Everybody knows that Keith Richards is un-killable. The man just simply won’t die.
Yet in a tale recounted by Richards back in 2010, it turns out the only person who could ever possibly outmatch his debaucherous habits was the one and only John Lennon.
Following an acid trip, Keith Richards and John Lennon decided to continue their adventure on the road in a blurry three day trip across England.
The full story was originally told in a chapter from Richards’ 2010 autobiography, Life. Although Richards himself allegedly has little to no memory of the events, he was able to piece together the episode with the help of recollections from Kari Ann Moller, the wife of Mick Jagger‘s younger brother.
Over the course of three days, Richards, Lennon, and Moller decided to go on a road trip after casually dropping some acid. Richards remembers that they were accompanied by a chauffeur, although Moller remembers it more like a cramped car with an “unidentifiable passenger”. After first visiting Lennon’s wife Cynthia, the three amigos decided that the next place to go was Lyme-Regis, where they would pay a visit to Moller’s mother.
Now, it’s always a lovely idea to visit your parents. However, if you’re tripping on acid and said parents live over 250 kilometres away, it may not be such a good idea. As Richards describes in the book: “What a nice visit for her mother, a couple of flying acid heads who’d been up for a couple of nights. We got there about dawn.”
Yet before the trio could actually get to her house, Lennon was recognised by passersby and they were all kicked out of a cafe (presumably for being too high). So the gang decided the next best course of action was to sit on a beach.
According to Richards, what followed were “some missing hours” before they eventually made it back to Lennon’s house: “There were palm trees so it looks as if we sat on the Torquay palm-lined esplanade for a great many hours, engrossed in a little world of our own. We got home, and so everyone was happy.”
Apparently, at the time, Lennon had wanted to do more drugs than Richards, which is a scary thought: “It was one of those cases of John want to do more drugs than me. Huge bag of weed, lump of hash and acid.”
Richards, who was taking a lot of acid in the late ’60s admitted the trips felt like “tapping into the dark”, and whilst bad trips were common, ultimately the thing that lured him each time was “the idea of a boundary that had to be pushed.”
Years later, Lennon and Richards would try and remember the blurry road trip: “Johnny and I were so out there that some years later, in New York, he would ask ‘What happened on that trip?'”
As per usual, Richards survived the experience and came out the other side to tell the tale, if somewhat fragmented. What wouldn’t we have given to have been a fly on the wall during the whole thing? Two of the best to ever do it, road tripping, tripping on the road.
We can only imagine what fully occurred, but you can’t always get what you want.
