Originally published in Uncut Take 294 (November 2021 issue)…
The Ealing Jazz Club didn’t promise much from the outside. Situated opposite Ealing Broadway tube station, wedged between a jeweller’s and a tea shop, a tight set of steps led down into a faceless cellar.
“It had a capacity of about a hundred people, maybe a few more,” recalls frequent visitor Dick Taylor. “There was a cloakroom, then a narrow room with the bar at one side. It was only a small club. But you’d walk through the door and it would sound like Chicago in there. The atmosphere was incredible.”
On March 17, 1962, the club began to operate as Britain’s first regular rhythm’n’blues venue. Led by guitarist Alexis Korner and harmonica player Cyril Davies, Blues Incorporated took over on Saturday nights, providing a nexus for the growing number of R&B bands that sprouting up around London and the suburbs.
But the Ealing Club wasn’t just about the music. It was a place where crucial connections were made, a gathering of kindred souls. “We all saw ourselves as crusaders for the blues,” says Paul Jones. “We were all more or less the same age. To find all these other likeminded people down there was very significant.”
One of these figures was 20-year-old Charlie Watts, then drummer with Blues Incorporated. “Charlie came from a jazz background and was just a brilliant drummer,” says Taylor. “You had to be seriously good to get into Alexis’s band. Everybody was aware of that. Not only that, but Charlie was also always such a cool character and smart dresser, from the early days.”
A nod and a handshake in a smoky room. Such was the ease with which friendships were made, alliances formed. In the space of a few weeks, Watts was introduced to Brian Jones, then Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. By the summer of 1962, all three had guested with Blues Incorporated, sharing the stage for the first time with their future bandmate.
“You never knew who was going to be part of Alexis’s band next,” says Taylor. “He wasn’t a particularly amazing musician, but he was so into his blues. He was more like a curator. That’s one of the key things about the club in those days. It was an offshoot of the jazz scene, because you had people like Dick Heckstall-Smith and Graham Bond. On stage at various times there would’ve been Charlie and Mick Avory and Jack Bruce. I remember arriving early one evening and meeting Ginger Baker.”
Records changed hands; recommendations were made. In the Ealing Jazz Club, the first stirrings of The Rolling Stones came together around Jagger, Richards, Jones, Taylor and Ealing Club regular, pianist Ian Stewart. The opportunity to recruit Watts, however, was scuppered by his commitment to Korner’s Blues Incorporated. All the same, he remained on their radar.
“We said, ‘God, we’d love that Charlie Watts if we could afford him’,” wrote Richards in his memoir, Life. “Because we all thought Charlie Watts was a God-given drummer.”
The Rollin’ Stones played their first show at the Marquee on July 12, 1962. They debuted at the Ealing Club two weeks later. They continued to perform there on nearly two dozen occasions up until March 1963. By which time, crucially, Charlie Watts had been installed as their permanent drummer. “When we got Charlie,” wrote Richards, “that really made it for us.”
Unlike his fellow Stones, Charlie Watts pursued a different route into music. His jazz epiphany was hearing saxophonist Gerry Mulligan’s “Walking Shoes”, but it was Chico Hamilton’s drumming – rather than Mulligan’s playing – that captured his attention. Deciding he wanted to be a drummer, he set about collecting jazz LPs by Charlie Parker, Johnny Dodds, Jelly Roll Morton and Duke Ellington.
Growing up in Wembley, a favourite pastime was going to neighbourhood parties and listening to “Mood Indigo”. He wanted to emulate bebop heroes like Max Roach and Kenny Clarke. “Not a bad aspiration,” he noted later.
Watts and next-door neighbour Dave Green, a promising bassist, began playing in local skiffle groups before joining a jazz band, Jo Jones All Stars, in 1958. In the fluid spirit of the times, Watts lent his talents elsewhere too, from Dixieland combos to paid gigs at weddings and bar mitzvahs.
“I just played with everybody,” he said in According To The Rolling Stones. “Playing was what I liked to do.” He was also watching. Phil Seamen and Tubby Hayes were two of his favourites. Alexis Korner sat in on guitar one night in a coffee bar, where Watts was jamming with an ensemble styled after Thelonious Monk. The connection made, and suitably impressed, Korner asked him to join his new venture, Blues Incorporated, in 1961.
A graphic designer for an advertising agency by day, Watts’ services were first required elsewhere – on a lengthy commission in Denmark – but he took up Korner’s offer on returning to London in February 1962. The Ealing Club residency was just weeks away. While Watts began his professional relationship with Korner, Brian Jones was busy recruiting for his nascent R&B band elsewhere.
