News The drummer Charlie Watts considered the greatest: “There’s only one of him”
In the grand scheme of rock history, drummers tend to come and go throughout every band. If they didn’t write any of the songs and their only job was to just keep the time throughout the song, most fans would give a passive shrug if they found out their favourite band let go of someone behind the skins. In the genre’s golden age, every band member was important, and Charlie Watts knew he was seeing something special when he saw Keith Moon for the first time.
Usually, anyone who had ever met Moon had scars or war stories to prove it. This man was completely insane, even by rock standards, and his hard-partying ways were the stuff of legend when he came out on the scene. Other bands may have been able to party hard, but there was some indestructible force behind Moon’s antics that made him look invincible whenever he threw a television out a window.
Though that was the expectation for what drummers were supposed to do, Watts was fairly reserved by comparison. Throughout his career with The Rolling Stones, Watts was just as likely to be listening to jazz in his spare time, getting some sleep once the gig was over, and being one of the few low-key members of the group.
If you were to take everything that Watts did on the drums, multiply it by 50 and put some attitude behind it, you would still only be halfway to what Moon could do. Whereas Pete Townshend may have written the songs, to say that Moon gave them a pulse would be underselling it. He turned these songs into musical rocketships whenever he played, and when combined with Townshend’s guitar and John Entwistle’s bass, they had a sonic wrecking ball before Roger Daltrey had even started screaming.
Watts knew that this was something that came only once every generation, later recalling in Rolling Stone, “Keith Moon, there was a character. Loved him. There’s only one of him. I miss him a lot…He was an amazing drummer with Pete (Townshend). A lot of guys, I don’t think, would have liked playing with him. He didn’t play real time or anything, he wasn’t funky or anything. He was a whole other thing”.
Moon may have had the physical stamina for three separate men in his prime, but that kind of excess was bound to catch up with him sooner or later. Although the rest of The Who managed to keep things in check whenever they went onstage, Moon’s struggles with alcohol were too much for him to take half the time, leading to him becoming out of step with the band halfway through Who Are You.
Even though he was still his charming self, Moon eventually succumbed to his demons in the late 1970s, passing away in his apartment after overdosing on pills. While the band would carry on without their trademark superstar behind the kit, you can’t help but listen to their later material and feel that something is missing.
The same goes for Watts when The Stones replaced him with Steve Jordan. Each drummer that came afterwards might do a phenomenal job behind the kit, but when you remove the original drummer of the band, it’s like removing the heartbeat of the group.
