Music: The Rolling Stones have lost Charlie Watts, gentleman drummer<

The Rolling Stones have lost Charlie Watts, gentleman drummer

Disappeared at the age of 80, Charles Robert Watts held the drums for fifty-eight years with the Rolling Stones. Faithful husband, jazz lover, horse breeder, dandy, collector, who was this drum major with legendary modesty and quiet strength? Portrait.

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“Charlie is good tonight!” exclaims Mick Jagger on the album "Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out!" before the riff of the title "Honky Tonk Woman" resounds. In the same breath, Watts sets the Rolling Stones machine in motion. Behind his jazz drums, a 1956 Gretsch, he animated the ensemble with flexibility. A metronomic quiet force. In New York City on that night in 1969, the band rocked Madison Square Garden. The “Wembley Whammer” (Wembley hitter) as Jagger liked to present him, solid on the tempo, ran the shop. This chic taciturn type was for fifty-eight years the backbone of the Stones. Musical and human cement, the humble drummer denied himself any quality. On the cover of the live album held to be one of the best ever recorded, he appears leaping and smiling next to a donkey, proof of his total self-mockery. “There is nothing obligatory in Charlie, even less his modesty”, will say Keith Richards.

i just realized that it's second sem and my prof never taught us how to say 'yes' and 'no' in chinese

— arson™🌙 Tue Mar 09 12:09:09 +0000 2021

Charles Robert "Charlie" Watts, born June 2, 1941, felt "miserable most of the time." This is what he said one day in an interview, praising as usual the thousand qualities of his companions. Looking disillusioned, staring into space, seeming to die of boredom with each sentence spoken, these signs of shyness were the trademark of this discreet dandy, absolute anti-rock star.

He died, surrounded by his family, at the age of 80, in a London hospital, Tuesday August 24, as discreetly as he lived. Watts was due to recover from surgery, stripping him of the stage for the first time in his career with the self-proclaimed "world's-greatest-rock-band". He had started with them in what was then a small formation of pure blues, at the Flamingo club in London, on January 14, 1963, after leaving Alexis Korner's Blues Incorporated because he "did not think he was good enough" . His absence, during the next American tour, which will kick off on September 26, in Saint-Louis, Missouri, was to be temporary. Until then, CW had never missed a single appointment, even suffering from throat cancer, as in 2004. This homebody used, after each tour, to announce that he was “retiring” . “I hate being away from home. I can't play drums at home. To play I have to go on the road and for that I have to leave home and it's like a vicious circle that has always been my life.

Charlie Watts, the son of a British Railways lorry driver and a stay-at-home mother, born in suburban London three months before the German bombing blitz, was a faithful husband and friend, father, grandfather, father and one of the most stylish men in the world, according to Vanity Fair. He was a horse breeder – his wife's passion – on a huge estate in Devon and a car collector, when he didn't have his driver's license but swooned at the finishes of his luxury machines, including a Lagonda Rapide from 1937. He also liked old drums that belonged to big names in jazz, objects dating from the Civil War, antique silver coins.

Charlie was an esthete. This former art student, graphic designer, typographer and briefly an advertiser, dreamed of becoming a painter. He reproduced, in a notebook, each of the beds in his hotel rooms, gave his opinion on the album covers, the configuration of the stages, the sets and any derivative product bearing the famous logo. But Charlie Watts was above all, whether he liked it or not, a damn good musician.

A passionate lover of jazz and blues – “Keith introduced me to rock'n'roll”, he would say – Watts began by imagining himself, typing on newspaper sheets, accompanying his idols, among which saxophonist Charlie "Bird" Parker. At 13, seeing a banjo, he tore off the handle and used the membrane sound box as a drum that he mounted on a tripod. One Christmas evening, he finally received a real but modest battery: snare drum and bass drum. Then his father bought him, on credit, a Ludwig Sky Blue Pearl, bought on Shaftesbury Avenue at the Drum City shop, like a certain Ringo Starr.

Watts listened to all the major drummers: Chico Hamilton, Elvin Jones, Buddy Rich, Roy Haynes, Tony Williams and especially Joe Morello, the teacher, whom he questioned in order to capture the clockwork subtlety of the syncopated rhythm on the “Take Five” by the Dave Brubeck Quartet. When he learned that the silversmith had financial worries, he made him pay the sums collected by the sale of baguettes, produced by a famous brand in his name. Watts was also a generous being.

To define the singularity of his playing, it would be appropriate to listen not only to the Stones, but also to this disc by Howlin' Wolf, "The London Howlin' Wolf Sessions", on which he balances in "Do the Do" and makes his drums, like these steps, jumping from one leg to the other, which he sketched just before entering the stage. By watching "One + One", a 1968 film by Jean-Luc Godard, we understand that the rhythm, within the Stones, did (almost) everything. From a simple folk song, “Sympathy for the Devil” has thus become a frenzied title.

