Let’s get one thing straight: The Rolling Stones’ drummer Charlie Watts was much more than the elegant, introverted man who witnessed the musical adventures and misadventures of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards for nearly six decades. The career of the “greatest rock band in history” would have gone to hell if it had not acted as a counterpoint between the singer’s claims and the guitarist’s shouts. It was Richards himself who admitted that “the Stones would not exist without Charlie.” And everyone agrees that if they didn’t exist, the Rolling Stones would have had to invent Charlie Watts. So it’s only fair to highlight his contribution to the group.
As Mike Edison pointed out in Sympathy for the Drummer. Why Charlie Watts is important, he was always the “incorruptible guardian of the Rolling Stones’ secret formula”; It was the cornerstone on which the legacy of His Demonic Majesty rested; the ceiling and floor of a huge house where most people enter only to look out of two large, facing windows (Jagger and Richards) through which light enters. The famous journalist and drummer of various bands – Raunch Hands, Pleasure Fuckers, Guadalupe Plata… – shows his admiration for Watts in a very entertaining article in which he mixes the musician’s biography with the history of the Stones. full of interesting anecdotes and accurate critical analysis of songs and albums.
A lover and student of jazz, the heir of Gene Krupa and an ardent admirer of Charlie Parker, Watts stitched the Rolling Stones together at his own whim with his rhythm and rhythm; He gives when he needs to give and creates enough space to create a track that makes him a unique drummer. «He scored a lot of goals when it was necessary and relaxed when it didn’t require singing; “At the end of the day, he was a humble guy who always stood behind the song,” says Edison. But aside from being a very refined drummer, he was more interested in finding roll than rock, no less than Stone of the Stones. Nothing with his group orgies. He had no interest – he married Shirley Ann Shepherd at 23 and was never with another woman – and always refused to take part in drug sessions held during recordings and tours. Although he remained on the sidelines of the circus for years, by the early ’80s, when his colleagues had already turned away from everything else, He fell into the arms of heroin and speed. His flirtation with drugs was short-lived: “I stopped dying for myself and my wife. “It was never really me,” he later admitted, and soon resumed his mission of setting the Rolling Stones’ beat.
His Evil Majesty is now celebrating the release of Hackney Diamondas with two cuts that Watts recorded before his death – Live by the sword and Mess it up. And they just announced a tour for 2024. They say the grim reaper will catch them swinging, not on the couch. Wats always considered himself a jazz musician and devoted himself to this when he was not in the band. Rock was his thing, and he said going to the Rolling Stones was like going to the office.