Time & Perspective Quote by Mick Taylor

What sounds like modesty is really a quiet manifesto about how the Rolling Stones worked when they were at their best: less hierarchy, more motion. Mick Taylor’s insistence that he “didn’t think of myself as a lead player” pushes against the rock-god narrative that sells bands as a set of fixed roles with fixed egos. In his telling, the live show isn’t a place to prove dominance; it’s a space where identity stays flexible enough for the music to breathe.

The key phrase is “switch around all the time.” Taylor frames lead and rhythm not as job titles but as functions, traded based on momentum, feel, and what a particular moment in a song demands. That detail - “Sometimes even within one song” - is a musician’s way of pointing to the Stones’ real engine: interplay. He’s also implicitly correcting a common misconception about Keith Richards as the permanent rhythm anchor and Taylor as the virtuoso lead. Taylor’s subtext is that the band’s groove came from mutual adjustment, not from one person “carrying” the track.

“It wasn’t strict and regimented” lands as both aesthetic and social commentary. Aesthetic, because looseness is the Stones’ brand of authority: the swagger that sounds like it might fall apart but never does. Social, because it hints at a band politics where credit and status were always contested. Taylor’s calm phrasing reads like restraint learned the hard way: in a group this iconic, the fight isn’t just over notes, it’s over narrative.