When Charlie Watts died, we lost the best of the Rolling Stones. I thought he was the best of them decades ago, and the gushing appraisals that have come out after the news of his death have done nothing to awaken the contrarian in me. He was the best of them because not only was he was the most accomplished musician, nor because he was the coolest in the band, but because he didn’t play the game like the other Rolling Stones did. Mick and Keef and the various others (Wyman, Wood et al.) kicked off in their rebellious youth engaged in a theatrical nihilism, pretending that they recognised the rules of rock showbiz but had decided they would be flicking two fingers at it whenever the cameras were on. In this kind of posturing there is always the danger of looking foolish as you get older (you decide – personally I think there’s an age when you wear sleeves on your work costume). Watts, though, always seemed to understand that the rules were there for a reason, and that the best work could be done within them. And so there he sat for sixty years, impervious as an Easter Island head, behind that kit, dragging the Stones toward excellence – sometimes, just toward competence – with his staunchness. And I knew this always to be the case, perhaps without ever really thinking about it.
My reaction to the Stones has always been one of suspicion. Is there anything authentic about them? There was always the chance they were charlatans, playing other people’s music with a knowing, smug grin on their faces. Why I should like them was always obvious (from 1968 to 1972 they put out four – five if you rate Goats Head Soup, which I do – of the greatest rock n roll albums of all time). But why I should dislike them always lingered. What it came down to in the end was this: if Charlie Watts thinks it’s worth being in this band, then that’s good enough for me.
I’d been listening to the Stones a lot this last year anyway, so when the inundation of Watts tributes led me down YouTube rabbit holes, I was pretty well reacquainted with their story and the music of that golden period. I’d also come back to the idea that the Stones were a band formed and kept real in the furnaces of Watts’ excellence. They were nothing without him behind them.
What I was feeling was made very clear to me just this last week, as I sat in a Lidl car park (in a car, I should add) eating a tuna fish sandwich. My phone rang and it was one of my oldest friends, Graham, who I’ve known and talked music with slasher movies with since I was eleven, and who I used to do a radio show with (and who, incidentally, has been a member of The Goldie Lookin’ Chain for the last twenty-odd years). He’s the type of old friend who rings up in the middle of the day for a random hour-long chat about Charlie Watts. He said he’d been down similar rabbit holes to me and had been watching a 1981 Stones concert in which the band came out on stage in a ramshackle parade presumably choreographed to have some kind of star power impact. (Here’s Keef. Woohoo! Here’s Mick. Woohoo! Here’s a guy who’s played with the band for thirty years but has never officially been regarded as a Rolling Stone. Umm, woohoo?). Watts, never one to indulge the showy side of showbiz, was away from the rest of the band on a small revolving stage. Graham said it was quite clear that until the two stages met, the rest of the band couldn’t hear Watts. He said the rest of the band, led by Keef, were a mess. Out of tune, out of time, out of their depth, swinging and lurching through “Brown Sugar”, or whatever it was they opened with. It was only when they hooked up with Watts’ steadying hand that it all came together, and the song got up on its feet. Watts, Graham emphasised, was everything to that band.
I was watching clips from a gig at the Marquee in London from 1971, from the era when Mick Taylor was lead guitarist in the band. It’s tough listen, some of it, and you wind up thankful for Watts coming in when he does on “Dead Flowers”, reining in Keef’s slightly out of tune spotty teenager rhythm guitar and Mick’s weird fast clapping, and setting up Taylor’s edgy energetic lead noodling for what is, in the end, a great live version of a good country song. Shoot ahead to 2008 and Martin Scorsese’s concert film, Shine A Light, and the rendition of “Sympathy for the Devil” at the tail end of which Keef is given the grandstanding moment that any guitar God would snatch at, and it’s a garbled fidgety mess of a solo, one full of fat fingered muffles and directionless cack-handed twaddle. Mick is doing his thing, flinging himself about and somehow squeezing every last drop out of that nasal-narrow vocal range of his; Mick and Keef are odd in their terribleness. The rest of the band, the Stones’s extended family, are tight and professional and smart, but what you have here, again, is a collection of seasoned turn-on-a-sixpence session players, conducted by Watts, raising Mick and Keef onto their shoulders.
