Keith Richards has blurred the line between fact and fiction more than any other musician. His life has been of such epic and ridiculous proportions that the Rolling Stones guitarist has become an almost cartoonish figure – synonymous with rock ‘n’ roll excess in a way that defies easy exaggeration. From snorting his father’s ashes to several high-profile brushes with the law, Richards danced dangerously with oblivion during his heyday and, remarkably, lived to tell the tale.
One of the most outlandish stories from that era concerns The Rolling Stones’ now-infamous 1972 American tour – a period on the road that has come to symbolise the band’s appetite for destruction. Every city they visited was left picking up the pieces, but it was in Chicago where Richards and touring saxophonist Bobby Keys enshrined the tour’s chaos in legend.
The Stones were in the city to perform three shows at the International Amphitheatre. Rather than check into one of Chicago’s hotels, they booked into a property belonging to their friend Hugh Hefner – the original Playboy Mansion, which Hefner would not leave for Los Angeles until three years later. They stayed free of charge. Richards and Keys did not exactly return the favour.
In his 2010 memoir Life, Richards recalled what happened one night when the two of them were in the bathroom of the Mansion, working their way through a tour doctor’s bag of pharmaceutical supplies.
“Bobby and I played it a little far when we set fire to the bathroom,” he wrote. “Well, we didn’t, the dope did. Not our fault. Bobby and I were just sitting in the john, comfortable, nice john, sitting on the floor, and we’ve got the doc’s bag and we’re just smorgasbording.”
He continued: “‘I wonder what these do?’ Bong. And at a certain point… talk about hazy, or foggy, Bobby says, ‘It’s smoky in here.’ And I’m looking at Bobby and can’t see him. And the drapes are smouldering away; everything was just about to go off big-time… There was a thumping on the door, waiters and guys in black suits bringing buckets of water. They get the door open and we’re sitting on the floor, our pupils very pinned. I said, ‘We could have done that ourselves. How dare you burst in on our private affair?'”
The doctor’s bag, Richards later explained, belonged to a physician the band had taken on tour for reasons that required little elaboration. The pair had a habit of getting the doctor sufficiently intoxicated before helping themselves to his supplies. On this occasion they locked themselves in the bathroom with the full bag, worked through an increasingly adventurous selection, and somewhere along the way started a fire. The result was pandemonium – waiters, Playboy bunnies and other residents running through the Mansion, with nobody immediately sure who was responsible. The usual suspects, as it turned out.
