My buddy, Karl, whom I work with, told me this story. This is quoted from the Los Angeles Times:
"By all accounts, Charlie Watts was a great drummer. By Keith Richards’ account, the man also had a great right hook.
That’s a lesson lead singer Mick Jagger learned the hard way during “a rare moment” in 1984, according to guitarist Keith Richards’ 2010 memoir, “Life.”
After Watts’ death was announced this week, fans of the rock band began reminiscing about the time
the musician apparently served his bandmate a knuckle sandwich. Watts
died Tuesday in London at age 80.
In his autobiography, Richards recalled witnessing Watts throw “his drummer’s punch — a punch I’ve seen a couple of times and it’s lethal. It carries a lot of balance and timing. He has to be badly provoked.”
According to the memoir, Richards and Jagger — who “weren’t on great terms at the time” — had just returned from a night out in Amsterdam to their hotel at “about five in the morning” when Jagger picked up the phone to ring Watts.
Despite Richards’ protests, Jagger called
Watts, asked “Where’s my drummer?,” then hung up when Watts didn’t respond. “About twenty minutes later,” Richards wrote in his book, “there was a knock at the door.”
“There was Charlie Watts, Savile Row suit, perfectly dressed, tie, shaved, the whole f— bit. I could smell the cologne!” Richards continued.
“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 ... and gave him a right hook.”
As Richards remembers it, Watts struck Jagger so hard that the frontman “fell back onto a silver platter of smoked salmon on the table and began to slide towards the open window and the canal below it.”
Richards thought it was a “good one,” he wrote, until he realized Jagger was wearing his wedding jacket. “I grabbed hold of it and caught Mick just before he slid into the Amsterdam canal. It took me twenty-four hours after that to talk Charlie down.
“I thought I’d done it when I took him up to his room, but twelve hours later, he was saying, ‘F— it, I’m gonna go down and do it again.’ It takes a lot to wind that man up.”
Nando.
