It was essentially your beat, your rhythm, your heart beating, your soul screaming “I am a Rolling Stone”. It was your brand. Like a tattooed sound in the walls of music of my memory. Like the fundamentals of your band.
Didn't know you once argued with Mick. They say you were in the middle of a tour and he asked “Where's my drummer?” in a room of a fancy hotel, and then minutes later you abruptly appeared and hit him in the face and told him “I'm not your drummer: you're my singer!” Nor didn't I know you'd written a book of poems and drawings in honor to Charlie Parker.
I just knew you were Charlie Watts, the low profile guy of “Their Satanic Majesties”. Vaguely I remembered listening to Get Yer Ya Ya's Out! in the firsts years of my life, when we lived in a small apartment and my dad read the newspaper in the living room on Sundays. Vaguely I remembered the cover of that album in which you were jumping all dressed in white and with a couple of electric guitars in your hands and shoulders. A donkey was behind you. It had pieces of a drum set and another electric guitar. Both were in some sort of abandoned highway. Somehow, the photograph made me think of the unknown paths of rock n' roll music.
My dad listened to that album one Sunday after another (or so I remember) and I used to play with my toys in the living room one Sunday after another and so I learned to be happy and comfortable with the songs of The Rolling Stones, and they became a part of my childhood rituals.
While I was experiencing this sort of iv shot of warmth, I was in the middle of another living room, many years later, and I was almost fourteen years old. We had recently moved to our own house. My dad did not longer hear Get Yer Ya Yar's Out! one Sunday after another. Then he had a weird fever for Miami Sound Machine, Santana and Charly García.
Nonetheless, it was a rad feeling. Immediately, as your snare hit into the song, flashes of my childhood came to my mind. Again, The Rolling Stones emerged from a mysterious device –not a turntable in this case, but an old TV–, providing me happiness and comfort.
Mick, Keith, Roonie and you were giants in black and white, with shades of gray, in the screen. A harmonica followed your snare drum and so the Telecaster riffs and the bass guitar lines. Mick sang “Love Is Strong” whilst everyone, except you, walked thru New York City. You were, as usual, this low profile awesome drummer, sat in the back of your drum set, holding the drumsticks with your peculiar jazz-style, and smiling and acting parsimonious, like if being the rhythm of The Rolling Stones was the easiest job in the world.
A few women jumped here and there, until the entire band met at Central Park.
Didn't I know that the aesthetics of that video in that afternoon in the middle of the 90's, sat in front of a TV, would bring me back to my childhood and to Get Yer Ya Ya's Out!; didn't I know that, a couple of decades later, whereas I still cannot process your death, I would realize that I've always been a Rolling Stone in my heart.
