Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards has cheated death so many times that he’s like a cat with nine lives, except maybe ninety-nine in his case.
A December 1965 show in Sacramento proved nearly fatal for Richards.
While singing, Richards, 82, did not realize that his microphone was not grounded.
“When the guitar string touched the metal stand, it shorted out the amplifier and sent a strong electric current through my body,” Bob Spitz writes in his forthcoming book, The Rolling Stones: The Biography.
A photographer who was there remembers Richards being “unconscious for a long time,” and years later the same thing happened to Stone the Crows lead guitarist Leslie Harvey, who died instantly.
Richards likely survived because he was wearing “thick rubber-soled shoes.”
The “Start Me Up” co-writer’s drug use skyrocketed after model and actress Anita Pallenberg began dating bandmate Brian Jones in 1967. Their relationship eventually produced three children (one died of SIDS), but the relationship was filled with a seemingly endless supply of illegal drugs.
Richards had always enjoyed recreational drugs, but then he discovered speedball. It was a combination of heroin and cocaine that was snorted to create a strong rush.
“According to Keith, ‘heroin’ ‘made everything possible,'” Spitz writes. “He considered it a ‘great leveler’ and said, ‘Once you get used to it, whatever happens, you can handle it.’
By the early 1970s, Spitz points out, Richards’ drug addiction had become a “tremendous threat to the Rolling Stones organization.” “His behavior was erratic” and often unpredictable.
Bassist Bill Wyman became irritated with his bandmates and “stopped talking to Keith at all. The only place they could rely on him was on stage.”
Richards and his friend Gram Parsons, a drug user, tried an unconventional detox by putting the drug to sleep for seven days while experiencing withdrawal symptoms.
They started using again a week later, but Parsons died of a drug overdose in 1973 at the age of 26.
In 1971, Richards and Pallenberg moved into Villa Nercourt, a historic 16-room Belle Époque mansion on the Côte d’Azur, but they opened the door to “a swarm of drug dealers who flocked to the villa like a flock of enterprising vultures.”
“Keith evolved into a full-time junkie,” Spitz writes, which caused “havoc with Keith’s time in countless ways,” including nodding off when putting his son Marlon to bed and staying awake for days on end creating riffs.
He was also reckless, driving his Jaguar around the French countryside to power a boat called Mandrax 2.
On one occasion, Richards went into a go-kart race with a friend while high, flew into the air and landed on his back.
Witnesses said the musician was dragged along his back for about 50 yards, leaving his back “as rough as a steak.”
But Richards had a solution. Daily morphine injections.
A detox attempt was made in Switzerland in 1972, but little materialized as friends feared Richards would die before arrival. Friends called an ambulance and found him lying “unconscious, cold and clammy” and one friend recalled him being “scared. I thought we were going to lose him”.
During the band’s infamous 1972 American tour, drugs were everywhere and were administered by tour doctor Larry Badgley, who Richards bullied into injecting him with Demerol. It was during this tour that Richards met his “second father” Freddie Sessler. Freddie Sessler was a Holocaust survivor who possessed unlimited amounts of drugs and distributed them for free.
The 1976 tour was equally taxing for Richards, who, according to the band’s tour manager, was “so unwell” that he even fell asleep on stage during a show in Germany.
“The situation got even worse,” the tour manager recalls. “The sound of the Stones made for a scary night because we had to support him everywhere.”
He also became brazen and stopped taking precautions to hide his problems, such as openly snorting cocaine in restaurants. When the tour returned to the UK, Richards nodded off behind the wheel of his Bentley as he drove back from a concert.
The passengers, son Marlon, Sessler, and the two women miraculously escaped injury, and Richards quickly hid the stash in the bushes before police arrived. Despite this, a search revealed LSD blotters and he was arrested.
This was one of five drug-related arrests from 1967 to 1978. Richards only served time in prison for the first one, which was just one night in jail.
By 1977, Richards was living with Pallenberg and their children in upstate New York and trying to remain sober.
But those intentions were put aside when he came to town to hang out with “Daddy” John Phillips, who was recording an album. Phillips was a “drug-filled basket case” and it wasn’t long before “Papa John and his friend,[current Health and Human Services Secretary]Robert F. Kennedy Jr., revived Keith’s desire for coke and heroin.”
Meanwhile, Pallenberg also took advantage of and took with him a 17-year-old girlfriend named Scott Cantrell, who committed suicide while playing Russian roulette at his home. It was the final straw for Richards, and he and Pallenberg eventually separated in 1979.
She passed away in 2017 at the age of 75.
Immediately after their breakup, Richards was introduced to Patti Hansen, a working-class model from Staten Island, but he was “deeply depressed.” They married four years later and had two daughters.
Richards successfully quit hard drugs. However, in 2018, he shared that he still occasionally drinks alcohol and consumes hashish and cannabis. He quit smoking in 2020.
He continues to perform, most recently appearing in an intimate concert celebrating his friend Bruce Willis last November.
Page Six reached out to Richards’ representatives for comment, but did not receive a response.
