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RIP Charlie Watts


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39 minutes ago, Chad Fuck said:

I was literally getting in a car to go to the State Fair in Dallas, when a friend from Austin called and asked if I wanted to see the Stones in Zilker instead.  Future Mrs. F got in the car, expecting to go to the Fair, but I said, "Fair?  We're headed to Austin!"  Off we went.

Saw them in '89 (last tour with Bill Wyman), then Voodoo Lounge (94?), Bridges to Babylon.  Had tix to see them at COTA and Cotton Bowl.  I have Cotton Bowl tix still if they maintain the tour.

Brave lady taking on the name Mrs Fuck

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2 hours ago, Deej said:

Caught the Steel Wheels and Voodoo Lounge tours at the Cotton Bowl, Bridges to Babylon at Texas Motor Speedway, and the Zilker show.

Steel Wheels I was at the Cotton Bowl second night.

Voodoo Lounge in San Antonio (I was at UT at the time)

Texas Motor Speedway and Zilker as well.  

We may've see 3/4 of those shows together.  50% minimum.  How about that?

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57 minutes ago, jimmyjazz said:

Man, if I were ever to take my dream of being a serious drummer seriously, I'd definitely go traditional grip, left hand on the snare, right hand everywhere else.

So much SNAP.  What a backbeat.

Isn't that the beauty of a guy like Charlie? I was never a drummer but had plenty of friends who were & in high school would hang out in their garages while they all banged the shit out of their kits with the thought that if you hit it hard enough you'd become Bonham or Moon. Or maybe just get your rocks off in the process.

But Charlie like so many of the other greats before him seemed to just roll effortlessly in the back, coil up, and <<WHAM>> hit it in the space where rock 'n roll really lives.

 

This version of Bitch was six years ago. I love Keef. "Talk is Cheap" is--according the Charlie--the greatest Stones album they never recorded. But his slip is showing all throughout this clip. Ronnie and the horns are covering his dropped licks all throughout the song.

But look at Charlie back there. He's in control of the whole song. When Keith messes up he strikes a pose and stares at his axe. Charlie just keeps chugging along in the back, leading Keith back into the groove.

I might have gone from beer to Irish whiskey to Oban earlier than planned tonight. RIP, Charlie. You were the best in my book.

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Isn't that the beauty of a guy like Charlie? I was never a drummer but had plenty of friends who were & in high school would hang out in their garages while they all banged the shit out of their kits with the thought that if you hit it hard enough you'd become Bonham or Moon. Or maybe just get your rocks off in the process.
But Charlie like so many of the other greats before him seemed to just roll effortlessly in the back, coil up, and > hit it in the space where rock 'n roll really lives.
 
This version of Bitch was six years ago. I love Keef. "Talk is Cheap" is--according the Charlie--the greatest Stones album they never recorded. But his slip is showing all throughout this clip. Ronnie and the horns are covering his dropped licks all throughout the song.
But look at Charlie back there. He's in control of the whole song. When Keith messes up he strikes a pose and stares at his axe. Charlie just keeps chugging along in the back, leading Keith back into the groove.
I might have gone from beer to Irish whiskey to Oban earlier than planned tonight. RIP, Charlie. You were the best in my book.
There is a photo of Charlie in Keith's autobiography "Life" that contains a caption that simply reads "The bed that I lay on" or something similar. Its all he had to say.

Throughout the whole book its apparent how much he looked up to Charlie. Today is probably the toughest of Keith's life.
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Max Weinberg was gutted by this loss & was waxing on Twitter about his "hero" Charlie last night. He told a lovely, multi-tweet story about going backstage at a Stones show about twenty years ago and being in the greeting line to meet Charlie. He said that after they talked for 3 or 4 minutes, Charlie gently took his hand and asked "so where are you going to now?" Max said he knew it was the classiest, loveliest "time to move along" he'd ever experienced. He said that's now the standard he uses. One drummer stealing yet another perfect lick from another.

