Charlie Watts

Conflicted is the only way to feel about the Rolling Stones. They’ve now spent forty years as a satire of their first fifteen. It would be easy to write them off. But those first fifteen years produced so many moments in which their workaday methods produced little fission miracles. It’s no more and no less than honest to scratch one’s head and ask “why?” about everything from Tattoo You onwards. The tours especially are exercises in embarrassment. Not just Mick’s tights or Keef’s pirate cosplay, but the spectacle, the rehashing, the nostalgia trip(-up). The real crime is that all they had to produce was fumes and that they obliged. They became a multi-national corporation whose product was a knock-off of the product they used to make. They plagiarized themselves on a conveyor belt of plug n’ play records and misdirection theatrics.

Charlie Watts sat behind it all, gazing down like the chief executive whose fashion he adopted. He avoided the rough and tumble of the factory floor, choosing to frame the fray within the boundaries of his modest kit. On some level, Charlie was the only thing that allowed the Stones to retain some small room legitimacy. You could still imagine him on the bandstand at the Checkerboard Lounge or even perched on a corner stool at the bar. The same imagining could never apply to Keith or Mick.

But, truth is, Charlie was a jobber. He just wanted to play. When he joined the Stones he was also a member of numerous other bands. As Ben Sisario reported yesterday in the New York Times,

“I used to play with loads of bands, and the Stones were just another one,” he told The Observer, a British newspaper, in 2000. “I thought they’d last three months, then a year, then three years, then I stopped counting.”

Charlie could have been just as happy (but a lot less wealthy) playing in a jazz trio at Ronnie Scott’s. He bred prizewinning Arabian horses. This fact says a lot about who Charlie was: He collected vintage cars even though he never learned to drive. Even though Mick and Keith courted him like starstruck suitors, he was lucky to catch on with two such manic, motivated drivers. He wasn’t so much their motor as their mechanic, keeping the machine musically and emotionally humming.

So I feel honest acknowledging that I’m conflicted too about Charlie. I admire the commitment to the cause, even if his commitment always seemed easier than Mick’s or Keith’s who each could have managed without the others. I appreciate the simple core that Charlie insisted on maintaining at the eye of the musical and theatrical storm, while also feeling that he was rather dull as a drummer. Sure, there’s that slightly behind the beat thing that everybody mentions. But he certainly didn’t invent that and one feels that a whole bunch of other drummers could have done what he did and most of us would never have noticed. He has, in fact, missed out on a healthy handful of sessions over the years and most are unaware or unsure if what they’re hearing is Charlie. (E.g. Is it Charlie on “Gimme Shelter?”)

Still, he rolled with the Stones and that is no small feat. Putting up not only with two boundless egos, but also shifting with his bandmates’ whims from blues to riffs to psychedelia and eventually a stilted, percolating disco. My favorite Stones’ stuff is the bootleg compilation known as Sympathy for the Disco, outtakes from the late-70s. Only one track is harvested from the 80s, 1981s “Come On Sugar.” It’s the last thing the Stones did that still suggests searching and yearning for something new – or more precisely, some new configuration of the parts they pilfered from Black music. What makes Sympathy for the Disco so good is how wrong they get it. If it’s the disco they’re aiming at, they land curled up in a shopping cart outside in the parking lot, having been thrown out by the bouncer after six too many Wild Rose shots. These tracks are disco-adjacent and skewed by the Stones’ obscenely rich, British, princes-of-perversity sensibilities. The misfire makes this music utterly unique, unlike any funky White weirdness being produced by post punk kids in New York’s No Wave at the same time.

Charlie’s playing is great throughout but never more so then on “Come On Sugar” where his contribution is primarily a heavy kick drum shadowed ever-so-slightly-later by an enveloping hi-hat closing around the beat like an oyster shell around a pearl. The snare drum intervenes like a curse, damning the unreachable trapped within. It’s inspired even if it’s just the work of a guy who’d play whatever you put in front of him.

In the 1989 film 25x5, Charlie is asked about the previous 25 years touring with the Rolling Stones. “Work five years, and twenty years hanging around.” It was the work that mattered to him. But he was willing to hang around waiting for someone else to count off. It’s telling that the Stones will now tour without him. They’re still counting off, even if Charlie’s done working.