Sympathy for the Drummer: Why Charlie Watts Matters

Published by Backbeat Books

An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.

4501 Forbes Blvd., Ste. 200

Lanham, MD 20706

www.rowman.com

Distributed by NATIONAL BOOK NETWORK

Copyright © 2019 by Mike Edison

Book design by Tom Seabrook.

Cover photograph by Ethan Russell © Ethan Russell.

Cover design and hand-lettering by Tilman Reitzle.

Musical transcriptions by Kenny Aranoff, except Rip This Joint by Mike Edison.

Uncredited photographs courtesy the author’s personal collection.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

ISBN 978-1-4930-4773-4 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-1-4930-5069-7 (e-book)

There is two kinds of music, the good, and the bad. I play the good kind.

Louis Armstrong

What the fuck’s a rock drummer?

Charlie Watts

Also by Mike Edison

Nonfiction

I Have Fun Everywhere I Go

Dirty! Dirty! Dirty!

You Are a Complete Disappointment

Fiction

Bye, Bye, Miss American Pie

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION: LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, THE ROLLING STONES

1. ALL THAT JAZZ

2. THE DEVIL’S MUSIC

3. NOT FADE AWAY

4. CHARLIE’S GOOD TONIGHT

5. RIP THIS JOINT

6. THE V WORD

7. THE HARDER THEY COME

8. RESPECTABLE

9. HANG FIRE

10. WHERE’S MY DRUMMER?

11. BRIDGES TO NOWHERE

12. BLUES IN THE NIGHT

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Before the Revolution: the Rolling Stones doing their civic duty, on the BBC’s Juke Box Jury, 1964. (Pictorial Press Ltd./Alamy)

INTRODUCTION

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, THE ROLLING STONES

It was a subversive, direct challenge to authority, and an unambiguous claim to show-business superiority. They were the power and the beauty, and they outclassed everything in their field.

Charlie Watts was the drummer, the driving force behind their salacious riff-bashing and groovy dance hits, their dirty, filthy basement boogie, and their rarified druggie laments. They drove harder than anything that had come before them, and played with more class and nuance than anyone had thought possible, a combination of precision and who-gives-a-fuck looseness that would define their best music. There was no compromise with this group. Even their cute country song was about heroin.

They embraced the future and the past with equal ardor and imagination. They molded the history of American music in their own image, creating an alternative universe where country and blues met with violence and LSD. Disco beats wrestled with steel guitars. Their gospel music was nasty. Everything stunk of sex.

And quite literally sitting behind it all, straddling a snare drum, across five decades, Charlie Watts evolved from beat-keeper to shaman, his hi-hat chugging, opening and closing in counterintuitive grace, percolating with sex and voodoo, dancing with the devil, clattering with abandon and artful intent.

Charlie Watts was a witness, a survivor, a warrior poet in the classic sense, tossing off his hyper-stylized salvos with subtle savagery, uncommon grace, and rhythmic savoir faire. With his easy swing and often loping, uneven fills, he found out how to get inside the song, like a great singer—and yet his relentless pounding on the most mean-spirited songs of the era delivered an authenticity to a band that on their best nights were an existential threat to status quo. He found space to breathe in a music that had little room for it. He stretched time, and while others blew up their drums looking for a cheap pop from audiences increasingly becoming slaves to the spectacle, he played his modest kit with finesse and humility and liberated the groove. He gave purchase to the singer and the guitar man. People have broken out of prison with less moxie.

° ° °

Charlie Watts is (or perhaps was, by now) the drummer of the Rolling Stones, a popular music group from England who began their careers in a sweaty London club in 1962, and at the apex of their career were known as The Greatest Rock’n’roll Band in the World. That they deserved the title is inarguable.

It’s hard to imagine anyone coming into this book completely naked—that the reader wouldn’t know who the Rolling Stones are makes little sense. And yet it would seem cheap not to take a moment to define our terms with a little dishing of the key players. The rules of engagement demand explanation! And anyway, playing the drums is all about context—has anyone ever asked you to come over to their house and play a song for them on the drums? Not bloody likely. So, begging forgiveness, I’d be very flattered to introduce the band.

