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Keith Richards: Just Kidding About Snorting Father's Ashes

Just kidding! Apparently, Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards was joking when he told an interviewer from NME magazine that he mixed his father's cremated remains with cocaine and snorted them. We're not sure whether to be disappointed or relieved.

A spokesman for Richards explained today that the ashes-snorting remarks were meant in jest. "It was an off-the-cuff remark, a joke, and it is not true," Bernard Doherty of LD Communications told the Associated Press. "File under April Fool's joke."

In the NME interview, Richards told the story about his father's ashes in response to a question about the strangest substances he'd ever tried to snort. "He was cremated, and I couldn't resist grinding him up with a little bit of blow," Richards told the interviewer. "My dad wouldn't have cared... it went down pretty well."

NME sticks by the authenticity of the quote and says that Richards did not appear to be joking. All we can say is, who knows? With so many tales of rock star debauchery surrounding old Keef, what's a few human ashes up the snout, more or less?

—The ARTISTdirect Staff
04.03.07