The passing of Charlie Watts has provoked many tributes in the UK. And yet his reputation and influence go way beyond these shores. T Bruce Wittet, a Canadian musician and writer, pays tribute to “the drummer who listened and allowed the music to move him”:
From the beginning of his long tenure with the Rolling Stones in 1963, Charlie got it right – to his way of thinking. And he stuck to his guns, to his way of thinking, through decades of fashion and folly, never even casting a wayward eye at the trends parading by.
The expression “cut from a different cloth” seemed tailor-made, pun intended, for Charlie Watts. He loathed casual sneakers, trainers, T-shirts, jeans, and off-the-rack suits in favour of the Saville Row offerings. When he was young, he’d get out of his home turf in Wembley with his dad on a journey to east London where his dad’s tailor worked. It’s a scene that may provide context for the Rolling Stone album cover for Between the Buttons. Charlie’s essential conservatism guided him through rough waters in his career just as the well-worn jazz 32-bar chorus steered him to destinations unknown to the GPS.
Indeed, if you visited Charlie Watts in New York City, you’d take a yellow cab to midtown and a hotel with a hidden (to the public) tower and you’d be allowed through doors unknown to civilians and buzzed up by security – if Charlie validated your visit. He’d answer the door of his room dressed in a suit that’d pass editorial approval for the cover of GQ, yet which was standard fare for him lounging, maybe pruning the roses. His hotel room was strategically placed, offering a view of 52nd Street, the jazz mecca in previous decades. The Stones would play the Gardens and he’d have access, of a weekend, to, say, Oscar Pettiford, JC Heard, Sonny Stitt, and when they audaciously reshaped the jazz world, Miles Davis and John Coltrane. From his lofty perch, he could swoop down and catch Philly Joe with Miles, or maybe Tony Williams, whom he appreciated less but understood. He’d sooner get a table and see, in the flesh, Chico Hamilton or Jimmy Cobb, to name two drummers who influenced him in his approach to ride cymbal. In that regard, Charlie would lament not managing to catch Davie Tough, another master of the ride. The ride cymbal defines jazz and if they steal your gear on the load-in, providing they spare the ride you can cover the gig.
With the Charlie Watts Orchestra or Quintet, the leader – no surprise here – would take a back seat to the vocalist, or to the horn soloist. He was quite capable, says his close friend Jim Keltner, the American session drummer, of “skipping around on the ride, varying the phrasing, although with the Stones it’d be straight up & down eighths”.
In his jazz groups, Charlie enjoyed playing the brushes – “stirring the soup”. He loved the architecture, the materials, the fine wires fanned-out, all assembled in optimum proportions.
Interestingly, Charlie did more than carry the spirit of jazz over to the Rolling Stones. His kit components were selected for their efficacy in jazz. A longtime friend of the Zildjian Company in Norwell, near Boston, Charlie nevertheless, employed, for the longest time, a cymbal made in Italy, and in fact one that he and roadie, the late Cheuch McGee, had found in a Paris trash bin. The significance is that Charlie Watts was able to work that cymbal into the Rolling Stones. It was a cymbal without a cup and thus without extraneous overtones – perfect for jazz. Charlie surprised all those paying attention when he began using the old UFIP flat ride cymbal continuously with the Stones. Until the crack began to emerge. Zildjian fashioned a replica that did the trick.
It had it coming: a thin, quiet cymbal struck with Charlie’s signature stick with its considerable girth. Some older fellows, accustomed to sticks like knitting needles, would depict Charlie’s stick as a tree trunk.
Similarly, the extent of Charlie’s fascination with jazz lore extended to drums. The archetypical jazz drum bore the distinctive Gretsch logo on the front skin of the bass drum, easily visible in legions of photos by Claxton et al. While in his jazz orchestra and quintet, Charlie often went with basic black Gretsch drums; with the Stones, it was always bigger drums. In the early days they might be Ludwig but Gretsch took over.
When the American magazine Modern Drummer interviewed Charlie and his long time friend Jim Keltner, on the occasion of the release of The Watts-Keltner Project, a bizarre outing with each track dedicated to a heritage jazz drummer, the writer managed a provocative question: “Charlie, for a guy who, let’s face it, can afford any drumset, I was wondering why you’d go with a tatty, scuffed up old Gretsch yellowed maple kit.” Charlie feigned anger but defused the blow with a smile. The answer, he explained, was obvious: he fancied the tone.
“Charlie was such a jazz guy,” Jim Keltner says. “It’s all we ever talked about. And we’d make a point of seeing who was playing in town. That’s what bonded us: starting out in jazz”.
Charlie Watts played in pretty much the same manner with the Stones as he played on jazz gigs. He liked to pop a mid-to-high tuned snare drum with a rimshot, harkening to a rich tradition that extended from Krupa style jazz to Stax and Motown soul tracks.
The man affectionately nicknamed “Charlie Boy” originally trained in design, took his place among rock heroes Mick, Keith, and originally Brian Jones and later Ron Wood, with considerable reluctance if not outright shyness. Never, except for a relatively short portion of his life, was he inclined to hang out with peers making toasts to the gods. Instead he played time that was steady, if not metronomic, and that floated. It was an accommodating time sense that carried his colleagues in a warm embrace. One doesn’t hear a lot of rushing or dragging on any Rolling Stones album. The answer was not in the machine, or fixing it in the mix, but in his hands and his concept.
Again, atypically, Charlie did not seek to lock-in with the bass player note for note. He admits, in fact, sometimes giving short shrift to bass and following Keith Richards, much the way jazz drummers did when comping. It was a lighter approach and while firm it allowed for a less ponderous, rock and roll rhythm section.
Charlie Watts died surrounded by family and passed on quietly as he lived. And will continue to live as the drummer who listened and allowed the music to move him and not the converse.