The singer is (or was) a bloke called Mick Jagger, whom Charlie sometimes referred to as Peter Pan for his tendency to ignore the Earth’s unbroken habit of circling the sun. Into his seventy-sixth year, Mick Jagger remained a blur, leaping and shuffling about, making teenagers wonder what he was eating for breakfast, and where they could get some.

At times, he was also one of the most astonishing lyricists the art has ever known, a poet whose Byronic instincts were well fed by the reality of the Rolling Stones and the times in which they lived—a tectonic culture shift that saw them glide almost unerringly from blues purists to the gorgeously lowdown and louche answer to the Beatles (the LSD was both blessing and curse), to rock aristocracy, punk rock revanchists, and, finally, showbiz titans whose back catalogue and near-mythical status obviated the need for them to make new records to sell out football stadiums.

Mick helped write songs that have defined several generations, taking credit for killing the Kennedys and howling rape and murder, but also celebrating love in all of its scaly forms. Often an inmate of his own worst nature whose songs like Stupid Girl or Under My Thumb or Some Girls would have shut him down had they been birthed in the new century, he has also done time as a flamboyant gender-bender, a romantic whose passion knew few bounds, crooning about women of every conceivable size and color, and singing enthusiastically about both sides of the cocksucking equation. He has been, at turns, a fearless artist, a singer of remarkable gifts, a jester, an elder statesman, a trend chaser and creator of trends, a fashion victim, and the greatest front man in the history of rock music. He is a flawed god, as all the good ones are.

Whereas Mick was the sun and the sky and the stars up above, his old school chum Keith Richards was the boots on the ground. A savant guitarist blessed with preternatural rhythmic instincts and good taste, he twisted the double-stops of Chuck Berry and an ancient Delta tuning into a proprietary formula, and spanked them with the joie de vivre that was his stock in trade, churning out simple riffs that crushed all that came before him, and all the while never letting his ego get in front of his playing. Long heralded as a survivor—once upon a time he was the most celebrated junkie on the planet, and his ability to hold drink and drug and work harder than anyone was legend as sacrosanct as that of King Arthur—the truth is he is alive not in spite of the Rolling Stones, but because of them, for the riff to Jumpin’ Jack Flash is more life-affirming than the alternative.

Keith was the perfect foil for Mick—the Jagger/Richards songwriting team became the axis upon which the Stones revolved, and, onstage, they became the Glimmer Twins, the Bonnie and Clyde of the rock’n’roll revolution. But the engine of the machine was the guy in back with the snare drum between his legs.

Keith was the best possible musical partner for Charlie Watts, with whom he created a conspiracy within a conspiracy. Together, they gave the Stones their unique swagger and flow—Keith’s chopping rhythm guitar and preternatural sense for the riff pushed Charlie’s sense of swing to the fore, forcing the run up to the beat and the gentle pulling back that became the Stones’ signature style. And this is reason No. 1 Why Charlie Watts Matters—he understood better than anyone the difference between anticipation and penetration. He gave Keith Richards friction. He made Mick Jagger explode.

° ° °

Charlie, Mick, and Keith were the Rolling Stones. Everyone else was replaceable.

Other members of the group have included Brian Jones, the founder of the group, a bluesman of no uncertain talent who had mastered the primitive urban spells of Elmore James and Slim Harpo, and who gave the band purpose, peeling off slide guitar riffs and harmonica stabs with a buttery ease. With Keith he began what famously became known as the Ancient Art of Weaving, a sympathetic two-guitar relationship where rhythm and lead roles were cast to the side in favor of an organic stew where neither guitar dominated the soundscape. Later, Brian would expand his grimoire to include such exotica as dulcimer, marimba, and Mellotron. A beautiful man, music poured from his fingertips, and his contributions to the early Stones hits burned bright, until he burned out, a casualty of the lifestyle and the times in which he lived. He was asked unambiguously to leave the group in 1969, and was found dead in a swimming pool soon after, leaving a legion of broken hearts and an undying mystique.

