1982: Mick Taylor sued Stones - what was verdict?

Top: there's two electric guitars, panned hard right & left. The one on the right is Keith. The song is in Bb, but Keith is likely playing in open G tuning (w/ a capo so he's in the key of Bb.) You can hear Keith doing some of his patented open G licks right off the bat. The lick that's the easiest to identify is the one that's similar to what he plays on Tumbling Dice. About 11 seconds into Tops there's a great example of that trademark lick of Keith's:



Tops: the guitar in the left channel is Mick Taylor. Like usual, Keith's guitar much louder in the mix, and he's playing a somewhat "busier" parts than Taylor. (Taylor's guitar gets louder about 1/2 though the tune.) The guitar solo and fills are definitely played by Mick Taylor. The lines are much more lyrical and fluid than Keith's. Keith's leads tend to be staccato, and very heavy on the Chuck Berry licks. (Keith's solo in Bitch is a good example of his lead style.) Mick Taylor also employees a very slow and wide vibrato on his bent notes, a technique rarely (ever?) employed by Keith.

 

Thanks for your extended reply, it's correct, but I was referring to "Waiting on a Friend "

 

Could very well be. But guitar lines are not typically the protected entity when a song is copyrighted unless there is no vocal and the main melody is played on a guitar.
If it were instrumental jazz and the songs identifiable melody was on a guitar, then it would be protected.
But as part of backing for a vocal song, normally not unless the guitar is playing exactly what the singer is singing.

 

Pure Mick Taylor.

 

Now that I think of it more, it is possible that the lawsuit over Stairway To Heaven could very well set a legal precedent, whether it is a win or a lose. It could well give instrument chops more legal standing, or set in stone that they have little legal standing.

 

I suspect that too, what makes you think it's him?

 

It sounds like him and his Gibson SG.

 

Keith also played an SG. I don't hear anything that sounds particularly like Mick Taylor myself, but it might well be him playing the main riff that starts the song. Doesn't mean he wrote it. Jagger also plays it on acoustic.

He was so upset he toured with them several times after that came out and played on five more studio albums before retiring due to reasons entirely unrelated to writing credits.

 

Man, if I was in his shoes, I would have been much tougher on them. I would have quit after only 4 more studio albums!

 

It sounds like both of them playing and trying to do what they had such trouble doing... weaving in and out of each other. Keith is playing the brassy main riff .. bah dah dah dah dah dah... you can hear Taylor playing a melody that seems to peak just before and during the part where the song goes "I'm just waitin' on a laaaaadaaaaaay" It's very audible in the released track and more audible here on the bootleg. It's a similar arrangement of guitars that you'd hear on the song LUXURY with Keith's trademark brassy scraping and Taylor's heavily weighted full lead notes playing along.

 

There was no good getting out from under that organization for a sideman. The money would have been in pushing HARD on a solo career and hoping something stuck. Taylor didn't have the mojo or personality to become Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton, Rory Gallagher or Peter Frampton.. but 1970 to 1976 was probably as good a time to be a British blues guitarist as history will ever record! And I don't know if Mick Jagger was all that easy to get around in that mid to late 70s period.

 

Interesting comparison as Mick Taylor does not play on Luxury. It's all Keith,.

 

There is only one electric guitar on Waiting on a friend, the official release. Mystery is whether it is Keith or Taylor, or maybe both, because the guitar track can be edited.

 

What if Taylor had copyrighted his music before showing it to the Stones? Would they have been able to use it without crediting him then?

 

Doesn't the story go that Taylor was driving around and the song came on the radio, billed as the new single, and he said, "Hey! That's me playing!" - If that is really the case, he must be on Waiting On A Friend, because it was a single and as far as I know, Tops was not.

 

No, not if he held the copyright first.
BUT, you have no idea what his contract looks like. It may have had some kind of exclusionary clause that prohibited him from writing outside the band. Just like many corporations require you to sign a contract that anything you invent while with them belongs to them.
It is possible he was contractually prohibited from copyrighting anything through any means other than the Stones publishing company.

You also should consider that anything he did write that they performed was likely done as a group effort and he was not the sole writer. Which means that whoever controlled the tapes of the copyright rough is who copyrighted it.

 

We're not talking about whether Mick Taylor wrote "Waiting on a Friend", are we? He quite plainly did no such thing.

 

Good to know, but I wasn't addressing the copywriting or protected entities. I was responding to the poster who asked why I thought Mick Taylor played on the track.

 

Waiting on a Friend: the main rhythm guitar part (played on electric guitar) is very similar to something Keith would play, but it's not quite as loose. A bigger giveaway that it's not Keith playing are the hammer-ons, pull-offs and (picked) single note licks that fall between the strumming of the chords. Those fills are both busier & more precise than anything Richards would play, and are very much in line with Mick Taylor's style. This lick, which is repeated a bunch of times throughout the song, w/ slight variations, is a good example. You can hear it at 1:11 and 2:45.



There's also an acoustic rhythm guitar part, but it's low in the mix. Tough to make out anything notable there, as far as particular playing style that's associated w/ a specific guitarist, but I wouldn't be surprised if Mick Jagger played that acoustic. Keith was strung out and already missing studio sessions at the time the early version of WOAF were cut. He was also absent during much of the editing, overdubbing, mixing, etc. Jagger did to come up with Tattoo You. It wouldn't be the first time Jagger and Taylor played all the guitar parts on a finished Stones tune.

 

There was no stand alone "music" for him to copyright. He has claimed to be co-writer with Mick on several tracks, when Keith wasn't willing or able to participate. Not quite the same as presenting finished songs and not getting paid.

 

Thanks

Thanks. My intuition says it's Taylor indeed, that "aura". Funny detail is that there are no credits on the vinyl TTY album sleeve.

 

I stand corrected... not only sounds like Keith's tone but is clearly his playing. Me on mental autopilot again.

 

always felt mick taylor got a big raw deal with the Stones.....but that with their last tour maybe they made things right.. I'm sure he got a nice chunk of change for those appearances..... sadly when I saw him with them it was a bit underwhelming because he played so little with them...even though it sounded really good.

 

If they really didn't want to credit him then they might have just cribbed some of his ideas on the basis that "we're the Stones.. if we didn't play the song it wouldn't matter WHAT you tried to write". The best bet for Taylor would have been to write a finished song.. copyright it and demo it and then offer it. Any rewrite of the song and subsequent use would be as close as he could have come to forcing them to credit him. Otherwise you get the Don Felder/Don Henley conundrum... "you came up with a chord progression.. it was I who wrote the compelling lyrics, gave the song structure, and sang it in a bewitching fashion... and then you did the solo at the end"!

 

It seems that rock and roll is a cuthroat business at the top.