Rolling Stones, Bob Marley and me: Alabama guitarist's epic life

Drugs and drinks were on top all the amplifiers in the studio, as Wayne Perkins recorded his remarkable guitar solos for the 1975 Rolling Stones song "Hand of Fate." Forty-two years later, it's difficult for him to remember some other details about cutting that swaggering Stones rocker.

However it went down, Perkins' "Hand of Fate" lines are among the most thrilling in a Stones catalog rich with guitar heroics. Skying, and full of heart. A native of the Chalkville area near Center Point, Perkins also played on two other cuts from "Black and Blue," the Stones album "Hand of Fate" appeared on: melancholic ballads "Memory Motel" and "Fool To Cry." Not only that, R&B number "Worried About You" originally tracked during "Black and Blue" sessions and eventually released on excellent 1981 Stones LP "Tattoo You," boasts another, cascading Perkins solo.

Rock 'n' roll lifestyle and passage of time aren't the only factors that have impacted Perkins' memory. Several years back, he was diagnosed with multiple brain tumors. He currently lives in a nice log cabin in Argo with his brother Dale Perkins, an IT installation tech. On a wall in Wayne's bedroom hangs an early-70s photo of him with guitar cult-hero Eddie Hinton outside Muscle Shoals Sound Studios, where both men worked as session musicians. "He has good days, and then he has days his head aches are so bad he can't hardly talk," Dale says of Wayne.

During a 90-minute phone interview on a recent "good day," Wayne is gracious, humble and witty. Although some corners are fuzzy, his memory is amazing at times. And he most certainly deserves to be remembered. While Stones and Marley superfans know Perkins' name, his musical accomplishments should be better known, particularly in his home state, where he's yet to be inducted into the Alabama Music Hall of Fame. (The latter would likely change though if the Alabama Music Hall of Fame adopted a "sideman" category, like the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame uses.)

Wayne Perkins is arguably the greatest guitarist Alabama ever produced. He's also led a life that cuts through '70s rock history like a lightning bolt. On Bob Marley & The Wailers' "Catch a Fire" album, Perkins overdubbed guitar lines that helped the Jamaican reggae act connect with worldwide rock and pop audiences. He dated folk goddess Joni Mitchell, played on her essential "Court and Spark" LP and lived with her at David Geffen's Beverly Hills mansion. Perkins was hanging around the Los Angeles country-rock scene when the Eagles were formed. He played on Lynyrd Skynyrd's Muscle Shoals demos and came close to joining that band. He cut studio tracks with John Prine, Levon Helm, Albert King, Joe Cocker and many other respected and best-selling artists. Played guitar with George Harrison in the ex-Beatle's kitchen until day turned to night. During the mid-80s, Perkins contributed to soundtracks for box-office smashes, like "The Karate Kid Part II." "I've been fortunate in my career to be in the right place and the right time and get involved with some good people and leave a bit of a footprint," Perkins says.

As brother Dale Perkins puts it, "He was in so many places when stuff was going on, it was like the 'Forrest Gump' thing. You tell people about all of this and they look at you like you're crazy, but it all happened."

If Wayne Perkins had been born in 1951 in Birmingham, England instead of Birmingham, Alabama he might have become a Rolling Stone, after gifted soloist Mick Taylor quit the band in late-1974. He still came damn close. "We liked Perkins a lot," Stones guitarist Keith Richards wrote in his riveting 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." Another American, Harvey Mandel, also ended up on some "Black and Blue" tracks and was among other guitarists in the running. In the end, rooster-haired Ronnie Wood, from pub-rock band the Faces, won out. "It wasn't so much the playing, when it came down to it," Richards wrote in "Life." "It came down to the face 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."

When he was working with The Stones, Perkins lived with Richards in a cottage behind The Wick, Wood's Richmond, England home. Richards' girlfriend, Italian actress/model Anita Pallenberg, and their two young children were there too. "It was a British family that I was becoming close to," Perkins says. "It was a bit of discovery period for me as well as being discovered. I was thinking more like a session player, but it was becoming clear to me that these guys were serious and wanted me as their new guitar player. It was a great situation to be thrust into."

If he didn't crash on the couch after playing guitar into the morning with Richards, Perkins slept on a single bed in the guest room he shared with Richards' hulking driver/body guard. "Keith and I got along great," Perkins says. "And I don't know if Mick (Jagger, Stones singer) approved of that because Keith and I were writing some things. That's a whole other monkey there. You're getting off into the bank account. [Laughs]" When they weren't making music or getting high in the cottage, Richards and Perkins would sometimes zoom off to clubs and music stores in a Ferrari or Bentley. Asked what it was like hitting the town with Keith Richards back then, Perkins laughs and says, "Oh man, we had a ball." Back then Perkins primarily played a black Gibson Les Paul Custom, but also had an old Fender Telecaster and Stratocaster at his disposal.

