Wayne Perkins, a journeyman guitarist who played on pivotal records by Joni Mitchell and Bob Marley and the Wailers before coming within an inch of joining both the Rolling Stones and Lynyrd Skynyrd, died on Monday after suffering a stroke. He was 74.
“For those who haven’t heard, Wayne passed away yesterday peacefully,” his brother Dale wrote on Facebook. “Our 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.”
Perkins 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.
“It was always one of my goals to play lead guitar with the biggest rock & roll bands in the world,” Perkins told the Los Angeles Daily News in 1996. “When I got there, it was the strangest thing — they played like the worst garage band I’d ever heard in my life. I knew the records, but I wasn’t 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.”
Perkins wound up overdubbing a slide guitar part on “Fool to Cry,” and was part of the core group that recorded “Memory Motel” and “Hand of Fate.” He also laid down a killer guitar solo on “Worried About You,” but the track wouldn’t be released until 1981’s Tattoo You.
The 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. “We liked Perkins a lot,” Keith Richards wrote in his 2010 memoir Life. “He was a lovely player, same style, which wouldn’t have ricocheted against what Mick Taylor was doing, very melodic, very well-played stuff. It wasn’t so much the playing, when it came down to it. It came down to the fact that Ronnie was English! Well, it is an English band, although you might not think that now. And we all felt we should retain the nationality of the band at the time.”
A little over a year later, he was offered a job in Lynyrd Skynyrd that he ultimately declined. “Something didn’t feel right to me,” Perkins told Culture Sonar in 2022. “I turned them down in December ‘76 and the plane crash was in October ‘77. 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.”
Perkins 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 “Swampers,” as immortalized in the lyrics to Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama.”
In 1973, Island Records founder Chris Blackwell invited Perkins into the studio with Bob Marley and the Wailers during the Catch a Fire sessions. “I’d never played on anything like that,” Perkins told the New American Journal in 2025. “But I’d been thrown in the mix with a lot of heavy-duty bluegrass players so you couldn’t really scare me with anything.”
Perkins wound up playing on “Concrete Jungle,” “Baby We’ve Got a Date (Rock It Baby),” and “Stir It Up,” even though he wasn’t initially credited. Years later, Perkins said his main memory of the sessions was when Marley “ran out there with a spliff about two feet long trying to cram it down my throat.”
Months later, Joni Mitchell brought Perkins into the studio as she was working on Court and Spark. Perkins would end up playing electric guitar on “Car on a Hill.”
Perkins 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.
He also maintained a good sense of humor about his near-miss in the Stones. “If I had joined,” he said in 2009, “by now I’d probably be a dead millionaire.”
© Melissa Auf der Maur