Education Quote by Mick Taylor

Mick Taylor is smuggling a quiet hierarchy into what sounds like an egalitarian origin story. He starts with modesty - "I suppose" - but the message is firm: musicianship isn’t primarily a matter of instruction, gear, or even discipline. It’s perception. Having "a good ear" is framed less as a skill you acquire and more as a native sensor, the difference between copying notes and actually inhabiting them.

That distinction matters because Taylor’s career sits inside one of rock’s central myths: that raw feel beats formal training. Coming out of the British blues boom and stepping into the Rolling Stones machine, he’s talking from a world where credibility is earned by sounding like you mean it. "Feel and understand what you're playing" isn’t romantic haze; it’s a standard. In blues-derived music, pitch and timing are only the skeleton. The living part is micro-choices: how long a note blooms, how a bend lands, how you sit behind or ahead of the beat. You can’t fake that with theory alone.

The subtext is also about apprenticeship. "Learn by watching and listening to other people" nods to the scene as a classroom: clubs, rehearsals, late-night records on repeat. It’s an argument for osmosis over certification, for attention as the real pedagogy. Taylor isn’t rejecting learning; he’s insisting the doorway into the music is sensory and social. Technique can be taught. Taste, phrasing, and that elusive "ear" are absorbed - or they aren’t.