7
CHARLIE AND BILL
When Blues Incorporated’s BBC gig became a regular thing, the Stones took over the Thursday night slot at the Marquee. It set the band apart from other would-be bluesmen: a regular gig meant playing time and exposure, which was everything. Harry Pendleton booked the Stones against his better judgment, then kept them on because they began to draw. Whereas four hundred people might show up for Blues Incorporated, many more were soon coming out for the Stones—kids wanted to see other kids, not mustachioed men in their thirties. Pendleton resented the teenage crowds, the stink and noise, an irritation expressed in snide remarks, put-downs. One afternoon, having had enough, Keith Richards took a swing at Harry Pendleton. Witnesses disagree. In some versions, Keith does not connect. In others, Pendleton is sent sprawling. Either way, that was the end of the gig.
It was also the last straw for Dick Taylor, who’d been thinking about going back to school. As Paul Jones said, “I thought it ridiculously optimistic to think we could make a living playing blues.” The fear for a young musician was staying on the circuit a season too long, only to realize that all your friends had gotten degrees and careers while you were in the exact place you’d been at eighteen, only you weren’t eighteen anymore. It was an autumnal mood, the way you feel when you wake from an afternoon nap and the house is empty. “When we lost the Marquee, I thought, well, there goes our best chance,” Taylor told me. “I decided to take a hard look at myself and really think through my situation. I wasn’t getting any younger. I suddenly realized what I had to do: quit the Stones and try to get into Royal Art College. I told Brian. He was nice about it. He said, ‘You’re the best rhythm and blues bass player in England,’ which was strange because I was the only rhythm and blues bass player in England. I got into college, and almost as soon as I started, the Stones became the biggest stars in the whole fuckin’ world! But I guess I cleared the way for Bill and Charlie. Without me quitting, who knows what would’ve happened.”
The Stones began auditioning bassists and drummers in late 1962. Bill Perks showed up at the Bricklayers Arms on December 7. He’d prepared by listening to the sort of music favored by the band, which he described as “slow blues.” When Bill came in, the Stones were at the bar smoking and laughing, a mean little circle. Jagger said hello, but Brian and Keith hung back, snickering. In whispered asides, they called Bill an “Ernie,” their term for the uncool who populated the outside world. Perks combed his hair in the fifties pompadour style. He wore sport coats, pressed pants, and sensible shoes. He was abbreviated, with narrow shoulders and a big head, dark eyes, and his hands…how can you play guitar with such small hands? The others were slapdash in comparison, with long, greasy hair and wrinkled, loose-fitting clothes. Having come from a bandstand world of neat jackets and shiny shoes, Bill was appalled by the Stones.
Bill Perks was of an earlier pop generation, five years older, but a decade back in time. Born October 24, 1936, he could recall World War II. The Battle of Britain, the air-raid shelters. In an early memory, he’s “standing in the street, looking up to a sky completely filled with formations of German bombers.” He grew up in South London, a runt, a tadpole. His father was a bricklayer, which is perfect, for what is a bassist if not a man who establishes the foundation? Like Muddy Waters, he lived in a house without plumbing or electric heat, thus came to the blues honestly, one cold walk to the outhouse at a time. At fifteen, he was apprenticed to a mason, but he’d already found rock ’n’ roll. He took up guitar but was troubled by his tiny hands. One night, he went to see a group called the Barron Knights perform in an old movie theater. “The sound of their bass guitar hit me straight in the balls,” he said later. “Staggered by its impact and the foundation it gave to the sound, I realized immediately what was missing in [my band]. From that moment, I wanted to play bass.” He removed the top strings from his guitar and restrung the bottom with bass strings. When he’d saved enough money, he bought a proper instrument. He loved bass because it matched his personality—the way he hung back, heard but rarely seen, the bricklayer, shy but crucially important.
After a hitch in the air force, he worked on the Royal Victoria Dock, married, became a father. On weekends, he played in bands. His key acquisitions came in the way of infrastructure. “I decided that if music was worth taking seriously, I’d better get good equipment,” he explained. Bill Perks was a classic type: the small man made large by rock ’n’ roll. In any other era, he would’ve been content with his wife, job, television, and beer, but he was instead pumped to monstrous proportions. He was twenty-six years old at the time of the audition, a fact later obscured. (In press materials, his birth year was changed from 1936 to 1941.) He jammed with the Stones, but it was listless, dispirited. “The big turning point came when I got my equipment in from the car and set it up,” he writes. “Their eyes opened wide on seeing my Vox AC30.”
When Bill Perks made his first appearance with the Stones, he was asked how he wanted to be introduced. It’s the great thing about rock ’n’ roll. You can reinvent yourself, assume any identity you want. Michael Jagger becomes Mick Jagger. Brian Jones becomes Elmo Lewis. Bill Perks recalled a kid he’d known in the Royal Air Force, a greaser, took what he wanted, never apologized. His name was Lee Wyman. It sounded nastier than Perks, tougher. Perks is a guy you ask for a loan. Wyman is a guy who parties from can till can’t. In this way, Bill Perks became Bill Wyman. In this way, Bill Wyman was born.
Ginger Baker took Brian Jones aside one night. He said the Stones were good but needed a decent drummer. He suggested Charlie Watts, which wasn’t a surprise. Watts was considered the best drummer on the scene. At one time or another, he’d played with just about everyone in the Stones, including Brian and Mick, but he resisted their entreaties. He did not need the gig, nor much care for their music. “You’ve got to understand something,” he told me years later, in his room, on the road, as we drank tea. “I’m not a rocker. Never have been.
