Charlie Watts on the moment The Rolling Stones became a cult: “An absolute riot”
Most diehard rock and roll fans tend to see their favourite artist as more than simple musicians. These are the people who could change the world with only a melody, and it wasn’t long before acts like The Beatles started to get treated like gods among men rather than a traditional pop group. While The Rolling Stones were already being looked at as the antithesis of the Fab Four, Charlie Watts had enough sense to realise when things started to get a little bit out of hand.
Then again, The Stones always relished in that kind of anarchy compared to The Beatles’ shows. Whereas the Liverpool lads may have started in a more seedy place when playing the mean streets of Hamburg, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were interested in making songs that made rock and roll seem a little bit more feral than usual, whether that meant distorting the guitars or writing with the kind of blues innuendos that most other bands would be turned off by.
When the band started touring, though, the idea of Beatlemania didn’t quite cover what they had to deal with they had to deal with. Most Beatles fans were mainly girls who wanted to scream their lungs out whenever they played, but if that was a case of having four Elvises for the price of one, the bad-boy nature that Jagger had whenever he sang was enough to send people into a frenzy and cause mayhem wherever they went.
While it wasn’t exactly punk rock yet, it’s easy to see where some of those anarchic shows in the 1970s got their start here. The Stones would never go out of their way to cause controversy the same way Sex Pistols did, but considering Watts was from the school of jazz drumming, it may have been a bit of a culture shock seeing people trampling over each other in a desperate attempt to get close to the band.
“There was so many people, and because there was no room to dance, they used to invent ridiculous dances.”
Charlie Watts
Even for a band that was as wild as The Stones, though, they weren’t ready to be crammed into a tiny room once they started to hit it big. The idea of them touring around the country was inevitable, but when Watts saw how the audience was behaving at their famous shows at the Crawdaddy, it felt like they were reacting to their music like some sort of ritualistic practice rather than a rock and roll show.
According to the drummer, they had become some other entity entirely when playing in Richmond, and there was nothing they could do about it, saying, “We became sort of a cult. Not because of us, it just happens. There was so many people, and because there was no room to dance, they used to invent ridiculous dances. That was really the best time for response of them all. It always ended in an absolute gyrating riot.”
While the thought of that seems slightly terrifying out of context, this wasn’t a case of the band putting their lives at risk. They almost relished in the idea that people found their music dangerous, and even if the parents didn’t approve, that only served to enhance their appeal as the kind of rock and roll band that no mother wanted to catch their children listening to.
The focus might have been more on the party atmosphere than the music at this point, but that didn’t seem to matter. The Stones still had a lot of growing up to do, and even if Watts would keep everything solid from behind the drumkit, he knew that this was something much bigger than the jazz greats he listened to. This was a new movement, and he was more than happy to go along for the ride.
