A handwritten letter Brian Jones sent Charlie Watts in 1962, before the Rolling Stones played their first concert, is being revealed publicly for the first time. Jones tried to recruit the drummer with a confident description of his new band and a blunt assessment of its current percussionist. Kept by Watts’s family for more than six decades, it heads to auction on December 15.
The Rolling Stones had not yet played their first concert when Brian Jones wrote to Charlie Watts in June 1962. The guitarist was assembling a rhythm-and-blues band and wanted a drummer capable of supporting his plans. More than 64 years later, his handwritten invitation provides a direct view of that early effort, before any of the group’s later success was assured.
Jones addressed the letter to the family home in Wembley where Watts had grown up. He began with an apology for the possible intrusion, explaining that he did not know the drummer’s professional arrangements with Alexis Korner. Seeing another musician behind the drums at a recent Ealing performance had made him wonder whether Watts might be available.
At the time, Watts worked in advertising while playing with Korner’s Blues Incorporated. The group was a meeting point for young British musicians interested in American blues and R&B. His jazz-informed approach and rhythmic feel made him an appealing prospect for Jones, whose invitation concerned a new band still trying to establish both its sound and its personnel.
The proposal mixed courtesy with confidence. Jones said his group needed a good drummer if Watts was no longer committed to Korner and still wanted to play R&B. He went further, suggesting his band already sounded better and was becoming tightly connected. For a group not yet publicly established as the Rolling Stones, that was an ambitious recruitment argument.
Practical details followed the enthusiasm. The musicians rehearsed on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, giving the invitation the character of an actual working arrangement. Rather than the large recording agreements associated with their later career, the letter concerns young musicians trying to find the right drummer and make a developing band stable enough to move forward.
The postscript described two guitars, harmonica, piano and drums, with bass intended to follow. It also abandoned the opening politeness when assessing the current drummer in distinctly unfavourable terms. The letter does not identify that musician, however, and the changing early personnel make it impossible to attach Jones’s criticism confidently to one specific person.
What it establishes is his dissatisfaction with the existing situation and belief that Watts could offer something different. The invitation was written before the first Rolling Stones concert at London’s Marquee Club on July 12, 1962. Watts did not play that show, and joining did not follow immediately from receiving Jones’s approach.
He became a member in January 1963, approximately seven months after the letter. The delay reflects a decision involving an existing job and musical commitments, rather than a move into a band with an assured future. Looking back from later success can obscure how uncertain that proposal would have appeared to someone with an established daily routine.
By early 1963, Bill Wyman had joined on bass, alongside Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Jones and Ian Stewart in the early lineup. Watts completed a rhythmic foundation that would shape the group for decades. The six musicians appeared together on February 2, 1963, marking another step in the formation of the band associated with its subsequent rise.
Richards later described in “Life” how strongly they wanted Watts as a permanent drummer, recalling efforts to cut food spending so they could pay him. That memory complements the letter’s more immediate evidence of recruitment. Together, they depict a persistent attempt to secure a musician the future Rolling Stones considered important to the sound they wanted.
Watts’s contribution subsequently became familiar through a controlled, jazz-shaped approach to rock drumming. His timing and response to Richards’s guitar, alongside years working with Wyman, supplied a distinctive foundation without depending on conspicuous solos. The letter captures the point before that long partnership began, when those future contributions remained a possibility rather than an established part of music history.
The early members’ paths later diverged. Jones left the group in 1969 and died that July, aged 27. Wyman’s departure was officially announced in 1993. Watts remained with the Rolling Stones until his death in August 2021, aged 80, extending his participation across nearly six decades after accepting the invitation that had initially required months of consideration.
The letter stayed in the drummer’s family and now emerges through his sister, with the original envelope addressed to the Wembley home. That provenance connects it directly to the recipient and the period of writing. It is a document made before fame, rather than a later souvenir created to commemorate the group’s achievements.
Sotheby’s will offer it in New York’s “Rock & Pop” auction on December 15, 2026, with an estimate of $70,000 to $80,000. Those are pre-sale figures, not an achieved price. Public viewing is scheduled for December 2–8, and online bidding begins December 2, leaving the eventual result dependent on collectors’ interest.
Sotheby’s music and pop-culture specialist Craig Inciardi highlighted its access to the band’s formation. The interest goes beyond signatures: the content shows one young musician trying to persuade another to join an uncertain venture. For the Rolling Stones, the letter preserves a moment when rehearsals, a search for personnel and Watts’s eventual decision still lay ahead of the recordings and worldwide tours.
