That’s Charlie Watts jumping for rock ’n’ roll joy on the cover of the Rolling Stones’ live album Get Yer Ya-Yas Out, dressed in a white T-shirt, white pants, and an Uncle Sam hat. He’s brandishing two guitars over his head while a mule, trailing behind him, dutifully carries Watts’s drum set.
It’s one of the few exuberant images of Watts, who often preferred to stay quietly in the background, letting his instrument speak for him. He “went for the groove,” as Stewart Copeland, the drummer for the Police, once observed. “Most rock drummers are trying to kill something; they’re chopping wood. Jazz drummers instead tend to be very loose to get that jazz feel, and he had that quality.”
Though Watts is regarded by some as the greatest drummer in rock history, jazz was his true passion. His day job was with the Stones, but in his off hours he’d play jazz with the Charlie Watts Quintet. And when he wasn’t playing jazz, he was collecting jazz-related ephemera—that, and first editions. His magnificent collection will be auctioned off at Christie’s in London this month. “Literature and Jazz: Part I” will go on sale live on September 28; “Literature and Jazz: Part II” is open for bidding online from September 15 to September 29.
Watts, who died in 2021, was more than just a rock star. A hipster with highbrow tastes, he was partial to Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers rather than Grand Funk Railroad or Vanilla Fudge. (Who isn’t?) Watts dressed in the bespoke style of the greats—Duke Ellington, Lester Young, Miles Davis—as if he had just stepped out of Birdland to smoke a cigarette.
Watts, it turns out, was a jazzhead with the library of an Oxford don. His vast collection of first editions includes Harlem Renaissance writers such as Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Countee Cullen, as well as English poets Dylan Thomas and Wilfred Owen. There are dozens of Agatha Christie novels alongside works by Arthur Conan Doyle, Dashiell Hammett, Dorothy Sayers, Raymond Chandler, and Chester Himes.
Masters of espionage, such as Graham Greene, Eric Ambler, and England’s greatest social critics and satirists, like George Orwell, P. G. Wodehouse, and Evelyn Waugh, also abound. As a collector, Charlie Watts threw a wide net, from D. H. Lawrence to Erle Stanley Gardner. Watts’s first career as a graphic artist is reflected in his collections of the Russan set-and-costume designer Léon Bakst.
The jewel in the crown is a rare presentation copy of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, inscribed, “For Harold Goldman/The original ‘Gatsby’ of this story, with thanks for letting me reveal the secrets of his past./Alcatraz/Cell Block 17/(I’ll be out soon, kid. Remember me to the mob. Fitzgerald).” Goldman was a fellow screenwriter at MGM, and “Cell Block 17” refers to the writing room where Fitzgerald briefly and frustratingly toiled. The very existence of this book is a literary event in itself.
There’s also Watts’s impressive collection of jazz photographs and memorabilia, such as a signed 10-inch single of Duke Ellington’s “Black Beauty/Swampy River” and a stunning black-and-white movie still of Josephine Baker reclining in a bathtub from the 1927 silent film La Sirène des Tropiques. Watts also collected Charlie Parker memorabilia, such as the saxophonist’s two Down Beat awards as well as his musicians’-union card.
Besides the Christie’s auction, we will be able to hear Charlie’s backbeat on two tracks from the Stones’ Hackney Diamonds, their first album of new songs in 18 years, to be released on October 20.
All I have left from crossing paths with the legendary drummer is his signature written across a doily from a French bistro in London. And that’s not for sale!
Nancy Schoenberger is the author of several books, including Wayne and Ford: The Films, the Friendship, and the Forging of an American Hero and Blanche: The Life and Times of Tennessee Williams’s Greatest Creation
