Keith Richards’ worst drug experience is a literal nightmare
Keith Richards has lived a thousand lives, and every single one of them has had enough thrills, spills and bellyaches to leave the most hardened partier with a worried look on their face. The Rolling Stones guitarist has more anecdotes than the entire music industry put together. Whether it is being clomped around the head by his hero Chuck Berry, being saved from drug charges by a blind “angel”, or nearly being electrocuted in a terrible on-stage accident — Keith Richards has done it all.
It’s nothing short of a miracle that Richards is still alive today, and with that, he has had countless near-death experiences over the years throughout his hedonistic-filled 1970s. However, after surviving that period, Richards could get through anything, and his very worst drug experience sounds like a living nightmare.
It wasn’t just Richards who was using drugs incessantly, chasing the high became The Rolling Stone’s primary motive for a number of years. the devotion to narcotics led to the band’s output declining over the years, as the drugs took their toll and the creative well ran dry. There aren’t many things you will read about Keith Richards that will shock you these days, after all, the guitarist has done his best efforts to check most things off his rocker bucket list. Remember, this is the man that has crushed up his father’s cremated remains and snorted them along with a bit of cocaine which, somehow, isn’t even his worst drug-related story.
Mick Jagger, speaking with Rolling Stone, put the band’s prior creative lull in the ’70s down to one thing, “Everyone was using drugs, Keith [Richards] particularly,” said the frontman in 1995. The band may well have been full of excellent musicians, but there can be no doubt that Richards was the creative lifeblood of the group. When his rhythmic beat dropped, the body of the band slowed to a crawl. “So I think it suffered a bit from all that. General malaise. I think we got a bit carried away with our own popularity and so on. It was a bit of a holiday period. I mean, we cared, but we didn’t care as much as we had. Not really concentrating on the creative process.”
Richards has racked up five drug charges since the start of his career, which never pushed him into taking the path to sobriety like so many of his contemporaries who swapped substances for smoothies. Instead, his reason for packing in the habit was boredom. In 2018, Richards was asked about his well-known hedonistic tendencies, “Drugs are not interesting these days,” he said. “They are very institutionalised and bland. And, anyway, I’ve done ’em all,” he boasted.
“I’m not saying I’m definitely off all of this stuff,” he also admits. “In six months’ time, I might be on it again. But at the moment, for a couple of months, I haven’t touched it,” before going on to say he finds sobriety “novel”. The songwriter has also, latterly, credited the birth of his grandchildren as a wake-up call to his destructive behaviour.
It’s incredible that it was boredom and his family rather than the following moment that happened on a European tour that put an end to Richards’ drug career, “Someone put strychnine (pesticide) in my dope,” he once recalled. “It was in Switzerland. I was totally comatose, but I was totally awake. I could listen to everyone, and they were like, he’s dead, he’s dead, waving their fingers and pushing me about. I was thinking I’m not dead,” the guitarist astonishingly admitted.
“I was number one on The Who’s list of people who were likely to die for 10 years. I mean, I was really disappointed when I fell off the list,” he semi-jokingly stated.
Thankfully, Keith’s life has slowed down somewhat now compared to his debauched heyday, and after surviving a nightmarish experience as he did in Switzerland then, he was primed to survive absolutely anything that life threw at him.
