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CaptainCorella
Spotted in another thread (the Covid one).

Totally brilliant remark.

"The James Watt telescope (they could have renamed it to Charlie Watts telescope, though) has finally made it into space!"

Is it too late to start the campaign?

After reading-up on James Watt’s contribution to life’s advancements, I reach the conclusion that he’s wholly worthy. Charlie Watts played the drums in a rock band. So, err, no. I’m sure you’re kidding, anyway!



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2021-12-27 13:09 by Big Al.

It's called the James Webb telescope...

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Koen
It's called the James Webb telescope...

Oh, erm... it must’ve been all the Nigerian Guinness Foreign Extra I consumed yesterday evening. I’ll have to read-up some more!

Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Chad Smith on his “unbelievable” experience meeting “incredible musician” Charlie Watts

"Charlie Watts is watching me f*cking play. Unbelievable!"

By Erica Campbell
10th February 2022

Red Hot Chili Peppers‘ Chad Smith has opened up about his “unbelievable” experience meeting legendary late Rolling Stones drummer, Charlie Watts.

Speaking to NME for the latest Big Read, the Chili’s drummer also discussed his respect for the Stones’ staying power.

“They’re still going man, still wheeling around,” said Smith. “I think because they were there in the very beginning of rock and roll or modern rock and roll anyway. They’re the last of the Mohicans, they’re still going somehow.”

Smith went on to tell NME about the time he met Watts (who died in August 2021, aged 80) while playing a show at the Rose Bowl back in 1994.

He explained how during sound-check, he noticed Watts standing to the side of his drum tech. “It was August and there he is in a full suit, standing there at 3 o’clock in the afternoon in the sun looking and watching us soundcheck,” the drummer shared. “I’m like ‘f*cking Charlie Watts is watching me f*cking play. Unbelievable!'”

The RHCP drummer went on to explain what it was like to spend time with the legendary sticksman outside of performing.

“He was such a big jazz guy – he wanted to know what kit I had. He was very sweet and I got to spend a day with him,” Smith said. “We had the same drum company called DW Drums and he was out here and we toured the factory together and he was so interested in all the different plies and what kind of wood and how it was put together. He was super cool and nice to everybody and just a real gentleman.”

He also talked about how the jazz enthusiast was an avid “collector” and music fan.

“He’d say ‘I have some watches from Gene Krupa and he says ‘I’m not gonna wear them but I look at them and it’s like, ‘hey, Gene wore those when he went out to dinner.’ He really appreciated those kinds of things. He was a real fan. When he spoke, all he wanted to talk about was jazz. I couldn’t get two words in about the Stones or anything. He just wanted to talk about everything jazz.”

Smith added: “I know some, but not to his extensive [knowledge], so I just nodded. You probably know people that go off on a tangent about something that you sort of don’t really know, you’re just kind of ‘Mmmm yes, Gerry Mulligan in 1946 oh wow really?’ But he was super sweet and nice and obviously what an incredible musician.”

[www.nme.com]

Thanks bye bye johnny - that was nice.
I was at that '94 Rose Bowl show, and along with the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Buddy Guy was also an opener - an amazing day and night from start to finish.

Here's a full video interview with Chad Smith and Charlie from a few years ago on the Drum Channel. > Charlie and Chad

"Charlie Watts was truly the gentleman of rock and roll. From a drummer’s perspective, his ability to swing a rock band
made you feel the music far beyond what you were hearing. We will continue to honor the legacy he left behind".

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Rip this joint, gonna save your soul, round and round and round we go......

Thanks bbj and Hairball for posting the NME article and the Drum Channel video, both about our Charlie Watts.

It's great every now and then to read, or watch and listen to videos featuring Charlie.

He will always be remembered by so many people all over the world.

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Big Al

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Koen
It's called the James Webb telescope...

Oh, erm... it must’ve been all the Nigerian Guinness Foreign Extra I consumed yesterday evening. I’ll have to read-up some more!

