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Charlie Watts is dead - obituary for Rolling Stones drummer: The drummer of the century

2021-08-25T00:54:04.738Z


He was the backbone of the Rolling Stones: For almost 60 years Charlie Watts managed to drive a herd of alpha animals in front of him. Now the world has lost a gentleman among the drummers.


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Charlie Watts at a Stones concert in Berlin in 2018

Photo:

HAYOUNG JEON / EPA

These Saville Row suits, this sense of style, this haircut, this grace, this coolness.

Charlie Watts, the Rolling Stones drummer, a style icon throughout his life, died on August 24th, 2021.

For almost 60 years, the slim man with the expressive face has been sitting behind what is probably the most minimal drum set-up that a band of this size has allowed itself over the decades.

As a native Brit, Charlie Watts thus corresponded to the ideal of the classic American jazz drummer who can bring a shop in Harlem to a boil with a bass drum, snare, three toms and two cymbals.

In fact, Charlie Watts came from jazz and played in small jazz bands until the end when the Rolling Stones weren't on a world tour.

With his supple demeanor that went far beyond his body language, his deep knowledge of the varieties of jazz and his infallible ability to make songs swing even when he submitted to the strict, straight corset of rhythm'n'blues, applies Watts as one of the greatest rock drummers in music history.

The foundation for Woods, Richards and Jagger

While other rock bands - from The Grateful Dead to Guns'n'Roses to Metallica - expected their drummers to add virtuoso, sometimes minute-long drum solos to their playing behind their drum castles, Charlie Watts shaped a brittle one Style that seemed to subordinate itself to the concept of the Rolling Stones with their hyperactive singer Mick Jagger and the two guitarists Ron Woods and Keith Richards at a superficial glance.

In fact, the supposed simplicity in Charlie Watt's understanding of rhythm was based on an attitude that was able to lend a highly complex syncopated density to the always similar and - in comparison to free jazz - limited rock patterns.

Charlie Watts, together with bassist Bill Wyman (until his departure in 1993) and since then Daryll Jones, provided a profound and reliable foundation that gave Woods, Richards and Jagger the freedom in their staging.

Behind this humble, at the same time extremely proud attitude of Watts was a work ethic that had outgrown the tradition of rhythm'n'blues and that had to keep the foundation of a groove steady over the duration of a concert. A deep love for the blues, reggae and bebop music of bygone times was also always noticeable. As a drummer, Charlie Watts usually only needed fakes and hints of rhythmic accentuations, the closest references to the game of the ancestors that his playing always remained unpredictable in the always predictable even in the context of meticulously choreographed stadium concerts of the Rolling Stones.

This drummer of the century also showed his skills on all of the band's studio recordings over the past six decades. The Rolling Stones' 1986 album "Dirty Work" may be considered the ugly duckling among studio releases by fans of the band. But on hardly any other Rolling Stones record does Watts' play, which appears to consist of an endless string of omissions, play such an important role as on »Dirty Work«. On this album you will find gruff rhythm'n'blues numbers ("One Hit (To the Body)" next to deep reggae cuts ("Too Rude"), delayed ballads ("Sleep Tonight") and with "Back to Zero" , "Harlem Shuffle" and "Winning Ugly" are even three pieces that approached the cool disco rock dance floor of the eighties with ease.What the cross-genre pieces have in common is that they were advanced, condensed and deconstructed against all regularities by Charlie Watts in a virtuoso manner.

Exactly three decades later, Charlie Watts played drums on the Rolling Stones' last studio album to date, "Blue & Lonesome" in 2016, at the age of 76, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. It's a game of conscious rhythmic understatement, which admittedly makes the blues numbers on the album swing in the first place. The same drummer plays, aged by decades, but with the same grace, again powerful, driving, condensed and deconstructing the beat against all regularities, always serving the band.

If you didn't know better, you could swear that another drummer is playing, Charlie Watts' game is so grounded in the stoic-repetitive blues. No comparison to the cold, funky, lively heroin serenity of "Dirty Work". The drummer would also have made a Bella Figura in the bands of Muddy Waters or Lightnin 'Hopkins and provided the foundation of the music and provided it with his trademark minimalism. Lived musical knowledge that has become a style.

Over the decades, Charlie Watts was able to contribute a resilient backbone to the millionaire company Rolling Stones with the reliability of a clockwork, which allowed the band to survive even those phases in which they seemed burned out and predictable greatest hits shows in Delivered football stadiums.

In fact, the Rolling Stones have been one of those bands that can be counted on one hand since the 1970s and have effortlessly attracted hundreds of thousands of viewers to their concerts at any point in their career.

"For once, my timing was not right this time."

So basically it could have gone on forever. As early as the early 1990s, the Rolling Stones ignored the charge that rock should be an expression of youth culture. The musicians just got older. Just a few weeks ago, the Rolling Stones announced that they would put their "No Filter" tour through the USA, which was interrupted by the corona pandemic, back on the streets on September 26th in St. Louis.

Due to an operation that could not be postponed but went without further complications, Charlie Watts was forced to take a break on the advice of his doctors, which is why he canceled his participation in the tour - and spiced it up with the self-deprecating statement: “For once, my timing is not this time But after a full recovery he intends to take over from interim drummer Steve Jordan.

It won't come to that now.

Presumably the Rolling Stones will give a series of very emotional concerts in September and October, the center of which will shine with the presence of an absence.

The world has lost a gentleman among the drummers, a giant who is only quiet in private, who has managed to drive a herd of alpha animals along for half a century.

His death leaves a deep, perhaps irreconcilable rift in a continuity that legions of fans have long seemed to have taken for granted.

The gap is so large that - with all of Steve Jordan's qualities, which he shows not least as the drummer in Keith Richard's side project The X-Pensive Winos - it would not be surprising if the departure of Charlie Watts would also bring the greatest rock bands to dawn rang in all the time.

Did we really think, did we really believe Charlie Watts would live forever?

Source: spiegel

All life articles on 2021-08-25

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