In 2002, stories began circulating that Keith Richards had mixed his dad’s ashes with some cocaine and snorted them shortly after Bert Richards’s death that year. Not so, replied Keef: …after having Dad’s ashes in a black box for six years, because I really couldn’t bring myself to scatter him to the winds, I finally planted a sturdy English oak to spread him around. And as I took the lid off the box, a fine spray of his ashes blew out onto the table. I couldn’t just brush him off, so I wiped my finger over it and snorted the residue. Ashes to ashes, father to son.
