Fortified by a midday cocktail of Campari and soda with a double shot of vodka,Keith Richards dives right into a subject he has personally researched as deeply as anyone: drugs and the near-death experience.
It has been 35 years since Richards kicked the heroin habit that made him the iconic rock’n’roll wastoid of the 1970s -- he curtailed his cocaine usage a few years later -- but there are certain vices he will not renounce. “Eh, I love my pot,” says the 71-year-old Rolling Stone, seated for lunch one Thursday in the empty back room at Il Cantinori in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village. He’s decked out in his customary head scarf, dark jacket and dress shirt unbuttoned to the navel. “Love my weed. Unashamedly a fan. A piece of good hashish now and again. But otherwise ...”
He loses himself for a moment in nostalgic reverie, then rejoins the present.
“You know, the state of good drugs has gone down. In the ’60s and ’70s, you had barbiturates, which were great downers. And Quaaludes. These drugs were fairly simple. You took them, you pissed them out. But these new ones, the Xanax? I’m not there with that. [But] I still take Dilantin” -- an anti-seizure -medicine -- “since the knock on the head.”
Ah yes, the knock on the head. That would be one of Richards’ more innocent brushes with death. While on vacation in Fiji in 2006, he fell out of a tree, encountering a branch on the way down. For a couple of days, he felt fine, then had to be medevac’d to New Zealand for life-or-death surgery. Like all of his stories, it’s hard to parse the truth from the legend on that one -- did he really fall out of a tree? What was he doing up there? How bad was the injury?