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10 hours ago, AnotherUTFan said:

There is a photo of Charlie in Keith's autobiography "Life" that contains a caption that simply reads "The bed that I lay on" or something similar. Its all he had to say.

I don't remember that photo but do remember this from Keef's book.   One of my favorite Stones pics ever:

image.thumb.png.a7ace14d2f1a0cb82ecf0ec36362e92b.png

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11 hours ago, GhostOfTomJoad said:

Isn't that the beauty of a guy like Charlie? I was never a drummer but had plenty of friends who were & in high school would hang out in their garages while they all banged the shit out of their kits with the thought that if you hit it hard enough you'd become Bonham or Moon. Or maybe just get your rocks off in the process.

But Charlie like so many of the other greats before him seemed to just roll effortlessly in the back, coil up, and <<WHAM>> hit it in the space where rock 'n roll really lives.

 

This version of Bitch was six years ago. I love Keef. "Talk is Cheap" is--according the Charlie--the greatest Stones album they never recorded. But his slip is showing all throughout this clip. Ronnie and the horns are covering his dropped licks all throughout the song.

But look at Charlie back there. He's in control of the whole song. When Keith messes up he strikes a pose and stares at his axe. Charlie just keeps chugging along in the back, leading Keith back into the groove.

I might have gone from beer to Irish whiskey to Oban earlier than planned tonight. RIP, Charlie. You were the best in my book.

Yeah, I think Ronnie has been the top guitarist in the band for quite some time.

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2 hours ago, Deej said:

He'll be back at 3:00, apparently. 

Just in time for tea.  

RIP, Mr. Watts.  It's not fair, but I've always thought of you on the 4-band Mount Rushmore of the British Invasion.  The Beatles, The Stones, The Who, and Zeppelin.  And in those bands were some incredible drummers-namely Bonham, Moon, and you. 

You were giants roaming the Earth, but what I love about you is that did it so different from one another.  Moon's oversized kit with two bass and seconds to live, Bonham's rather normal front setup with his signature timpani and gong out back, and then Charlie's.  Minimalist yet elegant to its core, just like Charlie.  But for the extra ride cymbal, it rather looked like a kit you could order for your child from a catalogue.  Moon was madness from start to finish, often overpowering a band of powerful musicians.  Bonham was bold and chaotic, but it blended controllably with Page and Jones.  And there was Charlie. understated but fierce.  Played it completely different with his known jazzy swing, but with a metronomic pattern and reverse cymbal usage that we all know in our mind's ear forever.  I can't define Charlie Watts, but I know him when I hear 'em.  I haven't played a drum kit in over a decade but I could pick up and play "Honky Tonk Women" right now because I can picture Charlie playing it, and I've always wanted to be like Charlie.  

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2 hours ago, Scooter Monzingo said:

Best Charlie story is of him punching Mick in the face after he called Charlie “his drummer” in an interview.

After punching Mick he shouted “you’re my lead singer”….

Between Charlie and Dusty the back beat will be impeccable. 
Fuck I hate getting old. 

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One of my favorite memories of Charlie, and it's really obscure and almost meaningless, was what my friend pointed out when we attended their Bridges To Babylon show at Texas Motor Speedway:
"What I love is how Charlie often doesn't play the hi-hat on 2 or 4 because that's when he hits the snare drum."
 
Who does that?  Who plays 8ths on the snare but leaves off 3 and 7?  That's Charlie.  You can see him do it at times in the video above.

I remember noticing that in a Stones music video in the early 90s. I had a drummer roommate at the time and he actually pointed it out as odd because it’s something that new drummers do before they learn to separate their hands. Interesting that an accomplished drummer would do it on purpose.

RIP Mr Watts
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7 minutes ago, Buzzrock said:


I remember noticing that in a Stones music video in the early 90s. I had a drummer roommate at the time and he actually pointed it out as odd because it’s something that new drummers do before they learn to separate their hands. Interesting that an accomplished drummer would do it on purpose.

