They spent a great deal of time together, and Richards typically liked to fuel their interactions with drugs and alcohol. Lennon did as well, but they had a different effect on him than on Richards. The Rolling Stones guitarist explained that Lennon usually ended a night together incredibly ill.
“I got to know John Lennon longer and better further down the line,” Richards wrote in his book Life. “We’d hang for quite a while; he and Yoko [Ono] would pop by. But the thing was with John — for all his vaunted bravado — he couldn’t really keep up.
He’d try and take anything I took but without my good training. A little bit of this, a little bit of that, couple of downers, a couple of uppers, coke and smack, and then I’m going to work. I was freewheeling. And John would inevitably end up in my john, hugging the porcelain.”
“I remember one night in the Plaza Hotel, he came by my room — and then he disappeared from the room,” he wrote. “I’m talking to the chicks, and their mates are all saying, I wonder where John went? And I go to the john, and there he is, hugging the parquet, on the tiles. Too much red wine and some smack. Technicolor yawn. ‘Don’t move me; these tiles are beautiful’— his face a ghastly green.”
"I don’t think John ever left my house except horizontally. Or definitely propped up.”
'When they shot John Lennon I got really well drunk'
Keith Richards recalled the event in 2000, saying: "I was downtown on Fifth Avenue in New York [when I heard about the shooting]. The first bit of news I got, I thought: 'He'll make it. It's just a flesh wound.' And then, later on, the news really came.
"He wasn't just a mate of mine, he was a mate of everybody's, really. He was a funny guy. And you realise that you're stunned. You really don't believe it. And you think: 'God, why can't I do anything about it?'"
The guitarist added: "I got well drunk on it. And I had another one for John."
"There were the Beatles, and there was John. As a band, they were a great unit. But John, he was his own man. We got along very well. We didn't see each other very often, but he would sort of turn up at your hotel. Usually, if I was in the city, I'd stay at the Plaza. If John turned up, that meant he wanted to party. He didn't come there to discuss, you know, philosophy, although it would end up like that."
