Golden Oldies
ROCKING INTO YOUR 80S
Quem di diligunt adulescens moritur – ‘He whom the gods esteem dies young’ – has been the unofficial motto of the music business.
If you were a proper rock ’n’ roller, you didn’t remember the Sixties. Real hellraisers were in the 27 Club along with Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Amy Winehouse and Kurt Cobain.
Plane crashes took Buddy Holly aged 22, Otis Redding aged 26 and Patsy Cline at 31. Ian Curtis of Joy Division hanged himself aged 23. Karen Carpenter died of a heart attack, aged 32. Dennis Wilson drowned at 39. John Lennon was shot dead aged 40. The list is long.
But the list is far longer of those who have made smaller headlines and older bones. The Rolling Stones are a case in point. Bryan Jones drowned in a swimming pool aged 27, but the late Charlie Watts, a man who described his career as ‘four decades of seeing Mick’s bum running around in front of me’, is more typical of the industry.
Papa was a rolling stone, and then Grandpa was – now even Great-grandpa can be a Rolling Stone (Mick Jagger became one in 2014, aged just 70). Bob Dylan, Paul Mccartney, Neil Diamond are all around 80 – the reasonably ripe old age at which Watts died.
Watts hated Glasto and didn’t like festivals, far preferring jazz. His Desert Island Discs, with Tony Hancock, Frank Sinatra and Charlie Parker among his picks, is worth a listen.
Fame was never the spur. Nor girls. He married Shirley in 1964 and hated women ‘chasing me down the road’.
He was the opposite of a burn-the-candle rocker. When he and Bill Wyman decided to grow beards, he said, ‘The effort left us exhausted.’
He would describe his long career with the Stones as an accident. ‘It was just another band. I thought it would last a year, three years, and then I stopped counting.’ And ‘the problem with the Rolling Stones was – you saw them in the newspapers.’
The morning after he died, the Today programme closed to a medley of Stones hits. I was doing the washing-up and I stood at the sink motionless as shivers went up and down my spine.
I listened to his drumming properly for the first time and realised that every time I danced to the Stones, I was dancing not to Mick’s vocals but to the beat of Watts’s drum.
What a very fine drummer this modest, dapper, Savile Row-suited man was.
‘I just like to be in there right in the front and very loud,’ he said.
I would say, ‘May he rest in peace’ – but from the sounds of it, given the choice, he’d prefer a nice bit of jazz.
RIP Charles Robert Watts (2nd June 1941-24th August 2021)