The Rolling Stones Haven’t Missed a Beat

The accompaniment of ragtime had a European origin. Any march or polka features an “oom-pah” in the bass clef supporting the melody—the “oom” on the strong beat, the “pah” on the weak beat; the left hand of a ragtime pianist does the same. As ragtime gave way to jazz, gospel, and early R&B, African American musicians began stressing the weak “pah” much more, almost inverting what was “weak” and what was “strong.” This accent got stronger over time, and in the 1950s it started taking over the world.

To a layperson, a backbeat might seem easy, and in some ways it is easy, at least compared to more complex Afro-Latin diasporic rhythms connected to traditional bell pattern or clave, where staggered syncopations flex like pulsating Morse code. One of the key creators of modern rock drumming was the New Orleans virtuoso Earl Palmer, who was first widely heard with legends like Fats Domino and Little Richard before going on to appear with many of the world’s most famous acts. “The backbeat came about because the public wasn’t buying jazz,” Palmer said, in a memoir written with Tony Scherman titled simply Backbeat, “so we put something in that was simpler and that’s what made the difference.”

Heavily syncopated African music always implied dance, and there’s little American popular music without some sort of African-based syncopation appropriate for a dance floor. A backbeat is a dance-worthy syncopation reduced to the essential.

As with anything essential, getting a backbeat right becomes an advanced topic. In the 20th century, African Americans created the template. Along with giving due credit to Earl Palmer, Jordan named more of the beat’s greatest proponents: Al Jackson Jr. of the Stax Records house band and Al Green’s band at Hi Records; Benny Benjamin, of Motown’s house band, informally known as the Funk Brothers; Fred Below, who accompanied Chess Records artists like Muddy Waters, Chuck Berry, and Bo Diddley; and James Brown drummers Clyde Stubblefield and John “Jabo” Starks, whose beats reverberate through hip-hop in the form of samples.

During the British Invasion, a group of drummers took up this topic like a consortium of mad English scientists: Ringo Starr for the Beatles, Ginger Baker for Cream, Mitch Mitchell for the Jimi Hendrix Experience, John Bonham for Led Zeppelin, and Charlie Watts for the Rolling Stones. Watts was never a flashy drummer, and he never used one of the outsize drum kits favored by many of the bands who headlined stadiums in the 1970s. As his tenure in the Stones matured into mastery, Watts worked out some of the sparest versions of the backbeat heard on record.

For right-handed drummers, the backbeat is played on the snare drum on two and four with the left hand, while the right steadily pulses eighth notes on the ride cymbal or the closed high hat. Watts’s trademark eventually became the omission of the right-hand stroke on the high hat at the point that it would normally line up with the backbeat. The jaunty flourish that resulted—a quick upswing of the right hand as the left dealt out a resounding “PAH”—seemed to epitomize the Stones’ aesthetic, with a bit of Englishness underlying the New World groove.

It was only when I spoke to Jordan that I learned that Watts did not invent that approach. “Charlie never left out the high hat in the ’60s,” Jordan said. “He started doing that in the ’70s. It was something in the air at that moment. Levon Helm and Jim Keltner did it, and now I do it too. It was especially relevant for recording. The backbeat snare explodes in the studio if the high hat is not also being played. The high hat gets into every microphone, so if you leave it out when hitting the snare, you can treat the snare however you want. Charlie does this on ‘Shattered’ and ‘Start Me Up,’ and it’s very exciting.”

Jordan has thought a lot about how to approach playing with the Rolling Stones. “Keith Richards and I are in the engine room, so to speak,” he told me. “But Darryl Jones and I have also worked closely together on the right way to make the basic groove happen. I like the way the Stones sounded on live gigs from 1971 to 1974—to me, that was one of the strongest periods of the band in terms of live energy and how they were playing as a unit, and I try to bring the spirit of that era to the gig. By now, we’re in full swing. The band has found its stride.”

For Jordan, much of contemporary music has lost the secret sauce for “push and pull,” often as a result of preprogrammed software that digitally homogenizes rhythm. “When you go to see live acts these days, half of what you’re hearing is sequenced in Pro Tools, which also means that the tempos don’t breathe,” he said. “The main thing is to bring an unbridled excitement to a live performance. Take ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’: If we stayed at the opening tempo—if I held the tempo from start to finish—it wouldn’t generate the type of excitement that’s on the record. They speed up on the studio records of ‘Brown Sugar’ and ‘Honky Tonk Women.’ This accelerando is for a reason: It’s part of the excitement of live performance. If you’re preoccupied with holding the time steady, it’s not as freewheeling. It’s restrained, which is exactly what you don’t want to do in rock and roll. There’s nothing worse in rock and roll than being too far behind the beat or slowing down.”

It’s a subtle art. Only a fellow professional would notice anything speeding up, and only an artist of Steve Jordan’s caliber could create such an effect without sounding artificial.

Jordan’s masters of the backbeat—Palmer, Jackson, Benjamin, Below, Stubblefield, and Starks—were six African American drummers. It was a reminder that the larger issue of race is not sorted in this arena. Who got paid and who got famous is a loaded subject. It’s easy for casual rock music fans to name-check Ringo Starr, Ginger Baker, and John Bonham. The James Brown drummers Clyde Stubblefield and Jabo Starks are vastly more obscure to the world at large, in spite of their ubiquity in popular music ever since the first time DJ Kool Herc alternated between two copies of Brown’s “Give It Up or Turnit a Loose,” turning Stubblefield’s drum break into an endless loop.

The Rolling Stones sit dead center in this controversy. Some cannot forgive the Stones for emulating Chicago blues records—many of them featuring Fred Below—at a talented-amateur level as they ascended to world domination. It’s beyond question that the African American architects of blues and R&B deserved not just wider acclaim but a fairer share of the immense profits their work and influence generated.

There’s no way to fix history, but to their credit, the Stones have done much more than many rock stars to keep mentioning the names of their heroes to their vast public. When the band was booked to perform on the American TV show Shindig! in 1965, they insisted that Howlin’ Wolf appear on the show as well, introducing him as the original performer of their latest hit, Willie Dixon’s “Little Red Rooster.” For the rest of his life, Charlie Watts could hardly get through an interview without praising Black jazz geniuses like Charlie Parker and Kenny Clarke. It’s well-known that the band’s name comes from a Muddy Waters song, and indeed one of the best tracks on Hackney Diamonds is Jagger and Richards’s closing duet on Waters’s “Rolling Stone Blues.”

Jagger and Richards could do literally anything with their platform and their band, and it’s no accident that they have a Black rhythm team, Darryl Jones and Steve Jordan, serious working professionals who cut their teeth playing jazz and R&B with luminaries of those fields. Jones and Jordan don’t need to prove that they can hang with Jagger and Richards—it’s the other way around. Jagger and Richards need to prove that they can walk onstage and groove with Jones and Jordan.

With that lineup in place at Lincoln Field, the Rolling Stones still sounded like the world’s greatest rock and roll band, emphasis on the word band. Afterward, my friends talked about how the already thrilling concert had ascended to electrifying new heights during that night’s version of “Honky Tonk Women.” I hadn’t noticed at the time, but Steve Jordan’s subtle accelerando must have had something to do with it. “When we get to the second chorus of ‘Honky Tonk Women,’” he told me, “I’ve already planned to pick it up, shift gears, and drive it forward.”