Wit & Attitude Quote by Charlie Watts

Watts is confessing to a kind of apprenticeship that starts in the gut, not the textbook. When he says he "didn't know what the hell" Charlie Parker was playing, he’s puncturing the mythology that great taste requires formal comprehension. Bebop, especially Parker’s phrasing and harmonic velocity, can sound like a locked door to anyone raised on swing-era grooves and tidy song forms. Watts isn’t embarrassed by that distance; he’s using it to mark the difference between decoding and being moved.

The second clause does the real work: "I just liked the way he played". It’s almost aggressively plain, a drummer’s sentence with no ornament, and that’s the point. Watts frames aesthetic judgment as immediate and bodily, the way rhythm hits before theory catches up. In a culture that loves gatekeeping (jazz as homework, genius as a password), this is a sly democratizing move: you’re allowed to love something you can’t yet explain.

Context matters. Watts came up as a jazz obsessive before becoming the engine of the Rolling Stones, a band often treated as raw instinct rather than virtuoso craft. His line quietly bridges those worlds. He’s nodding to Parker as a north star while defending the legitimacy of learning by listening, absorbing, and stealing feel. The subtext: sophistication isn’t always the ability to name the chord changes; sometimes it’s the courage to trust your ear, then spend the rest of your life catching up to what it already knew.