Keith Richards

Keith Richards (born 18 December 1943) is an English musician, singer and songwriter, and one of the original members of the English rock band the Rolling Stones.


 * I enjoyed it. Acid arrived just as we had worn ourselves out on the road, in 1966. It was kind of a vacation. I never went for the idea that this was some special club — the Acid Test and that bollocks.


 * I found it interesting that you were way out there but still functioning normally, doing things like driving; I'd stop off at the shops. Meanwhile, you were zooming off.


 * - Will Keith Richards Bury Us All?


 * Redlands was the setting for the famous drugs bust of February 1967, when Keith and Mick and several friends were raided by the police. "It's difficult to forget," he muses, "with 10 people in a room coming down off LSD, and looking out the window, hearing a knock on the door and sayin', 'There are some funny little midgets outside, all dressed the same. Oh, let 'em in.'
 * - Keith Richards: Heroin couldn't get him, nor the police, nor the hordes of dangerous girlfriends. Now he's going to be a grandfather. Keith Richards, a grandpa? Is this the end?


 * “Post-acid” was the prevailing mood at Redlands [Richards’ house] on a cold February morning in 1967. Post-acid: everybody arrives back with their feet on the ground, so to speak, and you’ve been with them all day, doing all kinds of nuts things and laughing your head off; you’ve gone for walks on the beach and you’re freezing cold and you’re not wearing any shoes and you’re wondering why you’ve got frostbite. The comedown hits everybody in a different way. Some people are going, let’s do it again, and others are going, enough already. And you can flash back into full acid drive at any moment.
 * There’s a knock at the door, I look through the window and there’s this whole lot of dwarves outside, but they’re all wearing the same clothes! They were policemen, but I didn’t know it. They just looked like very small people wearing dark blue with shiny bits and helmets. “Wonderful attire! Am I expecting you? Anyway, come on in, it’s a bit chilly out.” They were trying to read a warrant to me. “Oh, that’s very nice, but it’s a bit cold outside, come on in and read it to me over the fireplace.” I’d never been busted before and I was still on acid. Oh, make friends. Love. Not from me would there be “You cannot come in until I speak to my lawyer.” It was “Yeah, come on in!” And then roughly disabused.


 * While we’re gently bouncing down from the acid, they’re trampling through the place, doing what they’ve got to do, and none of us is really taking much notice of them. Obviously there was a shiver of the usuals, but there didn’t seem to be much we could do about it at that moment, so we just let them walk about and look in ashtrays. Incredibly enough, what they did come up with was only a few roaches and what Mick and Robert Fraser had in their pockets, which was a minute amount of amphetamine, bought legally by Mick in Italy, and in Robert’s case heroin tabs. Otherwise we just carried on.


 * [David] Schneiderman, who also went by the moniker of Acid King, was the source of that very high-quality acid of the time, such brands as Strawberry Fields, Sunshine and Purple Haze – where do you think Jimi got that from? All kinds of mixtures, and that’s how Schneiderman got in on the crowd, by providing this superduper acid. In those innocent days, now abruptly ended, nobody bothered about the cool guy, the dealer in the corner. One big happy party. In fact, the cool guy was the agent of the constabulary. He came with this bag full of goodies, including a lot of DMT, which we’d never had before, dimethyltryptamine, one of the ingredients of ayahuasca, a very powerful psychedelic. He was at every party for about two weeks and then mysteriously disappeared and was never seen again.
 * - You Can Always Get What You Want by Keith Richards & James Fox


 * Just before Keith left for Munich, on January 18 [1967], some of his friends helped arrange a party at Redlands for the weekend of February 12 at which Jagger would take LSD with Richards. To make sure the LSD would be of the finest quality, they invited a well-supplied American drug specialist, David Schneiderman (aka the Acid King).


 * On saturday morning the Acid King administered Mick Jagger his dose of White Lightning, a form of LSD that apparently guaranteed a colourful and harmonious trip. The acid test was a success. The party spent a delightful day tripping around the countryside. Richards and Jagger communicated on a new level. Then, that Saturday evening, just as they were all floating down in the living room to Dylan's Blonde On Blonde, the police raided.


 * Christopher Gibbs: "There seemed to be a lot of activity going on outside the windows. Suddenly we seemed to be surrounded by all these fascinated cops, who were terribly surprised at the exotic goings-on within."


 * Richards: "We were in a completely freaked-out state when the police arrived. There's a big knock at the door. Eight o'clock. Strobe lights are flickering. Marianne Faithfull had just had a bath and has wrapped herself up in a rug and is watching the box. The vibes were so funny. I told one of the women they brought with them to search the ladies, 'Would you mind stepping off that Moroccan cushion? Because you're ruining the tapestries...' They tried to get us to turn the record player off and we said, 'No, we won't turn it off but we'll turn it down.' We were playin' it like that. The level of drug education at Sussex CID (Criminal Investigation Department] was minimal. I'm sure they worked on instructions to take anything that they didn't recognise as being in their own homes. They left a bag of heroin down the sofa and took the incense sticks."
 * - Keith Richards: The Unauthorised Biography by Victor Bockris