The Rolling Stones drummer stayed just behind the beat—and set a new sartorial standard in rock n' roll
at a hospital in London, surrounded by his family. While the cause of death hasn’t been released, the Stones announced earlier this month that Watts would miss the band’s upcoming world tour after undergoing “a procedure which was completely successful,” adding that “doctors this week concluded that he now needs proper rest and recuperation.
In any case, the world will not see the likes—or the longevity—of Watts ever again. As the now-iconic lineup of the Rolling Stones was first coming together in London in 1963, Watts—then working variously as a jazz drummer and an artist for an ad agency after having turned his banjo into a snare drum as a child—was on a level above the then-struggling outfit, which existed mainly as a cover band specializing in American blues.
While Jones’s and Richards’s excesses with drugs are legendary and Wyman’s and Jagger’s exploits with women equally so, Watts secretly married Shirley Ann Shepard in 1964 and remained married to her for the rest of his life. On tour, he retired to his room alone, compiling a mountainous collection of drawings over the decades of every bed he slept in since 1967.
Three other obvious things need to be said about Charlie Watts: Aside from—and amidst—keeping the beat for the Stones, he was perhaps the finest sartorialist in all of rock n’ roll. By his own admission, he kept more than 200 suits, most of them custom made on Savile Row, in his London home alone, and owned “one of every style” of shoes—again, handmade. In a world largely defined by spandex and ripped jeans, Watts was the notched lapel, the tabbed collar.
Finally, Watts’s economy with words was on par with his spare eloquence on the drum kit. On tour in Amsterdam in 1984, after Jagger and Richards returned back to the band’s hotel around 5 a.m.
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