Keith Richards is a good example for children. Kids, don’t do drugs – you might snort your father up like cocaine, or pull a gun on your bandmate, or forget how to play music. Music you wrote and played for half a century. Ronnie Wood, the young one in the Rolling Stones, has put out these claims in his autobiography. Which are probably true, unless they are his own delusional drug flashbacks.

Keith was reportedly furious with Ronnie for smoking purified cocaine in a method known as freebasing.

Ronnie recalls: “After a row with Keith one day, he stormed off to get his gun. I warned everyone to ‘clear the decks’. Keith came back with his Derringer gun, pointed it at me and yelled, ‘You f***ing b*****d Woody!’.

“But I had my own gun, a .44 Magnum. I didn’t have any bullets for it but I calmly pulled it out. And that was the last time Keith pulled a gun on me - until the next time.”

In the tome, Ronnie confesses he became so addicted to cocaine he once banned his children from eating meringues in the house after he mistook a white crumb for a chunk of the drug and attempted to smoke it.

New Zealand Herald

Say no to drugs kids.

There are rumours around again that the Rolling Stones are going to retire – but Mick Jagger doesn’t think so.

Answering questions from readers of the BBC News website, the star, who has just spent two years touring with the band, said they had no plans to retire.

“I’m sure the Rolling Stones will do more things and more records and more tours. We’ve got no plans to stop any of that really,” the 64-year-old said.

“As far as I’m concerned I’m sure we’ll continue,” he added.

BBC

The Rolling Stones made $558,255,524 on their Bigger Bang tour, despite issues facing the band. Like Keith Richards falling out of a coconut tree in Fiji and suffering a head injury. Why would you retire? Why wouldn’t you keep travelling the world, having mini-breaks in Fiji, and making gazillions? I guess Ronnie’s allegations of the Stones forgetting how the songs go can’t be too serious – they remember them well enough for their shows.

The Stones are shown in 8/20/06 performing at Twickenham in London, thanks to PRPhotos.

There was a wedding in Auckland a few years ago on the same night as a Ricky Martin concert. The connection? Ricky did two shows that night, one of which was at the wedding. Ricky was rumoured to have caught a helicopter into the island wedding, swivelled his hips for a song or two, and then hopped back away on his helicopter.

How much do you think this would cost? Not as much as having the Eagles sing.

The ageing rockers earned just under £4million singing Hotel California at a private party in New York in 2003.

The Rolling Stones, in second place, made £3.5million for an hour’s work when they appeared at the 60th birthday party of Texas tycoon David Bonderman in Las Vegas in 2002.

Celine Dion, at number three with a £2.5million fee, gives private party performances two or three times a year.

Number four, Elton John, made £2million when he sang at the wedding of London pub supremo Peter Shalson in 2002.

And in fifth place is Christina Aguilera, who was paid £1.8million to sing at the wedding of Russian banker and industrialist Andrei Melnichenko to Miss Yugoslavia, Aleksandra Kokotovic, two years ago.

The Daily Mail

I think it might be kind of cool to have a band appear at my birthday, but not at my wedding. I drank nothing but diet water leading up to my wedding, and the dress cost a fortune, I wanted to be the biggest star there! Unless you‘re a big star yourself it’s probably best not to have a real one turn up.

Rounding out the top ten of the most expensive performing fees for private parties, were George Michael (£1.75m), Destiny’s Child (£750,000), Jennifer Lopez (£700,000), and Paul McCartney and Aerosmith tied for tenth place at £500,000.

I think I’ll just buy some new albums for my next birthday party, and a really nice cake. Then people will say “What a delicious cake” instead of “How much do ya reckon she paid for the Spice Girls?”

Keith Richards - the man who thinks snorting dead relatives’ ashes is a good idea – has taken a Swedish reviewer to task for giving the Stones concert a particularly bad review. The reviewer did make a few jabs at Richards specifically, but who amongst us hasn’t over the years? Keith Richards is kind of before my time, but I remember very specifically when I was born, the doctor explained life briefly and said “Cry a lot, poop a lot, and make a lot of jokes about Keith Richards.” All people are born with the knowledge that this is okay because Richards sets himself up for it, and just one of the things we’re supposed to do.

“Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards has demanded an apology from Swedish newspapers for their scathing reviews of the group’s performance in the country earlier this month. Tabloids Expressen and Aftonbladet gave thumbs down to the Aug. 3 concert at Ullevi stadium in Goteborg, with Expressen suggesting Richards was ‘superdrunk’ on stage.”

[From Newsday]

Well apparently Keith Richards is mad as hell, and he’s not going to take it anymore. He actually responded to the reviewer, and told him he’d cheapened the experience for all the fans at the concerts, and all of the poor saps who love the Rolling Stones but couldn’t afford the $145 tickets.

“‘This is a first!’ the 63-year-old rock star wrote in a letter published by Stockholm daily Dagens Nyheter. ‘Never before have I risen to the bait of a bad review. But this time … I have to stand up … for our fans all over Sweden … to say that you owe them, and us, an apology.’”

“Dagens Nyheter said it received the letter from concert organizer EMA Telstar. Company head Thomas Johansson told The Associated Press that Richards wrote the letter and gave it to him after reading translations of the Swedish reviews. “‘There were 56,000 people in Ullevi stadium who bought a ticket to our concert — and experienced a completely different show than the one you ‘reviewed,’” the letter said.”

“‘How dare you cheapen the experience for them — and for the hundreds of thousands of other people across Sweden who weren’t at Ullevi and have only your ‘review’ to go on. Write the truth. It was a good show.’ In his review, Aftonbladet’s music writer Markus Larsson gave the concert a score of two on a five-point scale, and said Richards appeared ‘a bit confused.’

“‘I am not going to apologize for my subjective opinion, ‘ Larsson told the paper’s Web edition on Wednesday. ‘It is Keith who should apologize. After all it costs around 1,000 kronor ($145) to see a rock star who can hardly handle the (guitar) riff to ‘Brown Sugar’ any more.’”

[From Newsday]

How dare the reviewer disagree? I think someone needs to explain to Keith Richards how reviews work. They’re rarely positive. The reviewer always thinks he’s better than the performer, because he’s generally some elitist snob. It’s probably best not to read them for 38 different reasons. Either way, the guy saying that Keith Richards wasn’t exactly on his game isn’t earth shattering news. Again, this is before my time, but haven’t people been saying that about him since the Stones early days? Not that he wasn’t good/great whatever, but due to the massive, ridiculous quantities of drugs, the guy wasn’t always playing with a level deck, right? Unless the Keith Richards Exit Polling Machine was working at all the doors to the stadium, I doubt he really can know that none of the people there would have agreed with the reviewer. That’d be really cute though, if you had exit polling machines shaped like a giant, dried up/shriveled Keith Richards, and you could press buttons that said “Awesome” or “Sucked way hard.” If he’s going to complain about bad reviews from now on, he should probably either quit eating drugs for breakfast and/or quit the band and focus on the machines. Either way would be better for him.

Picture note by JayBird: Here’s Keith at the : Pirates Of The Caribbean premiere in May. Images thanks to PR Photos.