The notion of a biography of the late Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts is an unlikely one. The beloved musician was always a steady presence in the band, a performer who never enjoyed the limelight and thought rock and roll was, on the whole, a bunch of foolishness. He once said, “I don’t really love rock and roll. I love jazz. But I love playing rock and roll with the Stones.”
No one has ever written a book about Watts’ life, though Mike Edison’s Sympathy for the Drummer, published a couple of years ago, provides a thorough analysis of Watts’ drumming style and his influence on other players, making a case for Watts’ place in the ranks of the greatest drummers, alongside Gene Krupa, Buddy Rich, and Hal Blaine.
How many books have been published about Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, and even Ronnie Wood, not to mention the Stones as a whole? Dozens, maybe close to 100. No one has written a book about Stones bassist Bill Wyman, but 1997 saw the release of his autobiography Stone Alone, a volume chock full of parsimony, animus and acerbity.
So classic rock fans will no doubt welcome Charlie’s Good Tonight: The Life, the Times and the Rolling Stones: The Authorized Biography of Charlie Watts by Paul Sexton (Harper, 368 pp. $27.99). The title refers to an aside made by Jagger on the live Stones album Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out, recorded (primarily) at Madison Square Garden in 1969. Many consider that the year the Stones reached their apex as a live act.
Watts was as vital a presence in the Stones as any member, past or present. His replacement for the 2021 tour, Steve Jordan, is a talented musician, with many significant credits (the original Blues Brothers, Late Night with David Letterman, Eric Clapton, Bob Dylan, etc.) on his resume, but he’s no Charlie Watts. And, for that matter, Charlie Watts was no Steve Jordan. Each musician’s approach to the drums is too unique to be fully imitated. Certainly, Jordan has studied Watts’ distinctive style (e.g. never hitting the snare and the hi-hat simultaneously), but you can only come so close to the real, unique thing.
Watts led an extraordinary life in the most ordinary way possible. Despite the fact that he occupied the drum throne in what has been described as The Greatest Rock and Roll Band in the World for almost 60 years, Watts never cared for the rock star lifestyle, content to spend time at home with his wife Shirley (Watts was married to the same woman from 1964 until his death in 2021) on their various estates, where they bred Arabian horses. You never saw Charlie hanging out with Andy Warhol or Princess Margaret or Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, unlike some people in the Stones.
The history of the Stones has been chronicled many times, most recently in The Stone Age by Lesley-Ann Jones. So what do we learn about Watts in Charlie’s Good Tonight? Sexton tells the reader that Watts was, from a young age, drawn to the finer things in life. He was a serious clothes horse, wearing bespoke garments almost exclusively, thanks to the inspiration of Miles Davis and other well-dressed jazz artists. He was also fond of custom-made shoes, even though it required quite some time to get them properly broken in. And he loved to collect cars, even though he never learned to drive.
Trained as a graphic artist, Watts worked as a commercial illustrator prior to the Stones’ initial rush of fame. In 1960, he wrote and illustrated a whimsical children’s book, Ode to a Highflying Bird, in honor of saxophonist Charlie Parker, of whom he said, “I was 13 or 14 when I first heard Charlie Parker. I am what I am, thanks to this man.” The book depicts Parker as a bird with a beak, a hat, and sunglasses. One caption reads, “He blew from his heart.”
Sexton periodically interrupts the chronology of Watts’ life with chapters (called “Backbeats”) centered around different themes which illuminate the drummer’s personality. This approach may be confusing to some readers who are not steeped in Stones lore, but the strategy makes sense in that there was no dramatic arc to Watts’ time on this mortal coil. After joining the Stones, it was a rather steady pattern of record, tour, and recuperate for the remainder of his life.
The only scandalous thing Watts ever did was to dive headfirst into heroin in the mid ‘80s, having missed out on the experience when other members of the band were shooting up a decade before. It was a fallow period for the Stones, with Jagger and Richards refusing to work together and firing bitchy shots at each other in the press.
This relatively brief spell of drugging (and drinking), chalked up by Watts to “male menopause,” ended when Watts sustained a broken ankle after stumbling on a trip to fetch another bottle of wine from his cellar. His injury almost prevented him from playing an upcoming gig with his jazz group, and Watts realized that he could not allow anything to separate him from his music.
While Charlie’s Good Tonight could be accused of being a potboiler, published to capitalize on Watts’ death last year, it is, instead, a testament to the character and humility of one of the best drummers ever to grace a stage. As Richards says in the book’s forward, “He was a very private man. There was no side on him, there was no act to follow. Charlie was just what you got, which was Charlie. He was the realest guy I ever met.”
In any case, the book couldn’t have been written before now anyway. Watts, the most modest of modest men, a drummer who refused to play drum solos, would never have allowed it in his lifetime.
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2022.