“One thing is very clear to me – just because we are called ‘drummers’ it doesn’t mean that groove is solely our responsibility. It also comes from the arrangement, the other instruments and the singer – in fact, the singer in many cases really can make, or break, the groove and feel of a song. As drummers, we are there to hold everything together, to add colour within the framework of the arrangement, and it was only later in my career that I came to realise that we are truly the last link in the chain when it comes to groove and feel.
“Knowing what a song needs comes from the benefite of experience, and it also comes from hours and hours of listening to the masters – Hal Blaine, Earl Palmer, Al Jackson Jr., Benny Benjamin, Roger Hawkins, John ‘Jabo’ Starks, to name but a few… All those guys that influenced me personally, are the people you are hearing when I play, and I’ll never forget how they made me feel every time I heard them.
“But, I can’t talk about groove without also mentioning two of my dearest friends, Ringo (Starr) and Charlie (Watts). Geez – when you think of me feel on all of those songs! And, of course, Jeff Porcaro who was truly like my little brother and taken from us way too soon.
“You can imagine the amount of records I have played on over the years, but the ones that I enjoy listening to the most are the ones where the other musicians are playing fantastic and my drums fit in good around them. I love being knocked out by
songs and performances – that’s the key for me. So if you really listen to what everyone around you is playing, you’ll know what to play or what not to play.
The Beatles’ own John Lennon wasn’t exactly a humble church mouse during his hedonistic rock star days, especially during ‘The Lost Weekend’. Yet even he couldn’t put up with the wilder than wild antics of singer Harry Nilsson and The Who’s notorious drummer and resident lunatic, Keith Moon.
Nicknamed Moon the Loon by his contemporaries, if The Who’s drummer wasn’t blowing up drums or toilets with cherry bombs, then he was driving cars into swimming pools. It made for a tabloid newspaper’s dream and meant the burnt a lot of bridges along the way. The offending moment regarding John Lennon came in 1973 and was of a particularly golden shade, leaving a stain and a stench that Lennon would never be able to shake.
The former Beatle, three years out of the band and in the throes of his solo stardom and personal tough circumstances, was in a state of flux in his career and his personal life. It was a period of time he later titled ‘The Lost Weekend’—an 18 month period in which he and Yoko Ono separated and, under direction from his wife, began having an affair with their assistant, May Pang.
Lennon did as he was told and begun to see May Pang more regularly but soon fell into some bad habits as he began heavily drinking and using heavy drugs once again. The months that the singer lost to pursue partying and drinking on an unprecedented level were some of his most frustrated as an artist. Holed up between Pang’s New York apartment and the L.A. studios, desperately trying to work through his recording contract so he could be free. Lennon was also falling in with a notoriously raucous crowd, as Keith Moon and Harry Nilsson became regular drinking buddies. Lennon lived and worked with the pair of party-lovers to make matters worse.
“John loved Harry,” Pang confessed in Lennon Revealed. “He loved his energy; he loved his writing. What he loved in Harry was the beauty of his friendship and relaxed personality. That’s what he saw.” Lennon was swept up with Nilsson and didn’t see how destructive the singer’s life was beginning to turn into or how detrimental it was to his own career. “Harry drank, a lot. But Harry was the type of guy that if you go out drinking with him, he’d be sure at the end of the night that there would be a big brawl and that you are the one who’s in trouble, even though he started it. Harry would keep feeding John drinks until it was too late.”
While the stories Nilsson shared with Lennon have become the stuff of legend, Lennon was less enthused about the party boy shenanigans of Keith Moon, who may have seemed like a young upstart to the established rockers, even though he’d been in the game for nearly as long. The drummer who, in fact, once asked to audition for The Beatles, was a source of constant disruption in the recording studio. It was a situation which would come to a head while Lennon recorded songs for his infamous LP Rock ‘n’ Roll with the equally infamous producer Phil Spector.
The heavy drinking and drug use around the ever-erratic and increasingly introspective Spector was beginning to wear on everybody involved, “John was exercising all his bad habits, as were we all, including Phil,” remembered drummer Jim Keltner. “The only problem with that was that Phil was the producer, and somebody had to be, you know, sane.”
“The guys were all drinking—and John was being one of the guys,” said Pang. “Everyone was as blitzed as he. One of the bass players got into a car wreck. We got kicked out of A&M [studios] when someone threw a bottle of liquor down the console.” But, it wasn’t liquor, though it may have been at one point during the day. No, the mystery liquid was actually Moon’s urine.
Lennon, sober at this time and infuriated by the constant hindrance he faced in the studios, decided enough was enough and wrote a scathing letter to Spector addressing the continuous mishaps that were befouling his work. Any Lennon fan will tell you, a letter from Lennon is often a piercing one. He wrote: “Phil – Should you not yet know it was Harry and Keith who pissed on the console. Jerry now wants to evict us, or that’s what Capitol tells us. Anyway, tell him to bill Capitol for the damage if any.”
The ‘Imagine’ singer continued, “I can’t be expected to mind adult rock stars nor can May [Pang, Lennon’s personal assistant] besides she works for me not A+M. I’m about to piss off to Record Plant [another recording facility] because of this crap.” It wouldn’t be the final time that Moon was in the same studio as Lennon as the Who drummer was also in attendance at the final recording session Lennon ever shared with fellow Beatle, Paul McCartney.
Both Lennon and Moon lived lavish but all too short lives, both dying before their time. But as with any friendship or working relationship when it’s a matter of pee, sometimes enough is enough. Seemingly, for John Lennon, the last straw was the dropping of Moon’s trousers—it’s good to have boundaries.
Take a look at the letter below, written in red felt pen, and imagine the ludicrous image that spawned it. It recently sold at auction for £53,000 a huge jump on it’s £6000 estimate.