I saw a documentary on drummers last night and Jim Keltner said he stole it from Charlie, and Steve Jordan stole it from him.  Then he had to train himself to only do it on occasion.

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8 minutes ago, Buzzrock said:


I remember noticing that in a Stones music video in the early 90s. I had a drummer roommate at the time and he actually pointed it out as odd because it’s something that new drummers do before they learn to separate their hands. Interesting that an accomplished drummer would do it on purpose.

RIP Mr Watts

Maybe that's just how he learned and he never unlearned it the "right way."  He talks about in the Chad Smith interview learning completely self-taught.

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On 8/24/2021 at 12:27 PM, jimmyjazz said:

One of my favorite memories of Charlie, and it's really obscure and almost meaningless, was what my friend pointed out when we attended their Bridges To Babylon show at Texas Motor Speedway:

"What I love is how Charlie often doesn't play the hi-hat on 2 or 4 because that's when he hits the snare drum."

 

Who does that?  Who plays 8ths on the snare but leaves off 3 and 7?  That's Charlie.  You can see him do it at times in the video above.

I am going to need a John Madden telestrator (sp) for this.  I am not musically inclined enough to know the details of which you speak.  I just know that it sounds good and I like it.

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2 hours ago, mininghorn88 said:

I am going to need a John Madden telestrator (sp) for this.  I am not musically inclined enough to know the details of which you speak.  I just know that it sounds good and I like it.

Here's a Youtube video that talks about it and tries to show it.  In the brief clip of Charlie playing, you can see how he lays off the hi-hat when he hits the snare.  Some of the comments to the video are interesting.  One commentator says that Charlie started doing it at the request of an engineer who was trying to isolate the sound of the snare drum as much as possible.  Don't know if that's true.  All I know is that when I started paying attention to drummers in songs on the radio or MTV or live many years ago, Charlie looked and sounded different in part because he would sometimes lay off the hi-hat when he was hitting the snare.

 

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2 hours ago, Deej said:

I remember thinking how old they were when this came out. They were in their mid-40's. Fuck.

 

yeah they seemed really old because almost all of the bands from the early/mid 60's had already blown up.  It was them and the Beach Boys.

Dave Grohl is 6 years older now than jagger was in this video.

 

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11 hours ago, mininghorn88 said:

I am going to need a John Madden telestrator (sp) for this.  I am not musically inclined enough to know the details of which you speak.  I just know that it sounds good and I like it.

Here's my crude attempt to explain it.  Excuse the Excel spreadsheet.

A basic rock beat comprises 8x "8th notes" to the measure.  I'm showing two measures below.  Way more often than not, a drummer will hit the hi hat cymbals (the clamshell pair on a stand right by the snare drum) on every 8th note.  They will also hit the snare drum on the 3rd and 7th of those notes, and the kick on the 1st and 5th.

Charlie Watts intentionally DOESN'T hit the hi hat when he hits the snare.  Look at the green cells in my illustration -- he only plays the snare on those 8th note "beats", not the snare and the hi hat cymbal simultaneously, as most drummers do.  It does make the snare a bit more isolated in a recording situation, I'll admit, although I'm not really sure that's the reason Charlie did it.  I think it was just the way he learned drums.

 

image.thumb.png.28f76c33c015afc8ceccf84b49002028.png

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6 minutes ago, jimmyjazz said:

Here's my crude attempt to explain it.  Excuse the Excel spreadsheet.

A basic rock beat comprises 8x "8th notes" to the measure.  I'm showing two measures below.  Way more often than not, a drummer will hit the hi hat cymbals (the clamshell pair on a stand right by the snare drum) on every 8th note.  They will also hit the snare drum on the 3rd and 7th of those notes, and the kick on the 1st and 5th.

Charlie Watts intentionally DOESN'T hit the hi hat when he hits the snare.  Look at the green cells in my illustration -- he only plays the snare on those 8th note "beats", not the snare and the hi hat cymbal simultaneously, as most drummers do.  It does make the snare a bit more isolated in a recording situation, I'll admit, although I'm not really sure that's the reason Charlie did it.  I think it was just the way he learned drums.

