Snort one for the old man
April 18, 2007 | 12:00am
There is, it seems, an advantage to being a Lifestyle copy editor. One gets to avoid reading any serious news  especially local news, which can be seriously depressing. Of course, this also means one is deluged daily with air-headed missives about celebutantes and underwear-challenged female pop stars. It is rather like bathing in Crisco oil: something slick and slippery and bad for the arteries. But at least it blocks out any heavy thinking.
Instead, I peruse news items that no longer get placed in the "weird celebrity news" section of the local newspaper; they’re just presented as straight news. Like the news item about Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards snorting his father’s cremains.
Of course, if any one celebrity were likely to have snorted someone’s burial ashes, it would undoubtedly be Keith Richards. The 64-year-old riff-meister has a colorful past. In fact, this is not the first time in recent memory that Richards has landed in "weird celebrity news." The other instance involved falling out of a tree.
Wire agencies reported that Richards’ band, the Rolling Stones, raked in over $150 million from a worldwide concert tour last year. This despite the fact that the tour was "temporarily hampered when guitarist Keith Richards fell out of a tree and required brain surgery."
Something about this line struck me as so funny when I read it, I nearly fell out of my ergonomic swivel chair. Not that brain surgery is, by itself, funny; nor is falling out of a tree, necessarily. Maybe it’s the fact that this sexagenarian band somehow managed to rake in hundreds of millions of dollars in a single year, despite having not released a listenable album since 1978’s "Some Girls," and despite having a 64-year-old rhythm guitarist who, for some reason, climbs trees on occasion. And the fact that Richards  a man who required complete blood transfusions in the past in order to comply with strict drug laws in countries he was touring  would never let a little thing like brain surgery get in the way of a Stones tour.
And now the exotic snorting habits come to light. Here’s Keef on the subject: "He was cremated and I couldn’t resist grinding him up with a little bit of blow… He wouldn’t have cared anyway."
Some have suggested the story is a hoax, but if it is, it was probably Keef-generated, because he’s the one who said it in a magazine interview. The thing is, Richards has been up and down with the Stones for so long, it doesn’t really strike me as something he would be shy about copping to. Just another day in the life of being a Rolling Stone, after all. Richards is the master of the blissed-out shrug, the man for whom the term "elegantly wasted" was coined, and the man whom Johnny Depp clearly patterned his "Jack Sparrow" character after in Pirates of the Caribbean (Richards even appears as Sparrow’s dad in the sequel, and it doesn’t appear as though the rock star needed to do much heavy acting).
I guess the story kind of made me wonder, though: would I want my son to do the same with my remains?
Setting aside the circumstances that would have my son (if I had one) become a drugged-out rock star (something I would most definitely disapprove of), I guess I wouldn’t really give a toss about the snorting bit  especially if I happened to be dead and cremated.
In fact, Richards’ revelation has the ring of tribute to it, if you really think about it. Suicidal "gonzo" writer Hunter S. Thompson, after all, had his cremains fired out of a cannon (a tribute organized by Johnny Depp, who seems to rub shoulders with some rather unsavory characters in life). If Thompson could authorize such treatment with his remains, I guess it’s not much of a stretch to think of Keith snorting up his dad’s cremains as a way of "saluting" dear old dad, in a way.
Though, to be fair, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t treat my dad in such a blasé, disrespectful fashion. I don’t know, I guess we had a fairly normal father-son relationship: Cub Scouts, Little League, the whole car-repair-holding-the-flashlight routine. No weird drug-snorting pacts that I can recall. But maybe Richards and his dad had a unique "understanding" about the senior’s final wishes, something involving a rolled-up hundred-pound note and a mirror surface.
No? Not buying it? Okay, perhaps Keith’s "cookie" jar was empty, and the guy, red-eyed and jittery, was pawing around the apartment for a mid-morning hit of something, saw the pearl-inlaid cremains box lying there on the coffee table, rubbed his chin and thought, "Er, what the hell…"
Each version is equally plausible.
Another possible explanation might be that Richards is some kind of ghoul. Appearances lend some credence to this theory. Also, certain cultures do believe that ingesting their enemies’ body parts after victory in battle will imbibe their vanquished strength. But Richards doesn’t seem like the scholarly type. And though he appears ghoulish, something has clearly preserved his life well past the sell-by date.
Maybe "ingesting" his dad’s remains was some weird form of pagan ritual, kind of like the "sin-eaters" of yore who ate copious amounts of food in front of corpses to take away any remaining boogie-boogie. This has a poetic ring to it, but I don’t really think this was Richards’ bag. For Keef, the word "sin" probably only appears in the context of "sin-gle malt scotch" or "Sin City."