The history of rock music is littered with stupid questions. Perhaps that’s part of the fun of it. Answering them can provide generations of fun. (Think of Lester Bangs musing “Diana Ross thinks she’s the best singer in the world when the sad fact is she’s not even the best singer in the Supremes”). But the Beatles or Stones question must finally now be put to bed. It’s the Beatles. Obviously.
And I have sympathy for the people who have dedicated their lives to getting this wrong. I, as a skinny, intense teenager was a passionate advocate for the side of Oasis in their ongoing battle against Blur. I realise (or rather did a long time back) that what Oasis gave 15-year-old me with Definitely Maybe (its raw sound, its attitude, its simple melodies, its working class vibe) was exactly what I needed at the time. Blur, pissing about with experimental song structures, mumbling smug poshboy media interviews, and a straight indie-pop sound, had nothing to offer me. I’m still not much a Blur fan, but I recognise now they were and infinitely better band than Oasis (who lost me around halfway through side two of (What the Story) Morning Glory?, by the way). So, I get it that people need different things from their bands. That swagger, that grit, that dedication to the brutal simplicity of black roots music. The Stones have that. But which was the better band, the Beatles or the Stones? Are. You. Fucking. Kidding. Me?
There are many reasons why The Beatles are the better band. One is that they had better songs. Two is that they had better musicians. Three is that they had John Lennon. Four is that the had George Harrison. There are numbers five through eight thousand, but let’s stick on track. All they need is the fact they had Paul McCartney, a musical genius (I don’t use the word lightly) and probably the greatest songwriter since Johanne Sebastian Bach. A man who fell out of bed with “Yesterday” leftover from a dream. If you believe in that sort of thing, here’s a man in communication with the Divine Spirit.
When Graham called me during my fine dining experience in the Lidl car park (cannot emphasise enough that I was in a car), it was not just to talk about Charlie Watts. It was also an instalment of an ongoing conversation surrounding McCartney 3,2,1, the Rick Rubin-Paul McCartney interview that has just recently dropped on Disney+. Graham and I are both McCartney devotees. We have talked incessantly in recent years about the rich wonders of McCartney’s solo career, particularly in the 70s when he was being oddly overshadowed by the inferior output of his fellow former Beatles. But we (or at least I – Graham has always been ahead of me on this stuff) have been awakened to the treasures beyond what I was brought up on (Band on the Run and “Mull of Kintyre”). Preoccupied with Harrison and Lennon when I was young, my brain somehow didn’t have room for the consistent genius on display on Red Rose Speedway, Ram, and McCartney I & II. Almost everything McCartney put out in the 1970s was good enough to be Beatles music. The same could not be said for Lennon, who put out one decent album’s worth of stuff accumulatively between the break-up of the Beatles in 1969 and his murder in 1980. Harrison’s quality control nose-dived considerably after All Things Must Pass (1970) and Living in the Material World (1973) dried up his Beatles’-days stockpile of great songs. McCartney, however, continued to push forward, to write and innovate and produce albums that each have their own stunning tapestry of high-energy boundary pushing rock and pop music. In the seventies, McCartney puts out no filler, no albums to fulfil contractual obligations, no covers albums, no Best of… (apart from Wings Greatest Hits in 1978); he just crafted wonderful albums of new material.
I could wax lyrical about McCartney all day, but there’s no point in committing it to print when Ian Leslie wrote the final word on this in his essay from 2020, “64 Reasons to Celebrate Paul McCartney”, so I’d direct you to that instead of tying you up with an inferior tribute here.
It’s interesting how a Beatles fan can go through the phases that mark some kind of coming-of-age. As a teen and twenty something, I was a Lennon-guy, responding to the myth that he was the experimenter and visionary in the band, but also to his rebelliousness and the fact he wrote “In My Life”, “Yer Blues”, and the most beautiful half of “A Day in the Life”. Then I moved to George, falling for his unusual and singular songwriting style with chords alien to pop, his uncanny Scouse vocal, and his searching spirituality. And now, as of about six or seven years ago, I am firmly of the belief that The Beatles was Paul McCartney’s band, that he drove it and provided the vision, the direction, and instigated almost all of the things that made the band great. The Rubin interview is definitive. If McCartney retires – he’s 80 next June – and we are never graced with any new material again, we have the privilege of the insight this 3-hours of television gives us into the greatest musical creative mind of the modern age.