 

image.thumb.png.28f76c33c015afc8ceccf84b49002028.png

good stuff.  I wonder if the jazz guys did it that way?

James Brown "get on the One!"

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https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/30/nyregion/charlie-watts-birdland-nyc.html

 

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In 1960, while working as an artist and graphic designer, and some years before the Rolling Stones were born, Charlie Watts began work on “Ode to a High-Flying Bird,” a captivating children’s book about his hero, the jazz great Charlie Parker. The book featured charming drawings of a bird named Charlie who realized he didn’t sound like most of the other birds, and who left home to fly to New York City, where he played “from his heart” and made a new nest for himself in “Birdland.”

 

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Charlie Parker made a 14-year-old Charlie Watts dream the impossible dream of visiting New York and playing at a jazz club. And while he thought at the time that “the only way to get to New York was in a band on a cruise ship,” he would actually get there in 1964 with the Rolling Stones. While Keith Richards and Mick Jagger hung out at the Apollo, where James Brown was doing five — five! — shows a day, Mr. Watts spent his free time haunting the jazz clubs he’d dreamed about as a boy: He saw Charles Mingus at Birdland, Gene Krupa at the Metropole, and Sonny Rollins, Earl Hines and Miles Davis.

 

Spoiler

Many decades later, Mr. Watts would achieve his jazz dreams, when he brought his jazz combo to play at the Blue Note, but his day job for almost six decades, of course, was with the Rolling Stones. He was their indispensable drummer, whose loose, jazz-inflected playing and improvisational ardor were the not-so-secret sauce that helped make the Stones such a singular and enduring band.

“Everybody thinks Mick and Keith are the Rolling Stones,” Mr. Richards once observed. “If Charlie wasn’t doing what he’s doing on drums, that wouldn’t be true at all. You’d find out that Charlie Watts is the Stones.” Charlie Watts, Mr. Richards added in his 2010 memoir, “Life,” “has always been the bed that I lie on musically.”

28ny-charlie-watts41-superJumbo.jpg?qual

 

Charlie Watts during a rehearsal in New York, in 1978. 

 

“The engine” was a favorite phrase musicians used to describe Mr. Watts’s role in the band. Also: its motor, its backbone, its heartbeat, its scaffolding, its glue. The soft-spoken Mr. Watts, who died last Tuesday, was more modest, saying he was “brought up under the theory the drummer was an accompanist.” His job, he said, was “to keep the time and help everyone else do what they do,” to lend the music a little “swing and bounce” that would make people get up and dance.

When other drummers started going for bigger and fancier kits, adorned with all sorts of chimes and gongs, Mr. Watts stuck with a small four-piece drum set from 1957 and, unlike Keith Moon and Ginger Baker, he never went in for flash pyrotechnics or showy solos. He loved playing onstage with his mates, but he hated life on the road, hated leaving home, hated the cringe-making trappings of rock ’n’ roll — the parties, the press, the screaming girls. While his bandmates were out late at night, getting into trouble, Mr. Watts was often in his hotel room, sketching pictures of the bed: He told interviewers that he’d drawn every bed he’d slept in on tour since 1967; by 2001, he said, he’d filled 12 to 15 diaries.

For that matter, Mr. Watts said he felt out of place in the whole rock ’n’ roll scene — “I live in TCM world, Turner Classic Movies,” he told a BBC radio show, explaining that he’d inherited his father’s love for 1940s-style tailor-made suits, and regarded Fred Astaire as “the ultimate in what you should be if you’re a professional.”

Indeed, Mr. Watts was a man of contradictions — a jazzman in the world’s greatest rock ’n’ roll band, an old-fashioned gentleman among pirates and bad boys, a homebody who spent much of his work life on the road. It was also his contradictions — his loose, swinging style combined with his love of precision; his idiosyncratic technique combined with his remarkable versatility — that made him such an exceptional drummer, and the perfect musical partner for Keith Richards in forging the Stones’ signature sound.

