Unbreakable Keith Richards
HRM
http://www.planetradiocity.com/musicreporter/features.php?featuresid=281 Sixty-five-year-old Keith Richards told a magazine last year that doctors from around the world have requested that he donate his body to their institution after he dies, so that they can examine his immune system.
Richards said, “Doctors all over the world want my body when it finally goes. Apparently, I do have an incredible immune system. I had Hepatitis C and cured it myself. Just by being me. They (doctors) want it so they can study it and figure out how to make other people much better. I mean, I eat everything wrong. I shove terrible things inside me.”
Truly, he does. In 2007, when a rock journalist asked him what the strangest thing he ever snorted was, he was quoted as saying, “My father. I snorted my father. He was cremated and I couldn't resist grinding him up with a little bit of blow (cocaine). My dad wouldn't have cared ... It went down pretty well, and I’m still alive.”
Richards later, however, said he was misquoted – he hadn’t grinded it up with cocaine at all, but snorted the ashes unaccompanied. Richards’ nasty drug addictions and eccentric habits are well-known, but this revelation caused a media uproar. Unlike the case with most musicians, journalists have never had to pry with Richards. He has never had qualms about making confessions.
About his ‘wild’ image, he has said, “It’s something you drag around behind you like a long shadow ... Even though that was nearly 20 years ago, you cannot convince some people that I’m not a mad drug addict. So I’ve still got that in my baggage.”
Well, maybe he isn’t the ‘mad drug addict’, but Richards is still off his rocker, as is manifest in his actions. In 2006, the guitarist, while in Fiji, suffered a head injury after falling out from a tree he had climbed. And this was the action of a 62-year-old man with five children and three grandchildren.
But then could you imagine what he was like as a “mad drug addict”? We don’t know all about it, but the little that we do is bad enough. Keith has been arrested on drug charges five times. But he’s been let off the hook each time. Once, in 1978, he was arrested in Canada after authorities suspected that he’d used heroin on a plane that landed in the country. Richards reportedly spent too many hours in the washroom on the flight. However, his punishment was light, since he was unlikely to steal for his habit. He was ordered to perform a charity concert for the Canadian National Institute for the Blind.
The harshest punishment he received was in 1967, but even that didn’t amount to much. Richards was sentenced to a year in prison for allowing cannabis to be smoked on his property. The sentence was, however, repealed for lack of evidence.
Richards, owing to his drug use, was also a bad driver (his wife no longer lets him drive). In the late '60s, he purchased a former Nazi staff car, crashed it, then had it rebuilt, and crashed it once again. In 1971, Richards took a nap while driving and wrecked another car. He did so yet again in 1976.
The extraordinary thing is that he’s survived every accident. But why? Is he plain lucky? Guess we’ll just have to wait for when he “finally goes”.
(This is the third part in a series on rockers who lived on the edge, and survived).
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