The bizarre connection between notorious hellraisers Dennis Hopper and Keith Richards
There are plenty of things that Dennis Hopper and Keith Richards have in common, and entirely in keeping with their shared reputations, most of them are heavily rooted in excess and debauchery.
They’ve both worked with Johnny Depp in the 1999 documentary The Source and the Pirates of the Caribbean sequels, respectively, but for the most part, any connections or spiritual similarities between the two are derived entirely from their rampant partying and hell-raising ways.
If there was a beverage that needed drinking, a drug that needed taking, or a line that needed snorting, then few names in the worlds of film and music would get to them quicker – or more voraciously – than the counterculture figurehead and the Rolling Stones’ resident wildman.
Hopper and Richards may have lived entirely different lives and dedicated themselves to completely different professions, but each fully earned their status as one of their generation’s hardest partiers. Multiple generations, in fact, with the pair continuing to live a life of hedonistic overabundance for decades.
What ties them even closer together? Again, it’s completely in keeping with their mythologies, because it involves a certain something being ingested by way of the nasal passage. However, it isn’t cocaine, although there was definitely plenty of that. Instead, it was human remains because can anyone really be called one of pop culture’s most notorious hellraisers if they haven’t snorted a line of the dead?
The answer is yes, but Hopper and Richards were always cut from a different kind of cloth. The production of Easy Rider couldn’t have happened the way that it did without copious amounts of narcotics, which at one stage reportedly left Hopper, Jack Nicholson, and Peter Fonda in desperate need of their next fix.
A production company employed secretaries whose job was to provide the trio with their daily dosages, but naturally, they needed more. Stumbling across a container and determined to hoover up anything and everything through their nose, the drug-addled triumvirate of Hopper, Nicholson, and Fonda is said to have inadvertently snorted the ashes of an executive’s dead wife during their unquenchable quest for coke.
Along very similar and equally morbid lines, it’s become an intrinsic part of Richards’ legend that he snorted a line of his father’s remains. Although the axeman has backtracked on his confession since he first made it, he subsequently doubled down and maintained that it was the absolute truth.
Thanks to the litany of eyebrow-raising stories to have swamped Hopper and Richards through the years, any connection between them was hardly going to be a mundane or everyday occurrence. With that in mind, snorting the ashes of a dead person actually makes a lot of sense, with the pair having lived a life that was overflowing with indulgence, eccentricity, and the ingestion of those in the afterlife.
