Apologies to Ringo Starr, but there were only three truly great rock ‘n’ roll drummers to come out of the 1960s: Keith Moon of the Who, John Bonham of Led Zeppelin, and Charlie Watts of the Rolling Stones. And one of those drummers is not like the others — Moon and Bonham were legendary wild men who didn’t make it out of the ‘70s alive. Watts, the reserved and gentlemanly heartbeat of the Stones, died on Aug. 24 at 80 years of age, surrounded by family and friends.
Even when Watts was out of control, he was in control. The defining Watts anecdote comes from Stones guitarist Keith Richards’s autobiography, Life. In 1984, after a night of some excess in Amsterdam, Richards and singer Mick Jagger returned to their hotel room, where Jagger thought it would be a good idea to ring up Watts at 5 a.m. Watts answered the phone to Jagger bleating, “Where’s my drummer?”
Watts hangs up the phone without saying a word, but it doesn’t end there. He gets up and heads down to meet Jagger and Richards. According to Richards, Watts entered their hotel room wearing a “Savile Row suit, perfectly dressed, tie, shaved, the whole f***ing bit. I could smell the cologne!” It was at this point that Watts brushed past Richards and told Jagger, “Never call me your drummer again.”
Then Watts “hauled him up by the lapels of my jacket and gave him a right hook.” Watts knocked Jagger backward onto a silver platter of smoked salmon and toward a window that opened into one of Amsterdam’s picturesque canals. Richards saved Jagger from falling into the canal only for Watts to demand to know why he didn’t let Jagger go for a swim. Richards explained that it was because Jagger was wearing a jacket that Richards had lent him, an explanation the nattily dressed Watts found acceptable.
Suffice to say, Watts had also been drinking when this happened, and this episode was somewhat out of character — he apologized for cold-cocking his singer when asked about the incident in 2003. In fact, one of the Stones’s biographers called him “the world’s politest man,” and while Watts was obviously wealthy, he largely rejected the trappings of being in the world’s biggest rock band. He was an expert in 18th-century silver antiques, he collected vintage cars despite being unable to drive, he raised Arabians on a 700-acre estate in southwestern England, and he remained loyal to jazz, his first musical love. “I never liked Elvis until I met Keith Richards,” he said.
Indeed, it was the musical relationship between Richards and Watts that defined the Rolling Stones. Watts, who had respectable jazz chops, was far and away the best musician in the band. But Richards’s innovative guitar playing defined the band’s sound, and Watts was happy to play second fiddle. The Stones always cultivated a pleasing tension with Watts’s steady snare falling just behind the beat created by Richards’s endless stream of rhythmically angular riffs.
And true to his personality, it was Watts’s impeccable judgment and restraint that made him a great drummer. Even the early Stones material is notable for arrangements that are barely more than controlled chaos — “Under My Thumb” comes to mind, in which the guitar, bass, and a prominent xylophone all play different rhythms that weave around each other. Somehow, Watts plays a brilliant and deceptively simple shuffle beat underneath it all — he always found a way to anchor a band that wanted to float away.
Indeed, Watts is so known for being the steady presence in, er, a crossfire hurricane, that it’s hard to imagine him gone. For decades, there’s been a running joke that Richards is some sort of heroin vampire who’s going to live forever, but it still seems improbable that Richards outlasted the far more reserved Watts, even if Watts was a few years older.
In this respect, Watts’s death is culturally significant in a peculiar way. His death at age 80 isn’t a rock star tragedy so much as a reminder that even the most culturally significant forces are subject to actuarial tables. In fact, the day before Watts died, news broke that Don Everly of the Everly Brothers had also passed. While the Everly Brothers weren’t as big as the Stones (who is?), the influence of songs such as “All I Have To Do Is Dream” and “Wake Up Little Susie” was enormous, yet the coverage of Everly’s death was disproportionately muted. After hearing of it, a musician friend of mine quipped, “Who had Jerry Lee Lewis on their bingo card for last surviving member of the 1986 inaugural class of Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductees?”
Like it or not, the next decade is going to be a classic rock mausoleum, so get out and see these artists while you can. And as it happens, the Stones are touring the states this fall. It won’t be the same without Charlie behind the kit, but Watts was modest enough that he was on record saying that he wanted the Stones to continue without him if anything happened. There was only one way he didn’t want the Stones to stop performing. “I’d hate for [the end of the band] to be a bloody big argument,” he told New Musical Express in 2018. “That would be a real sad moment.”
Mark Hemingway is a writer in Alexandria, Virginia.