During Perkins' time touring the world with soul rocker Leon Russell, he became friends with guitar god Eric Clapton. It was Clapton, while hanging out with Perkins in Jamaica, who phoned Jagger about giving his friend a try. Although The Stones had made a career out of imitating Southern blues artists, like Muddy Waters, and recorded in Muscle Shoals, the band didn't pepper Perkins with questions about Southern music history. "It wasn't like they were doing a book report or anything," Perkins says. "We just got together and played, you know?"

While recording "Black and Blue" at Munich, Germany's Musicland Studios, Perkins ran into Paul McCartney's wife Linda McCartney in the hallway. "We were sitting on top of Anvil cases out there and Paul was in the studio creating, and I kept bugging everybody to hear what he was doing ... 'No, you can't go in there.'" McCartney is one of few rock legends Perkins would've loved to work with but never did. Bob Dylan is another - although Perkins once auditioned for Dylan's band.

Born to a musical family in which his mom and dad both played guitar, Perkins took up the instrument at age 12. Early six-string inspirations include Chet Atkins, James Burton and Lonnie Mack. "That's all he did was just sit around and play guitar all the time, and he would advance so quick it was scary," Dale says of Wayne, 15 months his senior. The brothers had four younger sisters and the family's small home was often filled with friends. On Tuesday nights, Wayne's father, who'd taught him guitar basics, took his son to "shindigs" at neighbors' houses, where folks would sit around, play bluegrass music and drink coffee. One of the best local guitarists was a guy who worked for the gas company by day and lived at the top of a hill. "There was a bunch of great bluegrass players, man - banjo players and fiddle players," Perkins recalls. "And good God, Daddy dumped me right in the middle of that thing. He liked to see if I could swim." Perkins credits these early jam sessions with developing the adaptability and chops that later made him an in-demand session musician. "That's where it turned the corner," he says.

Perkins attended E.B. Erwin High School, but dropped out after a year or so to play full-time in bands with names like The Vikings, covering everything from British Invasion rock to Southern R&B. He also began doing session work at Bob Grove's Prestige Recording Studio, which Perkins says was located on 1^st Avenue in Birmingham and whose owner was also an insurance salesman. Perkins also started spending more time a little north, in emerging musical hotbed Muscle Shoals. Birmingham drummer Jasper Guarino told him about an opportunity playing guitar at Quin Ivey's Quinvy Studio in Sheffield, where Percy Sledge had recorded "When a Man Loves a Woman." "I got the job for a hundred bucks a week," Perkins says of arriving in the Shoals in the late-60s. "That was big bucks in those days, man."

Perkins also began working down the road, at Muscle Shoals Sound, playing on sessions with artists, studio co-founder Jimmy Johnson says, that included Joe Cocker, Leon Russell, Jimmy Cliff and Traffic's Steve Winwood and Jim Capaldi. "We did a lot of stuff together with Bobby Womack and a lot of interesting records," Johnson says. "I'm talking about multi-platinum records." Perkins became Muscle Shoals Sound's go-to rock guitarist. "He played solos and stuff to die for," Johnson says. "Wayne was very inventive, anything he ever played on, it was like he was born to it. It was very natural."

As a guitarist, Johnson places Perkins in the same category as Duane Allman, who'd been a session star at Muscle Shoals' Fame Studios before starting the Allman Brothers Band, and Eddie Hinton. "All I had to do was point Wayne in the right direction and he'd go for it. I'd say, 'Give me some Wayne Perkins' because he had a style of his own and you didn't have to make him imitate anybody. He just had to be him."

At one point during his Muscle Shoals period, Perkins was asked to join Lynyrd Skynyrd. Even though the band's singer Ronnie Van Zant was his "biggest, closest friend," Perkins didn't end up joining the eventual Southern rock icons. "I really came so close to doing that. But they didn't need me and I had a lot of other stuff coming my way and I wanted to do it."

Island Records founder Chris Blackwell brought some of his artists to Muscle Shoals Sound and met Perkins. He took the guitarist back to England with him, as part of folky trio Smith Perkins Smith, the first American band ever signed to Island. Smith Perkins Smith toured with groups including "All Right Now" rockers Free. "I ended up playing on a bunch of people's records," Perkins says. "Walking around England with a guitar in your hand doing session work is a good way to be discovered." Those records included what became Marley's 1973 "Catch a Fire" album. At Basing Street Studios, located in the basement of Island's London offices, Blackwell "tossed me in the mix with this reggae stuff and I didn't know what it was." At first, Pickens struggled to find his footing on exotic sounding opening-track "Concrete Jungle." The recording engineer turned down the bass, to simplify the mix. Perkins then conjured snaky fills and a spiraling, feedback-kissed solo worthy of Jimi Hendrix.

