A Lifetime of Mayhem and Stories

There are two roads you can take as a rock star. You could be responsible. keep the partying to a minimum Stay away from drugs and generally just look after yourself. Or you can be like Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones any other universe Keith would be long gone Destroyed by any number of misadventures with drugs, alcohol, and the law Yet he's still with us, something that really defies logic and explanation Between the formation of the Rolling Stones in nineteen sixty two and the end of nineteen seventy eight, He was arrested in multiple countries, jailed, and otherwise found himself in trouble with the law, all while drinking, drugging being in the world's greatest rock ' and roll band. The big turning point should have come with his arrest in Toronto in nineteen seventy eight This was a near miss with being sent to jail on charges of trafficking heroin He dodged that cannon ball Did things change Not really, because Keef just kept on being Keef He lived through a period when rock was at its most excessive What originally looked like legal disasters turned into myth and legend, and somehow Keith came out on the other side to perform and record into his eighties I'm Ellen Cross, and this is episode sixty six of Uncharted Cime and mayayhem in the music industry And we're going to pick up the story. From whereere we Lift thingsings off with Keith last time in nineteen seventy eight This is part two of the life and Crimes of Keith Richards Let's begin with a recap from part one Between nineteen sixty seven and nineteen seventy eight, Keith Richards was involved in five major trials involving multiple arrests nineteen sixty seven, twice in nineteen seventy three nineteen seventy seven in nineteen seventy eight There was only one actual prison sentence during that entire time, and it was overturned There was one major multi yearar sentence that was barely avoided But the last charge came after he was busted for heroin in Toronto in March of nineteen seventy seven Toronto cops ridated his hotel room at the Hilton ahead of some dates to record a live album at the tiny Elma Combo Keith had passed out because he'd been awake for five straight days Cops could wake him teacher remembers, they couldn't wake me By law, you have to be conscious to be arrested My memory of it is waking up and then going, slap, slap twow mounties dragging me about the room, slapping me They found five grams of Coke and twenty two grams of heroin The charge was trafficking, but all that smack was for Keith's personal use And for the next eighteen months, Keith's fate and that of the Rolling Stones was up in the air Somehow though, Keeef was let off with a slap on the wrist. with the most onerous condition being an order to perform two concerts for the Canadian National Institute for the Blind. Again, you can hear all those stories in detail on part one. Now you would think that the threat of a possible life sentence in a Canadian penitentiary would have scared Keith Straight But absolutely not Although we can say this After the Toronto drug Bust is when Keith started looking haggard and old That ordeal really began to age him That was just on the outside He did make an effort to get clean, although how he went about this and how successful he was is again the stuff of legend. For years, a story circulated that sometime in the late nineteen seventies, after the Toronto trial in nineteen seventy eight Keith checked into a private clinic in Switzerland, where doctors allegedly performed a procedure where Keith had all his blood replaced to remove any opioids It was drained out, filtered, and replaced Another version of the story says he got an entire blood transfusion, replacing his blood with clean donor blood What really happened? Keith says the complete drug replacement story is fake He did go to Switzerland for rehab, as did many wealthy addicts in the late seventies most of what was reported was extremely exaggerated. Yes, he did undergo medical detoxification Yes, he was ordered to rest Yes, there was some form of blood filtering or therapy Probably a procedure called hemofiltration which is often used on patients with acute kidney failure. There also might have been some sort of dialysis treatment He could have received plasma treatments. And there was almost certainly intravenous cleansing therapy, where the patient is given vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants directly into the bloodstream This is often used to combat addictions by delivering vital nutrients to the cells, bypassing the digestive system altogether But the idea of all his blood being replaced was rubbish something made up by the tabloid press Any treatment he would have received wasn't a medical miracle or particularly heroic, or involve some kind of sci fi medical intervention But it was such a good story that it will not die Keith definitely was