The trick to the interview is that it’s such a relaxed setting. McCartney is on home turf, the studio, and is talking to someone who knows his way around such a place. Rubin first came on the scene producing the likes of the Beastie Boys and Public Enemy in the late 1980s, but has since broadened his reputation as one of the great producers of the this era by creating the environment in which Johnny Cash could lay down his six volumes of American Recordings, perhaps the greatest swan song since Mozart’s Requiem. So, Rubin doesn’t just know how to unpick the buildings blocks of, say, “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” or “Band on the Run” (both of which he does so here with a surgeon’s care and precision), but he knows how to create an atmosphere from which he can elicit expression from the deepest corners of creative genius. He did it with Cash, he did it with Leonard Cohen, and here he does it, in place of an album of music, with McCartney.
Some of the stories we’ve heard before, but not in this way. How McCartney dragooned in David Mason for the piccolo trumpet solo on “Penny Lane” is folkloric stuff for Beatles fans, but seeing the writer of the song punch the air at that fabled high note that marks its end brings a lump to the throat. Rubin reading a quote to McCartney that he had never heard before: John Lennon praising his former band mate’s innovation and virtuosity on the bass is an intimate moment into the reflections of an old war horse that nobody has come close to capturing before on camera. McCartney 3, 2, 1 suffers from an embarrassment of such riches.
But the overarching takeaway is that McCartney came to us fully-formed. Watching him sit in the luscious monochrome of the camera frame, guitar in his lap, remembering the first song he ever wrote as a fourteen-year-old, it’s apparent he hasn't changed all that much in the intervening years. He mentions how Harrison in the early days of the Beatles wasn’t interested in song writing, but that he became “one of the greats”. Well, McCartney, without even comprehending what he was doing, without understanding any musical theory, was creating complex runs and contrapuntal melodies from his earliest impulses to compose. Writing this, I compiled a playlist of my favourite McCartney songs, Beatles and post, around a hundred tracks, and I put it on shuffle. Apart from the obvious technical evolutions of the studios he’s been working in over time, many of the songs have no problem seamlessly interplaying in the jumbled chronology. There is nothing to suggest a separation of sixty years of “I Saw Her Standing There” (which opens the Beatles debut album) to “Find My Way” (the first single from McCartney’s most recent solo record, McCartney III). “I Saw Her Standing There”, for me, is nowadays dominated by McCartney’s strutting looping bass. “Find My Way” is similarly marked by the joy of simplicity. McCartney seems to have had a preternatural understanding of the building blocks of melody, harmonics, and structural integrity of the pop song. When asked by Rubin for some pearl he’s learned from other great songwriters over the years, we wait for some invitation to understand the table manners of the Gods, an insight into the Divine language of genius. Roy Orbison taught him the importance of letting an audience know a song has finished. Give them that big climax, that ending note. There you have it: the joy of simplicity.
If Craig Brown’s book One, Two, Three, Four: The Beatles in Time, is the best book about the Beatles, then this is the best documentary about them. It purports to be about one of them, but it isn’t. It’s about what it was like to be in the studio as a Beatle, what it was like to be a Beatle, to work as one, to interact as one with the others, and what it’s been like to live as one in the fifty years since they split up. But most importantly it unveils how the Beatles were as good as they were. Not why, but how. And you cannot extract the answer from the documentary, the answer is the documentary. The answer to the age-old question, The Beatles or the Stones? is McCartney 1, 2, 3.
Gary Raymond is a novelist, critic, editor and broadcaster. His latest novel is Angels of Cairo, described by Waterstones as "Freewheeling, spiky and laugh-out-loud funny, Raymond's giddy comedy of angst-ridden filmmakers adrift in the heat of Cairo fizzes with one-liners and exquisitely constructed set-pieces."