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Charlie Watts on jazz and cleaning up (1986)
“The jazz orchestra was a good band in the end – during the period we were playing I had cleaned up, so the first phase was completely barmy and the second phase was totally straight: it was the first band I had played with for years where I was completely straight. I would have died if I had continued using drugs… I just stopped everything. I barely ate for two months, because I’d started to get fat from the drinking…
…Drugs are very hard to give up. For me, anyway. I didn’t even take that many. I wasn’t that badly affected, I wasn’t a junkie, but giving up was very, very hard. Much, much harder than the rest of it… I stopped when I slipped down the steps when I was in the cellar getting a bottle of wine… It really brought it home to me how far down I’d gone. I just stopped everything – drinking, smoking, taking drugs, everything, all at once. I just thought, enough is enough.”
One slip was all it took—literally. Charlie Watts realized just how far he’d spiraled when he fell down the cellar steps reaching for a bottle of wine. That moment was a jolt, a line in the sand. Without drama or fanfare, he simply stopped. No more drinking, no more drugs, no more cigarettes—just done. Cold turkey. It wasn’t easy, but Watts knew it had to be done. “Enough is enough,” he thought, and that was that.
Rolling Stones Charlie Watts: Clean Beats and Clarity
Ironically, it was jazz that brought him back to life. Watts joined a jazz orchestra during his recovery, and it turned out to be the first group he played with completely clean in years. The contrast was stark: the first phase of the band was chaotic, the second, crystal clear. He admitted he’d barely eaten for two months—detoxing from the booze had even made him gain weight before that. But quitting wasn’t smooth sailing. Even though he wasn’t using heavily and never considered himself a junkie, drugs were brutally hard to give up. “Much harder than the rest of it,” he confessed. Still, the music and his decision to clean up gave him a second wind. Had he kept going down the dark road, Watts believed he wouldn’t have made it out alive. (Ref. Rolling Stones Charlie Watts)
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