No artist in the world of music has lived so close to total destruction as Keith Richards. The Rolling Stones guitarist is synonymous with sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, with the extent of his hellraising just as famous as his music, conveying the unimaginably wild nature of his life.
From a slew of whirlwind romances to drug busts and the claim that he snorted his father’s ashes, most of Richards’ life reads like a work of fiction. Accordingly, he’s also had more brushes with death than the average person, with wild tales that go with every instance of this.
Remarkably, and due to his own fault, Richards has also had close scrapes with two life-threatening fires. The first occurred in 1972 when his band were on a stop in Chicago. In this downtime, Richards and his hellraising partner in crime, saxophonist Bobby Keys, were invited by Hugh Hefner for a stay at the original Playboy Mansion on the city’s Gold Coast. However, the pair nearly set the whole building ablaze when taking drugs in the bathroom.
“Bobby says, ‘It’s smoky in here’,” Richards recalled in his autobiography, Life. “And then a little later, there’s a thumping at 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 eyeballs very pinned.” Not long after, Hefner would take his house to Los Angeles.
The second fire was much more threatening, and it occurred in 1978. During the decade’s second half, The Rolling Stones lead guitarist had a relationship with Swedish model Lil Wergilis. When staying in a rented house in the home of the Los Angeles counterculture, Laurel Canyon, Wergilis abruptly woke Richards in the middle of the night, alerting him to a fire that had broken out in another room.
The cause of the fire has never been officially revealed, although when speaking to the Telegraph in 2010, Richards claimed that he’d accidentally set it aflame, but given his hazy memory from this period, it could have been anything that started it. “We had a few seconds to jump out of the window,” Richards wrote of the ordeal in Life. “I’m dressed in a short T-shirt only, and Lil is naked.”
To save the pair, a cousin of Richards’ longtime lover, Anita Pallenberg, picked them up and escorted them from the scene. However, when they returned to the property the following day, they found a “large sign stuck in the blackened grass that read, ‘Thanks a lot, Keith.’” The guitarist also revealed that the only possessions that survived were a chest of drawers that contained his passport, favourite tapes, jewellery and a gun with 500 rounds of ammunition.
Following the story, Richards queried: “So what am I supposed to gather from my life? That I’m blessed?”