a major addict But the tabloids played it up as him somehow being chemically indestructible. How is this guy still alive You know, that kind of thing already legendary, bigger than life Of course people believed it But weirdness kept following Keith around. On july twentieth, nineteen seventy nine, less than a year after he escaped Toronto A seventeen year old named Scott Cantrell died at Frog Hollow That's Keith's nineteenth century estate in South Salem, New York Cantrell was an American from nearby Norwk, Connecticut 'd been working as a groundskeeper on the estate. He was also having an affair with Keith's common law wife, thirty seven year old, Anita Pallenberg She'd met Cantrell through a mutual friend and decided to give him a place to stay because she had nowhere else to go Keith was barely around his relationship with Anita had soured And he was often seen with his new girlfriend, a Swedish model named Lil One Glass Green response Anita flaunted Cantrell referring to him as her boyfriend Anita was often by herself at Frogs Hollow, sometimes surrounded by Frank Sinatra's bodyguards, some big Italian guys who were around to make sure that Keef stayed off heroin Cantrell was described by some as a bad seed He'd sometimes tell Marlon, Keith's son that he was going to shoot and kill his dad Meanwhile Anita was very strung out on drugs, a problem that had been around for a while. She even delivered a daughter while she was receiving treatment at a Swiss rehab clinic On that Friday, july twentieth, nineteen seventy nine As Keith was away in Paris with the stones Anita was in the house with Marlin, who was ten years old at the time He was downstairs watching TV with a family friend named Jeffrey Sessler Anita and Cantrell were upstairs in the master bedroom, watching a documentary on the tenth anniversary of the Apollo eleven mission nextext thing we know, Cantraw was dead fromr a gunshot wound to the head Details are still pretty sketchy One report said that he apparently had been playing Russian roulette with himself with a stolen thirty eight caliber Swifith and Messin, emulating a scene in the movie The Deer Hunter But here's what Pallenberg told police He was lying on top of the bed over the covers. I was tidying up with my back toward him when there was a shot He was lying on his back and I turned him over I heard a gurgling sound. He was choking on his blood I picked up the revolver and put it on a chest of drawers. I don't like guns. Cops were called at ten thirty five PM about a shooting Detective Douglas Lamana was dispatched Cantrell was unconscious but still breathing An ambulance was called, but Cantrell died at twelve fifteen AM the following day in a nearby hospital A look at the revolver revealed two rounds in the chambers. One was empty. The bullet entered Cantrell's right temple and blew off the back of his head The bullet then ricocheted off the ceiling and landed on the floor. When the gun was examined further, no clear fingerprints were found. Anita Palenberg was charged with possession of stolen property and two counts of criminal possession over weapons over an unregistered pistol. She spent seven hours in her blood stained clothes at the local police station She was questioned and her passport was seized. She said that Cantrell smoked a lot of weed and was drinking that night, probablyably white wine A blood test revealed an alcohol level ofzero point zero six, which means he wasn't legally intoxicated at the time of his death Anita was soon released on five hundred dollars bail She could have faced up to four years in jail. An investigation showed that the thirty eight canantrell used had been stolen from a sheriff's office in Broward County in Florida on may twenty fifth, nineteen seventy eight, a year earlier It looked like Cantreru had acquired the gun when he was with the Stones when they opened their tour in Lakeland, Florida on june tenth He got it from someone in the Stones entourage who bought it from some local thug. This was the last straw for Keith and his relationship with Anita. they'd been on the out since the drug bust in Toronto Anita had been largely cut off by the rest of the stoness too. H's a quote from Keith's autobiography. Things went beyond the point of return with Anita when her young boyfriend blew his brains out in her house boy shot himself in the face, playing Russian roulette F, he says So the story goes. Keith and Anita separated Money was thrown at the situation to make it go away But Beyond that, Keith wanted nothing more to do with Anita The Cantrell family tried to sue, but they never got anywhere Anita Palenberg would die on june thirteenth, twenty seventeen at the age of seventy five from complications due to hepatitis C. More from the life and crimes of Keith Richards coming up How does a surgeon harm patients not face prison Underneath Staint Helena's volcanic lush scenery is a shocking, ongoing