The legendary Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts passed away yesterday, Tuesday August 24. Two months earlier, he had celebrated his 80th birthday. As tributes to his memory pour in from rock’s tenors, Zeweed looks back over the 60-year career of this gentleman of rock with the magic drumsticks.
If Keith Richards is said to be“the most elegantly destroyed musician in rock’n’roll“, Charlie Watts was the most elegant musician in rock’n’roll.
Sober, discreet, calm, married for over 50 years to his first and only wife, his personality is also the antithesis of that of the heartthrob Jagger or the eccentric Ron Wood.
Stoically wedged behind the 3 drums and the bass drum of his Gretsch, for 6 decades Charlie Watts was the measure of the band of all excesses. In 1963, invited by Brian Jones, he joined four blues fans from the London suburbs who were to create the“world’s greatest rock’n’roll band“. Bill Wymann on bass, Brian Jones and Keith Richards on guitars, Mick Jagger on vocals.
For two years, from 1963 to 1965, while playing with the Stones, he kept his (real) job as a precaution: graphic designer in an advertising agency. For while he may not be a womanizer like Brian Jones or Jagger, he sketches and draws to his heart’s content, always carrying around a notebook and a few pencils. This habit never left him. From 1968 onwards, on every tour, he would systematically sketch the hotel room in the city where the day’s concert was taking place, and then show the sketches to his wife. This habit he kept until his last tour with Les pierres qui roulent, in 2018.
This anecdote says a lot about the personality of this unusual musician: while his stage mates were ravaging their suites, he was patiently designing them. While his fellow musicians were having adventures with groupies, much to the chagrin of their wives or official girlfriends, he was patiently designing beds, bedside tables and bathrooms with his wife in mind. If the other members roll, crash and fall, he is a monolith, a rock, a mountain of impeccable tempo on which, in concert, the often tired guitars of Keith Richards, Brian Jones, Mick Taylor and Ron Wood rest.
Watts’ unique phrasing, this dry lightness with a relentless beat, comes from his training as a jazz musician. A passion that never left him (in the 80s and 90s, when the Stones were at a standstill, he put together several jazz bands and recorded some remarkable sessions), and which explains his unique, airy, fluid, yet dry and ultra-square rhythm.
From Sir Paul Mac Cartney to Elton John and Brian Wilson, the admiration and sympathy for Charlie Watts’s family and the Rolling Stones have been pouring in. Lenny Kravitz’s is the one we’ll remember and follow. In a tweet, the author of “Let love Rule” said that “the groove speaks for itself”.
The proof in three steps.
In 1973, to promote the album It’s only rock’n’roll and the song of the same name, the Rolling Stones decided to make a video in which they would end up in a foam bath. As the drummer’s position was a sitting one, poor Charlie Watts almost ended up drowning in the bubbles (see the end of the video with Charlie Watts stoically drinking his cup of foam without flinching).
In November 1968, the Rolling Stones invited the whole of musical London to come and party and record live sessions, some of which are anthology.
Among them, “Sympathy for the Devil”, accompanied by the great Charlie’s samba against the beat.
Charlie Watts’ other love: jazz. Here, in 1992, during a recording of The Denis Miller Show, a sweet cover of “Lover Man” with Bernard Fowler (who has also been doing back-up vocals for the Stones since 1990).
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