Did Keith Richards really stay awake for nine days?
Elton John once referred to Keith Richards as “a monkey with arthritis”. As brutal as that may be, you’d be hard-pressed to argue that he’s entirely human. Nobody else in the world looks, moves or speaks like Keef. His accent is not tied to any local dialect. Instead, it carries a unique cadence that can only be described as the sound of rum. His outfits seem to consist mostly of a scarf. And he moves in a mercurial manner that makes him a sniper’s nightmare.
But how much of this is affectation? How much of the Keef we know is born from an early realisation that standing out from the crowd was essential if you were going to make it in the congested counterculture scene? As such, how much trust can we truly place in the many fables ascribed to him?
It’s certainly true that he was arrested countless times; a tome of court documents proves it. It’s also true that he almost burnt down the Playboy Mansion, because Hugh Hefner corroborated it. And he may well have snorted his own father’s ashes owing to the fact that it would be an overtly strange lie. But of all the claims that have a slight air of contention, his epic stint without sleep seems questionable. “Nine days without a wink,” he bragged in his memoir, Life.
“I fell asleep standing up, eventually,“ he adds, “I was just putting another cassette back on the shelf, and I was feeling great, and I turned ’round and fell asleep. I fell against the edge of the speaker. Woke up in a pool of blood, wondering, ‘Is that claret?’” But is this medically possible? Can even a man as manic as The Rolling Stones rocker really avoid gathering moss to such an extent that he didn’t lie down for more than a week?
Can Keith Richards’ nine-day bender without sleep really be true?
In truth, not even science truly knows. There is basically no research available on such high levels of sleep deprivation. “It’s hard to ethically deprive people of that much sleep,” Dr Michelle Drerup told Cleveland Clinic. At 72 hours, pretty much the limit of ethical medical research, she explains you will already start to feel ”irritable, anxious, depressed and struggle with executive functioning and thinking.”
“You might also start to hallucinate: to see or hear things that aren’t there,” she adds. Somehow, Richards surpassed this threshold and went on for another six days ”feeling great”. In his memoir, he puts this down to adrenaline. In this instance, the adrenaline was born from making music, and as engineers crashed out for a kip under the desk, he would plough on like a man possessed. But oddly, like a man possessed with a strangely sound mind.
Beyond delusions, you also start to suffer from illusions. Things appear that aren’t there, but at the same time, you struggle to process things that are there—your wife and children, for instance, might become distant thoughts. While Richards does, indeed, make little reference to his family during this period, he doesn’t really report a great deal of mental trauma, either.
Is this plausible? Well, staying awake for such a stretch is certainly not impossible. We know that because in 1963, a 17-year-old boy named Randy Gardner set the unchallenged world record of staying awake for 11 days and 25 minutes. But lord knows, Gardner didn’t ‘feel great’—Gardner very nearly died.
However, while it is impossible to prove or disprove Keef’s breezy sleepless nine-day stint, you can question the motives. The supposed feat arrived in 1978 while the band were making Some Girls. At the time, he was a married father approaching 35. Including distinct US and UK versions, he had 17 albums under his belt with the Stones. While a criminal conviction for heroin was looming over his head, he was also a very wealthy man at this stage.
It seems strange, therefore, that he would embark on a potentially fatal stunt for reasons known only to himself. Marlon Richards, his eldest son, was nine at the time—it paints a peculiar picture to imagine him tottering into school and telling the teachers that his father couldn’t attend parents’ evening because he was midway through a nine-day saunter of sleeplessness.
In this case, the truth is as elusive as the whys and wherefores. If it is true that Richards cruised through nearly a fortnight without a wink and remained competent enough to help craft the Stones’ most commercially successful album, an assertion we have been legally advised to accept as the truth, then perhaps the bigger question is now how but why?
