“He turned drumming around”: The drummer Charlie Watts thought no one could compare to
Every drummer seems to have their own individual language whenever they step behind the kit. There are a lot of people who are brought up listening to the same records, but as soon as they start pumping out the rhythm, there will always be a slightly different pulse compared to the person who came before them. Although nothing could have replaced Charlie Watts when The Rolling Stones first began, he admitted that Tony Williams had the signature magic that no one could touch.
Compared to the other drummers from around Watts’s time who hit hard, he never looked to show off his strength every time he played. Certain Stones tracks were faster than others that relied on him flying off the handle, but there were just as many instances of him trying to lay down the perfect bed for Keith Richards to put his guitar riffs on top of.
Listening like that only comes from listening to a lot of jazz, and that was part of Watts’s upbringing before he had even heard of rock and roll. Looking at how he carefully constructed every one of his drum parts, he was never trying to showcase but instead tried to respond to whatever the rest of the group was playing at the time.
That’s not to say that he couldn’t show off, either. ‘Paint It Black’ is practically driven by how he plays off of the rest of the band with his chaotic fills, but Williams was a much different animal. Whereas Buddy Rich was the jazz drummer most listened to, Williams looked to deconstruct what everyone thought they were listening to whenever one of his songs.
There had been many drummers looking to play straight jazz without a care in the world, but what Williams brought was the swing that everyone was missing. Most of the biggest names in jazz, like Miles Davis, always knew how to dance around the chord changes, but as soon as Williams hit that signature groove, it felt like every song he touched got a nice breath of fresh air.
And even at the height of The Stones, Watts thought that no one could have matched what Williams was doing, saying, “My favourite (drummer with Miles onstage would be) Tony Williams, by a long way. Because he turned drumming around. Nobody played like Tony Williams did when he was 18. When I first saw him he was 18, nobody played like that. You didn’t drop time on your hat. The way I play and the way most guys played until he arrived would be to play straight through – 1, 2, 1, 2, 1, 2. But Tony would go tt-tt, tt-tt, tt-tt, tt-tt with his left foot, and nobody ever did that sort of thing. They didn’t play time like that. He would drop time, he would half it.”
And that half-time groove is what makes a lot of those Stones songs work. As much as people can appreciate the tunes that sound like a freight train, there’s a certain swagger that comes with being able to just sit on that riff and make it sound alluring by just tapping your foot a little bit differently.
Even though The Stones are the epitome of dangerousness during their prime, Watts knew that no amount of posturing can get in the way of that Williams shuffle. It’s one thing to play exactly what’s on a page, but making it swing is what turns a traditional song into a staple of music history.
