Snowy Wood / Sandy - John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers
Mick Taylor and John Mayall
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"Snowy Wood" and "Sandy": Mick Taylor's vinyl audition for the Rolling Stones.
May '67, Peter Green leaves the Bluesbreakers to form Fleetwood Mac, June '67 18 year-old Mick Taylor replies to Mayall's ad in Melody Maker for a replacement lead guitarist and gets the job, July '67 the new line-up records the follow-up to the album "A Hard Road" (see previous post), September '67 "Crusade" is released and fares even better than its predecessor, reaching number 8 in the UK charts.
Then, only 22 months later in June '69 Brian Jones is sacked from the Rolling Stones and Mayall recommends Taylor to Mick Jagger as his replacement. The first Stones record to feature Taylor on guitar was the single "Honky Tonk Women", released on July 4th 1969, the day after Brian Jones was found dead at the bottom of his swimming pool.
For sixty plus years, Mayall's crusade has been to play the blues, to keep the blues alive, only wavering periodically toward its cousin, jazz. The first such waver resulted in his most successful LP, "Bare Wires". This was the second Bluesbreakers' studio album to feature Taylor, and also featured Jon Hiseman on drums, Dick Heckstall-Smith and Tony Reeves on bass, all of whom promptly left to form perhaps the greatest jazz/rock band ever, Colosseum. Strongly jazz influenced it may be, but it's still the blues, with Mayall it's always the blues, to a lesser or greater degree. He's always been on that crusade.
"Snowy Wood" from "Crusade" demonstrates Taylor's firm grasp of the increasingly heavier, grungier rock sound, while the deeply bluesy "Sandy" from "Bare Wires" shows his Mississippi Delta credentials with some hypnotic bottleneck guitar that consistently upstages Mayall's journeyman vocal.
As for the actual audition, Jagger and Richard asked him back to record the very next day.
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