scandal They did the damage to you. makeake our life harder than it used to be A surgeon came to help devastation behind I'm Luke Jones. After the Pitcn trials, I headed to a different isolated community to investigate Listen to the sururgeon of St. Helena The nineteen eighties were largely a quiet time for Keith Richards. In nineteen eighty three, he started a long term relationship with Patty Hanson an American model who was everything that Anita wasn't when it came to drugs and looking after herself Pattty was a tremendously stabilizing influence on Keith They were married in Cabo San Lucas on Keith's fortieth birthday, december eighteenth, nineteen eighty three They're still together and have two daughters This doesn't mean that Keith lived a life of good health and domestic bliss There was still plenty of alcohol the occasional bit of drugs and his lifelong smoking habit. But attention turned away from his extracurricular pleasure activities to his often fractious relationship with Mick Jeagger After the release of the undercover album in nineteen eighty three, a record with sales that fell below expectations Keith and Mick rarely spoke Both embarked on sol careers There was a Stones album called Dirty Work in nineteen eighty six that featured mostly Keith's songs And Jagger would show up mostly just to record his parts and then disappear There was no tour to support that record either. Things were very frosty until nineteen eighty nine, when they recorded the Steeeel Wheels album, which was followed by their first world tour in seven years That was organized by Canadian promoter Michael Cole Since then, the stones have recorded sporadically. and have toured fairly frequently, relying on their deep catalog of past hits Keith through it all managed to stay out of trouble Mostly en came what's become known as the coconut tree catastrophe. In late april, two thousand six, in the middle of the Bger Bang tour, Keith went on vacation in Fiji after the band played two shows in New Zealand. Things were great until the twenty seventh, when something went wrong with a tree. The story is that he fractured his skull falling out of a coconut tree That's not exactly what happened There was a tree Keith says it was a gnarly little bush next to the beach Everyone just assumes it was a coconut tree because it's Fiji. But it wasn' Keith climbed up on a thick horizontal branch and was six or seven feet off the ground It was a place that many people had purched. And he was just sitting there, admiring the view and drying off from a dip in the ocean Then someone said, Lunch was ready. so he jumped down. but his wet sandy hands didn't have enough grip for a neat dismount. I quote from his biography There was another branch in front of me, and I thought I'll just grab hold of that and gently drop to the ground But I forgot my hands were still wet and there was sand and everything on them. And as I grabbed this branch, the grip didn't take I land it hard on my heels And my head went back and hit the trunk of the tree I was it It didn't bother me at the time So yeah, it rang his bell, but he didn't think much of it and went off to have something to eat A couple of days later, Keith was out on a sailing trip when he suddenly had a terrible headache, unlike anything he'd ever had before. As the boat roded the waves, It got worse and worse It was enough for Keith Richards to call a doctor He went to the local hospital where he was given a scan and it wasn't good He had a brain bleed acute cerebral hematoma He was in serious danger There was no one in Fiji who could perform the necessary surgery call was placed to New Zeand almost three thousand kilometers away. to a neurosurgeon named Dr. Andrew Law The phone rang at two in the morning someomeone had an interranial hemorrh He was a very famous person Doctor Law help He pushed a little more Who is it? he asked When he was told it was Keith Richards doror Law was freaked out because growing up, he had a Keith Richards poster on his bedroom wall Bring him in, he said Keith was airlifted to Mercy Ascot Hospital in Auckland Law monitored his progress for about a week, hoping that medication would dissolve the clot and make surgery unnecessary. Keith's condition got worse Keith called the doctor. He had a very bad headache. He was starting to slur his words He was starting to feel weakness in his arms and legs Waiting longer could result in a debilitating stroke It' time to operate On the morning of Monday, may eighth, Keith was prep for surgery as he was being sedated equipped to Nigel, the anesthesiologist, Better give me a lot I'm hard to put out This was not minor surgery Dror Law drilled into Keith's skull and cut through the dura, the thick protective membrane surrounding the brain He found a big jelly like clot about two centimeters long and growing, thanks to an artery that was still bleeding doror Law clamped the artery, sucked out