To the world, he was a rock star. But Watts often said that the actual experience was draining and unpleasant, and even frightening. “Girls chasing you down the street, screaming … horrible!… I hated it,” he told The Guardian newspaper in an interview. In another interview, he described the drumming life as a “cross between being an athlete and a total nervous wreck.”
Watts wasn’t a rock music fan at first and remembered being guided by Richards and Brian Jones as he absorbed blues and rock records, notably the music of bluesman Jimmy Reed. He said the band could trace its roots to a brief period when he had lost his job and shared an apartment with Jagger and Richards because he could live there rent-free.
“Keith Richards taught me rock and roll,” Watts said. “We’d have nothing to do all day and we’d play these records over and over again. I learned to love Muddy Waters. Keith turned me on to how good Elvis Presley was, and I’d always hated Elvis up ’til then.”
“Every band I’d ever been in had lasted a week,” he said. “I always thought the Stones would last a week, then a fortnight, and then suddenly, it’s 30 years.”
By JILL LAWLESS and GREGORY KATZ
Photo by Terry Disney/Daily Express
Don's Tunes
My favourite story almost certainly apocryphal, is when Charlie heard Mick phoned his hotel room at 5 in the morning and said “Where’s my drummer?” He showered shaved put his three piece suit on, a dash of cologne and went round to Mick’s room in his hotel, knocked the door and shoving Mick by the shoulders (“punched"- Keef) and he said
“Don’t ever call me your drummer again!
I’m not YOUR drummer!
Your MY singer!’
Class act!
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