Creativity Quote by Mick Taylor

Mick Taylor is doing a careful kind of praise here: the kind that admits the obvious without sounding like a diss. As a virtuoso guitarist joining a band that never sold itself as virtuoso, he frames the Rolling Stones' power as something almost anti-technical. "Not really so much their musical ability" isn’t a slam so much as a diagnosis of brand. The Stones win on vibe, not on clean execution; they make imperfection feel like permission.

The subtext is about what rock stardom actually measures. Taylor came from a more disciplined blues-rock lane (John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers), where chops were currency. Joining the Stones meant realizing the currency had changed: swagger, silhouette, timing-as-personality. "Style and attitude" becomes a way of saying the band’s instrument is cultural posture. It’s also a quiet acknowledgement of how they survived being compared to peers who could outplay them on paper; the Stones didn’t need to be the best technicians, they needed to be the most legible myth.

Context matters: Taylor’s era (1969-74) is the Stones at their most dangerous and most canonical - from Let It Bleed to Exile on Main St. That period pairs loose, dirty groove with precision in the right places, and Taylor was part of the precision. His quote reads like a musician recognizing that his skill functions best as contrast: he sharpens the band’s blur without erasing it. The uniqueness he points to is engineered chaos, a performance of unruliness that’s been rehearsed into identity.