Through Korner he met Brian Jones, who would play at Blues Incorporated gigs, and they found regular fans in Jagger and Richards, who also ended up playing with the group. In 1962 he joined Blues Incorporated, a linchpin band in the British rhythm and blues scene led by Alexis Korner, playing alongside the Cream bassist Jack Bruce and more in a fluid lineup. He later attended art school and became a graphic designer after graduation, playing in local bands on the side. His first musical love was US jazz from the swing and bebop eras, drumming along with jazz records after getting his first kit in his mid-teens. Modest, understated and reliable in a musical world characterised by volume, extravagance and mercurial personalities, Charlie was always good on the /YUR6lckf8k- Keith Richards August 24, 2021īorn in 1941, Watts was raised in Wembley, north-west London, and later the suburb of Kingsbury. This was both true, and beside the point. “Charlie’s good tonight, innee”, said Jagger on the live 1970 album Get Yer Ya Yas Out. Ultimately, he shaped rock and roll by ignoring its expectations. His passing will surely test that claim to its limits. “No Charlie, no Stones”, Keith Richards has repeatedly stated. Then again in the way he subtly pushes the tempo as the song nears its conclusion, which makes it simultaneously a standard rock beat with a tinge of funkiness - without overt syncopation. In Honky Tonk Women, this can be heard in the slight mismatch between the cowbell and his drums. But it was his deceptively difficult and idiosyncratic playing that propelled hits such as Honky Tonk Women and Start Me Up. Watts himself said, “there are a million kids who can play like me”. The Stones, then, relied almost as much on what he didn’t play – on the space he left – as on what he did. It’s very hard to do – to stop the beat going just for one beat and then come back in … And the way he stretches out the beat and what we do on top of that is a secret of the Stones sound. It pulls the time back because he has to make a little extra effort.Īnd so part of the languid feel of Charlie’s drumming comes from this unnecessary motion every two beats. On the hi-hat, most guys would play on all four beats, but on the two and the four, which is the backbeat, which is a very important thing in rock and roll, Charlie doesn’t play. The Stones groove derived from how Watts played infinitesimally behind the beat, which Richards has attributed to his distinctive style, and credited as foundational to the Stones sound. Watts’s hallmarks were simplicity and a feel that provided both space and a solid base for Keith Richards’ open-tuned swagger on guitar. But doing what he did is not as easy as he made it sound. What is good, though, is that people look at me and say, ‘Well, I can do that’”. “I don’t think what I do is particularly difficult. “I try to help them get what they want”, he said of Jagger and Richards. Self-effacing as well as self-taught, for Watts, serving the song was key. He lacked the quixotic flair of The Who’s Keith Moon, and his playing was far removed from the complex virtuosity of the prog-rock and fusion players who emerged in the 1970s, or indeed, his jazz influences like Roach. Unlike Led Zeppelin’s John Bonham, he was not an especially powerful hitter. But his jazz underpinning would help the band incorporate other genres into their repertoire, from reggae to funk, which helped expand what a rock sound was. Few would say he pulled the Stones in an overtly jazzy direction – this would be something he would explore more fully later through side-projects in the 90s, including a big-band and a jazz quintet. While the Stones’ most obvious musical inspiration was the blues, Watts’ drumming had the fluid yet disciplined tendencies of jazz. He idolised jazz pioneers including Max Roach, Tony Williams and Joe Morello, and his jazz sensibility – his capacity to “ swing” – informed the Stones’ music. Watts wasn’t formally trained as a jazz drummer, but like fellow Rolling Stone Brian Jones and Cream members Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker, he passed through the early sixties British blues evangelist Alexis Korner’s outfit, Blues Incorporated. For someone at the heart of a legendarily dissolute band, he largely eschewed both the glitz and grime of his milieu. He differed from his peers in the rock drumming pantheon, partly due to being a jazz aficionado, a sensibility that he took to the music of the Stones, and also through his self-contained manner. As Watts’s biographer Mark Edison put it: “No one dances to the guitar solos. Drummer Charlie Watts, who passed away on Monday, was as integral to the Rolling Stones as its frontman Mick Jagger and songwriting partner and guitarist Keith Richards.
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