Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards has cheated death so many times he’s like a cat with nine lives, only in his case, it’s probably ninety-nine.
A show in Sacramento in December 1965 proved almost fatal for Richards.
While he was singing, Richards, 82, didn’t realize his mic was ungrounded.
“The strings of his guitar touching the metal stand shorted out the amp and sent a strong surge of electricity” through his body, writes Bob Spitz in the upcoming book “The Rolling Stones: The Biography.”
A photographer who was there remembers that Richards was “unconscious for a long time,” and when the same thing happened a few years later to Leslie Harvey, the lead guitarist for Stone the Crows, he was instantly killed.
Richards was probably spared because he had been wearing “thick, rubber-soled shoes.”
The “Start Me Up” co-writer’s drug use ramped up when he began dating model and actress Anita Pallenberg in 1967, after she had been involved with his bandmate Brian Jones. Their relationship, which eventually included three children (one died of SIDS), was filled with a seemingly unending supply of illicit drugs.
Richards had always enjoyed recreational drugs, but then he was introduced to speedballs: heroin mixed with cocaine, snorted to generate an intense rush.
“‘Heroin,’ according to Keith, ‘made everything possible,’” writes Spitz. “He considered it ‘the great leveler,’ and said, ‘once you’re on that stuff, it doesn’t matter what comes your way, you can handle it.’”
By the early 70s, Richards’ drug dependence “had become a serious tug at the fabric of the Rolling Stones,” notes Spitz. “His behavior was erratic,” and often unpredictable.
Bassist Bill Wyman was so annoyed by his bandmate that he “stopped talking to Keith altogether. The only place his mates could count on him was on stage.”
Richards tried an unconventional detox with his drug-using pal, Gram Parsons, which involved being put to sleep for seven days, while going through withdrawal.
The two began using again a week later, and Parsons died of a drug overdose in 1973, aged 26.
In 1971, Richards and Pallenberg moved into Villa Nellcôte, a historic 16-room Belle Époque mansion on the French Riviera, with the two of them opening the door “to a pack of drug dealers who swarmed the villa like an enterprising flock of vultures.”
“Keith evolved into a full-time junke,” Spitz writes, which played “havoc with Keith Time in myriad ways,” including nodding off when he put his son, Marlon, to bed, and conversely being able to stay up for days without sleep, creating riffs.
He was also reckless, racing around the French countryside in his Jaguar and powering his boat, called Mandrax 2.
On one occasion, Richards went go-kart racing with a pal while high, flew into the air and landed on his back.
An eyewitness says the musician was dragged along his back for about fifty yards, resulting in his back being as “raw as a steak.”
But Richards had a solution — daily morphine injections.
Another attempt at detoxing in Switzerland in 1972 almost didn’t happen because pals were worried that Richards would die before arriving. Friends called an ambulance to transport him as he lay “unconscious, cold and clammy,” with one pal remembering that he was “terrified. I thought we were going to lose him.”
During the band’s infamous 1972 American tour, drugs were everywhere and administered by the tour doctor, Larry Badgley, who Richards bullied into giving shots of Demerol. It was on this tour that Richards met his “second dad,” Freddie Sessler, a 50-year-old Holocaust survivor who possessed an unlimited supply of drugs, which he gave away for free.
The 1976 tour proved equally taxing for Richards, who, according to the band’s tour manager, was “in really bad shape,” even falling asleep on stage during a show in Germany.
“It went from bad to worse,” remembers the tour manager. “We had to prop him up everywhere, and that made for nights when the Stones sounded dreadful.”
He also became brazen, no longer taking any precautions to hide his issues, like openly snorting cocaine in restaurants. When the tour returned to the UK, Richards was driving back from a concert when he nodded off at the wheel of his Bentley.
The passengers, his son Marlon, Sessler and two women, miraculously avoided injury, and Richards quickly hid his stash in a bush before police arrived. Nevertheless, a search found a blotter of LSD, and he was arrested.
It was one of five drug-related arrests that spanned from 1967 to 1978. Only one, the first, resulted in Richards serving any time — exactly one night in prison.
By 1977, Richards was living in upstate New York with Pallenberg and their kids and attempting to stay sober.
However, those intentions were sidelined when he began coming into the city to hang out with “Papa” John Phillips, who was recording an album. Phillips was a “drug-addled basket case,” and it wasn’t long before “Papa John and his pal, (the current Secretary of Health and Human Services) Robert F. Kennedy Jr., revived Keith’s appetite for coke and heroin.”
Meanwhile, Pallenberg was also using and had taken on a 17-year-old lover named Scott Cantrell, who killed himself while playing Russian roulette in their home. It was the final straw for Richards, and he and Pallenberg finally split in 1979.
She died in 2017, aged 75.
Shortly after the split, he was introduced to a model named Patti Hansen, who was from a working-class Staten Island family, and Richards “fell hard.” They married four years later and share two daughters.
Richards managed to wean himself off hard drugs. However, in 2018, he shared that he still occasionally drinks alcohol and consumes hashish and cannabis. He quit smoking in 2020.
He is also still performing, most recently last November, at an intimate concert celebrating his pal, Bruce Willis.
Page Six reached out to Richards’ reps for comment but did not receive a response.
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