the blood clot, and put the bone of the skull back cllamping it in place with four titanium pins Keith was then sent to the ICU for recovery. He woke up quickly and his first words were God, that's better By this time, the media had heard of Keith's accident This is where the coconut tree story started taking shape Other reports said that he'd crashed a jet ski Keith's condition was monitored for a few more days, and then on may thirteenth, five days after the surgery, he was discharged from the hospital That was good But Would there be any lingering effects The Stones had to delay the start of a European tour by six weeks The announcement came with a statement from Keith Excuse me, he said. I fell off my perch Sorry to disrupt everyone's plans, but now it's full steam ahead. Ouch Keith returned to the stage in Milan on july eleventh, two thousand six Dr. Law flew to Italy with the stones to keep an eye on his famous patient. Keith wanted him there So did the insurance companies underwriting the tour We were worried, Dr. Law said He might not remember how to play. He could have a fit on stage We were all very tense that night. Everyone Keith didn't let on but he came off stage euphoric because he proved he could do it. Keith got a kick out of all the people in the audience who were flaving inflatable palm trees too He made a full recovery, and Dror Law became a good friend, traveling with the stones and even living with Keith and his family for a while in Europe and the U.S Keith referred to him as my headad manan The next crazy story happened in two thousand seven Did Keith or did Keith not smoke his father's cremated ashes? In April of that year Keith gave an interview to The NME, one of England's weekly music papers Given the story of his drug use, he was asked What was the strangest thing you ever snorted His response was My father Bertt Richards died in two thousand one at the age of eighty four Here's a full quote from the interview I snorted my father He was cremated, and I couldn't resist grinding him up with a little bit of blow My dad wouldn't have cared He didn't give a crap It went down pretty well, and I'm still alive The story went nuclear around the world, and when it did Keith denied everything Here's that quote I wouldn't take cocaine at this point in my life unless I wished to commit suicide The truth of the matter is that I planted a sturdy English oak the lid off the box of ashes, and my dad is now growing oak trees and would love me for it Why did he say what he did? Keith blamed the press for getting it wrong. But the wild thing is that everyone believed him because Well, it's Keith Richards, right? And we're still not dg. Coming up, a list of all the other crazy things from the life of Keith Richards Let's run through a few more stories of mayhem that is the life of Keith Richards In december nineteen sixty five, the Stones were playing a show in Sacramento, California He leaned into the mic to sing. What he didn't know was the mic wasn't grounded When the strings of his guitar touched the mic stand, a surge of electricity shorted out his amp and sent a huge zap of electricity through his body He was knocked unconscious, flat out on his back crowd and the promoter thought he'd been shot But eventually, he came around a few hours later in the hospital. The thing that saved him Probably his thick rubber soled shoes In nineteen seventy two, during an American tour The Stones were invited to stay at the Playboy mansion in Chicago He almost burned the place down when he was cooking heroin in the bathroom and everything caught fire Then there's the alleged tale from sometime in the early nineteen seventies that says that Keith and his drug buddy, American guitarist Graham Parsons tried an unconventional detox program that had them put to sleep for seven days didn't work because a week after they were released they were using again Parsons would later die of an overdose in nineteen seventy three. When the Stones were living in tax exile in France in the early nineteen seventies, drug dealers were always dropping into Keith's villa He was a full time junkie at this point. He also recklessly drove his jaguar around the countryside, probably high. And he had a speedboat he called Mandrax I after the drug One day, he and some buddies went to a go cart track Keith was very, very high got into some kind of accident and his go kart flew into the air and dragged him down the track on his back for about fifty meters He was scraped raw He solved that pain problem with injections of morphine His worst drug experience came when he injected some heroin that had been cut with stchnine poison used to kill rodents and small mammals is extremely bad for humans if swallowed, inhaled, or absorbed through the eyes or mouth. This happened in Switzerland in nineteen seventy two. and the story is that Keith nodded off and no one could wake him up Keith remembers being