Why Another Stones-related Site and Forum?

A Chronological Career Analysis

GimmeMT.com has given a lot of thought to how to break-out MT's over fifty years in the music business into logical units. While we recognize and welcome that different people will have differing views on the relative significance of the eras and the band activities within them, we do think it is necessary to break things down into more manageable groupings to permit and encourage fan discussion.

I have met MT fans who focus largely on his work as a Bluesbreaker.  Obviously many focus on his years with the Stones.  Some have even decided they are "Mick Taylor solo" fans more than they are Rolling Stones fans.

By creating logical groupings, it is easier for a fan to read about and contribute to their favored era.

Accordingly, the SHOWS section reflects the editorial judgment of GimmeMT.com.

In the absence of significant prior commentary or concerted analysis of MT's long performing career, we believe that the likely two thousand live Mick Taylor performances can be meaningfully broken out into six distinct career eras:

Guitar Hero 1967-80
Axe for Hire 1981-85
Blues Journey 1986-90
No Resting Place 1991-98
Stone's Throw Era 1998-2007
Capstone 2008-now

Within each of these defined eras, we have created sub-groupings focused at the band/geographic level, with special focus on the existence and identity of a second guitar player or the nature of the touring activity (geographic, collaborative or peripatetic).

Recent years have been a little dispiriting for Mick Taylor fans on the internet. From 1995 through 2019, two dedicated fan-created Mick Taylor sites sequentially provided a central home for his fans. But more recently, the latter of them went dormant over three years ago, in favor of its Facebook presence.

Both web sites encouraged public commentary and discussion.

As social media became dominant in the 2010s, static web sites became less attractive. Social media teased easy access to a more general audience of millions. It provided a sense of immediacy and freshness, and in some cases a sense of closer access to the artist through their posts.

The downside took longer to discern. Social media sites are intentionally bad at surfacing old posts in favor of new and fresh content, because their advertisers require it. Social media is great at encouraging random blips and really bad at creating an organized, retrievable storehouse of collected knowledge.

Maybe someday AI will be able to find all the nuggets strewn randomly around social media and present them to us in a coherent narrative fashion, upon request. Until then, a return to fan-controlled web technology that provides long-tail stability and easy, organized access to large amounts of information and media makes more sense.

At present, the only active "must-check" Mick Taylor places on the internet exist within Rolling Stones-based sites.

These sites are focused on the Rolling Stones as a still-active band. They understandably do not encourage focus on that 8.25% portion of the Stones' 60-year career when Mick Taylor was the second guitar. This is so even though many of us consider those five years to have created much greater a proportion of their most interesting and enduring music.

Other artists have inspired amazing fan-created sites (for example, see the range of Springsteen sites

springsteenlyrics.com

Bruce Springsteen Website Links

It's time to produce a fan-created web presence again for Mick Taylor.

The GimmeMT.com domain name has been purchased for the maximum 10-year period and we are serious about getting our $89 worth.

So jump in, read and post and help us, and we'll re-evaluate in 2033!

After decades of listening to Mick Taylor's music and collecting it I realized I needed to start listening with more intention and focus if I hoped to hear everything at least once in my lifetime.

Because it seemed like a waste to end up with no record of my impressions, I decided to keep a record of the shows I have covered and my thoughts about them, and a record of which remained to be reviewed.

I have struggled to manage the exploding number of links to streaming sources for individual shows on YouTube, which are proliferating now that arrangements have apparently been reached with the music industry.

YouTube has a lousy search algorithm and seems to be designed to intentionally throw a lot of chaff into the wheat.

I searched for content management software to pull together all my Mick Taylor data fragments, including my own notes from recordings, my discovered links and memorabilia.

Most such software presumes group collaboration and are internet enabled by default.

I realized that my own personal trove of Mick Taylor information was ultimately likely to become extinct upon my eventual demise. It would be simply a bunch of files buried on a hard drive, and my computer would be wiped and probably given away.

It was obvious that sharing this information and opening it up to collaboration with and contribution from others was the only thing to do.

After testing solution after solution, I settled on web forum software to provide public interactivity as well as the ability to store and organize information logically, by show.

In the past several months I have tested three different forums, and decided to go with one focused on the trends of the future rather than the approach of twenty years ago.

With almost 2000 Mick Taylor performances, there needed to be a "way into" them, otherwise it's too hard to choose a starting point for exploration.

I needed to provide an opinionated timeline of Mick Taylor's long career, and use that organization to permit retrieval and discovery through the newer technologies of 'Categories' and 'Tags" in forum software.

Because it will take years to listen to and write reviews of the remaining MT shows, I am using this software to know what remains to be done and to allow others to start reading and contributing before I am finished.

By providing a vertical container by show, all forms of data to emerge can be collected and retrieved easily and instantly.

I hope the Mick Taylor Review Vault will prove to be an incomparable resource for those who want to listen to the music and to discuss it together, today and long into the future.

I hope GimmeMT.com reflects at least a fragment of the joy and sustenance that Mick Taylor's music has provided me over his incredible 60+ years making music.