As the band’s former bass player Bill Wyman recalled: “Every band follows the drummer. We don’t follow Charlie. Charlie follows Keith. So the drums are very slightly behind Keith. It’s only fractional. Seconds. Minuscule.” But it makes the Stones impossible to copy.

The propulsive drive of “Get Off My Cloud”; the manic, percussive beat of “19th Nervous Breakdown”; the gathering sense of menace in “Gimme Shelter”; the jazzy syncopation of “Start Me Up”; the lovely, laconic swing of “Beast of Burden” — all were testaments to Mr. Watts’s gift for modulating the mood of a track to create a musical conversation with Mr. Richards’s galvanic guitar and punctuate Mr. Jagger’s vocals and performance. The drummer had a minimalist’s instinct for how to make the most emotional impact with the most economical of licks, when to withhold and when to step on the gas, and how to effortlessly shift gears between the languid and the urgent, between savage immediacy and elegant formality.

I became a die-hard Stones fan the moment I saw them perform “Time Is on My Side” (in black and white) on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1964. They all wore suits or vests, I recall, except for Mr. Jagger, who wore a preppy crew-neck sweater. That weekend, I persuaded my father to drive me down to Cutler’s record shop in New Haven, Conn., where I bought “England’s Newest Hitmakers.” It was followed, not long after, by “Out of Our Heads” and “Between the Buttons” (which featured an enigmatic comic strip by Mr. Watts), and, in time, every other album the band released, even as vinyl gave way to CDs and CDs to digital downloads.

28NY-charlie-watts31-superJumbo.jpg?qual

The Rolling Stones on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1964

 

I made mix tapes of my favorite Stones tracks, and over the years, waited in lines in New York and Chicago and Paris to buy Stones tickets. The Stones were — and remain — a great live band, and no show (or song) was ever the same: “Midnight Rambler” not only waxed and waned in length — from nine to 15 minutes or so — but sometimes felt like old-school Chicago blues, sometimes more like a rock opera or improvisatory jazz. Some renditions of “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” and “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” seemed to set new land speed records, while versions of “Slipping Away” and “Wild Horses” took on affecting new layers of emotional nuance.

This is why the Rolling Stones have endured — why Charlie Watts, who initially thought the band might last three months, gave up counting after three years. They endured because of the depth and complexity of their music, which wasn’t just about “love and hope and sex and dreams,” but also about loss and time and mortality. They endured because of their connection with their audiences, and because, like the blues and jazz greats they grew up idolizing, they continually made their music new.

In his 2019 book “Sympathy for the Drummer: Why Charlie Watts Matters,” the writer and musician Mike Edison wrote: “In many ways, the Rolling Stones at their best were a more intense jazz band than Charlie’s actual jazz bands — when the Stones were cooking, not a lot got played the same way twice. There was more group improvisation.”

“Charlie played more aggressive, out-there jazz in the first four bars of ‘All Down the Line’ and the breakdowns of ‘Rip This Joint’ than with any of his jazz combos. There was more improvising and flashing of chops in ‘Midnight Rambler,’ when things were going right and Keith and Charlie were doing that thing, changing tempos and mashing up crazy shuffle stops, than there were on any quintet session.”

In such moments, Mr. Watts’s usually stoic onstage demeanor — focused, intense, in the zone — would crack into a radiant, boyish grin. “Charlie Watts playing the drums,” his biographer wrote, “is the sound of happiness, the aural equivalent of Snoopy doing his dance of joy.”

 

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Charlie Watts interview by Max Weinberg

Everybody knows Charlie hated doing interviews. Well, in '83 he sat down with Max Weinberg for Max's book The Big Beat: Conversations with Rock's Great Drummers. I've never read it before but damn if I might need to look for it. A long but VERY worthwhile read.

