CHARLIE WATTS
Charlie Watts, dearly departed, was the beating heart of The Rolling Stones, the key to their peerless groove, writes Mat Snow.
Over six pages, Mat Snow says farewell to the Stones’ irreplaceable, ever-swinging drummer and his idiosyncratic genius. Plus, Charlie’s finest beats, and memories of personal encounters.
“The Stones were one hell of a dance band. And the engine behind their irresistible danceability was Charlie.”
“CHARLIE SWINGS VERY nicely,” wrote 19-year-old Keith Richards in a 1963 diary entry of his band’s new and very expensive hiring on drums, “but can’t rock. Fabulous guy, though.”
In the month since the sudden, shocking news of Charlie Watts’s death at the age of 80, the outpouring of grieving tributes, anecdotes and impressions all attest to how Keith’s third assessment was absolutely correct. As to the first, no arguments there either. But it’s the second that now – and even then or only very shortly thereafter – seems so very wide of the mark.
So why did Keith – and Mick Jagger and Brian Jones, the core Stones trio dwelling in squalid circumstances in Chelsea’s Edith Grove – reduce themselves to starvation and shoplifting to stump up the £5 weekly stipend sufficient to lure the 21-year-old drummer from Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated?
Because, as Richards has been saying for many decades about modern rock’n’roll bands, they can all rock but not many can roll. Charlie could roll.
Roll – swing, call it what you will – was rare and could not be taught if it wasn’t innately there. But rock was another matter.
Unfailingly modest about his drumming abilities compared to the cream of American and British jazzmen whom he idolised, Charlie knew that what natural talent could not supply, hard work and study would have to instead. Besides, it would be rude not to. Charlie was nothing if not polite.
The trio – and Ian Stewart, the pianist relegated to the sidelines because he didn’t look the part even though he sounded it – knew their man. Charlie had the work ethic to teach himself, and rock would come. And it did.
Unexpectedly for a man who deplored the hippy era as “the silliest period”, not for him at all, Watts happily identified as “a Gemini,” as he told Esquire’s Robin Eggar in 1998. “Home to me is Stravinsky and Picasso, Miles and Fred Astaire, and out there is all this other crap, groupies and all that rubbish. I can divorce the two things very easily.” On the one hand Watts was the epitome of post-war pragmatic working-class self-betterment, a war baby who grew up in a prefab in Wembley, north-west London, to a dad who delivered parcels for the railways, progressing from horse and cart to Bedford van. And on the other he was the romantic in love with the world of Miles Davis and the green shirt, Charlie Parker and the Prince of Wales check suit – the sound and the style, the glamour and the genius, the self-medication and self-martyrdom in the sacred cause of jazz.
At first Watts thought he could juggle both worlds. A Mod before Mod was a thing (despite his low opinion of Italian tailoring), he could draw, and went to art school, in Harrow, not to doss and learn how to think outside the box like Pete Townshend a few years later in Ealing, but to equip himself for a proper career wielding Staedtler, Rotring and Letraset in a West End advertising agency, starting at Charlie Daniels Studios in 1960. Upwardly mobile, he was suited and salaried in an office, not overalled and waged at the wheel of a truck like his dad.
By night, however, he would be found down the clubs of Soho, worshipping at the feet of the very few American jazz legends that visa quotas would allow into the country to play, plus the British disciples hardly less virtuosic even if they shone with a dimmer, homegrown glamour.
It was a world introduced to him at the age of 12 by his Uncle Charlie playing Earl Bostic’s Flamingo on 78. At first the alto sax appealed, but Charlie Boy (as he was distinguished in a family of Charlies) would actually keep time to the record with a rolled-up newspaper alongside his next-door neighbour David Green on bass, a lifelong friend who would go on to play
“Home to me is Stravinsky and Picasso, and out there is all this other crap, groupies and all that rubbish.” CHARLIE WATTS
with such greats as tenorist Ben Webster. The two young jazzniks swapped Duke Ellington, Jelly Roll Morton, Johnny Dodds, Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie records. Another pivotal point for Charlie was hearing West Coast baritone saxophonist Gerry Mulligan’s Walking Shoes with Chico Hamilton on drums. Struggling with the fingering of a banjo he’d bought himself aged 14, Charlie whipped off the neck and strings to convert it to a primitive snare, and a few months later was given his first proper kit for Christmas, painting ‘Chico’ on the bass drumhead.
