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was instead obsessed by cool jazz. He saw himself, at fifteen, as Miles Davis, standing outside the Village Vanguard in an Ivy League suit, waiting to go on with ’Trane and Philly Joe Jones.
    He left school at sixteen, studied graphic design at Harrow School of Art in the late fifties, and in 1960 got a job in a London ad agency, where he learned lettering and poster design. He was making a little money, which he spent on smart clothes and Charlie Parker records.
    Charlie Parker. Bird. In 1939, improvising on his alto saxophone, Parker had fallen through the chord changes of the standard “Cherokee” and discovered bebop, the free-flowing and inspired jazz that grew into a hipster cult whose trademarks were the beret, the goatee, and the needle. Bebop was the cutting edge of music, and its players—Bird, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Charles Mingus—were the artistic astronauts of the time. Charlie Watts loved Charlie Parker so much that, in 1961 at the age of twenty, he wrote a children’s book called
Ode to a High-Flying Bird,
with little illustrations that told the bebop story in a sweet, innocent style.
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    Summer 1961. Charlie was playing drums with brushes behind a little Thelonious-style combo at the Troubadour when Alexis Korner came to sit in and play some blues. Korner took his little portable amp and hung it on the wall behind Charlie, who, though not particularly assertive, got up and took the amp off the wall. If it had to be amplified, it wasn’t going to drown the rest of the band. Alexis liked Charlie’s impeccable time and swinging approach, which recalled Papa Jo Jones of Count Basie’s orchestra. Alexis asked Charlie to join the blues group he was putting together for bandleader Acker Bilk. Charlie instead went on a Danish tour with veteran bebop reedman Don Byas, a cool gig for a twenty-year-old.
    Back in London, Charlie Watts met Alexis Korner again and joined the first lineup of Blues Incorporated in late January 1962.
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    But Charlie Watts was confused by Blues Incorporated. They wanted a Chicago-style backbeat, but Alexis and Cyril Davies were fighting (as they usually did) about how heavy it should be. Davies wanted a blues shuffle; Alexis wanted it to swing.
    â€œIt was an amazing band,” Charlie said, “but a total cacophony of sound. On a good night, it was a cross between R&B and Charlie Mingus, which was what Alexis wanted.” Korner had seen Mingus’s band, the Jazz Workshop, in action in London around 1960. Mingus, protean New York jazz bassist and composer, ran his shows as rehearsals, demanding his players redo passages that he didn’t like. Now Alexis Korner wanted a similar band that could develop its own audience and even a wider blues scene. The regular lineup and auxiliary musicians in the club could be joined by anyone from the audience with enough bottle to get up and wail with the best cats in London. Korner knew, from run-ins with young talent like that Brian kid in Cheltenham, that there were young blues fanatics out there, just drooling for the chance to get up and show their stuff.
    Charlie Watts was bemused by the whole disorganized lot. “When I first played with Cyril Davies, I thought, ’What the fuck is happening here?’ ” Watts had never heard an amplified harmonica before. Everyone was coming from their own special interest in the blues. “I didn’t know what the hell was going on.” During the winter of 1961, Korner, Davies, and Watts jammed together, joined by other Korner recruits, as they tried to line up club dates for the new group.
    But nobody wanted to hear it. The club owners felt threatened because their clientele wanted jazz, and these guys were playing the blues, considered primitive and uncool. Korner tried to book Blues Incorporated on the National