RIP Charlie Watts
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EatLeadCommie
Tommy Elrod
Doesn't get his proper due, IMO. So solid back there, like Ringo.
WakeandBake
Well-known member
That snare feel is unmatched anywhere in rock. Just a hair behind, a small fraction of a second, giving the Stones that piece of air in the rhythm section that made them greasy. Impossible to recreate or teach. drumming legend and helluva cool cat from what I have read. RIP
IAppreciateIt
no bunting allowed
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rip. i guess it's the legacy of the stones but this didnt even cross my mind as a possibility when i read he wasnt gonna be going on tour.
have tickets to the nashville show but tryna sell em and do charlotte instead, will be sad.
have tickets to the nashville show but tryna sell em and do charlotte instead, will be sad.
IAppreciateIt
no bunting allowed
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yep the keef and watts interplay was so unique. also not hitting the hi-hat w/ the snare is surprisingly difficult and sounds cool.
rkarl
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Damn, he really was one of the greats. During their 1978 US tour, they played the Spectrum and I had gotten backstage passes from one of my buddies.
Keith was incoherent before and after the show, but he was unbelieveable during. He could play almost anything no matter how wasted he was. He must have drunk a fifth of whiksey before the show and you'd never have known it. Mick was being Mick.
But Charlie was laid back. He knew what he had going was great and that he was the "normal" guy in the band. So when he asked us if we had seen the butthole strippers, I assumed this was some kind fo slang term for spicy food. But he was serious - he wanted to know where teh butthols strippers where, and he wasn't backing down. He was pretty stoned that night, so I tried to get him to lie down for a few but he wasnt having any of it.
He stared wandering aroudn backstage screaming about the butthole strippers who stood him up, to the point that mick asked him what the fuck he was yelling about. He explained that he had heard about these girls in philly who stripped and would then rub
their buttholes in your face, and he had ordered tow of them to come up preshow.
As it turned out, i figured out who he was talking about. There was a pair of strippers that would wander around independence square, offering to "give you liberty" from your money, and this was something they had invented. I called Tommy Finschwable up and told him that he needed to get them to the spectrum asap.
They showed up about 20 min bfeore the show started. Gave Charlie a lap dance and then a face dance, and he spent the whole show drumming with a big smile on his face. I looked at Mick and said, "now there's a real shit eating grin."
Keith was incoherent before and after the show, but he was unbelieveable during. He could play almost anything no matter how wasted he was. He must have drunk a fifth of whiksey before the show and you'd never have known it. Mick was being Mick.
But Charlie was laid back. He knew what he had going was great and that he was the "normal" guy in the band. So when he asked us if we had seen the butthole strippers, I assumed this was some kind fo slang term for spicy food. But he was serious - he wanted to know where teh butthols strippers where, and he wasn't backing down. He was pretty stoned that night, so I tried to get him to lie down for a few but he wasnt having any of it.
He stared wandering aroudn backstage screaming about the butthole strippers who stood him up, to the point that mick asked him what the fuck he was yelling about. He explained that he had heard about these girls in philly who stripped and would then rub
their buttholes in your face, and he had ordered tow of them to come up preshow.
As it turned out, i figured out who he was talking about. There was a pair of strippers that would wander around independence square, offering to "give you liberty" from your money, and this was something they had invented. I called Tommy Finschwable up and told him that he needed to get them to the spectrum asap.
They showed up about 20 min bfeore the show started. Gave Charlie a lap dance and then a face dance, and he spent the whole show drumming with a big smile on his face. I looked at Mick and said, "now there's a real shit eating grin."
cooleybird
Member
For the first time in ~70 years... the beat is a little off.
RIP Charlie.
RIP Charlie.
deacdiggler
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i can't be the only one amused that when you hover on rkarl's rep, you get "rkarl" instead of "will become famous" or something
freakadeac
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there are so many rock legends
when I’m old it’ll be like ‘RIP Avril Lavigne’ and nobody will care
when I’m old it’ll be like ‘RIP Avril Lavigne’ and nobody will care
EatLeadCommie
Tommy Elrod
I remember when Tattoo You came out and it was a big deal, got lots of hype on the radio stations back when people listened to those. And I was thinking, "The Rolling Stones are still around? They're so old."
That was in 1981-82 when the Stones were around 40.
That's not an RJ story or anything, but it makes me laugh when I think about it now that I'm older. I thought the Stones would miraculously be playing forever. They'll still play, but it won't be the same.
That was in 1981-82 when the Stones were around 40.