Hi Big All. I'm the guilty one. I ran over the subject again by coincidence and realized that I caused you doing all that research on James Watt, because still being down about the loss of our Charlie Watts, I mixed up the names of the famous steam engine inventor James Watt and the NASA guy James Webb. There was nothing wrong with your Guinness

From now on any time the James Webb telescope hits the news I will automatically think of Charlie. Maybe he will watch from the heavens over that precious telescope that will hopefully tell us lots more about how The Rolling Stones (and everything else) came into being
Cheers!

I'm a GHOST living in a ghost town

Darryl Jones Remembers Charlie Watts

The bassist honors his former Rolling Stones bandmate (6/2/41 – 8/24/21)

Published February 11, 2022 – By Darryl Jones


Photo: Enid Farber

The music of the Rolling Stones wasn’t a big part of our household growing up in Chicago. I do remember hearing a handful of songs on the radio that I tried to sing when I was around four years old, like “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and “She Loves You” by the Beatles, “I Got the Feeling” by James Brown, and “Satisfaction” by the Stones. Later, “Angie” was such a huge hit that it ended up on Black radio. That was probably the first song I was hip to that I knew was the Stones.

Many years later, I was going out with a woman in Italy and she was playing the Steel Wheels record. I was listening to it and she says, “Isn’t this great?” and I was like, “Yeah, it’s okay.” But the more I listened to it, the more I thought, “Hmm, the way I play could really work with them.” It was years later when I actually got that call, and I came in and auditioned. It would have been May 1993, and we played through a bunch of the hits like “Brown Sugar” and “Miss You.” Then later, in October of that year, they asked me to come in and play through the songs they had written for Voodoo Lounge.

As a bass player, the first thing that I do when I play with a band is zero in on the drummer. While it would have been easy to look at Keith Richards and Mick Jagger and Ronnie Wood standing in front of me, they were not my first concern. My first concern was “Let me see if I can lock in with Charlie.”

I started playing “Licking Stick” by James Brown. I was playing that bass line just to get a sound, and Charlie started playing and then we all jammed on that for a second. After we played that and maybe one or two songs, Charlie stood up and started pacing a bit. I remember thinking to myself, “Either that’s a really good sign or a really bad one.” But I felt like maybe he felt something. I remember leaving that audition thinking to myself, “If that felt as good to them as it felt to me, I think I’ll hear from them.”

It did feel to me like he was easy to play with. I definitely found out over the next months and years that there were certain things that I needed to learn when playing with him. But it felt good the first time.

I soon realized that, though we were playing in the rock & roll idiom, Charlie’s influences were quite a bit broader than that. Everyone knows he was a big jazz fan. You can certainly hear Papa Jo Jones in his playing. I know he loved all the swing and bebop guys: Dave Tough, Kenny Clarke, Max Roach, Philly Joe Jones … he was friends with Roy Haynes. I can’t say specifically which drummers influenced him but when he played a fill, that wasn’t a rock & roll fill. It wasn’t really straightforward. He also dug the Motown guys like Benny Benjamin and Al Jackson from Al Green’s band. He had all of those influences and all of those things went together into him creating this school of rock & roll drumming. He was also self-taught, so that creates a very particular kind of thing. If you’re self-taught, there’s less of a blueprint. It’s not easily copyable.

We talked about music constantly. All sorts of music. The thing about Charlie was that he was going to hear Miles well before I played with Miles. Charlie saw Miles in the ’60s. And then there were the blues guys. When you hear Charlie and the Stones talking about Muddy Waters, they’re not telling you some story that they heard. Instead from it’s when they were playing with Muddy Waters. I remember Charlie talking about what a cool and gentle guy Howlin’ Wolf was. He was pretty well-versed.

He collected famous people’s drums. For example, he had Dave Tough’s kit. He said, “History was made on that drum kit. That should be taken care of.”

I never met anybody who knew that much about clothes. Sometimes we’d be in Japan and he’d take me to his shirt tailor. He took me to his shoemaker in London and I had a few shoes made. I remember going into Huntsman of Savile Row with him and there was some material that was laying out as we went into the basement where the tailors were working. Charlie reached out and touched this fabric. When the guy came over to us, Charlie remarked about the gauge of the fabric. And the guy confirmed he was right. He looked at a jacket and said, “That’s from 1970.” And the guy said, “Yeah, that’s right, Charlie.” I thought it was brand-new. He was very well-versed in those sorts of things.

