well dressed charlie watts...

Charlie Watts: “While they were all going on about John Lee Hooker and all these other marvelous people like Muddy Waters, I’d be putting Charlie Parker and Sonny Rollins in. That’s what I was into when I joined the Rolling Stones, that’s what I used to listen to. Keith taught me to listen to Elvis Presley, because Elvis was someone I never bloody liked or listened to. Obviously, I’d heard ‘Hound Dog’ and all that, but to listen to him properly, Keith was the one who taught me.”

“Like Earl Phillips, Jimmy Reed’s drummer. Earl Phillips kind of played like a jazz drummer,” he says. “Another New Orleans drummer, Earl Palmer always thought of himself as a jazz player — and, in fact, he was; he played for King Pleasure.”

“That’s a drummer’s lot,” he says. “When you’d see Otis Redding, that band live, those tempos.… He was entertaining, doing it all, but he could stop during a sax solo or something. That drummer, though, was going the whole bloody time. It’s what you do. The drummer is the engine. It’s worse when you get tired and have a lot of the show still to do.

By Mikal Gilmore, Rolling Stone

Photo by John Stoddart