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Charlie Watts of the Rolling Stones performs during a concert on the No Filter European tour, at the U Arena stadium in Nanterre, near Paris, on Oct. 19, 2017.CHARLES PLATIAU/Reuters

Charlie Watts wasn’t in the studio for the demo version of the Rolling Stones’ 1974 single It’s Only Rock ‘n Roll (But I Like It). Instead, it’s Kenney Jones (of the Faces and, later, the Who) on drums. Some elements of the track were later overdubbed, but Jones’s part was kept. Watts, an unruffled type who always seemed to be on the verge of a shrug, was fine with that.

“That’s okay,” he said, “It sounds like me anyway.”

If it sounded like Watts, then it sounded like the Rolling Stones, and if it sounded like the Rolling Stones, that’s all that mattered to Watts. An Englishman’s Englishman, a Savile Row suit enthusiast and a team player through and through, Charlie Watts died at a London hospital on Tuesday. He was 80.

Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts dies at 80

Although Watts’s assessment that the drumming on It’s Only Rock ‘n Roll sounded like his was not meant to be boastful, we should consider it as high praise. The laconic swing and jazzy mojo of Watts may have been behind the scenes compared with Mick Jagger’s singer-boy shenanigans and Keith Richards’s riff-and-opiates swagger, but it was the sly groove of Watts that moved some of the most important songs of the rock canon.

“Charlie Watts gives me freedom to fly onstage,” Richards once said. Watts gave all of us freedom – to dance, to luxuriate mentally inside a deep rhythmic pocket or, if one absolutely must, to air drum (without pulling a muscle or looking the fool).

Fans might be surprised to learn the cowbell on the recording of Honky Tonk Women was played by producer Jimmy Miller. But if Miller put the “honky” in Honky Tonk Women, Watts was responsible for the slack beat that left great room for the rest of the band to work. Let’s call that the song’s “tonk,” for lack of a better term.

That’s Watts hitting a tiny 1930s suitcase drum kit on the marching, charging Street Fighting Man. That’s his civilized thrash on Stray Cat Blues, a song of lewd lyrical theme. That’s his perfect imprecision serving as the backbone of a rowdy musical chaos that has endured nearly 60 years.

Watts was treated for throat cancer in 2004. Earlier this month, it was announced session drummer Steve Jordan would replace him for the Rolling Stones tour in the United States this fall. “For once, my timing has been a little off,” Watts said in a statement. “I am working hard to get fully fit but I have today accepted on the advice of the experts that this will take a while.”

Just last week, the Stones released a previously unheard track from the vaults, Living In The Heart of Love, a loose-limbed rocker that is part of a coming 40th anniversary reissue of the 1981 album Tattoo You.

It’s hard to think of the Rolling Stones hitting the stage without their original drummer. His stoic classiness and bemused expression seem so necessary amid the hilarious excitability of Jagger and comic coolness of Richards, now the group’s sole remaining original members.

Remember Watts in the video for It’s Only Rock ‘n Roll, in which the band dressed up in sailor suits in a tent that fills with soapy bubbles as the song vamps to a close. The suds eventually overtake Watts – he’s the only musician sitting down. By the end of the video, Watts can longer be seen. That backbeat doesn’t stop, though.

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