RIP Charlie Watts 8/24/21

[Greg]

I'm not a big Rolling Stones fan, but the news of Mr. Watts death will reverberate through the newscape for awhile. I most recently heard about him because he wouldn't be part of the Stones Fall tour because of ill health.

[Drunk Monk]

Did you ever see them live? Those were some of the greatest stadium shows ever. 

Sad to hear. Watts was the backbone of the Stones sound.

[Greg]

I saw them at Dodger Stadium back in the 1990s. It was an awesome show. This was back around the time they started doing "Sympathy for the Devil' again. Very glad I saw them.

[thatguy]

I saw them at the Oakland Coliseum. This was the "50 & Counting" tour. Tickets were ridiculously expensive, but they were doing a lottery for each show for reasonably priced tickets. I somehow managed to win. Winners had to show up at a special entrance at a designated time to find out where their seats were. We were extreme stage left, at the very top row. I could reach up and touch the ceiling of the Coliseum. The diamond vision looked diamond shaped from this perspective and I could see the tops of everyone's head. That said, they put on a great show for a bunch of old geezers and Shannon got to meet Mick while we were waiting in line

https://www.dropbox.com/s/dz45edkgte44l3...k.JPG?dl=0

--tg

[Drunk Monk]

I don't know how many times I've seen the Stones. I can only remember missing one tour since I joined Rock Med in 87, but I probably missed a few more. I saw them at Oakland several times. 

My favorite memory was the Halloween show, not so much because of the Stones, but because I went in full make-up like the Crow and talked some people down like that. Maybe they didn't get talked down. Maybe I just got them to submit. I remember dealing with this trippin gal we pulled in from the parking lot. She was running amuck dosed to the gills, screaming incoherently. We strapped her to the gurney and were wheeling her in and I was monitoring her head. At one point, she looks up and sees my b&w crow makeup (full face paint) and gasped "OMG. It's Satan!" I looked down at her (oriented upside down from her point of view and said "That's right. I'm Satan. And I say BE STILL or you're going to hell." She went white as a sheet and stiff as a board and we didn't hear another peep out of her until she was well within main med. That probably caused permanent psychological damage but it was Halloween, after all.

DM also has a memory of another Stones show at Oakland Coliseum where a friend had access to some seats that were really close to stage. She was this elf queen hippie chick and kidnapped DM to join her for a few songs there and a joint. Right when the joint was lit, Mick launched into Sympathy for the Devil and the pyro shot pillars of flame into the sky. So close that the heat nearly seared off eyebrows. The elf queen nearly leapt out of her skin but to her credit, she didn't drop the joint.

[Dr. Ivor Yeti]

DM, you should write a book of your...oh, wait.

[Drunk Monk]

This is the book.

DM's Book of DOOM.

[Dr. Ivor Yeti]

A collection of short vignettes of your life would make a nice book. Would you get on that, please?

[Drunk Monk]

You know, I pitched that to YMAA, although there was this theme about aging or being a career martial artist. I've been kicking around this idea for a piece for KFM titled 'My last Tornado kick' and it's blossomed into something much larger... or festered. But YMAA didn't bite at it. I need to hone my elevator pitch on this.

I'm an essayist. After writing 1000-3000 word articles for 30 years, that's what I do best. I'm not confident I can sustain a longer form prose. 

I started three books when the pandemic struck. One was 'Covering the Masters' which would collate all my KFTC cover stories and add BTS comments on them. Another was 'Versus' - a series of 18 essays about martial arts using a yin yang motif of incongruous concepts. The third was another flailing attempt to capture the Rock/JAH Med experience. I kept a correspondence between a dearly departed friend and Rm accomplice for years. We shared so many tales. I thought of tooling that into a book, themed on the correspondence where the names were all hidden to protect the guilty. I didn't get far on that. I got nearly halfway through Versus until the hammer fell on the mag. Now I'm writing so goddamned much I can't think past my next deadline. My 2nd book may never happen.

[Dr. Ivor Yeti]

I was thinking more like what Jonathan Carroll does on his FB page: Very short slices of life, anything from one to a few paragraphs. Slices of a pretty extraordinary life. After several years, you collect em all into a single sumptuously bound limited-edition volume from a boutique publisher

[Drunk Monk]

That’s kinda whats in those correspondence emails. Tons of shared stories in a sort of code talk. I thought about borrowing the correspondence as a motif. I have years of those stories told between ourselves. My friend had lots of good ones too. He had left RM years prior. He’s the one that first dubbed me as DM. 

I started reworking our first correspondence thread but it kinda fell flat, although it had a good subtitle ‘it started with a drunken Viking...’

[King Bob]

Judging from the many book reviews I read, a lot of those essayist memoirs are just a series of short pieces strung together around a central theme - sometimes very loosely strung, with some pieces that don't fit but are stuck in there anyway. You could do that. (Cheerleading: Yay DM! You can do it!)

BACK TO THE THEME OF THE THREAD: One of the things I think was great about Charlie Watts was that he was always at sort of a distance from the whole thing, and often had a look on his face like he found the whole thing ridiculous. Somewhat different, but it reminds me of the Hopi clowns who mock the sacred ceremony while it's happening. Plus he was rock solid, and could swing. Rolling Stone has a very nice remembrance by Max Weinberg.

[Dr. Ivor Yeti]

Yeah, this one dude did that with a martial-art/Grateful Dead theme. Needed editing, but it was good.

[Drunk Monk]

Maybe...sometime. I'm writing so much to make rent that I can barely think past my next article, much less a whole feckin book. I keep thinking I'll get to it when I retire but that reminds me of one of my all time fav Scapino quotes "I'd do the starving artist thing if I could afford it"


Back on topic, here's the final performance of Charlie with the Stones:

[King Bob]

The starving artist thing gets old when you get into your 30s.

Years ago I saw an artist's talk, and his take was that artists need fairly well paying jobs that you don't have to think about when you're not doing them, so you have the mental space to do your work. He was a plumber.