Charlie Watts: I've recorded drums in the lavatory
Given half a chance, legendary Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts would talk all day to Adam Sweeting about his true love, jazz, and in particular his new boogie-woogie band .
Veteran drummer Charlie Watts is wearing a dark blue suit and an open-necked pale blue shirt, fitting attire for the man who came 22nd in GQ’s 50 Best-Dressed Men in Britain 2012, and is floating through a day of press interviews with an air of cheerful bemusement. Now 70, he retains the slight physique that seems to have been a prerequisite for becoming a Rolling Stone. His silver hair and lined face suggest words like “wisdom” or “maturity” rather than merely “old”.
He’s here to talk about his boogie-woogie band, The A, B, C & D of Boogie Woogie, but it’s impossible to avoid a bit of Stones talk. July 12 will mark the 50th anniversary of the Stones’ first gig, which was at London’s Marquee Club. A lavishly illustrated book, The Rolling Stones: 50, will be published on the day. Charlie didn’t officially join the band until January 1963, but their Golden Jubilee has sparked all kinds of rumours about live shows and special events, such as an appearance at the opening ceremony of the Olympics.
“I don’t think we’ll do that,” says Charlie. “I didn’t want to do it for a start. I’d love to have done the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, because that’s a great thing, I think, but I don’t think we’d have the time to do it. It’ll be a night of the Sirs won’t it, with Paul McCartney and Elton. Lovely guy, Elton. Do you know him?”
The jazz-loving Watts has managed to maintain a discreet distance between himself and the notoriety that has always surrounded the Stones. He never got himself carted off by the Canadian Mounties for heroin possession, for instance, and when the Stones were invited to Hugh Hefner’s Playboy mansion, Charlie, ever-faithful to his wife, Shirley, played pool while the others cavorted with Hef’s Bunnies. These days, Shirley and Charlie breed Arabian horses in Devon.
Watts’s true love has always been jazz, rather than the hysterical pandemonium of rock’n’roll. He has led his own big band and jazz quintet, and now he’s the C in The A, B, C & D of Boogie Woogie. He’s joined by pianists Axel Zwingenberger and Ben Waters plus bass player Dave Green, who has known Watts since their respective childhoods.
“Boogie woogie comes from a jazz-swing background, and playing it is very much like jazz drumming or blues drumming,” Watts explains. “It’s an old-fashioned way of playing and nobody does it now. There isn’t another band with two piano players like ours. Boogie woogie is a tiny little window in the world of jazz – it went bang, it flowered and then died out.
“Boogie-woogie piano is the basis of swing piano-playing and rock’n’roll, actually. They used to call it 'beat-your-daddy-8-to-the-bar’. It’s very physical and it’s bloody hard to play, but it’s wonderful.”
Anyone wanting to hear exactly how wonderful should visit Soho’s Pizza Express jazz club on Saturday, as the band has a gig there. Watts reckons the club, in Dean Street, is “a really nice room, it’s a great sound in there and you can hear everything. It’s like Ronnie Scott’s, that’s another nice room to play, although it used to be a musicians’ hang out and it isn’t that any more.” If his minders weren’t loitering to shunt him between appointments – we’re sitting in the Langham hotel so Charlie can nip across the road to the BBC to do radio interviews – he’d probably stay and chat about music all day. Jazz music, preferably. In 1964, Watts, who worked as a graphic designer before his musical career took off, drew a cartoon tribute to saxophonist Charlie Parker, which he called Ode To A High Flying Bird.
“I always had a great thing about Charlie Parker, and I still do. But the first person whose playing I was aware of was [baritone saxophonist] Gerry Mulligan, and the track was Walking Shoes, with Chico Hamilton playing drums. That’s what made me want to play the drums. Before that I wanted to play alto sax because I loved Earl Bostic.”
Watts tends to free-associate, and he’s soon off on a digression about drummers, including former Miles Davis associate Philly Joe Jones (who also played on R&B records for Atlantic, which used to be the Stones’ label in the US) and big band sticksmen Buddy Rich and Gene Krupa.
“Keith Moon from The Who used to play very much like Krupa,” he reminisces.
“He looked like him as well, the way he played with his head down. It was very difficult for Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey to carry on after Keith died, the same way I don’t think Led Zeppelin had the heart to carry on without John Bonham. John was so much a part of that sound. I don’t know if you ever stood near them onstage, but it was a hell of a bloody sound.”
One of Watts’s non-Stones ventures was a collaboration with fellow-drummer Jim Keltner on the Charlie Watts-Jim Keltner Project, where they paid tribute to the musical styles of a range of drummers, including Max Roach, Art Blakey and Roy Haynes. Pointedly, none of these idols was a rock musician. Has Charlie ever felt that the Rolling Stones didn’t give him room for his jazzier leanings?
“I’m not interested in having room really,” he says. “I can do what I like in the Stones, but obviously there are things you wouldn’t do. If Mick’s singing you wouldn’t suddenly play something flashy. There’s a way to play when you’re backing people. When you play with people for a little while, even with the ABC & D band, there are little things you know are going to come up so you can adjust accordingly.”
What he particularly appreciates with the Stones is their freedom to spend as much time, and indeed money, as they like in recording studios.
“We’ve been lucky that we’ve been able to afford the time to do that, because most people are in the studio for the day and out again,” he reflects. As a case in point, his ABC&D outfit are about to release a live album recorded on a loose-change budget at the Duc des Lombards club in Paris. “There’s no mixing or anything,” he says. “It’s called cheap.”
By contrast, “with the Stones, we go into the studio for a month and if it hasn’t worked by then we go back for another one. It’s ridiculous, really, it’s not how people make records now. But out of that process would come things like Sympathy For the Devil. We tried everything on that before we figured out which was the best beat to do. The first time I ever heard it was Mick playing it on the doorstep at my house on a summer’s night.”
What about Street Fighting Man, with its giant acoustic guitar and great walloping drumbeat?
“That was done with a tiny little drum kit, a toy drum kit, and Keith Richards playing acoustic guitar into an old cassette recorder. We used to experiment with a lot of things like that, then we tried it in the studio and overdubbed the bass drum. In fact, I think the bass drum was played by Dave Mason, the guitarist from Traffic. We’ve had a go at everything, I think. Sometimes I’ve recorded drums while sitting in the lavatory with headphones on. I remember we were recording in Ireland and I used to play in the stairwell. It was a great sound, actually.”
And about those new Rolling Stones plans again? Watts shrugs.
“Many plans. I don’t know. Nothing’s been decided. I mean, I hope they’ll ring me up if we do anything and let me know.”
Charlie Watts and The A, B, C & D of Boogie Woogie play at Soho’s Pizza Express Jazz Club (pizzaexpresslive.co.uk/jazzList.aspx) on Saturday
