Charlie Watts vs John Bonham

Sure, by making Watts sound like Bonham lol

will always take Stones over Zep (whom I love dearly, mind) but not entirely sure I’d be inclined listen to hours of just his drum tracks for the hell of it.

actually fuck that. maybe? lol

Bonham never hobbled a Zeppelin song the way Watts does "Get Off My Cloud"

(don’t love drums on Ruby tho)

i saw charlie leading a jazz band outdoors at lincoln center and there was one tune where he got turned around mid-song and never found his way back. i was a little embarrassed for him. i still pick him though.

Bonham did have the advantage of dying young.

best Charlie performances on RS records for me are on Some Girls/ Emotional/ Tattoo. probably has a lot to do w engineering but that’s my shit

John Bonham vs. Keith Moon is a much harder call. A coin toss, really.

I spent years in my bedroom – literally fucking years – listening to Bonham's drums and trying to emulate his swing or his behind-the-beat swagger or his speed or power. Not just memorizing what he did on those albums but getting myself into a place where I would have the same instinctual direction as he had.

--Dave Grohl

eh, who cares

John Bonham vs. Keith Moon is a much harder call. A coin toss, really.

i saw charlie leading a jazz band outdoors at lincoln center and there was one tune where he got turned around mid-song and never found his way back. i was a little embarrassed for him. i still pick him though.

I once saw Cindy Blackman completely lose the plot during a solo with Pharoah Sanders’ band in the mid 90s.

The fuck

Indeed

https://www.avclub.com/john-bonham-george-fludas-led-zeppelin-bonhamology-1849058797

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eef--qblm6A

Keith Moon vs. John Bonham POLL

Keith Moon vs. John Bonham POLL🕸

Good discussion in that thread.

_Bonham never hobbled a Zeppelin song the way Watts does "Get Off My Cloud"_


^slander

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

I loved reading this tribute to Charlie, especially Weinberg's:

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2021/aug/26/stewart-copeland-max-weinberg-on-charlie-watts-rolling-stones

I prefer Keith over Bonham, but this is horseshit, I love all three and they all bring something unique to the table. I don't want Bonham playing behind the Stones just as I wouldn't want Watts playing behind Zeppelin - changing any of the drummers like that would have fucked up the alchemy behind those records and those songs.

that doesn't mean mustard is better than stubbs bbq sauce

Otm

Bonham, and it isn't even close

birdistheword otm

"Amateurish" is description not criticism!

Right, "hobbled" was criticism.

Underrated Watts performance: "Jigsaw Puzzle".
Underrated Bonham performance: "South Bound Saurez" or "Ozone Baby"

"Jigsaw Puzzle" may be my favorite Stones song, and Charlie is one of the main reasons why. Those little grace notes just before the 1 and the 3 are so perfect in how they sustain and advance the narrative.

That's another song where the tempo is all over the place. But I think if anything that's where Charlie's "swing" comes in: it can't be easy to keep things together in such a famously shambling band! (Oddly, the Who might be the opposite example; Keith Moon can't have been easy to play with.)

That's another song where the tempo is all over the place.

(Oddly, the Who might be the opposite example; Keith Moon can't have been easy to play with.)

He could sometimes be difficult to play with; Entwistle sometimes talked about pulling a cymbal aside in order to find the beat by looking at Moon's feet. But he and Townshend developed their approaches so that they would work with Moon's (also, his volume was such that it necessitated the invention of the Marshall Stack). While there are few instances of Keith playing outside of the Who, no one on Labelle's "Miss Otis Regrets" or Mike Heron's "Warm Heart Pastry" (which also has Townshend, Ronnie Lane, and John Cale) sounds flummoxed by Moon's playing.

Retrospectively, Townshend has said "I didn't think much of him as a drummer," largely because the role of strict timekeeping fell to Pete. He never had the opportunity with Keith to play single-note solos against a solid backbeat, and just about all of Pete's choices for drummers in his solo projects and for the Who were slightly-behind-the-beat backbeat specialists.

