With Charlie Watts, You Always Got What You Wanted
Assuming the Rolling Stones finally roll out their long-delayed tour this fall, perhaps there will be a disclaimer on the tickets saying this is actually a performance by the lead singer and the lead guitarist of the Rolling Stones.
That can produce a terrific show, given that lead singer Mick Jagger and lead guitarist Keith Richards have always been the creative engine of the band, writing and performing some of rock ’n’ roll’s most powerful and exhilarating songs.
Mick and Keith and Ron Wood with a team of very talented backup musicians, however, is an ensemble performing Rolling Stones songs.
It’s not the Rolling Stones.
With the death Tuesday of Charlie Watts, the band’s drummer since before it caught fire, one too many trees have now fallen in that forest.
Asked in 1989 how the band carried on after the death of original Stone Brian Jones and original bass Bill Wyman, Richards said, “It’s still the Stones as long as Charlie is with us. He’s the piece that holds it together.”
Yesterday Richards posted a picture on Twitter showing Watts’s drum kit with a “Closed” sign hanging on the front.
Unlike with the Who or Cream or, heck, the Beatles, audiences tended not to notice the drummer in the Rolling Stones. He was quiet, not flashy. In more than 50 years with the band, he never took a traditional drum solo. He just kept the engine tuned and roaring.
The Rolling Stones would not have been the Rolling Stones without the beat that Charlie Watts put behind “Get Off Of My Cloud,” “19th Nervous Breakdown,” “Tumbling Dice,” “Beast of Burden,” “Paint It, Black,” “Honky Tonk Women” and hundreds more. His beats were as sharp as his famously tailored clothes. They could rip, they could crackle, they could thunder. When necessary, they could whisper.
To fans like Bruce Springsteen, Charlie’s drumming was the essence of rock ’n’ roll.
To Charlie Watts, well, he said in a 1986 interview that “I never knew what ‘rock and roll’ means. I still don’t. I play the drums. That’s all.”
Uh-huh. And Willie Mays just caught baseballs.
Watts tried not to talk to writers any more than he talked on stage, which was not at all. He wasn’t rude. He just had better ways to spend his time.
But in the fall of 1986, Keith and Mick were arguing about something — records, tours, redecorating, who knows? — so Charlie was taking advantage of the break to go on tour with The Charlie Watts Orchestra, a big band ensemble that played the music Charlie Watts, at home on his own time, preferred to spin on the stereo system he swore he still had a hard time operating.
“Billie Holiday, Edith Piaf,” he said. “I could hear them all day. I still like the old things. You can’t beat Fats Waller. There are times when I need to hear Monk.
“Keith turned me on to Elvis and I like the Chicago blues. Muddy Waters, Little Walter. I love Sinatra’s ’50s Capitol sessions. I’ll listen to anything if it’s good. But I love jazz.”
The Charlie Watts Orchestra’s album/CD, recorded live at Fulham Town Hall, included six classic big band tracks like “Stompin’ at the Savoy” and “Flyin’ Home.”
Ah, said Watts, Basie. That’s music.
One of the nice things about big band jazz, he mused, is that it doesn’t require lyrics. Okay, the Orchestra had a couple of female singers, but it could function without them. And no, if the female singers took ill, Charlie Watts would not fill in on vocals.
“I sing ‘Jeep’s Blues’ to myself,” he said. “I will never sing it for anyone else.”
In any case, when he took the Orchestra on the road for a short series of live performances, he had to promote them. So here he was in a publicist’s office, in jacket and tie as always, by himself, a helpless target for music writers who, to be honest, were mostly there because they loved the Rolling Stones, not Coltrane.
“I never do interviews,” he said. “With the Stones, Keith and Mick always do them. But with this band, there’s only me. So this week is hell for me.”
Truth is, though, he said, the real hard work was assembling and running his own band, right on down to being the one who worried about its public reception.
“I hate bad reviews,” he said. “I’m spoiled because I play in a band that never gets them.”
He loved to make the music and play it for an audience, he said. He just wished he could avoid everything else.
“When the Orchestra has finished, if we’re lucky, the audience claps,” he said. “With the Stones, they look at Mick. Here they look at me. It’s embarrassing.”
This from a man who was one-fifth of a rock ’n’ roll band that in its early days played what Wyman drolly described as “riots and near-riots” driven by mostly teenage female fans.
“Kids make records for kids, don’t they?” Watts mused in 1986. “I play in a so-called rock ’n’ roll band that was supposed to be what kids were interested in. I never have been.”
Don’t get him wrong, he said. With the Stones as with the Charlie Watts Orchestra, he loved the playing part. None of the rest, he said, much interested him. Asked if he thought the Stones would tour again, a hotly debated issue in 1986, he shrugged.
“I’d love to do it, but I wouldn’t suggest it,” he said. “Do we plan to? I have no idea. I’m always the last to know.”
That demeanor helps explain how Watts developed a reputation over the years as the calm and quiet segment of a notoriously volatile and flamboyant band. He was married to his wife Shirley for 57 years, from 1964 to his death, and he said his idea of a big night after a show was to “go home, read a good book and go to bed.”
Being a human being, however, meant it wasn’t all a rainbow. He had his drug period, picking up a two-year addiction in the early 1980s that he later said almost shredded his life and marriage.
The Charlie Watts Orchestra was part of the therapy that helped him to quit.
But the low profile of his private life didn’t lessen the seismic impact he had on the music of the Rolling Stones, on records and in concert.
The megashows the Stones helped pioneer, first in arenas and then stadiums, “were unusual places to play,” he said. “They were places that weren’t meant to play instruments in.
“It was a strange way to work — I’d see Mick maybe three times during a song and I couldn’t see anything else beyond the front of the stage. You also had no idea how the person with the mixer in the middle of the crowd was making you sound. But you got used to it. People seemed to like it.”
It was in some contrast to the Charlie Watts Orchestra shows, held in small venues designed for music.
“Here you have a sense of how you sound, your own volume,” he said. “Max Roach’s quality on drums had nothing to do with anything electronic. He had an inherent knowledge of volume. He knew you don’t play the same volume with a saxophone as you do with a piano.
“You look at old photos of bands and you see how far the drummer is in the back. Gene Krupa was in the bathroom.”
While Charlie Watts was never that far back with the Stones, he almost physically disappeared under the megasets of the Stones’s later stadium shows.
Still, you always heard him, even if you didn’t think you were listening for drums. You even heard him on the last transcendent moment he left for rock ’n’ roll fans — a brilliant, hilarious and altogether perfect air drumming riff during the Stones’s 2020 virtual concert performance of “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.”
With Charlie Watts, you could. For the Rolling Stones, his death closes an era.
