“I don’t have a drug problem, I have a police problem,” the guitarist said in his debut Keith Richards and good that he had them. This emblematic artist, founder of the Rolling Stones with Mick Jagger and Brian Jones in 1962, Today, December 18, he turns 79. We could say a whole record for a life of over sixty years of consuming drugs and alcohol.
Precisely, barring some other inconvenience with the firearms law, for example a large hunting knife or with his “friend”, a Smith & Wesson revolver, caliber 38, “with my Smith & Wesson I never feel alone” , his problems with the authorities were due to drugs.
arrests and trials
Indeed, he underwent five drug prosecutions, in 1967, twice in 1973, 1977 and 1978, and a series of minor arrests which Richards already considered pastimes of a busy life with rock and roll.
However, of all these experiences we saved two, both in February, one on the 12th and the other on the 27th, but ten years apart, the first, in 1967 and the second, in 1977.
The two sequels left, albeit in the opposite direction. The first encouraged him to the point of making him feel somehow outside the consequences of his consumption, while the second forced him to change his behavior not only with substances but also in his relationship life.
a guarded band
The Stones had been under surveillance, so to speak, by the English police due to their obvious links to drugs until, in a raid on Richards’ home in Redland, Sussex, they found the guitarist together with Mick Jagger, his girlfriend Marianne Faithfull and a couple of friends with some speed (which came from Jagger) and some heroin (which came from the friends present). Statements were collected, although there were no arrests that day.
The account that Richards gave in his autobiography He is curious about that afternoon-night: “I hear a knock and I look out the window and see many dwarfs dressed in blue under a thick drizzle who ask them to enter the house. They go in and start rummaging. They go up the stairs and meet Marianne who had taken a shower and she was coming out naked from the bathroom and before the commotion they were making she ran to cover herself with the first thing she found, a leopard skin. I’ve never been caught before.”
Days later, Jagger and Richards were charged with drug possession by a court that faced media pressure due to a clear sense of exhaustion of the Victorian model in terms of justice.
Of all the comments, which came from both sides, from those who favored punishment to those who believed authorities had no right to judge what adults do in private, the editorial in The Times, written by William Rees Mogg , entitled “Who crushes a butterfly with a wheel?”.
Both Richards and Jagger pleaded not guilty to the charge in court and the case was taken to Chichester Crown Court, from where he was taken to Lewes Prison to await sentencing and released on bail.
The sentence was known on June 29, 1967. Richards was convicted of allowing cannabis to be smoked on his property and sentenced to one year in prison and a £500 fine.; Jagger, was sentenced to three months in prison and fined £200 for possession of four amphetamine tablets.
Richards was incarcerated at Wormwood Scrubs prison in west London where spent only one night in prison; a month after the lawyers’ appeal, the guitarist’s sentence was overturned and Jagger’s was only tempered with a fine.
“The inmates showed me respect that night in jail and the judge managed to turn me into a folk hero overnight. I’ve been playing that role ever since,” the musician admitted.
The country house cost him just over £20,000 in 1966 and he continues to visit it with his wife, Patti Hansen, their children and grandchildren.
In particular, far from being paranoid with the police, the experience of his arrest gave him a strange confidence to get out of other similar situations after his paper in English court.
The accident in Canada
Ten years after that arrest in Sussex, Richards would live another, but much more complicated. For real, his arrest in Toronto was for possession of heroin and cocaine.
While in Europe and the United States the Stones had a certain liberality and hardly anyone from the authorities made fun of them, the Canadian police, at least in the 1970s, were not in tune with their consumption and persecuted every trace of the drug in its territories.
The Stones each traveled on their own to shows at the Mocambo Club in Toronto and the next album they wanted to begin recording with the intention of releasing it between 1977 and 1978.
As soon as he set foot in Toronto, the mounted police arrested Keith and his wife, Anita Pallenberg. In his autobiography, Lifetime, the guitarist recounts that he injected himself in the airplane bathroom, where he fell asleep and left just before landing, that is, he descended very high, even if without any substances on him; what they found was hashish in Anita’s purse, and she was released on bail.
Richards, foreseeing that they were waiting for him at the foot of the plane and how dangerous it was to buy in Toronto, sent an envelope with heroin and cocaine in his name to the Castillo Hotel, where they were staying.
After a show at Mocambo, Richards was arrested at dawn on February 27 in the hotel where 20 grams of heroin and 5 grams of cocaine were seized, enough to convict him of trafficking and sentence him to between seven years and life sentence. .
“It took me hours to wake up from that dream; I arrived at the police with the colorada from the slaps. The United States gave me a medical visa and I entered detoxification treatment. I climbed the walls for four days and only after that did I feel better,” Keith said.
He entered treatment with methadone, a clean drug (purchased on a prescription) that requires you to be drug-free on it to have its intended effect, which was an inconvenience for Keith as he continued to consume alcohol and marijuana and occasionally cocaine
Though he quickly pleaded guilty and entered a rehab facility, what would truly save Richards from prison was Rita, his “blind angel.” This blind young woman voluntarily came forward to testify and recounted how one night, after the Stones concert was over and she had begun walking home with her cane, a car pulled up beside her and they invited her to rise; it was Richards’ car that he asked the driver to drop off at her front door.
A story that evidently moved the jury who sentenced him to a year and a half pending imprisonment and who shouldn’t have continued to get into this type of trouble, which seems to have continued, he no longer had problems with justice; his fetishes, his handcuff bracelet and his skull ring are reminders of this bad drink.
This event, in addition to following the jury’s recommendations to the letter, soon led him to separate from Anita Pallenberg, with whom he had been since the end of the 1960s and with whom he had three children (Marlon, Angela and Tara, who died shortly after birth).
Since the late 1970s he has had no problems with the law, at least publicly, and today enjoys, without marijuana or alcohol, a stable family life with Patti Hansen (they have been married for 39 years), with daughters Theodora and Alexandra and their grandchildren.
As a corollary of a life plagued by dangerous drug situations, he noted long ago that “I like to be clean.”
mfb
Source: Clarin
