'Charlie's Good Tonight' by Paul Sexton
The news of Charlie Watts’ death came like a shock last summer. But as his biographer Paul Sexton writes, he would “have hugely embarrassed about the fuss.”
Watts was the picture of reserve and humility, a star who put up with stardom because he liked his job playing drums. He was there to support the songs, not to solo, and kept a simple kit. He was a charter member of one of the most important rock bands ever, The Rolling Stones, but wasn’t a Stones fan, preferring vintage jazz and R&B.
Sexton covers Watts’ charming eccentricities, integral to his character but financed by the band that became a multi-million-dollar enterprise. He collected rare cars but never learned to drive. He “toured the world for five and a half decades and spent all of them yearning to be back home.” And he filled his home with English silver, rare recordings, first editions, American Civil War memorabilia. And when not on tour with the Stones, he was likely to be seen in a three-piece suit, custom tailored on Saville Row.
His death was unexpected to everyone, including Watts. In 2020 the drummer approached Sexton, a longtime British rock critic, about working with him on an autobiography. If Sexton’s portrait is accurate, the self-effacing Watts might be happier to know that the praised heaped on him is someone else’s handiwork, the perspective of a sympathetic insider with full access to his family and bandmates. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards each contributed forwards to Charlie’s Good Tonight.
Stay on top of the news of the day
Subscribe to our free, daily e-newsletter to get Milwaukee's latest local news, restaurants, music, arts and entertainment and events delivered right to your inbox every weekday, plus a bonus Week in Review email on Saturdays.
Throughout, Watts’ playing is described for being not on the beat exactly but across it, adding that hint of swing that separated him from pile-driving hard rock drummers as well as fancy-playing fusion percussionists. And he was a consummate English gentleman in the best sense. Watts was, Sexton summarizes, “someone whose like we won’t see again, who almost seemed to belong in another epoch altogether: a man out of time, but always perfectly in time.”
