{"id":665215,"date":"2026-03-18T20:24:25","date_gmt":"2026-03-18T20:24:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/665215\/"},"modified":"2026-03-18T20:24:25","modified_gmt":"2026-03-18T20:24:25","slug":"wayne-perkins-guitarist-who-nearly-joined-rolling-stones-dead-at-74","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/665215\/","title":{"rendered":"Wayne Perkins, Guitarist Who Nearly Joined Rolling Stones, Dead at 74"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tWayne Perkins, a journeyman guitarist who played on pivotal records by Joni Mitchell<\/a> and Bob Marley and the Wailers before coming within an inch of joining both the Rolling Stones<\/a> and Lynyrd Skynyrd<\/a>, died on Monday after suffering a stroke. He was 74.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cFor those who haven\u2019t heard, Wayne passed away yesterday peacefully,\u201d his brother Dale wrote on Facebook. <\/a>\u201cOur sisters and family members were there with him. We appreciate all the kind thoughts and memories. He was one of a kind and we loved him very much, and thank you all.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tPerkins was a revered figure in guitar circles, but he nearly became a rock icon in 1975 when Eric Clapton recommended him to the Rolling Stones as a replacement for Mick Taylor. He flew out to Munich as the group was working up songs for its 1976 album Black and Blue.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIt was always one of my goals to play lead guitar with the biggest rock & roll bands in the world,\u201d Perkins told the Los Angeles Daily News in 1996. \u201cWhen I got there, it was the strangest thing \u2014 they played like the worst garage band I\u2019d ever heard in my life. I knew the records, but I wasn\u2019t impressed with them live. Then, the right light in the studio went on and something magic happened. All of a sudden they went from awful to incredible.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\n\tPerkins wound up overdubbing a slide guitar part on \u201cFool to Cry,\u201d and was part of the core group that recorded \u201cMemory Motel\u201d and \u201cHand of Fate.\u201d He also laid down a killer guitar solo on \u201cWorried About You,\u201d but the track wouldn\u2019t be released until 1981\u2019s Tattoo You.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\n\tThe Stones were also considering Harvey Mandel for the gig during the Black and Blue period, but wound up going with Ronnie Wood of the Faces. \u201cWe liked Perkins a lot,\u201d Keith Richards wrote in his 2010 memoir Life. \u201cHe was a lovely player, same style, which wouldn\u2019t have ricocheted against what Mick Taylor was doing, very melodic, very well-played stuff.\u00a0 It wasn\u2019t so much the playing, when it came down to it.\u00a0It came down to the fact that Ronnie was English! Well, it is an English band, although you might not think that now.\u00a0 And we all felt we should retain the nationality of the band at the time.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\t\tEditor\u2019s picks<\/p>\n

\n\tA little over a year later, he was offered a job in Lynyrd Skynyrd that he ultimately declined. \u201cSomething didn\u2019t feel right to me,\u201d Perkins told Culture Sonar in 2022. <\/a>\u201cI turned them down in December \u201876 and the plane crash was in October \u201877.\u00a0 I think about that one from time to time. Ronnie [Van Zant] was one of my best friends. I knew all the guys in the band and I would have made a ton of money.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tPerkins grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, and began playing guitar when he was 12, drawing inspiration from James Burton and Chet Atkins. Not long after dropping out of high school to commit himself full-time to music, he found regular work at Muscle Shoals Sound studio, playing with everyone from Joe Cocker and Leon Russell to Jimmy Cliff. The musicians at the studio were informally known as the \u201cSwampers,\u201d as immortalized in the lyrics to Skynyrd\u2019s \u201cSweet Home Alabama.\u201d <\/p>\n

\n\tIn 1973, Island Records founder Chris Blackwell invited Perkins into the studio with Bob Marley and the Wailers during the Catch a Fire sessions. \u201cI\u2019d never played on anything like that,\u201d Perkins told the New American Journal in 2025.<\/a> \u201cBut I\u2019d been thrown in the mix with a lot of heavy-duty bluegrass players so you couldn\u2019t really scare me with anything.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\n\tPerkins wound up playing on \u201cConcrete Jungle,\u201d \u201cBaby We\u2019ve Got a Date (Rock It Baby),\u201d and \u201cStir It Up,\u201d even though he wasn\u2019t initially credited. Years later, Perkins said his main memory of the sessions was when Marley \u201cran out there with a spliff about two feet long trying to cram it down my throat.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\tRelated Content<\/p>\n

\n\tMonths later, Joni Mitchell brought Perkins into the studio as she was working on Court and Spark. Perkins would end up playing electric guitar on \u201cCar on a Hill.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\tTrending Stories<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\n\tPerkins remained active in music throughout the Eighties and Nineties, even as major changes to the industry dried up much of the session work that defined his early years. <\/p>\n

\n\tHe also maintained a good sense of humor about his near-miss in the Stones. \u201cIf I had joined,\u201d he said in 2009, \u201cby now I\u2019d probably be a dead millionaire.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Wayne Perkins, a journeyman guitarist who played on pivotal records by Joni Mitchell and Bob Marley and the…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":665216,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[29],"tags":[171,108793,79586,975,32175,9455,43453,67,132,68],"class_list":["post-665215","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-entertainment","tag-joni-mitchell","tag-lynyrd-skynyrd","tag-music","tag-obit","tag-obituary","tag-rolling-stones","tag-united-states","tag-unitedstates","tag-us"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116252053904577238","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/665215","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=665215"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/665215\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/665216"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=665215"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=665215"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=665215"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}