Charlie's Good Tonight: The Authorised Biography of The Rolling Stones’ Charlie Watts

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Charlie was no stadium afficionado, but he understood the basic economics. Otherwise, he mused in a 1998 conversation, ‘You’d be playing a month in a town to play to 30,000 people. Where would you play, in a 3,000-seater hall? So it’s to accommodate that, and hopefully you can fill it up. And that’s what we’ve become. It’s our own fault, or pleasure, or whatever you call it. That’s how we’ve directed what we do. That’s how the world of doing what we do has gone. Drummer Steve Jordan, a former member of the house bands for “Saturday Night Live” and “Late Night with David Letterman,” is scheduled to take Watts’ place for the Stones’ upcoming tour, which is scheduled to start on September 26 in St. Louis. He also distracted himself from the squabbles and struggles of the Stones by putting together the Charlie Watts Big Band, which featured many top British jazz players.

Charlie Watts’s prized book and music Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts’s prized book and music

American first edition inscribed by the author: “With A Conan Doyle’s kindest recollections of pleasant partnership in travel June 13 th/91.” 8. All the Sad Young Men, F Scott Fitzgerald (1926) In 2004 came Watts at Scott’s, a live recording of the Charlie Watts Tentet at Ronnie Scott’s club in London. The disc appeared as news emerged that Watts had been undergoing surgery and radiotherapy for throat cancer. The treatment proved successful and the cancer went into remission.Jazz is where Watts’s enthusiasm for collecting first began as a teenager, searching out hard-to-find records by his musical heroes in specialist shops in Soho. Collecting became an obsession. Over the years he would collect American Civil War armaments, Horatio Nelson memorabilia, vintage Tailor & Cutter pattern books, suitcases, hats, Stuart silver, and cars, including several Rolls-Royces, a Bugatti Atlantic and a 1937 Lagonda – although he never learnt to drive. Charlie was born at University College Hospital, London, to Charles Watts, a lorry driver, and his wife Lillian (nee Eaves). The family (including his sister, Linda) lived in Wembley, north-west London, in a prefabricated home. This video has been removed. This could be because it launched early, our rights have expired, there was a legal issue, or for another reason. Charlie Watts: Rolling Stones drummer dies at age 80 – video obituary

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He was a connoisseur,” says Watts’s friend, the influential music manager and creative Tony King. “He wasn’t just collecting because he had the money to. He could tell you in detail about everything if you asked him.” HG Wells is a very good example. In the copy of The War of the Worlds, Wells has obviously spent some time drawing quite an elaborate caricature on one of the endpapers. Charlie would have loved the fact that these were copies that meant something to the authors themselves.” Watts, says King , “was a very quiet, under-the-radar collector; you never knew what he was up to.”Watts’s passion for jazz is reflected in rare recordings, sheet music, gelatin prints and books. There is the sheet music for Rhapsody in Blue and An American in Paris, along with the score for Acts 1 and 2 of Porgy and Bess, signed by George Gershwin. A copy of Negro Folk Songs As Sung by Lead Belly, by John A Lomax and Alan Lomax, is signed by Huddie Ledbetter – Lead Belly – himself.

Sympathy for the Drummer: Why Charlie Watts Matters Sympathy for the Drummer: Why Charlie Watts Matters

He was very proud of this sense of being a completist. I think he started with the authors, fell in love with the text and in the way so many of us do when we have a particular author that we love, he wanted to get as close as he could to their lives and the interaction they’d had with that copy of a book. The collection also includes a first edition of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles with an inscription reading “I perambulated Dartmoor before I wrote this book.” Conan Doyle’s inscriptions are “often very formulaic,” said Wiltshire, so this is “really quite special”. It’s “no coincidence”, says Wiltshire, that the outstanding item in the collection, The Great Gatsby, is the novel that defines the Jazz Age. He spent most of his time on his estate in Devon in southwest England. His wife bred horses and owned a well-known stud farm.Never do the authorised biography,” a colleague once told me. “You’ll find out where the bodies are buried, metaphorically speaking, but you won’t be allowed to publish their location.” That advice surely applies double when the act under consideration is the Rolling Stones, a group who have left in their wake a trail of outrage, depravity, misogyny, addiction and a few real-life cadavers. There has been some decent music at times, too. The group’s incendiary past gets scant airtime here – the hellish Altamont concert of 1969, for example, with its on-film crowd murder, was merely “an event waiting to go wrong”. Even the Stones’ music gets little attention. There are lists of who guested at which shows and on which albums, praise for Charlie Watts’s unerring timing and ability to hold together a rowdy, loose-limbed band (bassist Bill Wyman gets rare praise for his part too) and some commentary on drum technique, but the impact and meaning of the Stones’ music stays unremarked. He was given his first drum kit as a Christmas present in 1955, and while other kids were shaking a leg to Bill Haley or Elvis Presley, he dreamed of playing drums with Davis, or stepping into Art Blakey’s shoes with the Jazz Messengers. Watts’s ambiguity was there from the outset. He grew up in a prefab in a drab north London suburb, and jazz, his first love, became a passport to a world of crisply dressed cool and dazzling artistry, his heroes alto saxophonist Charlie Parker – jazz’s Picasso – and drummer Chico Hamilton. One of a talented pool orbiting around blues pioneer Alexis Korner in the early 1960s, Watts was headhunted by Jagger, Jones and Richards but faltered. “Should I join this interval band?” he asked his fellow travellers, relenting only after the trio secured enough gigs to match his wage in an advertising agency. Art – his only O-level – remained a passion. He sketched every tour hotel room he occupied, and later advised on the Stones’ elaborate stage sets. The Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts performs on stage during their "No Filter" tour at NRG Stadium on July 27, 2019 in Houston, Texas. (Photo by SUZANNE CORDEIRO / AFP) (Photo credit should read SUZANNE CORDEIRO/AFP via Getty Images) SUZANNE CORDEIRO/AFP/Getty Images First edition, inscribed by the author: “I perambulated Dartmoor before I wrote this book, A Conan Doyle.” 4. The Thirteen Problems, Agatha Christie (1932)