Brian Jones’ 1962 Letter Recruiting Charlie Watts to The Rolling Stones Heads to Sotheby’s at $70,000-$80,000 Estimate

A handwritten letter that captures a pivotal moment in the formation of The Rolling Stones is heading to auction, more than six decades after Brian Jones sent it to future drummer Charlie Watts. Sotheby’s will offer the June 1962 letter in its Rock & Pop online auction in New York, where it carries an estimate of $70,000 to $80,000. Bidding will be open from December 2 through December 15, with the letter also going on public view at Sotheby’s New York beginning December 2.

Coming directly from Watts’s family, the letter has remained out of public view for more than 60 years. It is accompanied by its original envelope and was addressed to “Mr. C. Watts” at Watts’s childhood home in Wembley. What makes the document particularly significant is its timing. Jones wrote the letter before the group had even adopted The Rolling Stones name and just weeks before the band’s first performance in July 1962. Watts would not officially join until January 1963.

Jones opens cautiously, writing, “Dear Charlie, if you consider this letter rather impertinent, please excuse me…” He then asks about Watts’s involvement with Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated before getting to the reason for the letter: Jones wanted him as the drummer for his own emerging group. “We are looking for a good drummer,” Jones wrote, adding that the musicians already considered their band better than Korner’s and believed they were developing “a very tightly-knit sound.”

The letter also provides a remarkably informal snapshot of the group while its lineup was still taking shape. In a postscript, Jones describes a band consisting of two guitars, harmonica, piano and drums, with plans to eventually add bass guitar. He was considerably less diplomatic about the musician then occupying the drum stool. “Our present drummer is atrocious!” Jones wrote.

At the time, Watts was already highly regarded in London’s rhythm and blues scene. His musical background was primarily in jazz, and he was performing with Blues Incorporated while also maintaining a day job in advertising. According to Sotheby’s, he was initially reluctant to leave the group and the security of his regular work for the uncertain future offered by Jones, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. The letter documents one of Jones’s early attempts to change his mind.

Sotheby’s notes that Watts did not officially join The Rolling Stones until seven months later, in January 1963. By then, Bill Wyman had also joined, and on February 2, 1963, the group performed with an early six-member lineup consisting of Watts, Wyman, Jones, Richards, Jagger and pianist Ian Stewart.

Watts would remain behind the drums for The Rolling Stones until his death in August 2021, becoming a defining part of the band’s sound over nearly six decades.

“Few documents bring us as close to the formation of a legendary band as this letter. 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,” said Craig Inciardi, Sotheby’s Music and Pop Culture Specialist.

The letter offers something different from a later autograph, concert-used instrument or tour artifact. It comes from a period when the future of the band was still uncertain, preserving in Jones’s own handwriting an effort to recruit a musician who would go on to become one of its longest-serving members.

The Brian Jones letter to Charlie Watts will be on view at Sotheby’s New York beginning December 2. Online bidding in Sotheby’s Rock & Pop auction will run from December 2 through December 15.