No, I think I’ll have to go with the mid-morning coffee-table scrambling on this one. It’s just so Keith.
Instead, I peruse news items that no longer get placed in the "weird celebrity news" section of the local newspaper; they’re just presented as straight news. Like the news item about Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards snorting his father’s cremains.
Of course, if any one celebrity were likely to have snorted someone’s burial ashes, it would undoubtedly be Keith Richards. The 64-year-old riff-meister has a colorful past. In fact, this is not the first time in recent memory that Richards has landed in "weird celebrity news." The other instance involved falling out of a tree.
Wire agencies reported that Richards’ band, the Rolling Stones, raked in over $150 million from a worldwide concert tour last year. This despite the fact that the tour was "temporarily hampered when guitarist Keith Richards fell out of a tree and required brain surgery."
Something about this line struck me as so funny when I read it, I nearly fell out of my ergonomic swivel chair. Not that brain surgery is, by itself, funny; nor is falling out of a tree, necessarily. Maybe it’s the fact that this sexagenarian band somehow managed to rake in hundreds of millions of dollars in a single year, despite having not released a listenable album since 1978’s "Some Girls," and despite having a 64-year-old rhythm guitarist who, for some reason, climbs trees on occasion. And the fact that Richards  a man who required complete blood transfusions in the past in order to comply with strict drug laws in countries he was touring  would never let a little thing like brain surgery get in the way of a Stones tour.
And now the exotic snorting habits come to light. Here’s Keef on the subject: "He was cremated and I couldn’t resist grinding him up with a little bit of blow… He wouldn’t have cared anyway."
Some have suggested the story is a hoax, but if it is, it was probably Keef-generated, because he’s the one who said it in a magazine interview. The thing is, Richards has been up and down with the Stones for so long, it doesn’t really strike me as something he would be shy about copping to. Just another day in the life of being a Rolling Stone, after all. Richards is the master of the blissed-out shrug, the man for whom the term "elegantly wasted" was coined, and the man whom Johnny Depp clearly patterned his "Jack Sparrow" character after in Pirates of the Caribbean (Richards even appears as Sparrow’s dad in the sequel, and it doesn’t appear as though the rock star needed to do much heavy acting).
I guess the story kind of made me wonder, though: would I want my son to do the same with my remains?
Setting aside the circumstances that would have my son (if I had one) become a drugged-out rock star (something I would most definitely disapprove of), I guess I wouldn’t really give a toss about the snorting bit  especially if I happened to be dead and cremated.
In fact, Richards’ revelation has the ring of tribute to it, if you really think about it. Suicidal "gonzo" writer Hunter S. Thompson, after all, had his cremains fired out of a cannon (a tribute organized by Johnny Depp, who seems to rub shoulders with some rather unsavory characters in life). If Thompson could authorize such treatment with his remains, I guess it’s not much of a stretch to think of Keith snorting up his dad’s cremains as a way of "saluting" dear old dad, in a way.
Though, to be fair, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t treat my dad in such a blasé, disrespectful fashion. I don’t know, I guess we had a fairly normal father-son relationship: Cub Scouts, Little League, the whole car-repair-holding-the-flashlight routine. No weird drug-snorting pacts that I can recall. But maybe Richards and his dad had a unique "understanding" about the senior’s final wishes, something involving a rolled-up hundred-pound note and a mirror surface.
No? Not buying it? Okay, perhaps Keith’s "cookie" jar was empty, and the guy, red-eyed and jittery, was pawing around the apartment for a mid-morning hit of something, saw the pearl-inlaid cremains box lying there on the coffee table, rubbed his chin and thought, "Er, what the hell…"
Each version is equally plausible.
Another possible explanation might be that Richards is some kind of ghoul. Appearances lend some credence to this theory. Also, certain cultures do believe that ingesting their enemies’ body parts after victory in battle will imbibe their vanquished strength. But Richards doesn’t seem like the scholarly type. And though he appears ghoulish, something has clearly preserved his life well past the sell-by date.
Maybe "ingesting" his dad’s remains was some weird form of pagan ritual, kind of like the "sin-eaters" of yore who ate copious amounts of food in front of corpses to take away any remaining boogie-boogie. This has a poetic ring to it, but I don’t really think this was Richards’ bag. For Keef, the word "sin" probably only appears in the context of "sin-gle malt scotch" or "Sin City."
No, I think I’ll have to go with the mid-morning coffee-table scrambling on this one. It’s just so Keith.
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