That's not an RJ story or anything, but it makes me laugh when I think about it now that I'm older. I thought the Stones would miraculously be playing forever. They'll still play, but it won't be the same.
WakeandBake
Well-known member
Sonny Rollins on sax had to make Charlie happy
Please; If you accept that 90% of the music post 1990 is garbage, you’ll be half way there.
Charlie Watts >>>>> Avril Lavigne. No contest.
Resilient Deac
Just wait until next year
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:heart:
EatLeadCommie
Tommy Elrod
Isbell killer as usual.
DeacWatcher
Ricky Peral
The Uniform Cool of Charlie Watts
Mr. Watts in 1989.Credit...John Stoddart/Popperfoto, via Getty Images
By Guy Trebay
“Style is the answer to everything,” Charles Bukowski, of all people, once said in a lecture that’s still afloat in the ether of YouTube. Swigging Schlitz from a bottle, the pockmarked laureate of the underground discoursed on one of the few traits that, as is well known, one may possess though never acquire.
Bullfighters have style and so do boxers, Bukowski said. He had seen more men with style inside of prison than outside its walls, he also somewhat questionably asserted. “To do a dull thing with style is preferable to doing a dangerous thing without it,” he then added — and that much, at least, seems indisputable.
Nobody ever accused the Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts, who died Aug. 24 at 80, of dullness. Yet so granitic and unshowy was he relative to his preening bandmates — in their face paint, frippery and feathers — that it was easy to be distracted from the ineffable Watts cool that anchored the Stones sound and that drew on a lineage far older than rock.
Well before joining what is generally called the world’s greatest rock ’n’ roll group, Mr. Watts, a trained graphic artist who learned to play after giving up banjo and turning the body of one into a drum, was a seasoned sessions player. He considered himself at heart a jazzman; his heroes were musicians like Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Lester Young and phenomenal pop crooners like the unfairly forgotten Billy Eckstine.
Image
While the rest of the Rolling Stones dressed the part of rock stars, Mr. Watts found his style groove on Savile Row. Here, with Ron Wood, Keith Richards and Mick Jagger, he celebrates the opening of “Let’s Spend the Night Together” in 1983.Credit...Carlos Rene Perez/Associated Press
Image
Mr. Watts in London, 1989.Credit...John Stoddart/Popperfoto, via Getty Images
Image
In a double-breasted suit, in 1992.Credit...Eamonn McCabe/Popperfoto, via Getty Images
He studied famously natty dressers like Fred Astaire, men who found a style and seldom deviated from it throughout their lives. A famous story about the Stones describes them starving in order to make enough money to recruit a drummer then in no great rush to join the band. “Literally!” Keith Richards wrote in “Life,” his excellent 2010 memoir. “We went shoplifting to get Charlie Watts.”
Mr. Watts was expensive then and, as it happened, chose for himself an image that seldom looked otherwise. “To be honest,” he once told GQ. “I have a very old-fashioned and traditional mode of dress.”
When his bandmates Mick Jagger and Mr. Richards began peacocking in Carnaby Road velvets, secondhand glad rags from Portobello Road, Moroccan djellabas, boas, sequined jumpsuits and dresses plucked from the wardrobes of their wives or girlfriends, Mr. Watts continued to dress as soberly as an attorney. And when, in the late 1970s, Mr. Jagger and Mr. Richards began adding suiting to their wardrobe, their selections tended to feature nipped waists, four-lane lapels, checkerboard patterns or Oxford bag trousers from the brilliant and flamboyant upstart Tommy Nutter.
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“I always felt totally out of place with the Rolling Stones,” Mr. Watts told GQ, at least in style terms. Photographs appeared of the band with everyone else wearing sneakers and Mr. Watts in a pair of lace-ups from the 19th-century Mayfair shoemaker George Cleverley. “I hate trainers,” he said, meaning athletic shoes. “Even if they’re fashionable.”
Perhaps in some ways Mr. Watts was just ahead of the other Stones and the rest of us in purely style terms — more evolved in his understanding of convention and how stealthily to subvert it, a bit like a jazz musician improvising on core melodies. There may even have been something punk in his determination early on to forgo the likes of Mr. Nutter and instead patronize some of the more venerable Savile Row tailors, places still so discreet in the 1970s that they often had no signs on their doors. It was his brilliance to mold what those tailors did to his own assured tastes.
