Remembering Charlie Watts: A Tribute

Charlie Watts was the greatest. It’s as simple as that. Pat Carty doffs his cap...

Everyone has that one artist or band that means more to them than anyone else. For me, since I was a very young man, it’s been The Rolling Stones. I could, if permitted, go on at length about the fact that Exile On Main St. is not only the greatest album of all time but is also quite possibly - allowing that modern medicine is pretty impressive, Shakespeare wrote some good lines, Picasso could knock them out, and landing on the moon most assuredly warranted a round of applause – the pinnacle of all human achievement. I could also tell you that everything they did in the four years from May 1968 to May 1972 – which is not to say that they didn’t make great records either side of those brackets, because they most assuredly did - is so perfect, so awe-inspiringly funky, groovy, and rocking, it could easily serve as the basis for a religion. And it does, in this house at least.

Accordingly, that phone call knocked me sideways. Charlie Watts, the drummer in the greatest rock n’ roll band of all time, had passed away, “peacefully in a London hospital, surrounded by his family,” which is as much as any of us can hope for and no more than the man deserved. There’s a whole treatise to be written here about why the death of certain famous people affect us so deeply. I know what it is in this case, though. Charlie Watts was, at least partly, responsible for a fair proportion of the magic and joy in my life. That’s why I mourn a man I’ve never met.

Watts had only recently announced that, due to required medical recuperation, he would be sitting out the Rolling Stones USA No Filter tour dates in the next few months. Steve Jordan, a long-time associate of Keith Richards, had been drafted in as a replacement, although many fans maintained that if there was No Charlie, there was No Stones. It has now been confirmed that these dates will go ahead. It’s their baby of course, and Jordan is a fine drummer – although he’s too loud on those Keith solo records – but he’s no Charlie Watts, because no one is.

The Jazz Man

He never considered himself a rock n’ roller at all, that was Mick and Keith’s job as far as he was concerned. He was a jazz man to his perfectly polished, custom-made shoes and at odds with the lifestyles of his mates. The wife he leaves behind is the same Shirley Shepherd he married in 1964, they had one daughter, Seraphina, and Watts, by all accounts, was a devoted father and grandfather. He lived quietly and well in Devon, where he kept horses and collected vintage cars, cars he would sit in and admire, because he never learned to drive. The universe had other plans for Charlie Watts’ hands and feet. He famously didn’t care for touring, preferring to stay home, but he loved to play.

Even from the very earliest of days, The Stones knew they were lucky to have him, and they wouldn’t have been half the band they were at all without him. A lifetime spent worshipping at the altars of Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong and, most especially, Charlie Parker – although he would later say that Gerry Mulligan’s ‘Walkin’ Shoes’ was the record that made him want to play drums - imbued Watts with a jump and swing beyond his contemporaries. While others invested in a second bass drum and more toms than you could fit in a reasonably sized van, Watts didn’t have to. He didn’t play twenty-minute drum solos that sent everyone to the bar, because Watts didn’t have to. Watts played the song, and he played it like no one else ever could.

“I don’t like drum solos; I never take them. I admire some people that do them but generally I don’t like them. It’s not something I sit and listen to. I prefer drummers in a band, you know, playing with the band.”

Once The Stones had secured his services back in 1963, when they could finally afford him and with Watts probably thinking he might get a year out of them at best, Keith Richards and Brian Jones pointed him in the direction of Earl Phillips, the man on the skins behind the likes of John Lee Hooker, Howlin’ Wolf, Eddie Taylor, Billy Boy Arnold and, most importantly for the emerging group’s sound perhaps, Jimmy Reed. Charlie added this new knowledge to what he already had and made The Rolling Stones into The Rolling Stones.

The Wembley Whammer

And let us make no bones about it, the sound of The Rolling Stones is the sound of rock n’ roll. It is the sound of Charlie and Keith locking in together, one slightly behind the beat, the other slightly ahead of it, creating a platform for the mighty Mick Jagger to dance and sing upon. No one else has ever even come close. Put on any Stones record and glory in the magic Watts brought to it. How about the ominous shuffles of ‘Midnight Rambler’? The introduction to ‘Street Fighting Man’, famously played on an old rehearsal kit that folded up into a suitcase? The hammering behind ‘Paint It, Black’? As Paul McLoone pointed out, Charlie’s drums as the lead instrument on ‘Get Off Of My Cloud’? Doing the satanic samba for ‘Sympathy For The Devil’? Every stop and start and style change buried in ‘Loving Cup’? The devil coming over the hill clatter of ‘Gimme Shelter’? The as close to perfection as makes no odds groove of 'Slave' or ‘Can’t You Hear Me Knocking’?

Disco, reggae, soul, blues, country – Charlie could bring something to all of them, and that something was himself. I could go on and marvel at his every contribution, he was really that good. He made The Stones great just by turning up. From their earliest days until now, from the Richmond Hotel and the Crawdaddy Club up to Croke Park, The Rolling Stones have always been a dance band and that is down to Charlie Watts. I’ve been dancing to his beat since a lightbulb went on over my head when I first heard it and I’ll continue dancing to it for as long as I can lift myself out of the chair. Only this morning I played ‘All Down The Line’ as I put together a radio show. I had to stop everything to throw shapes to Charlie’s intro and his miraculous fills. Every time Keith Richards has been interviewed, he riffs on the same idea. Lots of bands have the ‘rock’ but they don’t have the ‘roll’. The Stones always had it because The Stones always had Charlie.

What should be noted too is that Charlie Watts was quite possible the only person to ever enter their orbit who never put up with even an ounce of shit from either Mick or Keith. Everyone knows this story, but it’s a good one, so let’s enjoy it again. In an eighties hotel room in Amsterdam, a drunken Jagger once reportedly woke Watts, bellowing down the phone, ‘Where’s my drummer?” Watts got out of bed, dressed himself, impeccably of course, no doubt in one of the beautiful suits he was famous for, polished those shoes, combed his hair, shaved(!), and went downstairs, where he decked Jagger with a right hook, saying “Don’t ever call me ‘your drummer’ again. You’re my fucking singer!” Charlie had a wobble around then, deciding that, just as the others were starting to calm down, this was the right time for him to dabble in drink and drugs but, as he himself pointed out, when even Keith Richards tells you to cop on to yourself, you listen.

The Greatest

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, The Rolling Stones made the greatest records I have ever heard, and I’ve heard a few. The music they made, at their unassailable, imperial height, will be played for as long as humans have hearts in their chests and need reminding about how glorious it is to be alive, even if that time be oft so cruelly short. A large part of what makes those records so magnificent, those records that make you want to grin and dance and fuck and kick something over, is the playing of Charlie Robert Watts, the Wembley Whammer, the man who refused play the snare and the hi-hat on the same stroke, the jazzer who made rock n’ roll swing.

Every band, and I don’t care who they are or how strenuously they might deny it, have tried to sound like The Rolling Stones since The Rolling Stones but none of them have. They didn’t have Jagger’s voice and swagger, they didn’t have Keith’s piratical rhythm and genius chords, and they most assuredly did not have Charlie Watts' beat and swing because the universe only saw fit to make one of him. And now we don’t have him either. But, then again, we always will. Raise a glass to a good man and a hero. And play those records fucking loud.