A demonstration of the Charlie Watts method for handling interpersonal conflict on a high-performing team of specialists:
"One anecdote relates that in the mid-1980s, an intoxicated Jagger phoned Watts's hotel room in the middle of the night, asking, "Where's my drummer?" Watts reportedly got up, shaved, dressed in a suit, put on a tie and freshly shined shoes, descended the stairs, and punched Jagger in the face, saying: "Don't ever call me your drummer again. You're my fucking singer!"
"Mick and I weren’t on great terms at the time, but I said, c’mon, let’s go out. And I lent him the jacket I got married in. 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. He puts the phone down. Mick and I were still sitting there, pretty pissed – give Mick a couple of glasses, he’s gone – when, 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 of my jacket and gave him a right hook."
That's interesting. Where I grew up in Canada, "being pissed" could mean either very drunk (piss drunk) or very angry (pissed off) and you need to rely on context to disambiguate. On the other hand, the British phrase "taking the piss" would mean obtaining a urine sample and it's just downright confusing.
In America, "piss drunk" has a place but "being pissed" means exclusively "to be angry"... at least in every part I've ever been. I can't speak for upper New England, perhaps they'd take exception.
It's an extreme for "irony" - dissimulation (so extreme that I should add a /J). In other regions it would be "to fuck with someone".
I never understood the exact source of the expression. It could have been the mockery of stealing urine from the poor (who could actually sell it - I believe for example it is still used in tanneries around the world).
I'm pretty sure that this is my favorite Rolling Stones story, ever. In 'Life', Keith Richards talked about it really being Charlie's band, he was just in it.
I think you ought to reserve judgement until after you've had to manage a drunken Mick Jagger on your team. I won't condone this as a general approach, but I can see it working in certain circumstances, with certain people.
I was about to say; please tell me how you plan to establish "drunkeness" in Keith; the heuristics applied, the methodology used, the Keith-related emissions to be analyzed && the make and model of the mass-spec and HPLC used in the process.
just seemed so appropriate to use lyrics from the greatest band ever to answer questions about another band bandied about being the greatest but just not quite. <ducks>
I just finished reading pages from Charlie Munger about the importance of putting disincentives to undesirable behaviour.
What one finds excessive is, of course, cultural. The pages ended remembering the tribe of two millennia ago who killed the last warrior to show at the assembly, or the use of George Washington to hang farm-boy deserters forty feet high as an example.
Watched the most recent Berkshire Hathaway meeting which was really fascinating. However, Munger seems like he doesn't challenge his assumptions very often and also builds anecdotes whole cloth without alot of true historical facts to back up the claims.
Did Munger have any citations for these two claims? There seems to be plenty of discussion around on what executions did or didn't happen during the American revolutionary war, but I couldn't find anything even close to hanging farm-boy deserters "forty feet high". On the 2000 year old tribe, I couldn't find anything at all.
It was a very different, more flamboyant and volatile, era.
Recently watched "Gimme Shelter" a documentary about the free concert at Altamont in 1970 that ended with someone in the Hells Angels (which had been hired for security!) stabbing a concert-goer to death. This film, according to some, documents "the end of the 60's" and marked the beginning of a much meaner era. (https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidchiu/2019/12/03/altamont-a...).
"Gimme Shelter" (the film) captures the band personalities in a really preceptive way. Watts is pensive and brooding, Jagger is mercurial and far-removed from Earthy reality.
Not the song that was actually playing during the stabbing, as the urban legend goes, but, I still think the Altamont show has one of the best versions of Sympathy for the Devil. So raw sounding and you can hear the crowd starting to get riled up and stuff.
The biggest prize I ever won were on-stage tickets for the RS some twenty years ago and it turned out to be my greatest concert experience ever since. RIP.
This one hurts. One of my favorite parts of his style was he often didn't hit the high hat on 4 of a 4/4 beat. It's hard to hear it but I always thought that was an interesting choice. Whether he did it because that's how he learned to play or to deliberately leave some room for other sounds on the downbeat, it was interesting to me.
I first noticed that watching... the ... 81 tour film (album was 'Still Life' IIRC), I think, when I was first really digging in (well, it was ... probably 1990 when I was watching it, but that was still relatively 'recent').
I've watched for it in most videos and live perf since then and yep, didn't seem to change much. Unsure if it was a jazz-flavored thing or what, but distinctive.
Here's an interview in which he says he didn't ever noticed it - and some other guy (whom I'm too ignorant to identify) - explains how Charlie came up with that.
“I don't need to hear Bill to go through a song. I need to hear Keith to go through a song. I know Bill will be playing what I'm playing anyway. I need to hear Keith because it's all there: the time, the chord changes, and all the licks you have to follow.”
It's hard to talk too much about Charlie specifically, as in... he was a generally private person, and didn't do half the interviews the others did, but I remember a moderately 'techie' Stones connection from way back...
The Stones were a pretty early adopter of some tech, and were 'streaming' back in 1994.
I learned to drum listening to Led Zeppelin and Rolling Stones albums my dad set up for me in the garage. Watts is one of those great drummers who a lot of people miss because on the surface he seems simple. But, he’s hands down one of the greatest rock and roll drummers, up there with Ringo, Bonham.