“You couldn’t hold me up as an example of a rock-and-roll person at all,” he went on. “I was never like the lovely Keith Moon. My personality isn’t like Keith Moon’s. I liked him an awful lot as a person. He was lovely, but I was never like that. I am not an Aerosmith drummer, never have done. A TV producer, if he wanted a rock ’n’ roll band in a nightclub, would give you an Aerosmith clone, or the drummer in Pearl Jam. That look. Do you know what I mean? I’m not being offensive to them, I don’t mean to be if I sound it. I’m just saying I don’t look like that. I just play the drums. I happen to play in the Rolling Stones. I’ve done that for a long time. It started and continued. It’s a blues band. You can call it rock ’n’ roll but it’s blues. Chuck Berry is a blues player, but he virtually invented rock ’n’ roll.”
Charlie Watts was born on June 2, 1941. He grew up in Islington, north of London. His mother worked in a factory. His father was a driver for British Rail. Meanwhile, Charlie was listening to Duke Ellington on the BBC. He loved bebop. After graduating from Harrow Art School, while working as a designer in a London advertising firm, he put together a graphic biography of the trumpeter Charlie Parker: Ode to a Highflying Bird. For Charlie Watts, Elvis ’56 was Earl Bostic ’52, an alto sax player who fronted a Harlem combo that hit the charts with “Flamingo,” a jump blues. Charlie studied that song. It was the first time he became aware of any drummer, in this case Lionel Hampton, who played percussion as well as vibraphone. The beauty of the drumming, how it held everything together. It was a fascination that grew into an obsession with America, not the rock-’n’-roll energy, but cool blue jazz, the horn solo, the snare when it’s as faint as the heartbeat of a junk addict. “I used to listen to the records and dream of going to the Savoy Ballroom to see Chick Webb,” Watts said. “I’d love to have seen Ellington at the Cotton Club. I would have dressed beautifully for the occasion. I’d love to have seen Charlie Parker at the Royal Roost and Louis Armstrong at the Roseland Ballroom with a big band behind him…”
When Watts was fourteen, he heard “Walking Shoes” by the Gerry Mulligan Quartet. The drumming—Chico Hamilton playing with brushes—spurred him to action. He tore the strings off an old banjo and taught himself to play the snare. To fill out the sound, he banged pots and pans. His parents bought him a drum set that Christmas. He learned by listening to records, copying not just the sound but the style of his heroes. Cool eyes, impassive calm, the half smile that suggests the brain is not aware of what the hands are doing. And the clothes—my God, the clothes! More colorful shirts than Jay Gatsby, finer tweeds than Lucky Luciano. He’s handsome in an unusual way, with high cheekbones and eyes so wide-set he resembles a tropical fish. He strikes me as particularly British. The demeanor, the elegance, the bemusement. Half listening, never missing a thing, an oddball in the grungy world of rock ’n’ roll, humor so dry it can be detected only in trace amounts. “I give the impression of being bored,” he once said, “but I’m not bored. I’ve just a boring face.”
He began playing jazz in London with older musicians. He hung around Ronnie Scott’s club in Soho, jumping into combos that found themselves down a player. In this way, he was spotted by Korner, who mentored Watts as he’d mentored many others. Watts later spoke of his first visit to Korner’s flat as magical, an introduction to a new life: “The walls were full of records. The hip thing was to have them on the floor as well. All the records had been sent by record companies and I thought it was the hippest thing in the world. The whole Alexis setup was very glamorous to me, something I wanted to be a part of.” Korner urged Watts to join the Stones, who represented one of the best chances to carry the music forward. They lacked only a proper pulse. He finally took the plunge on January 14, 1963, when he debuted with the Stones at the Flamingo Club.
Charlie’s presence pulled together the loose ends, audio and visual. Perhaps because of his jazz training, his style is unique in rock ’n’ roll. In most bands, the drummer establishes the beat and the others fall into step. In the Stones, the rhythm guitarist establishes the beat, which the drummer picks up and follows. It gives the Stones’ sound a characteristic drag, a kind of musical drawl. You notice it even if you can’t explain why. It’s just the Stones, that idiosyncratic murmur. It’s one reason cover bands can never quite duplicate the sound: they lack the abnormality.
I saw it myself one night, watching the Stones rehearse. On song after song, it was Keith who got things going, as Charlie watched, waited, then, in the manner of a surfer catching a wave, grabbed and delineated the beat. In one extreme instance, Keith started the riff while Charlie was across the room drinking tea. When Charlie finished, he carefully disposed of his trash, adjusted his shirt, crossed the floor, sat down at the drums, twirled his sticks like Shane twirling his pistols, grinned at me, nodded at Keith, took a breath, then jumped in. “The Stones always had a very unique style built around a kind of delay,” Ron Wood said. “Keith plays something on the guitar, Charlie follows on the drums, and Bill is slightly behind Charlie with the bass. When Brian was playing with them he’d be somewhere in the middle. It combined to create a kind of chugging effect.”
When I asked Darryl Jones, who replaced Bill Wyman as the Stones bassist in 1994, what this felt like for a musician, he laughed. “When I first started with the Stones, it was like, these guys are chaos,” he said. “And there is a certain amount of chaos! It’s like a wheel spinning on its edge. But there’s got to be a little of that or it sounds too conceived. It’s been an important part of rock ’n’ roll from the beginning—from Elvis and those guys. Perfect just ain’t perfect, you know?”
It was not just Charlie’s drumming that completed the picture. It was his persona, stoic and unflappable. For the Stones, who, as Darryl Jones said, seem forever on the verge of spinning apart, Watts serves as an anchor, as ballast in the belly of the tossing ship. Cool as a jazz drummer who’s stumbled into the wrong party, signed on for a deviant gig, collar undone, tie undone. With Watts situated beside Wyman, the Stones had an implacable second line.