The late Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts is getting a new biography, Pitchfork reports.
Harper will publish Paul Sexton’s Charlie's Good Tonight: The Life, the Times, and the Rolling Stones: The Authorized Biography of Charlie Watts this fall. The publisher says the book will be an official biography, authorized by his family and bandmates, of “one of the world’s most revered and celebrated musicians of the last half century.”
Watts was born in London, and developed an interest in drumming as a boy; he had an affinity for jazz musicians like Gerry Mulligan and Charlie Parker. He joined the Rolling Stones in 1963, and stayed with the band until his death last year at the age of 80.
Sexton is a London-based music journalist who has covered the Rolling Stones for more than 30 years.
“Watts went through band bust-ups, bereavements and changes in personnel, managers, guitarists and rhythm sections, but remained the rock at the heart of the Rolling Stones for nearly 60 years—the thoughtful, intellectual but no less compelling counterpoint to the raucousness of his bandmates Keith Richards, Mick Jagger and Ronnie Wood,” Harper says of the book. “And this is his story.”
Charlie’s Good Tonight is slated for publication on Oct. 11.
Michael Schaub, a journalist and regular contributor to NPR, lives near Austin, Texas.
