The one member Mick Jagger and Keith Richards called the heart of The Rolling Stones: “Our mainstay”
There are so many bands that thrive off the same tension that Mick Jagger and Keith Richards had.
If you look at the greatest rock and roll bands that have come along in the past few decades, all of them are working off that same kind of sibling rivalry that made the magic, whether that was James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich or Robert Plant and Jimmy Page. But just because the other members of the band didn’t get that much attention didn’t make them any less important in the long run.
If anything, they were the ones who kept The Stones going throughout every decade. There isn’t a single person who didn’t know that Brian Jones formed the band and made them what they turned into, but Jagger and Richards were bringing the lifeblood to all of their songs. They needed a sense of menace everywhere they went, and that came from them trying to make tunes that were a bit more risque than before.
Every one of their songs had a bit more edge to them based on what the biggest names in blues had been doing, and their brand of rock and roll certainly wasn’t as dangerous as what The Beatles had been doing. They were a much different beast, but as any good rock and roll musician will tell you, it doesn’t matter in the slightest if it doesn’t have a good rhythm section behind it.
The bass player and the drummer need to be like brothers to a certain degree, and Bill Wyman was the perfect foil to what Richards was doing half the time. He could come up with different extensions on what they could do, but both Jagger and Richards figured that the Stones were never going to be the same again after Charlie Watts passed away after years of rock and roll debauchery.
Watts was the one adding a sense of stability, and Richards never took that for granted, even when drafting Steve Jordan, saying, “Charlie Watts was our mainstay… You took Charlie, everything fell apart, and to be able to transition this thing and also feeling Charlie’s presence in a way via Steve. Steve loved Charlie to death and they were good friends. So it’s almost like a transitional thing that we all have to deal with when we get up there every night.”
And despite Jagger having his back to Watts most every night, he felt that he was the true heartbeat of the band in every way, saying, “Charlie was the heartbeat for the band, you know, and also a very steady personality. He was a very reliable person, wasn’t a diva—that’s the last thing you want in a drummer.” But Watts’s influence on their sound is something that’s more felt than heard every single time that he worked on their records.
Aside from never playing his snare and hi-hat at the same time, the whole point of his playing was adding the breath back into the music. He was always indebted to the best jazz drummers that came before him, and the only thing that he could hope to do was do the same thing whenever he performed tunes like ‘Paint it Black’ or add that slight offbeat rhythm to a song like ‘Honky Tonk Women’.
So while Jordan does more than his fair share to keep the band moving throughout the years, there’s a certain energy that Watts carried with him that will never be felt again. Others have tried their best to capture the same Stones vibe on their own records, but unless you have the same hands and heartbeat that Watts had, you were only going to be a copycat of what they had done.
