Keith Richards

As far as I know, Keith Richards, the hard-driving guitarist for the Rolling Stones, is the closest thing we have to the walking dead.  He has lived a wild life.   He is famous for drug and alcohol abuse.

There have been close calls for Keith.  There was that time he was knocked unconscious by a blue electric flash and nearly electrocuted when he used his guitar to smack a microphone stand while onstage in Sacramento.  Another time, while staying in the south of France, his bed caught on fire.  Following that, his Redland Estates caught fire.  In both cases, it seems Keith Richards started the fires by passing out with lit cigarettes in hand.

Keith Richards survived strychnine poisoning in Switzerland.  That time, somebody apparently laced his dope with the poison.

Keith fell from a palm tree in Fiji.  That accident required brain surgery to repair him.  I also believe that is the accident that convinced him to stop using either cocaine or heroin.  Quitting at least one of those seemed prudent at the time.

You may recall the time when pop star Justin Bieber (age 20) and Keith Richards (age 71) nearly got in a fist fight at a resort in the Turks and Caicos Islands.  An actual fight might have been like matter meeting antimatter.  The end of all as we know it.

We are lucky to still have Keith Richards around.  He created some of the most distinctive and alluring guitar riffs of all time.  The riff for Satisfaction is unshakeable once you have heard it.

I started this blog with all intentions of telling how Keith Richards took in his once estranged father and allowed his father to join the Rolling Stones entourage on their world-wide stage tours for the last twenty years of his father’s life.  I will now end with that.

According to Keith, his dad knew how to party.  The two became quite close.

Keith’s father was cremated upon his death.  Following that, Keith admits to having mixed some of his father’s ashes into cocaine and snorting the mix.  “It went down pretty well,” he once told an interviewer, “and I’m still alive.”

--Mitchell Hegman