Pierre de Beauport, the longtime guitar technician with the Stones, said something apt about Charlie: “What an extraordinary example of a human being.” He really was extraordinary—very kind, thoughtful, and funny. They just don’t make them like that anymore. A true gentleman.

- as told to Lee Mergner

[jazztimes.com]

Every time I see this thread pop up, I'm thrown back to August last year.Sometimes still cannot believe it.

[www.nme.com]

Posted also here: [iorr.org] .

[jazztimes.com]

Nice read, nice sentiments from Darryl.
Thanks, harley

nice article & picture

He doesn’t sound like he is much of a fan of the Stones music made before he joined .The best he can say is Steel Wheels is okay?Implying only good thing is they played with and saw jazz and blues musicians

Why does everybody around here act as if Charlie Watts is not dead? They're all psyched for the upcoming years as if everything is normal and it is now time for a new Stones tour? It makes me sick. The loss of Brian Jones (a drugged wreck whose days were numbered since 1955 - NOT 1965), Mick Taylor (a brilliant yet socially-inept band/member/guitarist) and Bill Wyman (older, tired, and fed up with the machine) were all detrimental to the band. But Watts put the nail in the coffin. The yippity-do-da attitude of the fans who can't see that it is over fills me with disgust.

To parody William Shatner on an SNL skit at a Star Trek convention: "It was just a band. You have turned it into a colossal waste of time"

Face it: Charlie died after almost six decades of service. He (and the band) were a treasure. But please, finally let it go.

Please! 1969 was 53 years ago! Move on!

well ya heard it from spodlumt it's over time for bv to close the site

yes how dare the stones go on without charlie even years after charlie stated that he considered himself replaceable and before his death giving the blessing for his replacement

and of course this is not what charlie would have wanted

for the group of men he spent 60 years playing with to continue without him for as long as they can keeping his memory alive

playing the music he helped create (and that made him and his family extremely wealthy giving them a quality of life most of us could never dream of) bringing joy and pleasure to millions of fans

shame on the fans who in their grief at his loss found comfort and relief by gathering together with fellow fans in stadiums with what's left of the band to honor and celebrate him by watching them perform

because if there is one thing charlie watts hated it was music and the live performance of it

also shame on the fans who continue to love the band and there music and engage in fierce debate and discussion on the every minutae of there past present and yes future

because charlie a humble man who never felt entirely comfortable with his fame or the fuss people made about him

would have wanted his fans to remember him by shaming fellow fans who dare get excited at the prospect of new music, shows or archive releases from the rolling stones

Professor Wolf:
God bless you for endorsing my viewpoint!
Spodlumt

your soooooo welcome


but in all seriousness we all have our opinions

i don't think charlie would have wanted the stones to end because he died

and he wouldn't have wanted people to stop going see the band because he died either

nobody's pretending he didn't die

not a day goes by here that someone dosen't bring up charlie and how great he was

same thing for brian and ian

this place and what we do here is a living memorial to there memories

i'll admit that they are lesser without him and for some it just isn't worth it anymore

but for a lot of us there is just enough of that magic left that it makes it worthwhile

you don't have to go see them or buy new music from them

but can't you just accept that the rest of can without resorting to telling us how sick we make you?

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Spodlumt
Why does everybody around here act as if Charlie Watts is not dead?

The "Charlie Watts Dies at 80" thread have got more than 1,300 posts and 250,000 reads. Why do you talk in behalf of "everybody", when surely we all do know that Charlie is no longer with us?

Bjornulf

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bv

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Spodlumt
Why does everybody around here act as if Charlie Watts is not dead?

The "Charlie Watts Dies at 80" thread have got more than 1,300 posts and 250,000 reads. Why do you talk in behalf of "everybody", when surely we all do know that Charlie is no longer with us?