 A couple snippets:

Quote

We were sitting stageside, and when the set was over, Charlie swept down from the drums, handed his sticks to me (which I still have), and fingered the lapels of my suit. 

Oh, yeah, I always dressed up to see Charlie play. Respect. For me, it was like going to temple. As he inspected the material, he appraised, "Nice — worsted wool." But then Charlie bowed, took Becky's hand to lightly brush with a kiss, and in his oh-so-suave British accent said, "…and milady's in silk." Which she was.

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Your drum sound seems to stay remarkably consistent from track to track and album to album, particularly your snare. How do you achieve that tuning?

For me, it's really how it feels more than how it sounds, somehow. I play the military-style grip, and the hard thing about that, when you're playing rock & roll, is to get the volume. The nicest sound is not to hit a rim shot like Krupa used to — you know, the high, ringy one that you hit with the narrow part of the stick — but to take the fat part of the stick and hit across the drum onto the rim. You'll get a thick sound, especially if the top head ain't too tight. Also, I don't play very loudly; the sound doesn't really come from the volume. It's getting the thing to hit right all the time. That's when I feel comfortable; when it's on and you don't even think about it.

Quote

Charlie, I have one more question; it's about something you mentioned before, that the art of a good drummer is the ability to play with anyone. But you also said that you don't think you are a good drummer. Why?

Well, I don't think what I do is particularly difficult. What is good, though, is that people look at me and say, "Well, I can do that." I like that. The drumming I do ain't hard, but drumming is hard when you take it a step beyond me, which is where you should be if you really want to be good. I ain't that good, and it's taken me twenty years — though I think the band I'm in is pretty sensational.

 

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Charlie Watts interview by Max Weinberg
Everybody knows Charlie hated doing interviews. Well, in '83 he sat down with Max Weinberg for Max's book The Big Beat: Conversations with Rock's Great Drummers. I've never read it before but damn if I might need to look for it. A long but VERY worthwhile read.
 A couple snippets:

We were sitting stageside, and when the set was over, Charlie swept down from the drums, handed his sticks to me (which I still have), and fingered the lapels of my suit. 

Oh, yeah, I always dressed up to see Charlie play. Respect. For me, it was like going to temple. As he inspected the material, he appraised, "Nice — worsted wool." But then Charlie bowed, took Becky's hand to lightly brush with a kiss, and in his oh-so-suave British accent said, "…and milady's in silk." Which she was.

Your drum sound seems to stay remarkably consistent from track to track and album to album, particularly your snare. How do you achieve that tuning?

For me, it's really how it feels more than how it sounds, somehow. I play the military-style grip, and the hard thing about that, when you're playing rock & roll, is to get the volume. The nicest sound is not to hit a rim shot like Krupa used to — you know, the high, ringy one that you hit with the narrow part of the stick — but to take the fat part of the stick and hit across the drum onto the rim. You'll get a thick sound, especially if the top head ain't too tight. Also, I don't play very loudly; the sound doesn't really come from the volume. It's getting the thing to hit right all the time. That's when I feel comfortable; when it's on and you don't even think about it.

Charlie, I have one more question; it's about something you mentioned before, that the art of a good drummer is the ability to play with anyone. But you also said that you don't think you are a good drummer. Why?

Well, I don't think what I do is particularly difficult. What is good, though, is that people look at me and say, "Well, I can do that." I like that. The drumming I do ain't hard, but drumming is hard when you take it a step beyond me, which is where you should be if you really want to be good. I ain't that good, and it's taken me twenty years — though I think the band I'm in is pretty sensational.

 

It ain’t hard to be good, it’s hard to be good together.
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6 hours ago, GhostOfTomJoad said:

fingered the lapels of my suit. 

 

12 minutes ago, Chad Fuck said:

But then Charlie bowed, took Becky's hand to lightly brush with a kiss, and in his oh-so-suave British accent said, "…and milady's in silk."

And then fingered his wife. 

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