Charlie Watts 2.0

Having a hard time with this one.

Deaths that are close to me - family members - people that matter - result in the involuntary head shake reflex. Every time my brain randomly acknowledges this person has died, I involuntarily shake my head. As if I can't believe it. As if I refuse to admit it.

I have shaken my head many times since Charlie died.

Sirius XM has been paying tribute to Charlie and The Stones since he died and will continue through Labor Day. Doing all kinds of stuff. Playing the music, playing quotes from Ronnie, Mick, Charlie and Keith, playing quotes of other musicians, having guest DJ's play their favorite Stones songs.

I tried in a previous post to express what Charlie's death means to me. Rob Thomas did it better.

He was guest DJ-ing and he said Charlie Watts death feels like "the beginning of the end of an era."

Fucking perfect. That is it exactly.

John Lennon was murdered in 1980. He was forty years old. It did not feel like the beginning of the end because it was unnatural.

George Harrison died in 2001 from lung cancer that had spread to his brain. He was 58 years old. It did not feel like the beginning of the end because it was unnatural.

Charlie Watts was 80 years old. He lived a life. A full and very good life. A life that included a 58 year career with The Stones. That is a rich and fulfilling career by anyone's standard.

Paul McCartney is 79 years old. Ringo Starr is 81 years old. Ronnie Wood is 74 years old. Mick Jagger is 78 years old. Keith Richards is 77 years old.

I fear that Charlie was the first domino to fall. I fervently hope I am wrong, at least in the short run. I believe if your career is built around something you truly love, you tend to live longer. Happiness and contentment are powerful medications, unbeatable defenses against the foreboding relentlessness of time.

I loved Charlie Watts the man. The coolest of the cool. The most unlikely human to sit on stage behind Mick and Keith. The man with the perpetually sardonic smile who worshipped jazz over rock 'n roll. The man who laughed at the inconsequential trappings of rock stardom.

He was fiercely unique in the quietest of ways.

His death very definitely feels like the beginning of the end of an era. When Paul, Ringo, Ronnie, Mick and Keith are gone there will be a hole in the musical universe that can never be filled. Their absence will carry an indefinable weight, but a weight that my generation will carry on its shoulders until we too are gone.

But the shockwaves they created will go on forever, and thank god for that.

This is why the death of Charlie Watts is incomprehensible to me.