Take, for instance, the 1971 Peter Webb images — lost for 40 years before rediscovery in the past decade — depicting the young Mr. Watts and Mr. Richards from “Sticky Fingers” at the very height of their fame. Mr. Richards is fabulously attired in zippered black leather, graphically patterned velvet trousers in black-and-white, a contrast-patterned shirt, a custom leather bandoleer belt and buccaneer shag. Mr. Watts, by contrast, is wearing a three-piece suit with a six-button vest in what appears to be stolid burgomaster’s loden.
Or take the double-breasted dove gray morning coat the mature Mr. Watts is seen wearing in another shot of himself and his wife, Shirley, at Ascot. (The couple bred Arabian horses.) Beautifully cut for his compact frame (he was 5-foot-8), it is worn with a pale pink waistcoat and tie, a shirt whose rounded collars are pinned beneath the knot, a style he first glimpsed and copied from the cover of Dexter Gordon’s imperious jazz classic “Our Man in Paris.”
Image
Already by 1967, the Stones (with Brian Jones in rear) were venturing into Portobello Road glad rags, vintage scarves and their girlfriends’ dresses. A lilac tie with a velvet jacket was about as Mod as Mr. Watts would ever get.Credit...Tony Gale/Alamy
Image
It takes gumption, and a good relationship with one’s tailor, to pair a morning suit with a waistcoat in powder pink, as Mr. Watts, seen here with his wife, Shirley Watts, did at Ascot Racecourse in 2010.Credit...Indigo/Getty Images
Each of those suits was bespoke, the latter stitched by H. Huntsman & Sons, a Savile Row institution that has been dressing British swells since 1849. Theirs was one of just two tailoring companies Mr. Watts worked with throughout his life.
“Mr. Watts was one of the most stylish gentlemen I’ve had the pleasure of working with,” said Dario Carnera, the head cutter at Huntsman, in an email. “He imbued his own sartorial flair in every commission.” He ordered from the establishment for more than 50 years, the craftsman added. (In the Huntsman catalog there still exists a fabric — the Springfield stripe — of Mr. Watts's design.)
By his own rough estimate, Mr. Watts owned several hundred suits, at least as many pairs of shoes, an all-but-uncountable quantity of custom shirts and ties — so many clothes, in fact, that, inverting a hoary sexist cliché about fashion, it was his wife who complained that her husband spent too much time in front of the mirror.
Mr. Watts seldom wore any of his sartorial finery onstage, however, preferring the practicality and anonymity of short-sleeved dress shirts or T-shirts for concerts or tours. It was in civilian life that he cultivated, and eventually perfected, a sartorial image as elegant, serene and impeccable as his drumming.
With his Savile Row suits, custom shirts and jazzman’s assurance, the Rolling Stones drummer staged his own quiet rebellion.
Mr. Watts in 1989.Credit...John Stoddart/Popperfoto, via Getty Images
By Guy Trebay
- Published Aug. 25, 2021Updated Aug. 27, 2021
“Style is the answer to everything,” Charles Bukowski, of all people, once said in a lecture that’s still afloat in the ether of YouTube. Swigging Schlitz from a bottle, the pockmarked laureate of the underground discoursed on one of the few traits that, as is well known, one may possess though never acquire.
Bullfighters have style and so do boxers, Bukowski said. He had seen more men with style inside of prison than outside its walls, he also somewhat questionably asserted. “To do a dull thing with style is preferable to doing a dangerous thing without it,” he then added — and that much, at least, seems indisputable.
Nobody ever accused the Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts, who died Aug. 24 at 80, of dullness. Yet so granitic and unshowy was he relative to his preening bandmates — in their face paint, frippery and feathers — that it was easy to be distracted from the ineffable Watts cool that anchored the Stones sound and that drew on a lineage far older than rock.
Well before joining what is generally called the world’s greatest rock ’n’ roll group, Mr. Watts, a trained graphic artist who learned to play after giving up banjo and turning the body of one into a drum, was a seasoned sessions player. He considered himself at heart a jazzman; his heroes were musicians like Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Lester Young and phenomenal pop crooners like the unfairly forgotten Billy Eckstine.
Image
While the rest of the Rolling Stones dressed the part of rock stars, Mr. Watts found his style groove on Savile Row. Here, with Ron Wood, Keith Richards and Mick Jagger, he celebrates the opening of “Let’s Spend the Night Together” in 1983.Credit...Carlos Rene Perez/Associated Press
Image
Mr. Watts in London, 1989.Credit...John Stoddart/Popperfoto, via Getty Images
Image
In a double-breasted suit, in 1992.Credit...Eamonn McCabe/Popperfoto, via Getty Images
He studied famously natty dressers like Fred Astaire, men who found a style and seldom deviated from it throughout their lives. A famous story about the Stones describes them starving in order to make enough money to recruit a drummer then in no great rush to join the band. “Literally!” Keith Richards wrote in “Life,” his excellent 2010 memoir. “We went shoplifting to get Charlie Watts.”
