Nicky Hopkins, Ry Cooder, Mick Jagger, Bill Wyman & Charlie Watts - Jamming With Edward!

Wow, man - Charlie Watts...  We lost a GIANT today, ladies and gentlemen, and an inspiration to rock drummers everywhere.  The consummate, detached, sardonic professional and perfectionist, who grounded The Rolling Stones with his steady, yet innovative beats for nearly sixty years.  

I've been going through the multitude of remembrances, eulogies and tributes to Mr. Watts all afternoon since I heard the news.  Of all of them, I feel that Rob Sheffield captured the manner, spirit and essence of him the best, in the article filed earlier today in Rolling Stone magazine.  Honestly, what more need be said?

In honor of the late drummer, I'm offering up for your enjoyment not a Rolling Stones album or rarity, but the loose and rollicking jam session members of the band recorded with two longtime friends and session players (pianist Nicky Hopkins and guitarist Ry Cooder) one night in the spring of 1969, while The Stones were in the middle of recording tracks with producer Glyn Johns for their upcoming album Let It Bleed.  The quintet shambled and shuffled through a few loose bluesy originals (penned by Watts, Cooder and Hopkins), along with a couple of blues covers they liked.

It was all a big goof, and at the time it was done, they had no intention whatsoever of releasing the songs.  In the original liner notes, Mick Jagger describes the album as "a nice piece of bullshit... which we cut one night in London, England while waiting for our guitar player to get out of bed. It was promptly forgotten (which may have been for the better) ..."  As such, it sat around in the vaults for years, until one day a bored Johns retrieved it.  Johns said of the album: "[It] was just a joke really, just a laugh. I recorded it and they played it, and then, I don't know how long later [ed. note: nearly three years, actually], we dug the tapes out, I mixed it and they stuck it out on an album. It didn't really warrant releasing really, but it was okay, a bit of fun, and there's some good playing on it."  The disc charted briefly in America, eventually peaking at #33 on Billboard, but did nothing in the UK.

To this day, this release is generally reviled and disowned by Rolling Stones purists, who equate the recorded performances here to that of A Toot And A Snore In '74, a recording of a similarly loose (albeit drug-fueled) jam session by John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Harry Nilsson and Stevie Wonder in Los Angeles in the spring of 1974.  But I feel that comparison is unfair, and unwarranted.  Despite its slapdash nature, there is some good playing on this disc, and at best it shows The Stones unadorned, belting out numbers like the bar band they started out as.  All in all, it's definitely worth a listen.

So here it is for you all to do just that - Jamming With Edward! ("Edward" was Nicky Hopkins' nickname), recorded on the evening of April 23rd, 1969, and released on Rolling Stones Records on January 7th, 1972.  Enjoy this in the spirit in which it is offered, in honor of the life and legacy of the sublime and now-immortal Charlie Watts.  And as always, let me know what you think.

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