AN ODE TO CHARLIE WATTS, THE POLITEST MAN IN ROCK MUSIC:

Watts himself was later to remark, ‘Part of my problem was that I was never a teenager. I’d be off in the corner talking about Kierkegaard. I always took myself too seriously, and thought Buddy Holly was a great joke.’ It’s true that there was something a bit melancholic about the London lad with the long, Buster Keaton face who only ever wanted to read about cowboys or play the drums. He acquired his first kit at Christmas 1955, after at least a year of practicing nonstop on his mother’s pots and pans. At 18, Watts had only one ambition, which was to somehow find himself at Birdland in New York, wearing a hipster suit and sitting in behind the likes of Stan Getz or Miles Davis. Instead, he drifted in to a smoke-filled suburban London blues club one evening, to be confronted by the embryonic Rolling Stones. They courted him for about two years before he agreed to join, and even then he contained his excitement. The Stones’ roadie and sometime piano player Ian Stewart remembered that he’d simply driven up to the Watts’s front door one night in his van. ‘I said to Charlie, “Look, you’re in the band. That’s it.” And Charlie said, “Yeah, all right, then, but I don’t know what my mum’s gonna say”.’

Amid all the subsequent stories about Mars Bars, drug busts and Margaret Trudeau, Charlie remained the calm eye of the storm. He bought the former Archbishop of Canterbury’s home, raised sheepdogs and collected American Civil War memorabilia. He was the politest man in rock music. Once, in Detroit, a record executive named Mo Schulman invited the drummer up for a drink in his hotel suite, which was awash in champagne, caviar and an impressive variety of recreational drugs. When Schulman was then urgently called away on business, he affably told his guest to help himself from the display. ‘Anything you want,’ he stressed. Charlie took a bottle of beer, leaving both a five-dollar bill and a polite thank-you note on the counter. A few years later the Stones were yukking it up one night in the pinball room of Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion with its underwater bar and hot and cold running Bunnies. Charlie took one look at the Satyricon-like scene, rolled his eyes, said, ‘Uh-oh, this is star situation’, and retired alone with a good book.

Still though, there were limits to Watts’ politeness, as this classic Stones story recalls:

One night in Amsterdam in the 1980s, when Richards was celebrating his marriage, he and Jagger stayed up most of the night drinking. At 5 a.m., Jagger called Mr. Watts’s hotel room, according to Richards’s autobiography, and said, “Where’s my drummer?” “About twenty minutes later,” Richards went on, “there was a knock at the door. There was Charlie Watts, Savile Row suit, perfectly dressed, tie, shaved. . . . 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 . . . 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 it. . . . [I] caught Mick just before he slid into the Amsterdam canal.”

Here are some thoughts from Stewart Copeland of the Police, another brilliant drummer, about Watts’ drum technique, and how he drove the Stones:

https://youtu.be/N3ZH3PEjTLE

As for the surviving Stones, not surprisingly for a band led by Mick Jagger, the show (read: the money machine) must go on: Rolling Stones ‘moving ahead’ on tour despite Charlie Watts’ death.

On the other hand, as Mark Hemingway responds to the above story, “Watts was on record saying he wanted and expected The Stones to continue without him. ZZ Top is also playing this fall and Dusty wanted them to continue. Also, Stones tours employ hundreds of people who likely were out of work all pandemic.“