“Terrible”: Keith Richards picks the worst drummer he ever worked with
Any great rock and roll band needs to rely on a rock-solid drummer to keep everything low to the ground. Although many people can claim to keep time as best they can, it takes a certain internal rhythm to turn a song from being a fairly enjoyable pop hit to one of the best tunes that the world has ever heard. While most of the classic Rolling Stones sound can come from the right hand of Keith Richards, there were times he could easily sense that everything was going wrong.
When looking at The Stones’ best moments, they often come from them trying to make the best with a certain groove. Most of their early songs may have been able to get the job done within a few minutes, but looking at their classic period from Beggars Banquet through to Goats Head Soup, some of their songs managed to get a lot longer, which meant the band riding a groove and letting Mick Taylor fly off the handle whenever the time called for it.
And without Charlie Watts behind the kit, it would have never worked how it was supposed to. Watts was never a traditional fan of rock music, but listening to the way that he plays around with the time now and again, some of the best moments in the group’s career come from his musical imagination, whether it’s using the cowbell half the time on ‘Honky Tonk Women’ or throwing in some quirky fills from the jazz world.
Before Watts joined, though, he was never in the running for being a rock and roll drummer. All of his heroes came from the world of jazz, and for a brief moment, Tony Chapman was in the running for being one of the band’s first major percussionists. While the band could work with what they had, Chapman was never the right guy for the job in Richards’s mind.
You have to remember that the title of ‘rhythm guitarist’ should have that first word in big block letters, which means that they needed to have something a little bit stronger behind the kit. And no matter how much Richards could adapt to whatever drummer he was working with, Chapman was never consistent with any of his beats, usually playing a little fill here and there and always finding himself out of time with the rest of the group.
Although Richards would try to be diplomatic, he had no problem calling Chapman among the most botched members of any jam session he played, saying, “One day we picked up a drummer called Tony Chapman who was our first regular drummer. Terrible. One of the worst… cat would start a number and end up either four times as fast as he started it or three times as slow. But never stay the same.”
Once they found the money to afford Watts to join the group, though, everything fell into place. Despite it still being considered Brian Jones’s baby at this point, every member was able to contribute something to the mix now that they had a solid foundation to build their tunes around. But this was far from the typical rock and roll drumming that most people knew.
Much like Ringo Starr, Watts would turn himself into a bold musical thinker whenever he got behind the kit, usually throwing in offbeat accents when he could and never hitting his snare and hi-hat at the same time. It was a bit unconventional, but when has anything that The Stones have been involved known with going along with the program?
