Charlie Watts thought David Bowie “wasn’t a musical genius”
There’s a good chance that half of the modern music scene could be defined by what David Bowie had done previously. Although not everyone might claim to be a fan of ‘The Starman’ during his prime, his willingness to expand beyond the conventional means of pop songwriting has led to some of the biggest stars reinventing their sound to see how they fit into a different lens. Despite his penchant for classic songs, some of his contemporaries don’t see ‘The Thin White Duke’ in those terms.
When Bowie was first getting started, he tended to be a musical chameleon, making all kinds of sonic structures influenced by everyone around him. While that included more than a few strange detours in his career, it always returned to the sounds of the 1960s rock pop movement.
Though The Beatles did have a major impact on Bowie, his love for The Rolling Stones became much more apparent as he entered his glam-rock phase. Across albums like Aladdin Sane, Bowie would wear his rock and roll heroes on his sleeve, delivering a cover of their iconic ‘Let’s Spend the Night Together’ and even name-checking Mick Jagger in the lyrics of ‘Drive-In Saturday’.
Even with his musical reinventions, though, Charlie Watts was never as impressed with Bowie’s work. When talking about the legend after his passing in 2016, Watts thought that Bowie was a touch overrated, telling The Guardian, “I thought people would have been very sad obviously, and he was a lovely guy, and he wrote a couple of good songs. But for me, he wasn’t this musical genius”.
Granted, only someone of Watts’ calibre could make such a comment. Long before Bowie had even started gaining traction, Watts’s work with The Stones had reinvented rock and roll a few times over. After years of playing blues covers, they reimagined their sound in more ways than one, including psychedelic rock, baroque pop, and back into the blues all over again.
By the time Bowie had started to pay tribute to his heroes, The Rolling Stones were becoming living icons of the industry, going on a hot streak with new recruit Mick Taylor on albums like Sticky Fingers and Exile on Main St. While the disparaging remark might have been hurtful to Bowie were he still alive, he didn’t have to prove his chops to any of his heroes anymore.
Across his decades-long career, Bowie was the epitome of bravery in music, unafraid to change his style to whatever he felt at the time. Even if it didn’t make for some of the most commercially viable music, Bowie always worked to be the best well-rounded musician he could be.
Even in terms of song styles, Bowie may very well eclipse The Stones in terms of experimentation, working within the realms of blues, glam, kraut, post-rock, and soul music before he had even finished his first decade of recorded output. Even into his evergreen years, Bowie kept experimenting, even landing himself on the top of the charts off the momentum of albums like Let’s Dance, where he teamed up with Nile Rodgers to embrace the sounds of disco and dance music.
While Bowie was looking death in the face in 2016, he still found ways to subvert expectations, taking pieces of his music into the world of free jazz on the album Blackstar. Watts has earned his reputation as one of the most solid heartbeats in rock and roll, but there’s no disputing the genius that came after him.