Mick Taylor, Brian’s replacement, was a horse of a different color, a lead guitar player who didn’t weave so much as he rode on top of the rhythm section, and who would provide much of the stinging guitars and melodic aerodynamics across the Stones’ run of classic records. This is when they first earned the title The Greatest Rock’n’roll Band in the World, and there was no question, they were untouchable, the very best at what they did, the model for every band that came after them, in music, in fashion, in druggy behavior.

Taylor quit over some nonsense about not getting to write any songs, and seems to have regretted it ever since.

After a few auditions for the next guitar player, they landed on their old pal Ronnie Wood, ex of the Faces, themselves a somewhat sloppy version of the Stones, who fell-in with Keith almost too easily—Ronnie the rambunctious child, the optimist, the goofball, Keith the pirate who rarely traveled unarmed—and the Ancient Art of Weaving never sounded better.

Ronnie lasted longer than the last two guitar players put together, so maybe he was not actually replaceable, but seeing as he was in the band for twenty years before they made him a partner in the concern and not just an employee, you might surmise that the brain trust were hedging their bets. Occupational hazards in this group ran high.

Last but certainly not least of the Rolling Stones’ official members was the severely underrated bassist Bill Wyman, whose accomplishments and presence have never been sung with as much praise as they merit. Often buried in the mix, he drove the band, playing with a very certain mastery of his instrument, and kept order in what could be an unruly mess. He was unequivocally a component part of the Stones’ sound.

Bill’s departure from the band was officially announced in 1993—he was fifty-six years old, and, after being in the band for thirty years or so, he seemed very happy for it. If he had left early on, who knows where the Stones might have drifted, but he was able to leave what he had created for the next cat, who plays wonderfully, but the blueprint was written long before he joined the team.

And there they are, the Rolling Stones. There have been keyboard players, and, more properly, pianists, at least one who got demoted on looks and not talent; a saxophone player who helped define their sound but got canned for filling a bathtub with Dom Pérignon—one toke over the line, even for the Rolling Stones; and a producer who helped them make the leap from juvenile delinquents to proper gangsters before flaming out on his own bad dope trip. It is a story as bold as Exodus or any of the Gospels, rife with fury and resurrection. And we’ll get to all that.

But to the subject: Charlie Watts, an unrepentant jazz fan who had little love for rock’n’roll when he joined up with the Stones, and for whom drugs held little interest, found purchase in all of this. His ability to swing dirty blues, sleazy country music, and filthy hard rock with equal alacrity became the sine qua non of the organization. It only goes to follow that The Greatest Rock’n’roll Band in the World could not exist without The Greatest Rock’n’roll Drummer.

° ° °

Much has been written about the Rolling Stones, much of it surrounding the enduring mystique of Mick and Keith, the drugs, the infighting, the women. There are angry feminist tracts and fawning puff pieces, critical essays, fan books, symphonies of yellow journalism, biographies, writs by producers and groupies and hangers on, and a book of wisdom compiled from excerpts of Keith’s interviews. There are official coffee-table books, oral histories, and scads of photo books. Not content with being among the most documented human beings in history, several of them have written their own books to tell their side of the story.

The only thing they all seem to agree upon is that Charlie Watts motored this car. Keith has repeatedly said, No Charlie, No Stones. And yet the literature surrounding Charlie Watts is anemic, a deficit in the landscape.

Perhaps this has much to do with Charlie’s humility. Perhaps if he were more outspoken, less of a gentlemen, and played more like a lunatic than an actual musician; perhaps if his humor weren’t so dry, if he were into drugs and sex and mayhem and didn’t cast himself as the anti-rock star—married young, well mannered, and with little interest in the spotlight—perhaps if he drove cars into swimming pools and turned hotel rooms into kindling, then there would be a book or a movie about him. Perhaps if he shot lasers out of his eyes there would be an amusement-park ride.

