Within a few years of making their debut in 1964, people were calling
the Rolling Stones
the Greatest Rock 'n' Roll Band in the World, as if it had been their birthright. And despite a great many creative peaks and valleys over the decades, in the 2020s plenty of folks were still happy to call them that. They created consistently compelling, innovative music through the 1960s, and if they were more hit and miss in the '70s and '80s, the fact they could knock out albums like
Sticky Fingers
(1971),
Exile on Main Street
(1972),
Some Girls
(1978),
Tattoo You
(1981) and
Undercover
(1983) when the spirit moved them reminded fans that they never truly lost the touch, and as recently as 2016's raw, committed
Blue & Lonesome
and their enthusiastically received tours of the 2010s, they sounded as if they wanted to be certain the world knew no one could ever count them out as a force to be reckoned with.
Throughout the Stones' history, the twin focal points with most fans were
Mick Jagger
, the swaggering, lascivious, and kinetic vocalist and frontman, and
Keith Richards
, the guitarist who defined the notion of rhythm as lead and spent decades as rock's leading poster boy for charmingly reckless behavior. However, to a vocal minority and fans and an impressive number of fellow musicians, the true source of the band's magic could be found at the back of the stage, behind the drums.
Charlie Watts
, who died on August 24, 2021 at the age of 80, was always an implacable presence in concert, always focused and right in the zone, and he laid out arguably the most satisfying backbeat in rock 'n' roll history. From the late '60s onward, many rock drummers believed the prime indicators of talent were the ability to hit hard, throw as many exotic rudiments into a song as possible, and toss a few extended solos into the set. Charlie Watts had no use for any of that. What Watts brought to the Stones was a style that rolled just as much as it rocked. He gave their performances a swing that few of their peers could match, and their music had a groove that was the product of an unerring instinct about where to put the two and four on the snare, and fills that accented the songs and lifted them up, rather than nailing them down.
Ginger Baker
's work in
Cream
may have exemplified one school of thought about rock drumming, but Watts saw his job as a drummer not as a place to compete with his bandmates, but to support, complement, and augment when they were doing. As Watts once told a journalist, "I don’t like drum solos. I never take them. I admire some people who do them, but generally, I don’t like them. It’s not something I sit and listen to. I prefer drummers in the band playing with the band."
