Charlie Watts, whose strong but unremarkable drums drove the Rolling Stones for over 50 years, died in London on Tuesday. He was 80.
His death in a hospital was announced by his publicist Bernard Doherty. Further details were not immediately disclosed.
The Rolling Stones announced earlier this month that Mr. Watts would not be participating in the band’s upcoming “No Filter” tour of the United States after undergoing unspecified emergency medical treatment that the band officials said was successful .
Restrained, dignified and elegant, Mr. Watts was never as extravagant, either on stage or outside, as most of his rock star colleagues, let alone the singer of the Stones, Mick Jagger. Contented himself with being one of the best rock drummers of his generation, he played with a jazzy swing that made the band’s gigantic success possible. As the Stones guitarist Keith Richards said in his 2010 autobiography “Life”, “Charlie Watts was always the bed I lay on musically.”
While some rock drummers hunted for volume and bombast, Mr. Watts defined his game with subtlety, swing and solid groove.
“As much as Mick’s voice and Keith’s guitar, Charlie Watts’ snare sound is the Rolling Stones,” wrote Bruce Springsteen in an introduction to drummer Max Weinberg’s 1991 edition of The Big Beat. “When Mick sings, ‘It’s only rock’ n ‘roll but I like it’, Charlie is in the back and shows you why!”
Charles Robert Watts was born in London on June 2, 1941. His mother, the former Lillian Charlotte Eaves, was a housewife; his father, Charles Richard Watts, was with the Royal Air Force and became a truck driver for British Railways after World War II.
Charlie’s first instrument was a banjo, but puzzled by the fingering required to play it, he removed his neck and transformed his body into a snare drum. He discovered jazz at the age of 12 and soon became a fan of Miles Davis, Duke Ellington and Charles Mingus.
In 1960 Mr. Watts graduated from the Harrow School of Art and found employment as a graphic designer with a London advertising agency. He wrote and illustrated “Ode to a Highflying Bird,” a children’s book about jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker (although it wasn’t published until 1965). In the evenings he played drums with various groups.
Most of them were jazz combos, but he was also invited to join Alexis Korner’s raw rhythm-and-blues collective Blues Incorporated. Mr Watts declined the invitation because he was leaving England to work as a graphic designer in Scandinavia, but he joined the group when he returned a few months later.
The newly formed Rolling Stones (then Rollin ‘Stones) knew they needed a good drummer but couldn’t afford Mr. Watts, who was already getting a regular salary from his various gigs. “We starved ourselves to pay for him!” Mr. Richards wrote. “Literally. We went shoplifting to get Charlie Watts.”
In early 1963, when they could finally guarantee five pounds a week, Mr. Watts joined the band, completing the canonical line-up of Mr. Richards, Mr. Jagger, guitarist Brian Jones, bassist Bill Wyman and pianist Ian Stewart. He moved in with his bandmates and immersed himself in Chicago blues records.
After the success of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones quickly rose from being an electro blues special to one of the biggest bands of the British invasion of the 1960s. While Mr. Richards ‘guitar riff defined the band’s most famous single, the 1965 chart-topping “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” Mr. Watts’ drum pattern was just as important. He was tireless on “Paint It Black” (No. 1 in 1966), lithe on “Ruby Tuesday” (No. 1 in 1967) and the master of a funky groove on “Honky Tonk Women” (No. 1 in 1969).
Mr. Watts was ambivalent about the fame he gained as a member of the group often referred to as “the greatest rock ‘n’ roll in the world”. As he said in the 2003 book According to the Rolling Stones, “I loved playing with Keith and the band – I still do – but I wasn’t interested in being a pop idol, Sitting there with screaming girls It’s not the world I’m from. It’s not what I wanted to be and I still think it’s silly. “
As the Stones ran over the years, Mr. Watts drew on his graphic background to help design the band’s sets, merchandise and album covers – he even put a comic strip on the back of their 1967 album “Between” for the band Buttons. “While the Stones cultivated bad boy images and indulged a collective appetite for debauchery, Mr. Watts avoided mostly sex and drugs. In 1964, he secretly married Shirley Ann Shepherd, an art student and sculptor.
On tour he went back to his hotel room alone; every night he sketched his accommodation. “Since 1967 I’ve drawn every bed I’ve slept in on tour,” he told Rolling Stone magazine in 1996. “It’s a fantastic non-book.”
While other members of the Stones battled for control of the band, Mr. Watts stayed largely out of internal politics. As he told The Weekend Australian in 2014, “I usually mumble in the background.”
Considering himself a leader, Mr. Jones was fired from the Stones in 1969 (and found dead in his swimming pool shortly afterwards). Mr. Jagger and Mr. Richards spent decades arguing, sometimes making albums without being in the studio at the same time. Mr. Watts was happy to work with one or both of them.
However, there was a time when Mr. Watts is known to be annoyed at being treated like a wage worker rather than an equal member of the group. In 1984, Mr. Jagger and Mr. Richards went out drinking for one night in Amsterdam. When they got back to their hotel around 5am, Mr. Jagger called Mr. Watts, woke him up and asked, “Where’s my drummer?” Twenty minutes later, Mr. Watts appeared in Mr. Jagger’s room, coldly angry but shaved and smartly dressed in a Savile Row suit and tie.
“Never call me your drummer again,” he said to Mr. Jagger before grabbing his lapel and hooking it up properly. Mr. Richards said he just barely saved Mr. Jagger from falling out a window into an Amsterdam canal.
“It’s not something I’m proud of and if I hadn’t been drinking I never would have,” said Watts in 2003. “The bottom line is, don’t piss me off.”
At the time, Mr. Watts was in the early stages of a midlife crisis that manifested itself as a two year tamer. Just as the other Stones got into moderation in their 40s, he became addicted to amphetamines and heroin, which nearly destroyed his marriage. After passing out in a recording studio and breaking his ankle while falling down a flight of stairs, he quit, Cold Turkey.
Mr Watts and his wife had a daughter, Seraphina, in 1968 and, after spending some time as tax exiles in France, moved to a farm in south-west England. There they bred award-winning Arabian horses and gradually expanded their stud to over 250 horses on 700 hectares of land. Information about his survivors was not immediately available. Mr Doherty, the publicist, said Mr Watts “died peacefully” in the hospital “surrounded by his family”.
The Rolling Stones made 30 studio albums, nine of them at the top of the American charts and 10 at the top of the UK charts. The band was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1989 – a ceremony Mr. Watts skipped.
Eventually the Stones agreed to release an album every four years, followed by an extremely lucrative world tour. (They grossed over half a billion dollars on their Bigger Bang tour between 2005 and 2007.)
But Mr. Watts’ true love remained jazz, and he filled the time between those tours with jazz groups of various sizes – the Charlie Watts Quintet, the Charlie Watts Tentet, the Charlie Watts Orchestra. But soon he would be back on the road with the Stones, playing in sold-out arenas and sketching beds in empty hotel rooms.
He wasn’t slowed by age or throat cancer in 2004. In 2016, Metallica Billboard’s drummer Lars Ulrich said that since he wanted to play until his 70s, he saw Mr. Watts as his model. “The only roadmap is Charlie Watts,” he said.
Meanwhile, Mr. Watts kept the beat with a simple four-piece drum kit and anchored the Rolling Stones spectacle.
“I’ve always wanted to be a drummer,” he told Rolling Stone in 1996, adding that he envisioned a more intimate environment at arena rock shows. “I always had this illusion that I was in Blue Note or Birdland with Charlie Parker in front of me. It didn’t sound like it, but that was the illusion I had. “
