The one Rolling Stone that didn’t like their music: “Rock and roll was a dirty word”
There’s no conceivable way to divorce Mick Jagger from rock and roll history if you tried.
Although The Rolling Stones have gone down a lot of different roads throughout their history together, Joe Elliott of Def Leppard isn’t exactly off the mark when he said that the almighty ‘Book of Rock’ will probably have the frontman’s tongue on the front of it when it is eventually written. But for all of their accolades for helping push the genre forward, it’s not like they were strictly rock players throughout their time together.
Hell, if there was any specific genre that the band would classify themselves, it would probably be more about the blues than any type of rock and roll. Keith Richards had no problems wearing his influences from Chuck Berry on his sleeve whenever he played his favourite tunes, but there were also a lot of times where you would listen to their albums and the best song would be covers of artists like Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters rather than any of their original material.
And once they hit their classic period in the late 1960s, even Richards started taking cues from country music. He had been hanging out with Gram Parsons trying to find the right sound he was looking for, and when you look at how Jagger reacted to the music half the time, you could tell that he was far more interested in making music that was closer to pop than anything remotely rock and roll.
Given how his solo career has panned out, it’s not like that kind of music was ever going to overshadow what The Stones were doing, but it was important to at least keep things eclectic throughout their discography. The idea of working with The Dust Brothers might have sounded like a nutty idea in theory and an even weirder one in practice, but it was better for them to be taking chances than falling into a holding pattern where everyone knows where their albums are going.
But from day one, Charlie Watts was never onboard with the purest rock and roll song. He had grown up in the era before rock and roll was born, and much like his contemporaries like Ginger Baker, it was always about taking a few cues from the jazz world and adding a pulse that wasn’t felt in rock and roll before.
There were certainly capable drummers alongside him like Ringo Starr, but Jagger felt that Watts never fully embraced rock and roll, saying, “Charlie is not a power drummer. He’s a swing drummer, which I suppose shows that he’s a jazz drummer; he started being a jazz drummer. I don’t think he ever thought of playing rock ’n’ roll. Rock and roll was a dirty word to him, I should think, when he was growing up, because he liked all these jazz drummers that played with a very light touch, swing drummers that never played eights.”
If you go back and listen to those records with that in mind, though, it makes all the sense in the world. Aside from the fact that he very rarely played the hi-hat and the snare at the same time, Watts was always trying to put a certain sense of swing into the music where most drummers would stay stagnant, even on their more unconventional songs like ‘Paint It Black’ with that insistent beat kicking everything off.
It was far from the most authentic form of rock and roll, but if Watts hadn’t played that way, chances are we would have a slightly different version of Richards than the one we know today. After all, the rhythm guitarist and the drummer are always musical brothers in their own strange way, and the reason why those ‘Keef’ licks sound as great as they do come from always having the right foundation to work with on the bottom.
