Keith Richards on why Mick Avory wasn’t good enough for The Rolling Stones: “He was terrible”
Not every group of musicians is cut out to make beautiful music together. It all comes down to chemistry, and no matter how many times someone claims to be able to run through each song perfectly, it doesn’t matter if there’s no sense of dynamics in between playing with their bandmates. The Rolling Stones were halfway to making the perfect lineup in the early 1960s, but before Charlie Watts got behind the drum stool, Keith Richards thought Mick Avory had no business drumming for them.
Because when you think about it, the beginning of The Stones’ career saw them operating with the same kind of dynamic as The Beatles. The Fab Four may have gravitated around John Lennon and Paul McCartney, but if you were to have taken any one person out of the equation, the entire operation would have collapsed in on itself.
But it’s not like what they played in those days was all that complicated. On their first handful of records, most of their greatest moments came from them mining the same blues artists that everyone in England was working with, and it took Andrew Loog Oldham to get Mick Jagger and Richards to bother writing any original material for their albums.
When looking at raw rock and roll drumming, though, Avory was far from a bad choice. Some of the nervous energy that comes from ‘You Really Got Me’ was because of his relentless groove behind the kit, and once they switched over to making plaintive ballads like ‘Waterloo Sunset’, very few drummers can tone things down that much and still make it sound great.
Once Avory appeared on the list of names of potential drummers, though, Richards could tell that he wasn’t right for the band within the first few seconds of the first songs, saying, “We were rehearsing drummers. Mick Avory came by, the drummer of the Kinks. He was terrible, then. Couldn’t find that off beat. Couldn’t pick up on that Jimmy Reed stuff.”
And if you can’t play the blues, that’s practically a cardinal sin for The Stones. Everything about their music has been about them trying to emulate their heroes, so it’s no use trying to find someone who couldn’t understand the difference between the lowdown and dirty sounds of Muddy Waters and the traditional sounds of The British Invasion.
Hell, even Charlie Watts didn’t have the most intense knowledge of the blues when he first joined the group, but his sampling of different jazz textures made him the best possible person for the job. Blues and jazz have never been that far away, and when he started playing along to tunes like ‘Satisfaction’, the band jumped in a much different way than they would have been with any that could just keep time.
Looking at what happened amongst the Kinks, though, maybe the group dodged a bullet in letting Avory off the hook. No matter how tense it might have become within the band with Watts, chances are that the drummer would never start hurling pieces of his kit at one of the band members should they get out of line.