“Charlie’s good tonight, isn’t he?” One of my favorite parts from one of my favorite albums, Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out by The Rolling Stones. Wherever you are Charlie, keep being good.
Never thought I'd get to see the Stones, but I did a few years ago at the Desert Trip concerts. Honestly, I think I was lucky to catch them then. Same with all the bands that played there. Charlie was great and I was amazed by him. He was still banging on those drums as fast as ever and keeping the beat spot on.
They were all happy to be there. Well, except maybe Dylan. Not sure if he's ever been "happy" but they were all having fun and thrilled to be there together.
We all knew we're getting close to moving on. And we all felt like we did back then together. Each time one of them leaves the rest of us are all step closer. But, damn... our generation still rocked the house.
Saw him at Pizza Express in London, playing with his boogie-woogie mates... will miss that chap. I fear the rest of the Stones will soon follow. RIP Charlie.
I understand and agree, although some are somewhat preposterous and only ever made sense in context. I finally watched Easy Rider recently, and sure, the freedom, riding with no protection, sleeping wherever - but it's such a mediocre, badly-woven film. Same for quite a few Stones songs and a lot of other '60s/70s stuff - except Jimi Hendrix, that man was an alien.
Could it be that they just had a different agenda for their art than you do, and that the context and agendas changed over time? I find it more interesting to try to understand their time, to try to learn what their view of art was, what the norms were, what the context, was, and why - rather than try to judge their work by my standards, as if the changes of time have made my way superior.
Context allows us to forgive some sins (which is what I was alluding to, in the first half of my comment on Easy Rider), not all of them.
It is an objective fact that the centralization and scarcity of mass-media broadcasting, back then, effectively acted as a funnel towards certain works, amplifying their influence well beyond their merit.
> The universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there's no good reason to go into space--each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones who made the irrational decision.
The Rolling Stones are one of the greatest bands of all times. The passing of one of its original members (who, by the way, was part of the band for 58 years) it's a cultural event that it is worth discussing it.
> anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosit
I think something like this gratifies intellectual curiosit of a lot of people. But as someone else said, upvotes and downvotes will decide better than any rule.
Don't be so sure. Music is intimately related to math, and the Stones were one of the most innovative [Edit: influential] musical groups in human history. There are probably hacking and tech connections that are not immediately obvious.
Also, social phenomena are interesting from a technological point of view as well (there's a reason social media is a thing) and the Stones were definitely that.
I see no reason to downvote, but in some businesses they have a thing called engineering.
Recording engineers are their own breed and many of the rock & roll greats were not university-trained but through years of serious progress earned the title with far less likelihood than a student entering a traditional engineering college.
When the Stones started they only used 4-track studio recording gear and of course it was analog based on vacuum tubes with magnetic tape.
Fairly big sound they got.
Today's digital engineers can be considered to have a vast array of tools which never existed then, and 32 channels plus.
Even with all that and the best software money can buy, there are going to be some engineers who never come close to capturing the real sound of a 4-piece rock act no matter how much time they put into mixing it.
Not compared to a hastily mixed cut from a legendary analog release.
And state-of-the-art studios may not be able to record at all without the functioning or presence of software which is naturally expected but not one of the limitations or show-stoppers of the analog days.
Rock & roll is just one example of how technology marches on but people themselves don't necessarily get more advanced at the same rate.
If anyone had told me that when I was a kid, it would have been a life changing event.
My mom had a piano and played it, badly. She tried to sight read, but had no sense of tempo, or of starting with slow practice (playing in time, but slower). And she liked to play what she called "schmaltzy" stuff. (Think "Heart and Soul" and "Peg o' My Heart" played with a constantly varying tempo, speeding up and slowing down as she worked out the notes.)
This is not to criticize her: she did what she could to instill a love of music in her kids.
But I was happier reading my math and physics books. I tried to make sense of Mom's sheet music, but it just seemed like a bunch of dots and lines.
If I'd known that sheet music notation had anything to do with math, I would have jumped on it!
The criterion is along the lines of something that may be of interest to hackers. Not necessarily as hackers, but to them in general.
All communities either become conservative and lock in around a few norms and aggressively police them or become liberal and become about anything and everything.
There is no healthy middle.
I mean why should economics and housing and finance topics be of interests to hackers?
It's kind of a community feel - I think HN has done a good job of flexing occasionally to allow non-tech news around cultural influences.
The Rolling Stones are one of the most influential rock bands of the past half century and that is potentially worthy of discussion.
I think housing and economy and finance are even more appropriate at times, especially when discussing topics that affect the average person - wonky, technical discussions that take a lot of thought and processing of second order effects.
I for one am glad there is a wide variety of topics of interest posted and discussed here. If we were only pigeonholed into tech topics I would probably get bored of HN.
I did prefer the original title which included the fact that Charlie Watts was the drummer for the Rolling Stones. I didn't know him by name, and adding more context to the title seemed helpful to me at least.
In general I feel like HN suffers from title over-editing, but never from too much variety.
"One anecdote relates that in the mid-1980s, an intoxicated Jagger phoned Watts's hotel room in the middle of the night, asking, "Where's my drummer?" Watts reportedly got up, shaved, dressed in a suit, put on a tie and freshly shined shoes, descended the stairs, and punched Jagger in the face, saying: "Don't ever call me your drummer again. You're my fucking singer!"