Wealth & Money Quote by Mick Taylor

It lands like a backhanded compliment: if the Rolling Stones are still out there, it can only be because they want to be. Mick Taylor strips away the most common late-career alibi in pop culture - the payday reunion - and replaces it with something more interesting: appetite. The line refuses the sentimental narrative arc of rise, fall, redemption. No breakup, no mythic “return,” no tidy ending that lets the audience feel like they witnessed a full story. Instead, “They’ve always been there” recasts the Stones as infrastructure.

That phrasing carries a lot of subtext. It’s admiration, yes, but it also hints at something faintly unnerving: persistence as identity. If a band never really disappears, it never has to confront the question of what it is without the machine of touring, attention, and repetition. Taylor frames their longevity as pleasure, but “pleasure” here can mean craft, adrenaline, ritual, even compulsion - the need to keep proving the thing still works in front of a crowd.

The context matters: Taylor is an ex-member, not an outside critic. He’s close enough to know the grind, far enough to speak plainly. In a culture that rewards the dramatic comeback because it flatters our sense of eras and closure, he argues the Stones have operated on a different logic: continuity over reinvention. The real flex isn’t that they can still sell tickets; it’s that they never stopped being a fact of life.