The Rolling Stones were from the start a song of fire and ice. The brimstone came courtesy of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards – each, in their way, an original of the badly behaving rock star species.
And the cool, calm presence holding it all together was Charlie Watts, the group's drummer, who has died at age 80.
Watts’ centrality to the Stones will have been obvious to the 80,000 or so who gathered at Croke Park in May 2018 to see Watts’s final Irish concert with the band. He was one of the first on stage yet cut such an unobtrusive figure that he was easy to miss. Seated calmly behind his modest drum kit, he looked more like an office worker clocking in for a day’s honest graft than one of the best sticksmen of all time.
The Stones roared to life that night, the show a thunderous ghost train ride through their greatest hits. And it was Watts, as much as Richards or Ron Wood, who drove it forward.
His importance flowed both from his music and his personality. With a background in jazz, his playing had a cool, clinical finish. This made him the perfect foil for the volcanic forces Richards unleashed with his guitar.
“If it hadn’t been for Charlie I would never have been able to expand and develop,” Richards wrote of Watts in his 2010 autobiography, Life. “Number one with Charlie is that he’s got great feel … There’s a tremendous personality and subtlety in his playing. If you look at the size of his kit, it’s ludicrous compared with what most drummers use these days … Charlie, with just that one classico set-up, can pull it all off. Nothing pretentious and then you hear him and it don’t half go bang.”
That bang reverberates through the Stones’ greatest moments. Watts’ locked-down groove on Gimme Shelter was key to its air of suffocating menace. And on (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction, it’s Watts who leads as the band plunge into the “hey, hey, hey – that’s what I say” line.
Yet while reserved, he had his demons. In the 1980s Watts became addicted to heroin. “I was warring with myself at that time,” he said, crediting his stable marriage to wife of nearly 60 years, Shirley Ann Shepherd, for helping him get clean.
And there were long-running tensions between the “excess all eras” philosophy espoused by Mick and Keith, and Watts’ more introverted perspective in music and on life.
This came to a head during the making of Exile On Main Street. Much of the LP was assembled at Richards’ revolving door party mansion at Villefranche-sur-Mer on the Côte d’Azur in 1971. But getting Watts to stay became an issue. He recoiled from the decadence.
“He has an artistic temperament,” Richards wrote in Life. “It’s just too uncool for him to live down in the Côte d’Azur in summer. Too much society going on and too much blah blah … Charlie’s the kind of guy that would go down in winter when it’s horrible and empty.”
Watts also avoided most of the internal feuding that raged within the Stones for years. That wasn’t to say that he couldn’t stand up for himself as required. One flashpoint occurred in 1984, when the band were in Amsterdam for business meetings. Mick and Keith went out on the town, then retired to their hotel to drink whiskey until 5am. Which was when Mick – over Keith’s protests – phoned Watts’ room and asked “where’s my drummer?”.
Twenty minutes later there was a knock on the door. “He walked straight past me, got hold of Mick and said ‘never call me your drummer again’,” Richards would recall. “Then he hauled him up by the lapels … and gave him a right hook.”
That incident was remarkable because it was so out of character. In his decades in the Stones, Watts was typically a picture of self effacement. A quiet man at the heart of the raging storm.
“I never play our records, but I love hearing them, you know, go on the car radio or something,” he once told NPR. “I don’t know – it does wonders for the ego, doesn’t it?”
