The day after Mick Taylor announced be was quitting the Rolling Stones, a telegram arrived for him from Munich. It was from Keith Richards: "Really enjoyed playing with you for the last five years. Thanks for all the turn ons. Best wishes and love."

"Mick just read it and started crying," said Taylor's wife Rosie at their London home.

Taylor himself said: "It was a really nice telegram, it really got to me. And what it says completely reflects how I feel about them."

So why did he quit?

"I'd worked with them in such a way, and for so long, that I didn't think I could go much further without some different musicians," Taylor said. "So when this chance with Jack Bruce came up, well, I wanted to be with him. I'd known for several months that Jack wanted to put together a new band. We'd played a lot together lately, and we'd really hit it off well. It was all for purely musical reasons. There was no personal animosity in the split. There was no row, no quibbling or squabbling."

About an hour after Taylor's statement came out, Jagger phoned from Munich, where the rest of the Stones had been working for five days on their next album. "I'm sorry to see him go, but I think people should be free to do what they want to do," Jagger said. "I mean it's not the army, it's just a sort of rock & roll band. It's very hard for me to explain exactly why he quit. I'm not Mick, so it's difficult for me to explain his personal reasons. But when we went to Eric Clapton's concert at Hammersmith [London] last week, and to the party at Robert Stigwood's afterwards, Mick and I talked. He just said he'd played with us for five years, and he felt he wanted to play some different kind of music. So I said, 'That's okay, that's fine,' and that was that. We were due to return to Munich about two or three days later to start recording, so I didn't really have much time to talk to him. But we did have a couple of hours. There wasn't any kind of row or anything."

There may not have been a row, but there certainly was a mad flurry of upper-echelon activity when Taylor told the group that he wasn't going to attend the Munich sessions.

"The main thing everybody was pissed off about," said a friend of Taylor, "was that the Stones were supposed to be recording and planning a huge world tour. All of a sudden they find they're going to be without one guitarist. And they admit it's going to be hard to replace him. I assume the word came down from Ahmet Ertegun (chairman of the board at Atlantic Records, which distributes the Stones' records] to try to get Mick to stay. Marshall Chess [head of Rolling Stones Records] came to London and stalled, chasing Mick around, trying to find him, by phone, by foot, by car." But Taylor had already gone into hiding. Stones publicists had difficulty trying to locate him to issue a statement.

And as soon as the statement appeared, the music biz came alive with all kinds of explanations -- a row between Jagger/Richard and Taylor . . . money problems. There was talk that the break had come because Taylor hadn't been getting enough credit for co-writing tracks -- with subsequent loss of royalties. Denials quickly came from Jagger and Rosie Taylor. Then Taylor himself angrily denied the stories in a phone interview. "I'm very disturbed by those rumors . . . it had absolutely nothing to do with those things. I'm very upset about it, because I really like the guys in the Stones," he said. "I've really loved working with them for the past five years -- we've had some really great times. And I'd like to work with them again. But how are they going to feel if they open a paper somewhere and see something completely wrong, making all sorts of claims and sounding as if it comes from me? Nothing could be further from the truth.

"I think the rumors were started by an interview I did in a trade paper, but the things I said were taken out of context. And I never wanted the things I said written, reported or repeated. Whatever I felt about credits on songs has nothing to do with my decision to leave. If Mick or Keith ever want to do solo albums, I'd really like to be in on them. And that's especially why I want these rumors killed, because I don't want my friendship with the Stones jeopardized, or anything I may do with them later."

Rosie is just as adamant, but she hints at disenchantment over credits. "Mick is a musical person . . . it was just a question of having musical acknowledgement. If you know him or have anything to do with him, you know that he doesn't think of the money at all like that. It was the last thing on his mind. Sure the credits appear as Jagger/Richards, because it's always been the case. They've done by far most of the Stones' writing."