Not that Watts saw drums as anything more than a hobby. He would rather drink in the glamour of the dancehall bands suited and booted in a blaze of brass than be bothered to practise paradiddles, flams and rolls for hour after lonely hour. Sitting in, aged 17, with a skiffle group at the Wimbledon Palais in a brief slot between Lou Prager sets was a bit of fun, not the start of something.
The homegrown DIY answer to American rock’n’roll, skiffle meant no more to Charlie than the original article. Fats Domino was the only rock’n’roller he had any time for, and he hated Elvis until Keith Richards educated him otherwise a few years later. Skiffle, however, was morphing into something else. Many young British fans were following up the skiffle staple Leadbelly to explore, via pricey American imports bought on mail order or in specialist Soho shops, the seductive world of rhythm and blues, with hit rocker Chuck Berry the gateway to the Chess stable and then deeper still to the smaller labels, country blues, folk blues and so on. Around London a little scene was growing, and it began to make headway into clubs always eager to pull punters to the bar via the box office.
Convinced that he was no more than a second-rater compared to such British jazz drummers as Bobby Orr or Phil Seamen, Charlie was serious about art and design but merely enjoying himself playing Thelonious Monk tunes in a quartet. But he was good enough to attract the ear of one of the prime movers in London’s blossoming R&B scene, Alexis Korner, who one evening in Earl’s Court’s legendary Troubadour offered him the stool with Blues Incorporated. Hitherto under the impression that rhythm and blues meant slowed-down Charlie Parker and that the harmonica meant Larry Adler and The Goon Show’s Max Geldray, Watts had a lot to learn but far too low an opinion of himself as a jazzer to be snobbish about the offer. Besides, he couldn’t help noticing that on the traditionally dead Thursday night at the Marquee club, Korner was pulling in a bigger crowd than British jazz star Johnny Dankworth on Sundays.
SOON WATTS WAS GIVING THE swing not only to Blues Incorporated (whose floating membership included Brian Jones, styling himself Elmo Lewis, down from Cheltenham, and Mick Jagger and Keith Richards up from Dartford) but three more R&B outfits besides; however low down the drumming totem pole he felt, he was clearly more than good enough for these new kids on the London club block. Which is when this Blues Incorporated offshoot group calling themselves The Rollin’ Stones started bidding for his services.
Watts’s evening excursions were beginning to encroach on his day job. The ad agency management insisted that the confrontation-averse art director have a word with the young assistant slumped yet again at his drawing board after another late night keeping time. “Charlie,” he said, or so the story goes, “you have to make a decision. You can either be a first-rate art director or a second-rate drummer.”
How much Watts agonised over that choice will now never be known. But he
chucked in the salary to move into Jagger, Richards and Jones’s Edith Grove hellhole to immerse himself in the music and get the hang of how to rock.
What perhaps none of these young guys then knew was that many of the drummers – like Fred Below, S.P. Leary and Tom Whitehead – on the R&B records they pored over were versatile pros who also played jazz. And that though, at first hearing, Jimmy Reed drummer Earl Phillips might appear to be merely bashing away, closer study revealed a master of subtle simplicity. Charlie was getting his templates.
Many reasons have been advanced over the years as to what it was that lifted The Rolling Stones out of a scene bursting with talent and enthusiasm to become household names as The Beatles’ evil twin. One of them surely is this: they became one hell of a dance band. And the engine behind that irresistible danceability was Charlie.
The breakthrough hit came in summer ’65. History records how Richards woke up with the catchy riff to (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction and at first imagined it arranged for horns as an album track in the Stax soul style until persuaded it could be colossal picked out on fuzz guitar. But the Stax vibe was not forgotten; house skinsman Al Jackson Jr was a titan of subtle simplicity, and drumming the song in that style cooked up the year’s biggest floorfiller and defined the moment in Watts’s musical development when everything fell into place.
It had the lot: space for Mick, Keith, Brian and Bill to make their presences felt, swing, effortless authority – and by God it rocked.