Apart from bv's statistics, I like to make a point to Spodlumt.
Whether we like it or not, our (everybody's) life is built on memories.
Whatever we do today will be a memory tomorrow. Your memory about The Rolling Stones apparently ends in 1969, but off course that's not really true. You're upset about people's behaviour concerning Charlie Watts, but you remember him dying on August 24 last year, right? So until that time "they" were still the Rolling Stones for you? No Brian Jones, no Ian Stewart, Bill and Mick T. don't exist for you anymore? Our American friends now have a memory of the Rolling Stones without Charlie and hopefully soon "we Europeans" will too and maybe even our Latino friends.
If you're really a Rolling Stones fan (and hopefully not a frustrated Beatles fan who wants them to "die" as a band) embrase them with all your heart (and with our beloved Charlie Watts as your treasure memory, just like many still love to remember Brian Jones). They are just as much part of your life as they are of all of us here on IORR. Memories ...



I'm a GHOST living in a ghost town

Dear Charlie, time flies, today it's been 6 months since you left us, the pain just got more painful, I'm missing a big piece of my heart that will never heal.

[www.facebook.com]






Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2022-02-24 10:16 by UrbanSteel.

Keith spoke about Charlie's illness for the first time during the Love Rocks NYC interview. He stated that Charlie battled 'a round of cancer two years ago' (that would be in 2019 or 2020) but got a 'double whammy' last year... Keith also said that he visited Charlie prior to his death..

The "CBS Sunday Morning" interview referenced above:

Ah yeah, thanks!

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Koen
Every time I see this thread pop up, I'm thrown back to August last year.Sometimes still cannot believe it.

I know exactly what you mean. Feel exactly the same

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jigsaw69

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Koen
Every time I see this thread pop up, I'm thrown back to August last year.Sometimes still cannot believe it.

I know exactly what you mean. Feel exactly the same

Yep. Still sort of unbelievable.

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steffialicia

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jigsaw69

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Koen
Every time I see this thread pop up, I'm thrown back to August last year.Sometimes still cannot believe it.

I know exactly what you mean. Feel exactly the same

Yep. Still sort of unbelievable.

Yes, and when the Stones plays live without him, it really hits home how much he is missed.

_____________________________________________________________
Rip this joint, gonna save your soul, round and round and round we go......

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Hairball

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steffialicia

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jigsaw69

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Koen
Every time I see this thread pop up, I'm thrown back to August last year.Sometimes still cannot believe it.

I know exactly what you mean. Feel exactly the same

Yep. Still sort of unbelievable.

Yes, and when the Stones plays live without him, it really hits home how much he is missed.

I haven't seen them without him yet. It's going to be hard to get used to. For me the moment it hit home were the photos of the 1st final bow last year with just the 3 of them left. It just didn't feel right. I'm less enthusiastic about this tour than any previous I've attended, but I still plan to make it to all 3 UK shows + just maybe one abroad. All LD if poss. It will be tinged with sadness for sure.

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grzegorz67

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Hairball

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steffialicia

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jigsaw69

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Koen
Every time I see this thread pop up, I'm thrown back to August last year.Sometimes still cannot believe it.

I know exactly what you mean. Feel exactly the same

Yep. Still sort of unbelievable.

Yes, and when the Stones plays live without him, it really hits home how much he is missed.

I haven't seen them without him yet. It's going to be hard to get used to. For me the moment it hit home were the photos of the 1st final bow last year with just the 3 of them left. It just didn't feel right. I'm less enthusiastic about this tour than any previous I've attended, but I still plan to make it to all 3 UK shows + just maybe one abroad. All LD if poss. It will be tinged with sadness for sure.

It definitely didn't feel right, and it's definitely not the same.
I managed to see two shows nearby in L.A. last October (LD's for both), and while they were good fun, they were more than enough for that mini-tour.
If they ever make it back to the States - specifically to the SoCal area, I might see them again, but the enthusiasm is definitely far from what it used to be.
Have a good time at the three shows you attend - - if I was attending just one, Liverpool would probably be my top pick as my wife and I have friends and family nearby in Chester.

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Rip this joint, gonna save your soul, round and round and round we go......