Charlie Watts’ Sure Shot

By Binky Philips

This little vignette was chosen to be included in the Deluxe 40th Anniversary Edition of the Rolling Stones’ legendary live album from 1969, Get Your Ya-Ya’s Out!, recently released on ABKCO Records:

I went to see the Stones on Thanksgiving Thursday, 1969. Yes, the legendary Get Your Ya-Ya’s Out!/Altamont tour at Madison Square Garden.

Back then, the Garden concert promoters and security people had no idea what they were doing. There was actually a gap about 30 feet deep between the stage and the front row. The kind of vacuum nature abhors. So, naturally, as the lights went down for the Stones, a 16 year old boy like me with nosebleed seats would be tear-assing it up to the front of the stage, dodging ushers and other crazed Down Fronters on their way there. And so, that’s just what I did.

I even wound up in the Maysles Bros.’ “Gimme Shelter” film for three seconds at the very beginning of the movie... lower left hand third of the screen during  “Jumping Jack Flash”… exactly 10 seconds after the “... spike right through my head...” line...  John Lennon glasses, long hair parted on the side, chicken-neck boppin’ my little teenage head.

Anyway, it was without a doubt the scariest audience I’ve ever been in. Where you stood, left/right and/or back/front was completely and utterly beyond your control. I’d be standing in front of Keef for the beginning of “Live With Me” and suddenly the entire crowd would shift with frightening speed that just swept me along like riptide and now I’d be 25 feet to the left, in front of Mick Taylor... and 90 seconds later, back to Keef... like seaweed near the shore.

This happened through the whole show but then, by the time the Stones got to the last 3 or 4 songs of the set, it had gotten so jam-packed-crowded that the shifting stopped, and to my amazing luck, I got stuck smackdab in front of Charlie’s drum kit, dead center.

But at that point, it was so insanely crowded I literally couldn’t even lift my arms.  If your nose itched, you were outta luck. I absolutely could not raise them from my sides. THAT was scary. TOTALLY crushed together and TOTALLY trapped.  Of course, I was loving every second of it.

So now, the final encore is over, and Mick and Mick and Keef and Bill are bowing center-stage and for some reason I decided to look behind them at Charlie up on his drum-riser.  He was looking at the drumstick in his right hand and then burst out laughing as he realized he’s been playing with a stick that was missing it’s top two inches. He shrugged and threw the broken stick into the audience (let me stop here and say that, while I’ve always been terrible at math, I’ve got a gift for 3D geometry) and so, as Charlie hurled the stick, I instantly knew that the damn thing was heading straight for my face!

As I’ve said, I couldn’t lift my arms at all, so I just had to let that stick twirl end over end right into my nose. It hit me hard enough to knock my glasses off my face. In what had to be a nano-second, I looked down and saw my glasses and the stick sliding down the front of my pea-jacket (yes, I was wearing a heavy wool coat in this mob). Then, I glanced up and saw about 90 people diving towards me to get the stick. With all my effort I desperately dove straight down and blindly somehow came up with both the stick and my glasses with one frantic grab. I immediately stuffed it inside my coat so no one in the crowd knew who’d caught it.

I thought I’d lost it over the ensuing decades, but one morning recently, I found Charlie’s drumstick in the bottom of my t-shirt drawer. God knows how long it had been laying under my collection of rock 'n roll promo t's. I have no recollection of putting it there. And the best thing about it, and something I had never realized when I was young, the stick is really dinged up, just dozens and dozens of small dents. Hell, Charlie Watts must’ve used that stick for half the show.

Coda: Earlier this year, I told this story to my old friend, Bob Merlis. He got in touch with the folks at ABKCO and, lo and behold, this tale of Charlie’s drumstick and my face wound up in the book that comes with the 40th Anniversary Deluxe Box-set reissue of the live album. And I just discovered that on page 39, in the photo of Mick Jagger on his knees during “Midnight Rambler,” not only can you see me in the photo (the half-face looking to my left about an inch above Jagger’s raised fist) but, about four faces behind me is none other than Johnny Genzale, three years before he became Johnny Thunders of the New York Dolls.