But he was there for it all: the murder at Altamont, the myriad drug busts and casualties, the creation of some of the greatest musical documents of his time. His broken drum fills made good records great ones, and his toy drum set became the anchor for one of the most menacing, violent songs of all time. There was ancient wisdom in his rhythm, even as he found jazz in the most unlikely of all places—the most dangerous rock’n’roll band in the world.

He spent fifty years watching Mick Jagger shake his narrow ass across increasingly byzantine tours, and not only did he survive a lifetime on the road with Keith Richards, but together they became a beating heart, the greasiest, sexiest rhythm section in the history of the sport. Is there a band in the world not influenced in some way by the Rolling Stones?

I think it’s time to give the drummer some.

Charlie Watts in New York City, 1964. (Trinity Mirror/Mirrorpix/Alamy)

ONE

ALL THAT JAZZ

Playing the drums is a tough racket—racket being the operative word.

Drums are loud, and take up lots of space—not just a few feet of carpet, rather the extended war zone that carries the howitzer-like report of a rim shot and the whomp of the bass drum—and in my experience, at least, drums are the beginning of a lifetime of noise complaints from increasingly annoyed neighbors and visits from the police.

Drums were once played on military fields, snare drums rat-a-tat-tatting over the thunder of musket and cannon fire and the ghastly wailing of wounded soldiers. The American army fought what must have been the noisiest Revolution in history—just look at the paintings! There is always some goddam drummer in there, blasting away on the snare drum, 150 years before Gene Krupa thrilled audiences with Sing, Sing, Sing, making his employer, the Benny Goodman Orchestra, something like the Metallica of their day.

° ° °

I remember watching the television game show Wheel of Fortune one day when I was home sick from school—surely there would have been no other reason to watch it. The object of the game was for contestants to solve word puzzles with the help of a clue, and one of the clues this day was, The worst thing a child can say to their parents. You would think that would have opened up a whole can of worms, but the answer was fairly prosaic: I want to play the drums.1

Drums do not come with volume switches. Properly played, the modern drum set is hit with wooden sticks. Rock’n’roll drum sets are like artillery, a series of tuned ordnance, staged for maximum impact.²

Drums are the foundation upon which the cocaine palaces known as discotheques were built in the 1970s, with the bottom heavy boom shh-whack, boom boom shh-whack beat being the concrete in the mix, but they are also the very essence of jazz in all of its wonderful forms, and, of course, the backbone of the hydra known as rock’n’roll.

A deft drummer can make a sad song sadder, lift a joyous chorus to heaven, and be the prime mover in sex with a stranger, beginning on the dance floor, as so many dalliances and revolutions have.

The deafening thwack of beating tom-toms, and the piercing attack and frightening decay of large crash cymbals—those round metal things festooned around the drummer like razor-edged flying saucers, the clangorous copper fauna of an extraterrestrial jungle—are designed to cut through the din of symphony orchestras, swing bands, and fabulously loud rock groups whose volume-fetishizing guitarists carry amplifiers the size of refrigerators. Which is the reason, incidentally, why Led Zeppelin IV is the record that when you are stoned and listening to it really loud, that you think you hear the phone ringing the most when it really isn’t ringing at all. But we’ll get to that later.

A lousy drummer can tank a song in short order. I always think about what Bob Dylan offered, when asked to give some advice to prospective drummers: What should the guy avoid? No big cymbal crashes on the word ‘kick’ in the song ‘I Get a Kick Out of You.’

A big part of being a successful drummer is resisting temptation, which is another reason Why Charlie Watts Matters: he never overplayed his hand, never chased flashy fills, never competed with the rest of the band for air space, never played anything just because he could. He found nuance in a music that often had little room for it, and along with his greatest conspirator, Keith Richards, he gave the Stones their swaggering beat.

Of course, on the other side of the street, Keith Moon’s pyrotechnic,