Howdy. Further to yesterday's discussion: The ability to maintain tempo, even as intensity rises or falls, is much more difficult than it sounds. It's a bit like the way that draftsmen can draw very straight lines freehand - much practice required. The greatest musicians in any style are always the ones with this quality. Glenn Gould, Jimi Hendrix, James Jamerson, John Coltrane, Ringo Starr. You can hear it in the music. The spaces between the notes are beautiful, thrilling, awe-inspiring. The difficulty in finding musicians capable of playing like this has unfortunately led to pop music essentially being played by machines. This might pass for a while - i.e. the time it takes for teenagers to buy a product en masse, make people famous, etc. but ultimately music made this way will not have the staying power of music played by humans.
So back to the Stones - to their credit, they know how good Charlie is, and at their best, they play with him. When they run into trouble, they don't. Sometimes, the band starts very strongly and then gets a bit out of control ("rushes", in Musician) as the track goes along. Sometimes they don't lock in with him at all.
On the Stones' website, there's a video of Charlie talking about jazz drumming, where he discusses, almost apologetically, the fact that what he knows he learned from copying, and he speaks with the humility found in all great musicians. But this is how all serious musicians learn. One of the paradoxes involved in music, and the other arts as well, is that the more copying someone has done, the more originality they end up contributing. (For a literary parallel, read T.S. Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent".) This also leads to the aforementioned humility.
Suggested listening: "Bitch", "A Day in the Life", "Little Wing", "My Favorite Things","Ain't No Mountain High Enough" (Marvin Gaye & Tammi Terrell), The Goldberg Variations 1981 (cf. 1955).