RONNIE WOOD
Took Bunsen burner to parties to smoke coke He turned to drink after first love killed in car
RONNIE Wood drank and snorted his way to becoming rock’s most infamous wildman.
But the Rolling Stone only knew he had truly spiralled out of control when he turned up to showbiz parties smoking cocaine with his personal Bunsen burner.
Revealing the depths of his addiction, Ronnie told how he carried the science lab tool to light the drug in a glass pipe in a bid to get a purer hit – known as freebasing.
The 72-year-old guitarist said:
“I felt that with the base, the freebase, it was controlling me. I had no control over it. It took me about three years to get off it.
“It’s incredibly powerful, it ruled everything, getting high with that pipe was frightening. [ You] do anything for it and I can understand why people went out and killed for it.
“I enjoyed the s**t out if it. Took it with me wherever I went. I thought it was the best thing going.
“I would take it to parties and go, ‘ Everybody try this’, get [a] great big Bunsen burner out, the pipes, the works, freebase and everything. And people would be going, ‘ You’re f*****g crazy’ but I would love it.”
DESTRUCTIVE
Ronnie made the astonishing admission in a new documentary about his life Somebody Up There Likes Me.
But he admitted many of his pals ended up dead after living such a destructive lifestyle.
Ronnie added: “I have seen enough people go over the top.
“Some of them didn’t make it. It was a really horrible thing and you would learn a lesson from that.”
At one point Damien Hirst took Ronnie to a rehab clinic after snooker star Ronnie O’Sullivan told the artist he was concerned.
All the more astonishing as Hirst admitted a mammoth coke intake had turned him into a “babbling f***** g wreck” and O’Sullivan confessed to bingeing on drink and drugs until 7am when “the birds would be tweeting and I’d think ‘I’m bang in trouble’’’.
Speaking of the call from O’Sullivan, Hirst revealed: “He said, ‘ Ronnie is in a real mess he needs to go to rehab.’
“I picked him up with his son Jesse, and of course he is drinking. We went out and we went to a local pub on the way.”
Ronnie, who has beaten lung cancer, played in The Faces with friend Sir Rod Stewart before joining the Stones in 1975. His life of excess finally ended nine years ago and he has been sober ever since. Ronnie lives with theatre producer wife Sally, 41, and their three-year-old twin daughters Alice and Gracie.
In the film, the couple talk of his daily work to stay clean and sober.
Ronnie said: “It’s very difficult because you go through a period of dry and you go, ‘I’ve done it. I’ve cleaned up now. I can have just one.’ And that is a big mistake because you can’t just have one. I probably like things too much, which is harmless for some things like music, but harmful in ways like dope and drink.”
Sally added: “You can’t just think that it is not there. It could creep up at any point so that is a big deal for us.” Speaking of how her husband stays sober, she said: “Classes or rehab or AA meetings, he has his meditation books, check-in daily, how are you doing?
“It’s not just drugs, it is smoking, it’s drinking. We put the recovery first because everything else follows so. That makes sense for us.”
Ronnie’s bandmates also feature in the 70-minute film.
Mick Jagger, 76, revealed: “We all went through our overdoing it phase.
“[Ronnie] really wanted to be sober but it was very difficult to do if you’ve been doing it all your life. If I was some