SIMPLICITY OF MEANS was key to Charlie Watts’s style. Ideally manufactured by Gretsch in basic black with 1957 his preferred vintage (fastidious taste was a Watts hallmark from suits to shoes to dogs and even to thoroughbred horses and vintage cars, despite the fact he could neither ride nor drive), his kit of choice consisted only of four drums: bass, floor tom, mounted tom and snare. Focusing on the one and the three rather than the two and the four in a four-beat bar, he’d lead with his right foot on the bass drum to push the band forward, with his left hand smacking the snare just
“I wouldn’t want to play with anybody else but The Rolling Stones. I enjoy being with them and playing with them immensely.” CHARLIE WATTS
behind the direct backbeat and, unusually, never simultaneously with the hi-hat completing the shuffle feel on the two and the four. After the eclipse of Brian Jones, Keith Richards led the band with Charlie following, flipping the common practice in rock of everyone following the drummer’s lead. These fractional delays gave the Stones an elastic articulation that mimicked a dancer’s movement.
His two-year growth phase over, Satisfaction was where Watts hit his stride. From then on, he bossed the Stones’ groove with an authority that challenged Richards to keep up. But the musical chemistry between the two was growing, the synergy of tension and release, drive and relaxation, that made their music so human, so danceable. Unlike the increasingly head-and-heart Beatles, this was body music, music you felt first, moved to first – and only then thought about.
Watts was highly sensitive to Richards’s vibrations: “Keith is the most interesting, the most different of us all,” he would tell The Observer’s Barbara Ellen in 2000. “He’s a man of vision.” And their relative contributions are there to see in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1968 movie One Plus One, in part a fly-on-the-wall documentary of the Stones recording Sympathy For The Devil at Olympic Studios in Barnes. Intriguingly, for a while the song lacked a compelling groove despite Charlie trying everything. Jazz to the rescue. Just check out A Night In Tunisia on Dexter Gordon’s 1963 album Our Man In Paris; though not the blueprint for Sympathy’s samba, Kenny Clarke’s drumming was its inspiration.
IF THE STONES PEAKED MUSICALLY between 1968 and 1972 on the foundation of the Charlie-Keith chemistry, the dapper drummer felt otherwise out of kilter with the times, and looked it too, the louche long hair and down-dressing exotica an uncomfortable fit. A devoted husband since the age of 23 to sculptress Shirley, he’d sooner sketch his hotel room on tour than fill it with groupies and groovers, and would even go to bed early while recording Exile On Main St. in Nellcôte on the Côte d’Azur.
As for festivals, Watts deplored how the wind would disturb his cymbals; and never mind Altamont, he even hated the legendary free Hyde Park 1969 comeback show.
“My wife got hit with a stale sandwich,” he grumbled to The Guardian in 2013. “I remember her going mad with that. I don’t blame her. I never liked the hippy thing to start with. It’s not what I’d like to do for a weekend, I can tell you.”
If the half-century since that Stones
golden era has embellished and refurbished the legacy rather than substantially adding to it, so it was for Duke Ellington and many other jazz inspirations who kept on keeping on. Watts loved the renewed band camaraderie stoked by the affable Ron Wood, and aside from working closely with Richards on the musical nuts and bolts behind the scenes, the art director manquŽ had a significant hand in their stage and product design. “We’re the best thing on those huge stages,” he told MOJO’s Chris Ingham in 1996. “I’ve seen great bands shrink on ’em. We had some of the Seattle grunge lot on; nice little records, they were lost on a football field.”
For all his insistence that despite his friendships with the band, the Stones were not what gave his life meaning but always just a job, he was perhaps more emotionally invested than he thought. At a time of particular band fractiousness in the mid-’80s, he shocked everyone, not least himself, by hitting the wine, speed and smack. With Shirley despairing, he pulled himself together just in time, and focused instead on jazz side projects, lavish labours of love repaying favourite musicians for all the pleasure and meaning they’d given his life.
But alongside the romance, always the pragmatism. Many British fans of a certain vintage will recall the Stones’ disappointing run early in the boiling summer of ’76 at the Earl’s Court Arena with wayward sound compounding Keith Richards at his chemical nadir. At the end of the show as the lotus-leaf stage closed over his head, Charlie put down his sticks and walked away from his drum stool like a factory worker clocking off at the end of a shift.
Job done, the moment seemed to say; not a great day at the coalface but there will be better. And there were, stretching another 45 years, right up to the age of 80.
In 1994 the late Robert Sandall asked him why he kept doing it.
“Keith would say, ‘What else are you going to do?’” he replied, before adding, “I probably enjoy it more now. I can see what I’m doing now, in a way. I’m more relaxed with it. And I would like to say that I wouldn’t want to play with anybody else but The Rolling Stones. I enjoy being with them and playing with them immensely. Immensely. Always have done.”
It was always more than just a job, and Charlie Watts was always more than just a drummer. A lot more.