{"id":211101,"date":"2025-10-19T13:57:08","date_gmt":"2025-10-19T13:57:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/211101\/"},"modified":"2025-10-19T13:57:08","modified_gmt":"2025-10-19T13:57:08","slug":"the-scary-moment-keith-richards-threatened-ronnie-woods-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/211101\/","title":{"rendered":"The scary moment Keith Richards threatened Ronnie Wood’s life"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Keith<\/p>\n

(Credit: Miss Sophie)<\/p>\n

Sun 19 October 2025 11:40, UK <\/p>\n

At least 50 per cent of rock and roll is image. Sure, deft fretting skills and an enchanting vocal range can help, but as the punk movement perfectly illustrated, attitude is key. Throughout the 1960s, British invasion bands paved a new era for rock music, which blossomed with the hippie movement but would ultimately defy the core principles. Alongside The Velvet Underground and The Stooges, The Rolling Stones<\/a> proposed a darker, more hedonistic blueprint for the 1970s punk era. <\/p>\n

The Stones were marketed as the \u201cbad boy\u201d alternative to The Beatles by their original manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, in the 1960s. For the most part, this was a false visage. Still, on several occasions, the Stones\u2019 hedonistic and chaotic lifestyles led to cases of life-threatening violence \u2013 not exactly in keeping with the peace and love motif.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It\u2019s the dark side of the Stones\u2019 raucous energy that many people forget. It is easy to get lost in the hedonistic idealism of a rock band seemingly always off the rails. The drugs, the sex and the rock \u2018n\u2019 roll it inspired are designed to be intoxicating by nature. But there is always a downside to the tremendous highs, and while the Stones were all icons in their own right, their drug use also got the better of them on several occasions. <\/p>\n

It\u2019s no secret that Keith Richards was the most chaotic of the Stones. The most dubious elements of his legacy can be attributed to his long-lived struggle with addiction, chiefly heroin. Heroin addicts are usually docile and relaxed when they have the opiate surging through their system. However, when recovering, the mind can turn on a sixpence and elicit fits of rage. <\/p>\n

In his 2007 autobiography, Ronnie Wood, who\u00a0joined the Stones in 1975<\/a>\u00a0to fill in for Mick Taylor, recounted several gripping stories from the band\u2019s wild heyday. In the most shocking of these tales, Richards held a gun to Wood\u2019s head after a drug-fuelled argument about cocaine. It would be one of the most hair-raising moments of his tenure with the band and showed just how close the group, and the members within it, were to implosion at any time. <\/p>\n

\"Rolling<\/a>Mick Jagger and Ronnie Wood on stage. (Credit: Gorup de Besanez)<\/p>\n

\u201cAfter a row with Keith one day, he stormed off to get his gun,\u201d Wood recalled. \u201cI warned everyone to \u2018clear the decks\u2019. Keith came back with his Derringer gun, pointed it at me and yelled, \u2018You fucking bastard Woody!\u2019 But I had my own gun, a .44 Magnum. I didn\u2019t have any bullets for it, but I calmly pulled it out. And that was the last time Keith pulled a gun on me\u2026 until the next time.\u201d<\/p>\n

Elsewhere in Wood\u2019s unfiltered autobiography, he recalled another dicey moment with his fellow guitarist. \u201cKeith burst into my room, broke the glass container of my pipe, and headed towards me, looking at my head\u2026 he broke a bottle and cut me with it,\u201d Wood wrote. \u201cI stormed out of there and went straight to Mick and Charlie, who were working on a song in a room just down the hall. And as I looked at them bleeding and staining the carpet, Mick looked at me and said, \u2018Do you have any ideas for the bridge?’\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

This ambivalence is perhaps the coldest part of the entire story. It suggests two things, either the band were simply nonplussed by the apparent plight that awaited Wood or, more likely, they were so used to the chaos of being in The Rolling Stones that this kind of murderous antics felt normal. Either way, it is a frightening sentence. But that wasn\u2019t all. <\/p>\n

He added: \u201cReturning to my room, Richards pulled the razor from him, put it to my neck, and yelled, \u2018I\u2019d cut your fucking throat, but your girlfriend would never forgive me for the fuss she\u2019d make\u2026\u2019. This is said by someone who used heroin for ten years.\u201d<\/p>\n

Though Richards undoubtedly took centre stage for the lion\u2019s share of the Stones\u2019 wildest moments, he wasn\u2019t the only one who resorted to violence. In Richards\u2019 autobiography, titled Life, he recalled one night when Jagger was drunk and repeatedly called up to Charlie Watts\u2019 hotel room shouting, \u201cWhere\u2019s my drummer?\u201d<\/p>\n

Clearly not happy with the tone of Jagger\u2019s persistence nor his bold sense of possession, Watts marched down to the frontman\u2019s hotel room to give him a physical lesson he wouldn\u2019t forget in a hurry. About 20 minutes after the phone calls, Richards remembered a knock at the door. \u201cThere was Charlie Watts, Savile Row suit, perfectly dressed, tie, shaved, the whole fucking bit,\u201d he wrote. \u201cI opened the door, and he didn\u2019t even look at me, he walked straight past me, got hold of Mick and said: \u2018Never call me your drummer again.\u2019 Then he hauled him up by the lapels of his jacket and gave him a right hook. Mick fell back onto a silver platter of smoked salmon and began to slide towards the open window and the canal below\u2026 It takes a lot to wind that man up.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Related Topics<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"(Credit: Miss Sophie) Sun 19 October 2025 11:40, UK At least 50 per cent of rock and roll…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":211102,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[6491,96,25721,25722,80988,15747,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-211101","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment","tag-keith-richards","tag-mick-jagger","tag-ronnie-wood","tag-the-rolling-stones","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211101","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=211101"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211101\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/211102"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=211101"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=211101"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=211101"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}