Charlie Watts, the backbone of the Rolling Stones for almost six decades on drums, died on Tuesday at the age of 80. Watts together with Mick Jagger and Keith Richards are the only members of the Stones to have featured on all thirty of the band’s studio albums.
Raised in northwest London and affectionately known as the ‘Wembley Whammer’, the young Watts’s first love was jazz. After listening to records by Jelly Roll Morton, Thelonious Monk, and Charlie Parker, the teenage Watts deconstructed a banjo to sate his burgeoning interest in the drums. He recalled:
‘I bought a banjo, and I didn’t like the dots on the neck. So I took the neck off, and at the same time I heard a drummer called Chico Hamilton, who played with Gerry Mulligan, and I wanted to play like that, with brushes. I didn’t have a snare drum, so I put the banjo head on a stand.’
Watts received his first drum kit in 1955 and played along to his collection of jazz records, while in the meantime enrolling as a student at Harrow Art School. His professional career began as a graphic designer for an advertising agency, as he sat in on drums for the local bands who managed to score gigs at coffee shops and clubs. After playing in the jazz band Middlesex with his childhood friend and double bassist Dave Green, in 1961 Watts was invited by Alexis Korner to join Blues Incorporated, accepting the offer upon his return from a graphic design assignment in Denmark.
It was in 1962 that Watts first met the slide guitarist Brian Jones, the keyboardist Ian Stewart, the singer Mick Jagger, and the guitarist Keith Richards, who frequented the local rhythm and blues clubs and variously passed through the ranks of Blues Incorporated. With a career in design and a regular salary from his side job as a drummer, it was January 1963 before Watts was persuaded to join their fledgling band the Rolling Stones. His first performance as a regular member of the group came on 2 February at the Ealing Jazz Club.
From the steady beat and gentle swing of Gerry Mulligan and all those Pacific Jazz records to the enduring influences of Charles Mingus and Miles Davis, from the outset the supple drumming of Watts complemented the rest of the band as they embraced the Chicago blues then embarked on a transatlantic stomp across America.
And from the sinuous snare and steady kick of ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’ to the arabesque patterns of ‘Sympathy for the Devil’, or from the swagger of ‘Honky Tonk Women’ to the stuttering introduction to ‘Rocks Off’ as the group continued their run of chart-topping albums, Watts was the bedrock as the Rolling Stones became especially for a time in the late sixties and early seventies the greatest band in the world.
Charlie Watts married discreetly to Shirley Ann Shepherd in October 1964, and at the end of the year published an illustrated tribute to Charlie Parker entitled Ode to a High Flying Bird. He continued to draw on his penchant for design and illustration, contributing a comic strip to the sleeve of Between the Buttons and routinely aiding with the design of tour merchandise and stage sets.
In the late seventies, Watts began his first proper foray outside of the band, joining back up with Alexis Korner and the original Stones keyboardist Ian Stewart to form the boogie woogie group Rocket 88. He toured widely as a big band jazz musician, and in the nineties formed the first of a series of jazz ensembles which grew to include the Charlie Watts Quintet, the Charlie Watts Tentet, and the Charlie Watts Orchestra. The Stones by this point were releasing new albums every three or four years, followed by record-grossing world tours.
Besuited in public and often seated behind his drum kit wearing a t-shirt or polo and slacks, Watts cut a restrained yet debonaire figure and generally disdained the life of a rock star. At home in Devon he helped to breed prizewinning horses. Admired for his sense of style and well known for eschewing the limelight, any sense of Watts as a supine figure was skewered by an anecdote which Keith Richards regaled in his acclaimed autobiography Life.
Richards recalled ‘a rare moment, in late 1984, of Charlie throwing his drummer’s punch – a punch I’ve seen a couple of times and it’s lethal; it carries a lot of balance and timing. He has to be badly provoked’. The Stones were in Amsterdam and after a night on the town with Richards, an inebriated Mick Jagger opted to call Watts over the hotel phone. It was five in the morning and Jagger asked ‘Where’s my drummer?’ before hanging up. Twenty minutes had passed, and then:
‘There was Charlie Watts, Savile Row suit, perfectly dressed, tie, shaved, the whole fucking bit. I could smell the cologne! I opened the door and he didn’t even look at me, he walked straight past me, got hold of Mick and said, ‘Never call me your drummer again’. Then he hauled him up by the lapels of my jacket and gave him a right hook. Mick fell back onto a silver platter of smoked salmon on the table and began to slide towards the open window and the canal below.’
Otherwise Watts said that he ‘loved playing with Keith and the band’ but was never interested in ‘being a pop idol sitting there with girls screaming’. Describing the band’s heyday, he said ‘Back in the seventies, Bill Wyman and I decided to grow beards and the effort left us exhausted’, while in 1996 he told Rolling Stone magazine ‘I’ve drawn every bed I’ve slept in on tour since 1967. It’s a fantastic non-book’.
He added ‘I’ve always had this illusion of being in the Blue Note or Birdland with Charlie Parker in front of me’. Instead after a crash course in the blues stylings of Earl Phillips, staying true to a simple four-piece drum kit, Watts became one of the greatest drummers in the history of rock and roll. In Life, which was published in 2010, Keith Richards wrote ‘Charlie Watts has always been the bed that I lie on musically’, and as colleagues and admirers paid their respects there can be no greater tribute than that.
A brief descent into drug use and alcoholism tested Watts’s marriage in the mid-eighties, and despite having quit smoking by the end of the decade, in 2004 Watts was diagnosed with throat cancer which went into remission after a course of treatment.
Earlier this month, the Rolling Stones announced that Watts would be absent upon the resumption of the No Filter Tour, scheduled to resume across the United States in September. Watts had recently undergone an unspecified medical procedure, which representatives described as a success. His death on Tuesday was announced by his publicist, with Watts leaving behind his wife Shirley, their daughter Seraphina, and a granddaughter named Charlotte.
