The rock bands Charlie Watts considered “vastly overrated”
Charlie Watts was never into anything too flashy with The Rolling Stones. He could have easily tried to lay down some mean drum solo if he wanted, but would that really have worked to put some jazzy freakout in the middle of ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’? Watts was always smarter than that, but he didn’t think the rest of the rock community had the same idea when he saw acts like Cream and Led Zeppelin gaining traction.
For Watts, he was always more interested in the song. Just go back to any Rolling Stones classic, and you’ll find Watts flying up and down his drumkit while never overplaying any of his fills. He was into making everything sound clean, and if it got to the point where you couldn’t hear the main riff over his drums, he probably thought something was very wrong.
Once the British Invasion started turning towards psychedelia, people suddenly realised that you didn’t really need to stay inside the three-minute pop song format. The Grateful Dead and Allman Brothers Band were expanding their craft to include massive jams on their live albums, so why couldn’t the rest of them try their hand at making something a little better when they hit record?
It’s not like The Stones didn’t fall prey to that trap every now and then. Across an album like Sticky Fingers, a song like ‘Can’t You Hear Me Knockin’ works best when it’s being played out with Mick Taylor and Richards trading different lines between each other. It has its place, but that wasn’t Watts’s preference.
When talking about bands jamming, Watts thought they were doing nothing but waste time, telling Louder, “A lot of white bands to me are vastly overrated. I say white bands because most of the music I love to play on record is by black American musicians, 40s and 50s stuff. When white musicians did get hold of the blues, they seemed compelled to expand it in all directions: Led Zeppelin, Cream, 15-minute versions of ‘Crossroads’. The Stones never did”.
That’s not to say that Watts didn’t know how to cut loose when he played the drums, though. If you listen to where the band took the blues when he was in the group, they were more inclined to add different genres into the mix. A song like ‘Love in Vain’ may have been a straightforward Robert Johnson tune, but turning it into a country tune is a sign of the band’s genius.
If anything, that was something that many bands of The Stones’ generation were taught. There’s only so much time to work with for something to get on the radio, so it’s better to actually make your statement as compactly as you can and move rather than fall into a strange zone where you start boring the audience.
Although The Stones could certainly learn a thing or two when working alongside bands like Zeppelin, it was more about having more style when playing than having too much substance. Jams can be fun, but for Watts, taking amazing songs and dragging them out for too long is the entire reason why the phrase “don’t bore us, get to the chorus” exists.