“He called me and said, ‘I’m gonna form this band and I’m gonna be rich and famous,”‘ says Paul Jones. “‘Do you want to be my singer?’ I said no. I turned him down, firstly, because I thought he was being unduly optimistic about the future for a blues band. I’d also just passed an audition as singer with a dance band at the Adelphi in Slough. And, for the first time in my life, there was money in it. I needed to earn a living.”
An ad in the Musicians Wanted section of Jazz News in May 1962 caught the eye of Ian Stewart. Within a month, Jones had also recruited Jagger, Richards, Taylor and drummer Tony Chapman. The latter was a case of making do. Richards later remembered Chapman as a terrible player. Watts was still tantalisingly out of reach.
“I saw him maybe four or five times with Blues Incorporated,” says Taylor. “For someone who was essentially a quiet drummer, he could really drive a band. I was amazed at how powerful he was. The thing was, unlike a lot of drummers, he didn’t lose any of his drive as he got older. He always really went for it.”
It wasn’t just the pay packet: for Watts, Blues Incorporated was an education. Not only was the band highly adaptable – equally versed in blues, jazz and R&B – but it was the first time he’d played with a harmonica player. He was astounded by Cyril Davies’ sheer power. There were also the additional delights of forming a rhythm section with Jack Bruce or studying master saxophonist Dick Heckstall-Smith up close. But Ian Stewart was desperate to recruit his old Blues Incorporated ally to Jones’ new band.
Richards was holding out too: “To me, Charlie Watts was the secret essence of the whole thing,” he wrote. “That went back to Ian Stewart – ‘We have to have Charlie Watts’ – and all the skulduggery that went down in order to get Charlie. We starved ourselves to pay for him! Literally. We went shoplifting to get Charlie Watts. We cut down on our rations, we wanted him so bad, man.”
Unrequited, Richards and co pressed on. With two guitarists already, Jones asked Taylor to switch to bass in time for their first gig at the Marquee. Encouraged by the success of the Ealing Club, the venue had also decided to host a regular R&B night by the spring of 1962.
As the year wore on, the Stones’ lineup started to take on a more familiar shape. Taylor was absent when they cut a handful of early demos at Curly Clayton Sound Studios in Highbury in late October. Dissatisfied with playing bass, he went back to college; less than a year later, he co-founded another essential R&B outfit, The Pretty Things. Bill Wyman was tipped off to the vacancy by Chapman, his ex-bandmate from The Clifrons. Married, with a young son, Wyman was six or seven years older than the others and was yet to fully embrace the blues.
“I heard Elmore James, Little Walter, Muddy Waters and Jimmy Reed for the first time when I did that first session with the Stones,” he says. “They were doing slow 12-bar blues all night, but I was used to playing in dance halls, doing requests and uptempo things.”
In December ’62, around the same time as Wyman was auditioning for the Stones, Watts left Blues Incorporated. He was a victim of his own success. Gigs were piling up; they were beginning to impact on his daytime job. Grudgingly, he took less frequent bookings with other blues bands around the capital. The Stones sent out an invite. He was playing with Art Wood, older brother of Ron, when he agreed to give it a shot.
“For me, it was just another job offer, to be honest,” Watts said later. “I was in three bands already when I joined The Rolling Stones.” He made his live debut with them at his old haunt, the Ealing Club, on January 12, 1963.
For Charlie Watts, joining The Rolling Stones came at a critical juncture in British culture. Trad jazz, which gave birth to skiffle, had been dominant in popular music during the 1950s, driven by players like Chris Barber, Acker Bilk and Humphrey Lyttelton. It reached a peak in the early ’60s, in the vacuum left by the first wave of rock’n’roll.
Elvis had returned from military service but been seduced by Hollywood, Jerry Lee Lewis had fallen from grace, Chuck Berry was in jail, Little Richard had denounced secular music and Buddy Holly was gone. The folk revival was gathering pace too, parallel to its weightier cousin in America, bridged by musicologists like Alan Lomax. While The Beatles were ascending sharply, by 1963 the highest reaches of the pop charts were just as likely to feature Kenny Ball, The Bachelors or Frank Ifield.
The blues, by contrast, had yet to boom. Watts had yet to discover its merits, too. The Stones were back in Ealing on Tuesday, January 15, three nights after his live debut. In his diary entry that night, Richards writes: “Charlie swings, but he hasn’t got the right sound yet. Rectify that tomorrow!”