And to bring it back to Watts,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2Z_FO0uao8

Before I got to Tarfumes on Pete as timekeeper etc., was thinking about seeing Stones in Memphis, 1975----Robert Palmer's coverage incl. some excellent points:

Jim Dickinson, the Memphis musician who played piano on “Wild Horses,” burst into the press box from backstage, where he’d obviously been having a good time. “Listen to that rhythm section,” he crowed. “Now that they’ve got Ollie Brown to keep time, Charlie doesn’t have to, and he’s playing. Wyman too. I’ve heard ’em cook some fast jazz in the studio just warming up, and then they start playing Stones songs and it’s back to the gorilla music. But this is great.”
...Brown’s cowbell and timbales reproduced the special lift the overdubbed percussion tracks have always given key Stones songs. His solidity enabled Watts to vary his cymbal sound and introduce cross-rhythms... Richards, whose rhythm guitar parts are the backbone of every Stones rocker, had turned virtually all the lead work over to Wood. “Get Off My Cloud,” “Heartbreaker” and a few other tunes had taken on an 8/8 rhythm feel with salsa flavoring...
...Back at the hotel, Wyman commented that he liked the audience and Furry Lewis, then left with Memphis R&B bassist “Duck” Dunn. Charlie Watts sat down and, asked how he liked playing with Ollie Brown, replied, “Oh, he’s a great player. Great. We used a percussionist from Billy’s band before, on a European tour, but that was more spontaneous. This time we decided to do it right and rehearsed intensively.” Did Ollie free him to experiment more? “I don’t know, I just play.”
But Watts really wanted to talk about jazz. In New York he’d been impressed by avant-garde pianist Cecil Taylor, swing-era musicians Roy Eldridge and Paul Quinichette and drummer Roy Haynes. “Every time people tell me I’m good,” he said, “I . . . like it at first — anybody does — but then I think about people like Roy [Haynes], who played with Charlie Parker and John Coltrane and is still playing in clubs. You know, when I started I played Dixieland, and then I went on to bands that were trying to re-create the Johnny Hodges and Duke Ellington small-band sound from the Thirties. I worked up to playing Fifties-period Thelonious Monk. All the time I thought that what I’d eventually be doing, what I wanted to be doing, was playing with a trio in a cellar for a few junkies.” A reporter who’d been looking for an opening blurted, “What do you think of American music?” Watts stared with his huge, liquid eyes and snorted softly, “I don’t know about anything but American music,” he said. “None of us do, really. And what I like about American music is basically black music. That’s not to say white people can’t play it, but to me, American music is black music.”

even as somebody who has a lot of time for rolling stones records, i feel like the effect of charlie watts' drumming is being oversold here. as it was following his death, when i constantly had to hear that watts was "actually a jazz drummer."

do we really need to bend over backyards to make it seem like he had this grand, mystical vision of impersonating a shitty drummer in order to serve the music? isn't it okay to just admit that he's a shitty drummer who was in the right place at the right time, and that it's a happy coincidence that it ended up working so well? seems a lot easier to me

xpost vary his cymbal sound and introduce cross-rhythms... To put it mildly! He was flying through the rest of the music at times, but/and it all worked that way--Billy Preston was a good listener, for instance.

A rock drummer who learned from jazz, I'd say. He talked elsewhere about working early on with "eccentric old men" who were really into Mingus, for instance.

for instance

I’m so happy my dumb ass question got so much discussion going

Prediction : Bonham

Thanks for posting that, dow. Watts also mentioned digging Cecil (and Ornette) in an early '90s TV interview. And Roy Haynes is still out there playing. I saw him in 2018 and was completely blown away.

And thank you, Tarfumes,for making me think of that concert, and leading me to that piece, which I hadn't seen before---here's another one I just came across, haven't read the whole thing yet:

In a previously unpublished interview from 2013, Watts goes deep into his favorite drummers, what the Stones do better than the Beatles, and outlasting almost every band
By MIKAL GILMORE

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Hell yeah
The people have spoken

So many Watts apologists itt

Charlie Watts b.1941
John Bonham b.1948

I think this is the big difference.

Uh no

xp i don't really buy into that but if anything it's when they died