Trying to name the coolest member of the Rolling Stones is like picking a favorite child or sibling. But come on: it was obviously drummer Charlie Watts. In a band that defined glamour and excess, he was measured—the backbone of the group, musically and otherwise. What’s cooler than that?
With his death Tuesday, we’ve lost the man Keith Richards called “one of the greatest drummers the damn world is ever gonna see.” Watts was 80, and the news came a few weeks after it was announced that he’d be missing the Stones’s upcoming U.S. tour because of a recent surgery. Otherwise, he hadn’t sat out a show since he got the gig in 1963. In the six decades between, he burned the openings to songs like “Honky Tonk Women” and “Sympathy for the Devil” into our collective consciousness.
Even though he shared a stage with the biggest, most flamboyant personalities in all of human history, Watts was truly comfortable doing his own thing. On a stylistic level, as he told GQ in 2012, “I always felt totally out of place with the Rolling Stones. Not as a person—they never made me feel like that. I just mean the way I looked. Photos of the band would come back—I'll have a pair of shoes on and they've got trainers [sneakers]. I hate trainers, even if they're fashionable.” He opted for impeccable Savile Row suits, a fondness instilled in him by his working-class father, who took young Charlie along to the tailor’s.
But performing is where he really stood out. When I saw the Stones a couple years back, Mick and Keith and Ronnie were all swanning around in their spiked hair and silks and pirate gear. Charlie, meanwhile, sat steadily at his drums in a dadcore blue button-down, the very portrait of aging gracefully. This, I thought, this is what real power looks like.
Beyond the sartorial, there was a spiritual component to his coolness. Watts was the rare kind of rock star who couldn’t have cared less about the star part. He married his wife Shirley in 1964 and they stayed together for the rest of his life. As the story goes, when the Stones would visit the Playboy Mansion, Watts, ever-faithful, would opt to hang out in the game room. While his bandmates made headline upon headline, he settled down in a quiet English countryside town and raised horses.
It’s probably because of his usual equanimity that this anecdote from Keith Richards’s memoir, Life, is making the rounds today:
“We got back to the hotel about five in the morning and Mick called up Charlie. I said, don’t call him, not at this hour. But he did, and said, ‘Where’s my drummer?’ No answer … About twenty minutes later, there was a knock at the door. There was Charlie Watts, Savile Row suit, perfectly dressed, tie, shaved the whole fucking bit. I could smell the cologne! I opened the door and he didn’t even look at me, he walked straight past me, got hold of Mick and said, ‘Never call me your drummer again.’ Then he hauled him up by the lapels … and gave him a right hook.”
Cool means never losing yours—except when you really, really have to.