Charlie Watts’ favourite Rolling Stones song: “It’s an iconic riff”
With The Rolling Stones, the majority of the attention has been spent admiring the mesmeric talents of Keith Richards and Mick Jagger. As the group’s chief songwriters who also took on the most glamorous roles in the band, it’s easy to comprehend why The Glimmer Twins stole the limelight.
Although Richards and Jagger are now the only two surviving founder members of the group that remain, The Rolling Stones, at their height, were the sum of their collective parts. Pivotally, Brian Jones was the brainchild behind the band’s formation, and without him, there would have been no Rolling Stones.
While Jones’ struggle with addiction, which led to his dismissal before his tragic death in 1969, brought his contribution to The Rolling Stones to an end, drummer Charlie Watts was a crucial part of their rock ‘n’ roll machine for 60 years.
Due to his quiet public persona and contentment with his position in the shadows, Watts never quite received the flowers he deserved. Nevertheless, those who knew the band best were all too aware of the ingredients Watts brought to the group and didn’t overlook his impact.
“The Rolling Stones are truly the greatest rock and roll band in the world and always will be,” Bob Dylan once declared. “The last, too,” he added in his glowing appraisal of Watts and his cohorts. “Everything that came after them: metal, rap, punk, new wave, pop-rock, you name it, you can trace it all back to the Rolling Stones. They were the first and last, and no one’s ever done it better.”
That comment is the highest praise a rabblerousing rocker can receive. Not that they’ve ever been short of confidence or artistic pride themselves; as Keith Richards once said, “You’ve got the sun, you’ve got the moon, and you’ve got the Rolling Stones.”
Richards may have never struggled with confidence in his band’s abilities, but the guitarist has always shared the credit with his bandmates. If there is one star that the swaggering Richards was willing to bow to, it was his beloved tempo-setter, Mr Charlie Watts. As Richards said when he championed ‘Street Fighting Man’ as the band’s crowning moment: “Charlie stuck with me on this track. I’m the rhythm player. I’m not a virtuoso soloist or anything like that. To work together with the drummer that’s my joy. This record, to me, is one of the examples of what can happen when two cats believe in each other.”
Speaking of finding their feet, ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’ was the first step on the rock ‘n’ roll journey in earnest that Dylan would go on to eulogise.
For Watts, the classic track had a special place in his heart for many reasons, none more critical than putting The Rolling Stones on the map. While they were already a known quantity before the release of ‘Satisfaction’, everybody stood up and took notice after hearing this one song. “I chose ‘Satisfaction’,” Watts once said when championing the breakthrough 1965 single as his favourite Rolling Stones track.
Adding: “It was just the first really big record we ever made. It’s an iconic riff. It just sums up the whole period, really.”
Furthermore, Watts also touched upon the connection between the members that imbue the songs with alchemical energy. “He usually starts the intros,” Watts said of Richards’ staggering start-ups. “And very much when we were in the early period of our existence, monitors were kind of non-existent, so I had to have his amplifier quite close to me, and they weren’t very big amplifiers. With an audience shouting, I needed that to know where the changes came, because you could very rarely hear Mick.”
It’s a mark of Watts and his understanding of the drums that his appraisal focuses primarily on his bandmates rather than celebrating his own performance. As fellow sticksmith Ringo Starr once said: “You look at Charlie Watts in the Stones and there is nothing really said and he’s an amazing drummer but the drummers tended not to get the writing. The drummer is the driving force but when you have songwriters of that calibre and singers they much prefer to talk about the songs and the writers.”
Nobody knew this to be more accurate than Watts. He was the silent, beating heart of the band, setting the foundations for his colleagues to thrive, and ‘Satisfaction’ is the prime example of this skill set.
