Wayne Perkins, the Alabama-born guitarist whose extraordinary career brought him within inches of joining the Rolling Stones, died on March 16 after suffering a stroke. He was 74. His brother Dale confirmed the news on social media: “He was one of a kind, and we loved him very much.”
The story of Wayne Perkins is one of music history’s great near-misses, and one of its great careers. After Mick Taylor left the Stones in late 1974, Eric Clapton, a close friend of Perkins, personally called Mick Jagger to recommend him. Perkins played lead guitar on three tracks from the band’s 1976 album ‘Black and Blue,’ including the scorching “Hand of Fate,” the ballads “Memory Motel” and “Fool to Cry,” and a fourth track, “Worried About You,” later released on 1981’s ‘Tattoo You.’ Keith Richards wrote warmly of him in his 2010 memoir ‘Life’: “We liked Perkins a lot. He was a lovely player.” In the end, Ronnie Wood got the job, Richards explaining simply that the band wanted to keep an Englishman in the lineup.
It was not the first legendary band to come calling. Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Ronnie Van Zant, one of Perkins’ closest friends, asked him to join the band. Perkins declined, saying “they didn’t need me and I had a lot of other stuff coming my way.” That other stuff was considerable. Working out of Muscle Shoals Sound Studio in the early 1970s, he became one of the most sought-after session guitarists in the world, playing on records with Joe Cocker, Leon Russell, Steve Winwood, Jim Capaldi, and Jimmy Cliff. Island Records founder Chris Blackwell was so impressed he brought Perkins to London as part of trio Smith Perkins Smith, the first American act signed to Island Records.
In London, Blackwell placed Perkins in the sessions for Bob Marley and the Wailers’ breakthrough 1973 album ‘Catch a Fire,’ where he contributed lead guitar overdubs to “Concrete Jungle,” “Stir It Up,” and “Baby We’ve Got a Date.” His playing helped make the record more accessible to rock audiences, though he went uncredited on the original liner notes until a 2001 reissue. A year later, he played on Joni Mitchell’s landmark ‘Court and Spark,’ with Sounds magazine specifically citing his guitar work on “Car on a Hill.” For a period, he and Mitchell were also romantically linked.
Born in Birmingham, Alabama in 1951, Perkins taught himself guitar at 12 and was playing session work by 15. He is survived by his brother Dale and his four sisters. Al.com, which profiled him extensively in 2017, described him as “arguably the greatest guitarist Alabama ever produced.” Based on the records he left behind, that is a difficult argument to dispute.