Naturally, as a jazz head, Charlie never had issues with swing. His formative weeks with the Stones saw him schooled in the Chicago blues by Jones and Richards. The pair of them played him Jimmy Reed records for days on end. Watts loathed rock’n’roll as a young teenager, but Richards now persuaded him to appreciate the finer points of Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley. He quickly found his way through by listening to the nuanced playing of Reed’s drummer, Earl Phillips.
The key, said Watts, was discovering that Phillips “was playing on those records like a jazz drummer, playing swing, with a straight four”. In truth, it wasn’t that great a leap for Watts, a man blessed with an intuitive feel for rhythm and tone, his distinct snare sound locking into the groove of Richards’ leads. The guitarist’s subsequent diary entry, on February 2, 1963, reads: “Ealing. Charlie & Bill. Fabulous evening with big crowd. Sound returned with a bang. Charlie fabulous.”
The Stones didn’t just find a great drummer, they found their identity. Richards credits Watts with enabling him to develop as a player: “There’s tremendous personality and subtlety in his playing… He’s up there with the best – Elvin Jones, Philly Joe Jones. He’s got the feel, the looseness of it and he’s very economical.”
The band’s growth accelerated in the wake of Watts’ arrival, as did their popularity. Under the auspices of impresario Giorgio Gomelsky, the Stones began playing in the back room of the Station Hotel in Richmond, soon renamed the Crawdaddy Club. “At Richmond we became sort of a cult, in a way,” Watts observed. “It always ended up in an absolute gyrating riot.”
Double bassist Danny Thompson, later to find fame with Pentangle, was an early witness. “I was gigging with the Gus Galbraith Quintet in ’63 and we played there one night,” he explains. “The interval support band was the Stones. I remember seeing their blue Ford Thames van parked up on the road, with ‘The Rolling Stones’ painted on the side in big white letters. I had to admire their sheer exuberance for the blues. They were trying to play the proper stuff and generated so much excitement. During the interval we were outside having a fag when the manager came out and said, ‘Just to let you know, we’re keeping this other band on. Here’s your money, you can go home.”‘
The Crawdaddy residency also brought them into contact with 19-year-old Andrew Loog Oldham. His brash management style and hustler’s instinct helped the band replicate the delirium they’d generated in Richmond across theatres and ballrooms throughout the UK. One thing struck him as incongruous though: Charlie Watts. Meticulously dressed in button-down shirt, tie and jacket, his stage demeanour was ineffably cool, unlike that of his bandmates.
“He was with the Stones, but not of them,” wrote Oldham in his memoir Stoned. “Kinda blue, like he’d been transported for the evening from Ronnie Scott’s or Birdland.” Reporter Chris Welch was of a similar mind when he met the Stones after joining Melody Maker. He first saw them play in a packed tent at the 3rd National Jazz & Blues Festival at Richmond Athletic Club in August 1963.
“It truly was a turning point in UK music history, when the trad audience turned round and literally ran across the field to see the Stones,” he says. “It’s hard to exaggerate how very popular they became overnight.” His next encounter was backstage at the Slough Adelphi: “Charlie was quite taciturn, he didn’t like talking or doing interviews. But I got to know him because he was a jazz fan, like me. That’s how we managed to get along so well. He was much more kind of grown up than the rest of them. I don’t think he thought that the Stones were beneath his dignity, but he always had it in his own mind that he was playing this R&B music because it was a gig and that he’d sooner be playing on stage with a jazz group. When the Stones toured America, we’d sneak off to jazz clubs together in New York.”
Outwardly at least, Watts appeared unruffled by the Stones’ rapid ascent. “Not Fade Away”, a Buddy Holly cover indebted to Bo Diddley, had gone top three in February 1964. Their self-titled debut topped the album charts soon after. The band embarked on a series of package tours, each one generating greater hysteria than the last.
“I remember talking to Charlie and him saying that he was only expecting it to last six months,” recalls “The Crying Game” hitmaker Dave Berry, who joined the Stones, The Ronettes, Marty Wilde and the Swinging Blue Jeans on the road that year. “But it was absolute bedlam everywhere. Screaming girls were trying to storm the stage every night. In fact, at one gig the Stones played, in Hamilton, Scotland, they had to build a huge chicken-wire fence in front of the stage. It was like a zoo, kids were trying to climb over the wire.”
