“The strangest thing I’ve tried to snort?” Keith Richards once famously mused. “My father. I snorted my father.” A pregnant pause descended on the interview, no doubt a joke was expected to be delivered. But no, “he was cremated,” Richards continued, “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 shit. It went down pretty well, and I’m still alive.”
This admission to NME back in 2007 has become a sort of paradigm for The Rolling Stones guitarist’s excesses. I’m not even sure you’d say that it is even decadent, it is simply debauched, a sort of nasal posthumous cannibalism. This was the hell-raising way that Richards as always perceived, it is just on this occasion he took a surrealist and yet inevitable turn, because like a toddler with a pea, anything you tell Richards not to put up his nose is whizzing up his snout in a flash… read more >