totally awake but also completely comatose Everyone around him was exclaiming, He's dead, he's dead. And Keith could only lie there How he recovered from that is That same year, the Stones' tour entourage included a doctor Dr. Larry Badgeley was bullied by Keith into giving him shots of demorog This was in addition to what he got from his new friend, Freddy Sessler, a fifty year old Holocaust survivor, who seemed to have access to an endless supply of drugs Keith called him, My second dad During a nineteen seventy six tour, Keith was often completely out of it During a show in Germany, he fell asleep on stage in the middle of a gig It became the job of a group of Rhdies to prop them up Keith was known to do lines of Cokea at a restaurant, right out in the open. He didn't care what people saw or said In nineteen eighty nine He threatened to stab Donald Trump. The stones were at the end of their steel wheels tour, and the finale was a big payer view event But the only venue that they could find for it was Trump's pllaza hotel and casino in Atlantic City Keith was already a Trump hiter and didn't want to do it. promoter Michael Cole works something out. And he promised that as long as the stones were in the building Keith would never have to see Trump Well you can probably guess what happened Trump showed up anyway And this did not sit well with Keith In the dressing room, he pulled out his massive hunting knife and slammed it on the table Do I have to go over there and fire him myself? he said They never actually met face to face, but if they had probably wouldn't have been pretty. In the midst of a layover on an Australian tour in twenty ten, he met a woman with a steady supply of high grade pharmaceutical cocaine He lived with her in the week in the suburbs of Melbourne, and they struck a deal. She would get him Coke, and he acted as nanny for her baby boy when she went to work during the day, playing with him, putting him down for a nap, and changing diapers. He says, There's someone in Melbourne who doesn't even know that I wiped his ass There's the story of a three day road tripvendnder with John Lennon they ended up in the south of England and somehow managed to get home to London Neither one of them remembered a thing about those three days His idol, Chuck Berry, once gave Keith a black eye. It was a gig in New York and Keith went backstage to the dress room to meet Chuck He saw Chuck's guitar just lying there, so he thought he'd just play it for a bit When Chuck came in, he was outraged and he blasted Keith right in the face You never touch another man's guitar Rolling Stone Magazinece sent the writer Truman Capotody to cover the stones during their nineteen seventy two tour. Kief did not like him. He broke into Capoti's hotel room, trashed the place, and then decorated it with some stolen ketchup to make it look like there was blood everywhere What about today? Keith still drinks occasionally. There may be a little weed or hash from time to time But he did reportedly quit smoking in twenty twenty. Keith has this reputation of being indestructible, and you can see why electrocution, consumption of every drug known, reckless behavior, brain surgery, If it can happen It happened to Keef at least once Rolling Stone magazine once asked him this question. When the time finally comes, how would you like to make your exit Keith's reply was, in a ball of smoke and a great explosion. Which does sound fitting, doesn't it Would the explosion really do him in Probably not You can catch up on all episodes of Uncharted by downloading them from your favorite podcast platform. They're all free for the taking If you have any questions or comments about anything you hear on this podcast, email me at Allan at Allancross.ca. We can meet up on all the social media sites along with my website, ajournal offmusical Things dot coma which is updated with music news and recommendations every single day. It also comes with a free daily newsletter filled with music news, opinion, and music recommendations And there's my podcast, the ongoing History of New Music, which deals with rock music and alternative music through the decades. And there are hundreds and hundreds of episodes of that show that you can enjoy all for free See you next time for more stories of Cime and mayhem in the music industry Episodes arrive every two weeks. Tchnical productuctions by R Johnston. I'm Ellen Cross Since the dawn of time, humanity has been at war. It has shaped the world around us. And if it somehow feels like we've been here before, it's because we have I'm David Boris. I'm a military historian, and on my new podcast, Hostile History, I take us inside history's most defining wars and rebellions. From Gangghist Khan to the war in Iran, find out how the past can explain the present. search for and follow hostile history on Spotify, Apple podcasts, Amazon Music, or wherever you find your favorite podcasts