There's a postscript in this letter that tells you everything about Brian Jones. After laying out his band's instrumentation and ambitions, he adds, almost as an afterthought, that their current drummer is 'atrocious.' It's the kind of detail that makes you understand exactly who Jones was — charming, competitive, completely unguarded — and why he was the one writing the letter in the first place. The context matters. In mid-1962, Charlie Watts was not a struggling musician looking for his break. He was a trained graphic designer working in advertising, playing drums for Alexis Korner's Blues Incorporated — London's most credible rhythm and blues outfit. Jones's pitch is therefore not to a desperate young man but to someone with options, which is why the letter is carefully deferential at the top ('if you consider this letter rather impertinent, please excuse me') and quietly boastful throughout. The audacity of 'we consider our band far better than Alex's' is worth sitting with. Blues Incorporated was the incubator for nearly the entire British R&B scene. Korner's band at various points included Jack Bruce, Ginger Baker, and Long John Baldry. Jones was pitching against that pedigree with a band that didn't yet have a name, a bass player, or a competent drummer. The confidence is either delusional or foundational — and history settled that question. Watts didn't immediately bite. Seven months passed between this letter and his official joining in January 1963. What finally convinced him is unrecorded, but Keith Richards's account in his autobiography Life gives a measure of the band's desire: they cut back on food to afford him. 'We starved ourselves to pay for him,' Richards wrote. That detail, alongside Jones's letter, sketches a band that knew precisely what it needed before it knew what it was. The letter comes directly from Watts's sister and has never been publicly shown. That provenance — not a dealer's collection, not a previous auction — is part of what makes it unusual. Documents this intimate from this moment in rock history almost never emerge. The February 1963 six-member lineup of Watts, Wyman, Jones, Richards, Jagger, and pianist Ian Stewart would remain the band's core sound for nearly sixty years, until Watts's death in August 2021. This letter is, in a fairly literal sense, where that started. Sotheby's estimates $70,000–$80,000 for the December sale, which feels right for the category — significant but not stratospheric. The real value here is archival and narrative. This is a primary source document for one of the most consequential band formations in popular music, in Jones's own hand, addressed to Watts's childhood home in Wembley. Whatever it fetches, it will be underpaying for what it is.