"I'd never played on anything like that," Perkins says, "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." After Perkins finished his "Concrete Jungle" solo, Marley "ran out there with a spliff about two feet long trying to cram it down my throat." Still, he says the reggae singer "was more focused on that track than about getting me high." Perkins also added smoky slide on the playful "Baby We've Got a Date" and slow-motion wah-wah for sexy ballad "Stir It Up." "The wah-wah was just a pedal that I happened to be running through because it fit right in the middle of two guitar chords," he recalls.

Perkins says not being credited on "Catch a Fire" until a 2001 reissue didn't bother him. "It just showed me what the industry was about. When I booked that I didn't really put everything under a magnifying glass." And how has playing on Marley and Stones records impacted him financially? "I've made some money off of it but it wasn't like I was a band member - those guys make some money and that's the thing you learn as you get into these deals. But as a session player you can't get attached to that kind of thing."

Asked for a favorite among his Stones and Marley recordings, Perkins says he'd have to sit down and listen to all the tracks again, something he hasn't done in a long time. Outside of those cuts, brother Dale Perkins' favorite of Wayne's work is greasy 1972 Joe Cocker hit "High Time We Went." Perkins ran up massive phone bills calling home to Alabama, Dale says, during his Stones period, which also included living with the band on the top floor of a Rotterdam, Netherlands hotel while working on material. "We all thought he was in the band, that he was going to be a Rolling Stone," Dale says. "He said that when they're practicing it didn't always sound like it was all together, but when the tape started rolling it all worked perfect. He loved it. But Ron Wood just sort of fit. He was one of them, he looked like one of them."

During his Los Angeles period, Wayne lived for a spell in room 203 at the Sunset Marquis Hotel, and hit nightspots like The Troubadour and Whisky a Go Go with Jackson Browne. Former Byrds/Flying Burrito Brothers musician Chris Ethridge played a major role in getting him established with Los Angeles studios, Perkins says. He fondly recalls playing slide guitar on Joni Mitchell's song "Car On a Hill" using idol James Burton's pink paisley Tele. Perkins recalls Mitchell made British-style tea in the mornings and the Geffen mansion they lived in had a huge garden, but beyond that declines to describe what dating the blonde legendary songwriter was like.

The Perkins family wasn't shocked by Wayne's ascension into rock's stratosphere. "He just had it from day one," Dale says. "If he picked up a guitar and started playing, everybody turned their heads. It was just automatic."

In the late-70s, Dale, who'd previously rubbed elbows with some stars at Muscle Shoals Sound when Wayne worked there, got a first-hand taste of the big-time. After Wayne returned home to join a group called The Alabama Power Band, with Dale on drums, the act signed to Capitol Records. "(The country band) Alabama had just come along, so we couldn't use Alabama Power Band," Dale says. "We were throwing around other names and the (University of) Alabama football team was doing great so somebody said, 'Let's call ourselves the Crimson Tide,' and one of the record producers went all nuts about. We looked at each other like it was crazy but they did it anyway."

While recording with Crimson Tide at Hollywood's Capitol Studios, Dale met stars like Dolly Parton, Barbra Streisand and Merle Haggard. Unfortunately, after two melodic and promising LPs, Capitol dropped Crimson Tide around 1980. "That's when the bottom fell out of everything and a lot of people lost their record deal," Dale says. The '80s brought Wayne soundtrack work on films including "Summer School" and "Police Academy 2" and albums from country group Oak Ridge Boys and Americana artist Delbert McClinton. The impressive career didn't come without damage. Perkins has delt with substance abuse demons that in the music-business are more like occupational hazards. But he survided to tell the tale.

After decades of helping other people make great sounding records, Perkins finally released his own album in 1996. His blues set "Mendo Hotel" included a searing cover of 1968 psych-pop gem "Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In)," two years before the original was used prominently in comedy film "The Big Lebowski."

When Perkins was diagnosed with brain tumors, his old Stones pals - who back in the '70s sent him a gold record for "Black and Blue" sales - reached out. "Keith, Mick and Ronnie would get in touch with him when he was laid up," Dale Perkins says. These days, Wayne still plays guitar, although not as often as his prime, and has held to his trusty Tele. (Alas, he no longer has his sweet Martin D-28 acoustic: "I wish I still had that baby.") He's taking better care of himself and health-permitting doesn't rule out moving back to the West Coast, where he has a son in his-early 20s and, at his ex-manager's house, a garage-full of vintage photos and guitars. "I'm trying to get in the mindset of getting out touring again and doing studio work," Wayne says. Dale thinks that's possible if his brother can find a way to manage those crippling headaches, and the family is trying to get Wayne to a new neurologist to help with that.

Having played with - and literally helped make - a few legends in his time, does Wayne Perkins ever wish he was considered one too? He laughs. And then says, "I don't know, man. I've never thought of that, but thrust me in the studio with any group of players and I can hang with them. As far as being a legend ... Hell, I'm not through yet."