This comes from the same mold of bloggery nonsense that claimed Charlie quit the band.

Wow, are you saying that what is printed in the Mail is not always 100% reliable and true???!!!!

Drew

One would think he would have at least removed the cans from the kitchen sink before the reporter showed up. This guy sounds like a typical loser, talking about lawsuits & what might beens. I think he was treated shabbily but as noted above he wouldn't be getting all that much in royalties unless he had songwriting credits. Also, note that he says he doesn't regret leaving the Stones but then later on says he wishes he had followed Mick J's advice to take a 6 month break. He's 61 which is old but it's time to stop wallowing in pity.

Makes Mick and Keith look like worthless people in my opinion..

You compare this to the Beatles and all the money Pete Best collected when Anthology 1 came out and well .. it just makes Mick and Keith look like garbage.

Not a surprise and am glad its getting out there because people deserve to know.

The title of the article is an intentionally misleading attention-grabber, since as far as I know MT is a Rolling Stone no more. That said, whether his dues are millions or pennies is neither here nor there - they're still his dues. So I hope he's going to be charging not only interest but also compound interest!

As much as I love the Stones(and I do) and Keith is my musical idol,the band can and have chewed people up and spit them out. Taylor,Brian to an extent although he contributed alot to his demise,Gram Parsons,Nicky Hopkins,Jimmy Miller and on and on! IMO

... Gram and Nicky?? i agree with the general premise, but i think you're exaggerating on those two

they should just pay the man for cryin out loud, then again he did quit so maybe they have bad feelings towards him

Quote
Addicted
Very sad read. I'm a bit surprised by some of the comments here. I find it absolutely inapropriate to use irony and try to make bad jokes on Mick Taylor's behalf. That's definitely not the level of dignity or compassion I expect on this board.
We mustn't get to the point where our blind loyalty to the band, and in particular - its founding members - makes it ok for us to step on others. People who have obviously been done wrong. And I sincerely hope we are still able to see that even our beloved Stones have done some pretty immoral and unethical things to people who've worked for and with them. Mick Taylor is, unfortunately, one of them.
I hope, from the bottom of my heart, that justice will prevail. Prefereably that the Stones think through their former conduct, and help him out financially - with money that are rightfully Mick Taylor's - or that he gets his act together and teams up with a sharp lawyer.

I know they've been generous (Keith in particular) to other friends and blues musicians in particular, when they've been down and out and full of cancer or in need of heart surgery, and I dare say Mick Taylor deserves their attention and care.
Some people might find this illoyal of me - that doesn't worry me at all. Too many people around them tell them about their genious and level of coolness. I think they're well aware of what they've done and how good - or bad - it is. They need someone to say: Listen, gentlemen - what the hell is this? And what are you going to do to make it right?! I'm sure that's what Stu would have done.

This is very well-put, Addicted. This guy (Taylor) was clearly part of the creative process and during the period of what is widely known to be the Stones artisitc zenith. I have a hard time understanding how the Stones could screw-over individuals in various business deals (example: Marilou--the author of the great Love You Live book), but Mick Taylor! Hey Mick--get a good Lawyer and get this settled before it's too late. Be sure to bring Ya-Ya's, Sticky Fingers, Exile, GHS, IORR and Brussels '73 to the trial. They paid K.D. Lang. Mick & Keith need to make this right. My days of buying $450.00 tickets are done!

"By 1974, I felt I’d gone as far as I could with the band. I didn’t think they’d stay together. The records were doing well but the band was falling apart – it was in chaos.
‘Mick and Keith weren’t talking or working together and it was taking longer and longer to make the albums. So as well as Keith’s addiction there was Mick’s frustration and my own disenchantment and disillusionment with them."\


........interesting....apparently the open hostilities of the 80's were rooted way back in '74.

Hey folks, this article is 100% malarkey ... pure bollocks. Don't believe a word of it.

It's in the Mail, for crying out loud ... and a classic example of the time-honored tabloid story known as "ooooo, look how far this former celebrity has fallen."

They will make anything up to sell their filthy rag!

Drew