A fire in Laurel Canyon: The night Keith Richards knew he was “blessed”
Despite living a life of rock and roll excess for upwards of five decades, Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards is still going strong. For the majority of his existence, the musician and songwriter has been fueled entirely by a diet of sex, drugs, and rock and roll – the archetypal ‘live fast, die young’ lifestyle. However, Richards did not die young. So how can his continued existence, in the face of all logic, be explained? Perhaps it is divine intervention.
Whichever way you spin it, Keith Richards had led an incredibly lucky existence. Although he is an undeniably groundbreaking guitarist and songwriter, there are many great songwriters and guitarists out there, and very few of them could hope to reach the same level of success as The Rolling Stones. What started out as a teenage blues rock outfit in 1960s London soon became a global rock phenomenon which has lasted for half a century.
Expectedly, his time at the forefront of The Rolling Stones has given Keith Richards a library’s worth of bizarre and otherworldly anecdotes. Upon hearing many of these stories, you cannot help but question how, on Earth, this man is still alive. This is particularly true when it comes to Richards’ strange history of surviving housefires, which caused him to question whether or not he is “blessed”.
Perhaps the most serious of these incidents occurred in 1978, during a particularly drug-addled period in his life. At the time, Richards was renting out a grandiose house in Laurel Canyon in Los Angeles – an area which has provided a home to countless iconic rock figures, from Frank Zappa to Joni Mitchell.
Richards’ rented accommodation was owned by producer and music mogul Skip Taylor, who left the Rolling Stones guitarist in charge of the $3.5 million property. This fairly questionable decision from Taylor would soon be the cause of incredible regret, as his mansion would soon be reduced to little more than a pile of ashes.
Reportedly, Richards hosted a party in the house and, in the collective drunken state of mind, nobody had thought to properly turn off the gas fire. Richards himself was once quoted as revealing, “There was a big party one night, and somebody had turned the gas fire off — but not all the way.” The story goes that some incense had ignited the abundance of gas in the house, and soon, the 1930s house was entirely engulfed in flames as Richards slept peacefully in his bed.
Eventually, a – presumably hungover – Richards emerged from his slumber to find his surroundings covered in flames. “We had a few seconds to jump out of the window,” he later wrote of the incident in his autobiography Life. “I’m dressed in a short T-shirt only, and Lil [Wergilis] is naked.” Jumping out of the window of an early 20th-century mansion in the Hollywood Hills alongside a naked Swedish model is something that could probably only have happened to Keith Richards.
This near-death experience, along with Richards’ various other near-death experiences, led the guitarist to look inward. “So what am I supposed to gather from my life?” he questioned, “That I’m blessed?” It certainly feels as though Richards could have been saved by a higher power, particularly given the incredible luck that he has experienced throughout his life, in terms of both near-misses and the unparalleled success of The Rolling Stones.
