A previously unseen handwritten letter from late Rolling Stones guitarist and co-founder Brian Jones inviting drummer Charlie Watts to join the legendary group is up for auction. Addressed to “Mr. C. Watts” at his childhood home in Wembley, England, the letter was written in June 1962 and sent before the band formally adopted their name, just weeks before their first performance that July.
“Few documents bring us as close to the formation of a legendary band as this letter,” said auction house Sotheby’s music and pop culture specialist Craig Inciardi in a press release announcing the sale. “Written just weeks before The Rolling Stones’ first performance and months before Charlie Watts officially joined the group, it captures the excitement and ambition of a band on the cusp of history. It is an extraordinary first-hand record of Brian Jones’s determination to recruit the drummer whose distinctive sound would help define The Rolling Stones for nearly six decades.”
The letter provided by Watt’s sister was in the family’s possession for more than 60 years and it, along with the original envelope, will make their auction debut at Sotheby’s New York’s Rock & Pop sale on Dec. 15 with an initial estimate between $70,000-$80,000.
The friendly, cheeky missive from Jones — who was initially a creative engine of the band before drug and alcohol issues caused his firing in 1969 — opens with the friendly greeting, “Dear Charlie, if you consider this letter rather impertinent, please excuse me…” According to Sotheby’s, Jones then asks about Watts’s work with Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated band, which was one of the leading R&B acts on the London scene at the time.
He then makes his pitch. “We are looking for a good drummer. Already we consider our band far better than Alex’s – we are getting a very tightly-knit sound,” he wrote of the budding group, which at that point consisted of two guitars, harmonica, piano and drums, with plans to add a bassist, as well as a clear-eyed measure of their then-current timekeeper.
“Our current drummer is atrocious!” Jones wrote to Watts, whose background was primarily in jazz, but who would go on to be the Stones’ drummer until his death in 2021 at age 80. Guitarist Keith Richards described the hard sell the band gave Watts in his 2010 autobiography, Life, in which he said he and his bandmates cut back on their eating to afford their preferred drummer. “We starved ourselves to pay for him! Literally. We went shoplifting to get Charlie Watts. We cut down our rations, we wanted him so bad, man,” Richards wrote.
Initially, the letter didn’t seem to do the trick, as it took another seven months before Watts officially joined the group in January 1963. The letter will be on public view at Sotheby’s New York from Dec. 2 through its auction on Dec. 15. Click here to see the auction listing.
The Stones are gearing up to release an expanded edition of this year’s Foreign Tongues album, renamed Foreign Tongues, Loose Lips. The set featuring five new songs from the sessions for the group’s 25th studio album is due out on Nov. 27.