Charlie, who we hear groping, ends up laying the foundations by using his snare drum like the timpani of a Latin percussionist. Keith: “Everyone thinks Mick and I are the Rolling Stones. If Charlie didn't do what he does on drums, it wouldn't be true at all. Charlie Watts IS the Stones.” We hear it from “Satisfaction” in 1965 or “Paint It, Black”, the following year. You have to listen to "Can't You Hear Me Knocking" (1971) on "Sticky Fingers" to understand what a rock drummer is who swings like a jazzman, the same on "Tumbling Dice" (1972) and even better on " Slave”, where, entering alone, Watts waves, imperial. “There is something impossible to copy, said ex-bassist Bill Wyman. We don't follow Charlie, but Charlie follows Keith (rhythm guitar, editor's note). So the drums are very slightly behind the guitar. Just a second. And me, I tend to play ahead. There is a kind of wavering.”

Stewart Copeland, drummer of The Police, analyzing Watts' style for the Guardian points out: “Technically he leads with his right foot on the bass drum, which pushes the band forward. Meanwhile, his left hand on the snare is a little relaxed, a little lazy – and that combination of propulsion and relaxation is the technical definition of what he does. But you can try it all you want, it won't look like Charlie."

Watts never hit his snare drum and his hi-hat cymbals simultaneously and he beat on beats 1 and 3. Not that he was an outstanding technician, but by retaining, in his own way, his strikes and placing them in the right moment, he entered the very heart of music and life. “White batsmen don't swing. With the exception of Watts,” says Richards. Charlie, like all autodidacts, had accumulated scholarly knowledge and had endless references. It was he who advised Keith Richards drummer Steve Jordan to pulsate within the X-Pensive Winos. And it's the same Jordan – drummer for Stevie Wonder, James Brown, the Blues Brothers and so many others – dubbed by Watts during his lifetime who takes up the stool left vacant.

Is it serious doctor? No. For years, the Stones have been putting on an impeccable mega-show. A giant jukebox where, alas, improvisation no longer has its place. Charlie Watts knew he was not irreplaceable, said so and placed his ego behind the music. The proof, on November 16, 1968, at the Olympic studios in London, during the sessions of "You Can't Always Get What You Want". Producer Jimmy Miller, a multi-instrumentalist, showed him a beat. But at the time of the sound recording, he did not give her the chopsticks. Witness of the scene, Al Kooper remembers it, dumbfounded, in the book “Rocks Off”: “Charlie supported that with an incredible class. I don't know if he was unhappy. Well, who wouldn't? But it couldn't be seen. He's a gentleman…” Charlie would say, “Jimmy made me rethink the way I play drums in the studio. I got better thanks to him. And we made, in his company, some of our best records.

Watts could also lose his temper. One evening in Amsterdam, Mick Jagger had the misfortune to call him on the phone, swinging at him: “Where is my drummer?” Charlie put on his best suit, shaved and combed his hair, he came downstairs and grabbed the singer, warning him, “Don't ever call me your drummer again. You are my d… singer!” The right went, Jagger crossed the room. Keith saw it all: “On the table was a large silver dish filled with smoked salmon. Mick started sliding on his back towards the open window. As he was wearing my wedding jacket, I caught up with him. Charlie, him, drew no kind of pride from it. The sixties were sex, drugs and rock'n'roll, but I was not like that, he said.

He met Shirley Ann Shepherd, his only wife, long before the success of the Stones and married her on October 14, 1965. Charlie is the father of Seraphina, 53, and the grandfather of Charlotte. And he was the only member of the group to refuse to go to the Playboy Mansion, at Hugh Hefner, the boss of Playboy, during the American tour of 1972.

In the middle of a midlife crisis, he succumbed to heroin in the mid-1980s. “I was getting high and drinking a lot. It was the hardest time for me. It took me two or three years to get over it, ”he said, almost destroying his household. The group, on the verge of sinking, then released the aptly named “Dirty Work. Everything” is a thing of the past today.

And, when it comes down to it, eight decades is a remarkable feat to die as a rock drummer. John Bonham of Led Zeppelin and Keith Moon of The Who left the track at 32. Less noisy and less predictable, Charlie Watts, the Stone philosopher, leaves a huge void. We leave him the last word, sprinkled with humor: “I'm afraid to stop and become old. But I'm sure we can always find a one-week engagement in Bognor Regis (tiny English seaside resort, editor's note) or elsewhere. From now on, it is in the poster, in star: in paradise.

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