hennemusic

Keith Richards will make a rare appearance on CBS Sunday Morning tomorrow to promote his new autobiography, “Life,” which hits stores on Tuesday (26).

According to CBS, The Rolling Stones' guitarist will open up with Anthony Mason about his career, fame, and his relationship with Mick Jagger.

CBS Sunday Morning airs Sunday, October 24 at 9:00 a.m. ET/PT....and they have released a couple of clips to promo the show.

In the first one, Keith talks about the rumors that he snorted his father's ashes. This news broke in April of 2007 when Richards told the New Musical Express "The strangest thing I’ve tried to snort? My father. I snorted my father. He was cremated and I couldn’t resist grinding him up with a little bit of blow. My dad wouldn’t have cared, he didn’t give a s**t. It went down pretty well, and I’m still alive.”

Keith Richards – on snorting his Dad’s ashes
CBS News Sunday Morning – to air October 24, 2010

We may find out all kinds of things about Keith when “Life” is released, including some confirmation on the legend that he had his blood replaced in 1973 to help clean out his system fast for a tour, at a time when Richards was heavily into heroin (there is speculation that this may have happened more than once).

This story has been told many time by many people, including bodyguard Tony Sanchez, who worked for Keith for about eight years; he wrote about blood transfusions for Keith, in Switzerland in ’73, in “Up And Down With The Rolling Stones”...

(pg. 281/282) “There’s a doctor from Florida who can get you off dope in a few days by changing your blood,” Marshall Chess (son and nephew of the founders of Chess Records) told Keith. “He did it for me in Mexico a while back, and it worked perfectly.”

The Florida doctor would carry out the blood change for Keith in a villa called Le Pec Varp, in Villas-Sur-Ollon, Switzerland. Keith would fly directly to Switzerland after the Stones’ concert in Birmingham on September 19. He would then be cured in time to play with the Stones again in Berne, Switzerland on September 26. Marshall was going to Switzerland with Keith to have his blood changed at the same time.

In “Keith Richards: The Biography,” author Victor Bockris told a similar story, with more detail:

(pg. 211/212) Before departing for the European tour, Keith had realized that he had to get off heroin again, if only to regain the strength needed to meet the demanding schedule. He had discovered that there was a clinic in Switzerland that specialized in an expensive but effective and painless three-day blood-cleansing cure. In between playing Innsbruck, Austria, on September 23 and Bern, Switzerland on September 26, Keith and Marshall Chess, who had become addicted under Richards’ influence, checked in to get their blood cleaned. The treatment involved a hemodialysis in which the patient’s blood was passed through a pump, where it was separated from sterile dialysis fluid by a semipermeable membrane. This allowed any toxic substances that had built up in the bloodstream, which would normally have been secreted by the kidneys, to diffuse out of the blood into the dialysis fluid.

From this cure sprang the myth that Keith regularly had the blood emptied out of his body and replaced with a fresh supply. This Draculian notion is one of the few elements of his image that Richards has gone to some pains to correct, but to no avail. “someone asked me how I cleaned up, so I told them I went to Switzerland and had my blood completely changed. I was just fooling around. I opened my jacket and said ‘How do you like my blood change?’ That’s all it was, a joke. I was f**king sick of answering that question. So I gave them a story.”

Urban legend…or fact?

Keith Richards – on the “Vampire rumour”
CBS News Sunday Morning – to air October 24, 2010