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Charlie Chuckles

Charlie plays the drums that way. He knows that Keith has been awake for four manic days and needs a little something to pull him back from the next moment into the present one. So Charlie usually lays on the back of the beat, holding back (especially the snare slap, which is the rhythm guitar player’s mistress, as I said); he holds that slap to the last possible micromoment when the skin can still be pounded. And here’s his secret, the one he discovered entirely by himself, and that everyone identifies as “playing like Charlie Watts”: What everyone else would regard as the last micromoment in the range of the beat isn’t really the very last micromoment. The one you and I would call “last” is actually only the last serious moment. There is another micromoment behind that one, and it is comical, it is a rhythmic snort or a jocular grunt, and it takes all of Keith’s gravity and intensity and insane focus and releases it into the room as levity and fun. Charlie hits it and Keith (serious, dangerous, violent, drug-addicted, passionate, hopeless Keith) smiles. That’s when the whip comes down. And when the whip comes down, it hurts sort of good, doesn’t it? I admit that I like it when Keith likes treating me that way. And I’m straight, too.

Charlie Watts is an excellent drummer, and I now know he can play any style he wants to play. He isn’t all that limited. (I mean, everyone has limitations.) Charlie’s job is to take the grooves and riffs that Keith feeds him and make them congeal into something Bill can distribut around the room, in ways that everyone can use (I’m afraid that only Keith can use his own grooves without Charlie’s help). So, even though Charlie’s reach is from the first micromoent before one to the last micromoment after four, he always lags behind Keith, and that is very much by design. This keeps Keith on the front edge of the whole sound and still holds him in, makes him available to the rest of us in little bursts. And after all, we need a second to follow Keith’s mania. The lag also creates a musical space in which other things can happen. And they do.

I can’t think of a better example of how Charlie interprets Keith than “Beast of Burden,” which is a song that rarely gets covered successfully, even by bar bands that make their living covering Stones songs. The groove is extremely difficult to capture, and without the groove, the song basically sucks. One of the secrets of the song is the oodles of empty sonic space. That space is created by the distance between the clean riffing guitar and the trailing drums, and how Charlie comically hops to the front of the beat where Keith is and then falls way back, repeated every measure. How very far Charlie has allowed himself to trail becomes obvious when he hits the almost random double snare slap on the “and” of three and the “and” of four, instead of just the four. That “and” of four is actually into the next measure and Keith has already attacked.

The song also very much requires that the bass stay out of the way, being so understated as nearly to disappear. It’s like watching Bill Wyman onstage, which you must admit is like watching paint dry. So I will take back one thing I said earlier. I know of one person capable of standing absolutely, stock still when Keith hits the opening chords of “Brown Sugar.” The one person in the world who is best able to stay out of the way of anything Keith may do is his bass player. More about that in a moment, but to finish the previous thought before getting on to the next one, Keith mentions in his autobiography that this lagging behind the beat is Charlie’s sense of humor, and that on given nights they even try to test one another’s rhythmic limits, to see if one can screw up the other one. I’m sorry, but that’s just way cool.

Paying the Bill: An Ode to Satisfaction

Now we come to the unhappy part of the story. As far as I can tell, Bill Wyman just wasn’t destined for happiness and certainly not for satisfaction. (Holy cow. Just