Wayne Perkins was one of those Zelig-like music figures, a brilliant guitarist who pops up on records everywhere but never became a household name.
He almost joined The Rolling Stones, he turned down Lynyrd Skynyrd, and he played with almost everyone from Joni Mitchell to Bob Marley, but sometimes he didn’t even get his name on the credits.
One example was Catch A Fire, the breakthrough album for Bob Marley & The Wailers. It was only on a re-release 30 years later that he was credited for the rock guitar that transformed a Jamaican reggae album into an international hit.
Just as notably, it was Perkins whose guitar lit up the Stones album Black And Blue, even though he never got the gig of replacing Mick Taylor after an audition with the band.
It went so well that he spent six months sharing a house – on Ron Wood’s estate – with Keith Richards, who taught him all the Stones songs, including the ones for that forthcoming album.
But the job went to Wood instead, not due to any deficiency in technique but purely because Wood, then in The Faces, was English and looked like a natural Rolling Stone.
Prior to that, Perkins had toured the world with Leon Russell, recorded studio sessions with Joe Cocker, and became romantically involved with Joni Mitchell when she was recording Court And Spark.
It’s his subtle slide guitar that decorates her song Car On A Hill, though it’s not his own guitar – he played it, at Joni’s rquest, on the pink Telecaster left in the studio by one of his idols, James Burton.
A teenage prodigy from Birmingham, Alabama, Perkins played his first guitar session when he was only 15 and released his first single, with a band called The Vikings, a year later.
He then joined the legendary Muscle Shoals Studio Sound house band, replacing the great Eddie Hinton, and briefly played in a band he formed with two brothers.
Smith Perkins & Smith made two underrated albums and toured the UK with Free and Fairport Convention, Argent and Uriah Heep, and while in London he met Chris Blackwell.
The Island Records boss asked him to add guitar to tracks from his new Jamaican group The Wailers – including Concrete Jungle, with its spectacular solo, and Stir It Up – to give it more of a crossover sound to appeal to rock fans.
Perkins had never heard reggae before, and confessed he could not understand a word of Marley’s thick Jamaican patois, but he found his way into the music, and the fragrant smoke-filled studio, and Marley was overjoyed with the results.
Over many years Perkins played on sessions by artists as diverse as The Everly Brothers, Jimmy Cliff, Michael Bolton, Steve Winwood, Millie Jackson, Levon Helm, Roger McGuinn and Billy Ray Cyrus.
And despite being overlooked for the Stones job, he ended up playing on three songs on Black And Blue, including Fool To Cry and Memory Motel.
But for my money his finest contribution came on Worried About You, which was recorded at the same sessions but left off the album until it appeared years later on Tattoo You. His solo just eclipses the one on Hand Of Fate.