Rolling Stones Drummer Charlie Watts Dies

Charlie watts, drummer for the Rolling Stones, has died at the age of 80.

The announcement was made by his press office with a note asking that the law be respected. “the privacy of his family, band members and close friends at this difficult time”. His heart failed to survive an emergency operation, a regurgitation of the problem that had prevented him from participating in the band's 13-date tour.

“For once I was out of time” had commented, but the suspicion is that the Rolling Stones today they really lose a fundamental piece of their lineup. The last to enter in fact, in 1963, about a year after the official debut of Mick Jagger and company. And at that time Watts, of the genre they intended to propose, that sort of unstoppable cross between rhythmic blues and pure rock, had not the slightest idea.

Yes, because Charlie Watts came from jazz: “For me – he said – the blues was Charlie Parker when he played slowly” and probably, this was the band's fortune so much so that from the outside Watts was considered the least Stones of the Stones, for the Stones, as also stated several times by Keith Richards, it was instead a glue of inestimable value. Meanwhile human, the only one apparently capable of mediating between two very first women like Jagger and Richards.

And then musically: the Rolling Stones would have been different without that touch, that rhythm, that heartbeat, that Charlie Watts managed to infuse into the rock somersaults of the other members.

Watts was the reflective soul of the Rolling Stones, never over the top, even when he lived over the top, like any damned rock star worth his salt. In the 80s, in fact, he also ended up in the tunnel of heroin, when he was moving around the scene with wild recklessness, but the thing never became public knowledge, almost top secret compared to the public demonstrations of his friend Keith.

We are leaving today the one that Rolling Stone magazine placed twelfth in its ranking of the one hundred best drummers, ironically, who will be remembered for having made history in a blues rock band, when in fact he always committed himself until the end to not abandon jazz with projects outside the Stones with which he had made a name for himself in a more intellectual but less noisy and glittering musical universe.

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The Rolling Stones will probably continue to exist in a rather loose manner, having become untouchable icons, pieces of history regardless, whose physical existence counts up to a certain point; he will be replaced by Steve Jordan, as happened in these last dates, another great drummer, already famous for having played with the genius John Mayer but above all in the legendary Blues Brothers, as well as being a collaborator in several projects of Keith Richards himself and having toured with Eric Clapton.

But something suggests that the Rolling Stones today have lost that something that anchored them to the music they played, that of a time when there was a need to survive in a world that changed its features every decade. And it is above all thanks to Charlie Watts if the Rolling Stones, on the threshold of 60 years of existence, still sit among the untouchables of the history of music.