Keith Richards: I Snorted My Father

NME reportedly reports that Keith Richards mixed his dead Dad's ashes with some cocaine and sucked the old man up his nose. Only problem is, it's not on NME's site. Still, if it's a late April Fool's Day joke, it's a good one:

"The strangest thing I've tried to snort? My father. I snorted my father," Richards was quoted as saying by British music magazine NME.

"He was cremated and I couldn't resist grinding him up with a little bit of blow. My dad wouldn't have cared," he said. "... It went down pretty well, and I'm still alive. I did it because that was the way I did it. Now people think it's a way of life," he was quoted as saying.

"I've no pretensions about immortality," he added. "I'm the same as everyone... just kind of lucky. I was No. 1 on the `who's likely to die' list for 10 years. I mean, I was really disappointed when I fell off the list," Richards said.

Link   |   Thanks X Ray!

Comments

[Clayton]

Wow.

This reminds me of a single by Nig Heist called "If You Love Me You'll Snort My Load." And then again, it doesn't remind me of anything I've ever seen or read. I really hope this is true.

[Jesus Mary and Joseph]

And he's looking more sporty then ever! Johnny Depp should give up now.

[Holland Oats]

yeah, and that image is actually sean penn

[Clayton]

I thought it was Wayne Newton.

[bartleby]

To me it's no big deal, I would prefer to be flushed. But if his mom or some siblings are around, I mean are they just clamming up in expectation of Uncle Kieth's monetary legacy?
At least ragtime, or for that matter mandolin orchestras, died with dignity.

[SKM]

Not that this makes it any more or less authentic, but the NME has now posted the story.

http://www.nme.com/news/the-rolling-stones/27515 if the link above gets broken...

[Holland Oats]

and isn't this already in a jicks song?

[K]

It does give one pause for thought; would snorting Keith Richards get you high? If so, how much would a gram of Keith go for? And what would be the effect?

[Clayton]

Damn it.

Keith's manager says it was all a joke.

http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1556258/20070403/rolling_stones.jhtml

[Station Manager Ken]

Oh well. We'll always have that photo...

[bartelby]

I must admit that I was kind of fooled. A friend of mine once had me casually convinced that she grew up next door to Curtis Mayfield's house and wrote some of his songs which he then took credit for.

[Krys O.]

What's even more cruel as a prank/hoax is what some doofus at Harp Magazine wrote about a Captain Beefheart Tour: (I think the link is gone perhaps put out of its misery by someone with a conscience)

http://harpmagazine.com/news/detail.cfm?article=11056

"Fred Mills April 1, 2007
HARP has learned that legendary Captain Beefheart, whose last foray into the music industry was in 1982, has recorded a
new album and will be reconvening his Magic Band to tour behind it.

The tour will have its official debut at Bonnaroo in June and then get into full gear in late July, to run through October.

The opening act is to be P.J. Harvey, whose John Parish will also be pulling double-duty on guitar in the Magic Band due to Gary Lucas' prior commitments with his own Gods And Monsters. The other players include John "Drumbo" French and Michael Traylor on drums, Rockette Morton on bass, and Denny Waller on guitar, plus an as-yet-unnamed keyboard player.

The eponymous album is described as "a mixture of folk, rock and extemporaneous da-da boogie, along with at least one avant-garde Tex-Mex medley, and a freewheeling cover of Robert Johnson's country-blues classic "Me and the Devil Blues." Sessions were produced by Ry Cooder and featured the Magic Band augmented by some of the same players who
appear on Cooder's recent My Name is Buddy (e.g. Jim Keltner, Mike Elizondo, Cooder's son Joachim and, on the aforementioned Tex-Mex number, accordionist Flaco Jimenez). Captain Beefheart will be released by Nonesuch (also Cooder's current label) on July 10.

Beefheart (a/k/a Don Van Vliet), in typically left-field manner, didn't make the announcement via the usual channels (his official MySpace page, Pitchfork.com, etc.) but at a news conference held at the Annual Van Vliet Family picnic, located at a state park near his home in Mojave, Calif. A small handful of reporters had been tipped off in advance by Beefheart's manager, Herb Cohen, who in an official statement noted, "With my longtime friend Don's re-emergence, the musical world will finally get a firsthand taste of the quality rock
'n' roll that it has been sorely missing for the past quarter- century."

Beefheart read Cohen's statement aloud at the press conference and, according to HARP's Byron Coley who was on hand, the notoriously curmudgeonly performer snorted, ripped the document in half, and said, "'The higher you go, the rarer the vegetation.' Salvador Dali said
that, although I don't know where he got it. I think I've read it in a classic of one sort or another. Or older classic. What do you think about that? Am I right or wrong? Although there really is no right or wrong. The truth has no patterns."

For those not in the know of truth and its patterns, Beefheart, born in 1941 in Glendale, Calif., emerged in the early '60s as a protégé of Frank Zappa. His 1969 album Trout Mask Replica regularly figures on Top 100 Albums of All Time lists, and he also exerted a huge influence among the punk and new wave bands of the late '70s and early '80s, who embraced his final trifecta of albums-1978's Shiny Beast, 1980's Doc at the Radar Station and 1982's Ice Cream for Crow as benchmarks of DIY bloody-minded artistic inventiveness.

According to Wikipedia, "Since the end of his musical career around 1982, Van Vliet has made few public appearances, preferring a quiet life in his California home where he has concentrated on a career in painting. His interest in art dates back to a childhood talent for sculpting and his work-employing what has been surmised as a 'neo- primitive abstract-expressionist aesthetic,' has received international recognition.

Several of Van Vliet's former band members recently reformed as a group, and toured as The Magic Band from 2003 to 2006."

Meanwhile, Precision Made, a newly-formed imprint of Handmade, which itself is an imprint of Rhino Records, will be issuing a limited-to-5000-copies Beefheart box set, provisionally titled Flight of the Blimp. The five-disc collection will contain rarities, outtakes, and live material culled from the artist's Straight/Reprise/Warner Brothers years and reportedly does not overlap with the Revenant label's earlier Grow Fins rarities box. It's set for a late July or early August release."

Gotta love the front page of the NY Daily News,"I SNORTED MY DAD."

[Andy]

So Papa really is a rolling stone then!

[Clayton]

I'm just going to assume that it's true, and that this latest statement is just a bit of damage control. According to MTV, they were the only news organization who persisted until the truth was revealed. Bravo, MTV. If Keith's manager was so shocked that everybody took it so seriously, why hadn't one of their lackeys informed the press once the story began to circulate? Why would they wait for MTV to contact them? They must've known what kind of press this would generate, but given the fact that it's a fairly ghoulish tidbit, it only makes sense that they would retract it.

MTV were quick to point out how "notoriously unreliable" the NME is, but weren't they the ones who allowed Courtney Love to read a rewritten version of Kurt Cobain's "suicide letter" on the air? Sheesh. Anyway, Keith's camp wasn't denying that he said those words, so apparently NME got it right. MTV needs to stick to what they know best: non-music-related programming.

[Henry]

In that picture of Keith he looks remarkably like grandpa out of Texas Chainsaw Massacre!