Mr. Watts was expensive then and, as it happened, chose for himself an image that seldom looked otherwise. “To be honest,” he once told GQ. “I have a very old-fashioned and traditional mode of dress.”
When his bandmates Mick Jagger and Mr. Richards began peacocking in Carnaby Road velvets, secondhand glad rags from Portobello Road, Moroccan djellabas, boas, sequined jumpsuits and dresses plucked from the wardrobes of their wives or girlfriends, Mr. Watts continued to dress as soberly as an attorney. And when, in the late 1970s, Mr. Jagger and Mr. Richards began adding suiting to their wardrobe, their selections tended to feature nipped waists, four-lane lapels, checkerboard patterns or Oxford bag trousers from the brilliant and flamboyant upstart Tommy Nutter.
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Continue reading the main story
“I always felt totally out of place with the Rolling Stones,” Mr. Watts told GQ, at least in style terms. Photographs appeared of the band with everyone else wearing sneakers and Mr. Watts in a pair of lace-ups from the 19th-century Mayfair shoemaker George Cleverley. “I hate trainers,” he said, meaning athletic shoes. “Even if they’re fashionable.”
Perhaps in some ways Mr. Watts was just ahead of the other Stones and the rest of us in purely style terms — more evolved in his understanding of convention and how stealthily to subvert it, a bit like a jazz musician improvising on core melodies. There may even have been something punk in his determination early on to forgo the likes of Mr. Nutter and instead patronize some of the more venerable Savile Row tailors, places still so discreet in the 1970s that they often had no signs on their doors. It was his brilliance to mold what those tailors did to his own assured tastes.
Take, for instance, the 1971 Peter Webb images — lost for 40 years before rediscovery in the past decade — depicting the young Mr. Watts and Mr. Richards from “Sticky Fingers” at the very height of their fame. Mr. Richards is fabulously attired in zippered black leather, graphically patterned velvet trousers in black-and-white, a contrast-patterned shirt, a custom leather bandoleer belt and buccaneer shag. Mr. Watts, by contrast, is wearing a three-piece suit with a six-button vest in what appears to be stolid burgomaster’s loden.
Or take the double-breasted dove gray morning coat the mature Mr. Watts is seen wearing in another shot of himself and his wife, Shirley, at Ascot. (The couple bred Arabian horses.) Beautifully cut for his compact frame (he was 5-foot-8), it is worn with a pale pink waistcoat and tie, a shirt whose rounded collars are pinned beneath the knot, a style he first glimpsed and copied from the cover of Dexter Gordon’s imperious jazz classic “Our Man in Paris.”
Image
Already by 1967, the Stones (with Brian Jones in rear) were venturing into Portobello Road glad rags, vintage scarves and their girlfriends’ dresses. A lilac tie with a velvet jacket was about as Mod as Mr. Watts would ever get.Credit...Tony Gale/Alamy
Image
It takes gumption, and a good relationship with one’s tailor, to pair a morning suit with a waistcoat in powder pink, as Mr. Watts, seen here with his wife, Shirley Watts, did at Ascot Racecourse in 2010.Credit...Indigo/Getty Images
Each of those suits was bespoke, the latter stitched by H. Huntsman & Sons, a Savile Row institution that has been dressing British swells since 1849. Theirs was one of just two tailoring companies Mr. Watts worked with throughout his life.
“Mr. Watts was one of the most stylish gentlemen I’ve had the pleasure of working with,” said Dario Carnera, the head cutter at Huntsman, in an email. “He imbued his own sartorial flair in every commission.” He ordered from the establishment for more than 50 years, the craftsman added. (In the Huntsman catalog there still exists a fabric — the Springfield stripe — of Mr. Watts's design.)
By his own rough estimate, Mr. Watts owned several hundred suits, at least as many pairs of shoes, an all-but-uncountable quantity of custom shirts and ties — so many clothes, in fact, that, inverting a hoary sexist cliché about fashion, it was his wife who complained that her husband spent too much time in front of the mirror.
Mr. Watts seldom wore any of his sartorial finery onstage, however, preferring the practicality and anonymity of short-sleeved dress shirts or T-shirts for concerts or tours. It was in civilian life that he cultivated, and eventually perfected, a sartorial image as elegant, serene and impeccable as his drumming.