Watts seemed to be the antithesis of the louche ’60s pop star model. Instead, he quietly went about his own business while his bandmates partied. He wed Shirley Shepherd, who he’d met pre-Stones, in a secret ceremony in Bradford. On days off in America, Watts would rather visit Civil War sites than join Jones and Wyman in Hollywood. He published a children’s book. And you’d never catch him taking a leak up a garage wall. Watts’ public image may have been muted, but his bandmates and fellow musicians understood his vital importance to the Stones.
A two-day session at Chess Studios in Chicago, during their first American tour, gave the Stones a chance to meet one of their idols, Muddy Waters. It also resulted in a cover of Bobby and Shirley Womack’s “It’s All Over Now”, their first No 1 hit back home. In Life, Richards reflected on their time in the States, recalling that Bobby Womack was astonished to discover, on finally meeting them, that the Stones weren’t black. He partly ascribes it to his and Jagger’s utter absorption in the blues, pointing out that a damp flat in London is essentially the same as a damp flat in Chicago. But he forwards another possible answer: Charlie.
“He was playing very much like black drummers playing with Sam and Dave and the Motown stuff or the soul drummers,” wrote Richards. And while the conventional narrative has it that The Rolling Stones is essentially Mick and Keith, Richards has always insisted otherwise. In his opinion, Charlie Watts is The Rolling Stones.
The Stones’ early development was complete by 1965, when Jagger and Richards finally became a bona fide songwriting partnership. The success of “The Last Time”, which topped the charts in March and April that year, roughly coincided with their introduction to Gered Mankowitz. The photographer was commissioned to shoot the band by Andrew Oldham.
“The band came to my studio in Mason’s Yard for our first session together,” says Mankowitz, who shot the moody cover of Out Of Our Heads that day. “They were charming, warm, welcoming. What was special about them, as a group of five, was they weren’t trying to make a united effort to present any kind of showbiz image. The Beatles wore shiny suits, had glossy hair and presented a uniform appearance. But the Stones rejected all of that.”
Mankowitz, who continued to shoot the Stones until 1967, was immediately drawn to Watts. “I felt very close to Keith but I got on very well with Charlie,” he says. “He was always very kind to me, good company. He took me under his wing a bit, like an older brother might. It was a very nice, important friendship during that two- or three-year period.
“I’d started to become interested in jazz and the culture surrounding it,” Mankowitz continues. “So Charlie took me to the Blue Note and another couple of places when the Stones played New York that year. Everybody knew him there because he was a frequent visitor and he had an allotted table. Charlie sat down and got his ciggies out. As soon as he put a cigarette to his lips, the maître d’ whipped out a match, struck it on his belt – which had two matchboxes on either side and lit Charlie’s cigarette. All in one movement. I thought that was so cool. I just felt like I was in this amazing movie and Charlie was a wonderful guide. I was just overwhelmed by the experience. He also took me to another place, the Hickory House, where there was an extraordinary blind British pianist called Eddie Thompson. Charlie was this lovely, low-key, gentle sort of mentoring adviser.”
Mankowitz entered the band’s world at a decisive moment. The Stones were in the process of shedding their recent past – blues, jazz, R&B, the Ealing Club and taking control of their own destiny. Their world was moving fast, as were the times.
“When I first met them, they’d spent a while paying their dues,” he says. “Satisfaction’ hadn’t been a hit yet and Mick and Keith’s writing was just taking off, as was the media’s interest in stoking a rivalry between The Beatles and the Stones. I don’t think any of them believed they were going to be huge, but it was all going to become consolidated in ’65. They were right on the cusp.”
The one implacable force, it seemed, was Charlie Watts. While his bandmates underwent all manner of personal and professional trials – and tragedies in the years immediately after, Watts stayed true to himself. Success and fame didn’t appear to alter him. He was a warm, unassuming presence who took joy in the simpler pleasures life had to offer. He just happened to be the peerless drummer for the greatest rock’n’roll band in the world. Mankowitz has a prized memory of their time together, one that illustrates Watts’ unique personality and the sense of urbanity that he brought to the Stones.
“I dug out some photographs recently, taken during a little antiques shopping trip that he and I did in New York in 1965,” he says. “I’d forgotten about them and was completely taken aback by how beautiful his suit was. Even then, when the big bucks hadn’t really started flowing yet, Charlie looked immaculate. He really did. And this was just him and I going off to look at antiques. It wasn’t an event, it wasn’t a special occasion. It was just a couple of lads wandering about. But he was so beautifully dressed.”