Carlo Little: The drummer Brian Jones initially wanted to join The Rolling Stones
There’s no way to discount chemistry within any rock and roll band. Even though people can spend their entire lives trying to find the best person to play with, it all comes down to whether or not sparks fly the minute that someone picks up an instrument and starts feeding off their musical partners whenever a tune starts. Although Brian Jones had a very specific idea in mind when forming The Rolling Stones, he initially felt that this drummer had everything that he wanted at the back of the stage.
However, there’s a difference between what Jones wanted and what the band eventually became. There had been plenty of instances where the guitarist acted as the leader of the group, but looking at where Mick Jagger and Keith Richards took their songs, it was impossible for him to compete with them since he didn’t have tunes like ‘Satisfaction’ or ‘The Last Time’ under his belt.
When settling on the lineup, Jones still had a vision of the perfect blues combo. The music that The Beatles were championing was all well and good, but he had his eye on something a little more rustic, akin to the bluesmen that he heard growing up, like Sonny Boy Williamson and Muddy Waters.
As much as the band could play blues until dawn, there was something magical about the way Charlie Watts played off of everyone else. Outside of locking in with Richards whenever he churned out a riff, Watts was always a descendant of genres like jazz, meaning that every single one of his performances had a certain amount of groove to it before the riff even came in half the time.
When first scouring for musicians, though, Jones had an eye on what Carlo Little was bringing to the table. The band had started jamming with people like Mick Avory of The Kinks, but back when keyboardist Ian Stewart was still a mainline member of the group, he remembered Jones telling him that Little would have made them the band that he wanted to be in.
Despite the band being lost in the woods for a fair bit of the early 1960s, Little seemed to be the right guy for the guitarist, with Stewart saying, “Brian was quite enthralled with Carlo. He’d never heard anything like it before. Brian wanted someone flash like Carlo Little because by then Brian was starting to see dollar signs.”
Dollar signs can only take someone so far, and when Watts got behind the drumkit, there was always an argument as to who was right for the job. Little could very well have played the songs exactly how Jones wanted them to be played, but there’s a certain heartbeat that’s missing even when Steve Jordan played with The Stones following Watts’s passing.
Given where Little ended up in bands like The Flower Pot Men, though, it was probably a blessing in disguise that the band went in a different direction. They would have still most likely sold a bunch of records, but we not be speaking about them in such hallowed terms today with that lineup.
