You have got to hand it to legendary rock n’ roll guitarist Keith Richards. Richards was prescribed a drug, Dilantin, as a result of a head injury he sustained while falling out of a coconut tree last year in Fiji. Man, what a life. You put a metric ton of illegal substances in your body and nearly bite the big one, not from a heart attack or heroin overdose, but from a curiously spontaneous tree-climbing whimsy on the beaches of New Zealand.
I’m not quite sure which is more impressive: surviving 40-year bender of all the booze, blow, and smokes in the universe; or surviving a 15-foot plunge while plucking coconuts. Either way, there is a certain level of irony in that Mr. Richards can’t snort the great white china anymore, not because of the health risks it carries by itself, but because cocaine apparently doesn’t get along so well with his medicine he’s taking for his head injury. Who would’ve thought?
Even more ironic is the possibility that Keith was “coconut-hunting” because he was under the impression that they actually had cocaine inside of them. Isn’t that why they call them “coke”-a-nuts?
There may not be an explanation for this little debacle, but one thing is for sure: Keith should definitely consider limiting his climbing to stairs…and not too many of them. After all, without the benefit of cocaine, the Ritz Carlton lobby staircase may seem like Mount Everest to a man who, before his coconut-encounter, was used to making a living climbing the music charts. I suppose even that gets old after 40 plus years.
Best of luck to the Keith Richards and the Stones, for after Jimmy Paige’s ‘left pinky’ injury, Led Zeppelin is now in the running for most bizarre tour-impeding incidents.
