'His lips were turning blue': New book details Sir Mick Jagger's near-death experience
Sir Mick Jagger almost died after taking heroin, a new book has claimed.
Sir Mick Jagger allegedly almost died after taking heroin
The Rolling Stones rocker reportedly "collapsed on the floor" at record producer Marshall Chess' apartment in New York City and had to be resuscitated following the incident, which took place in 1976.
According to Page Six, Bob Spitz recounted the alleged incident in his new book The Rolling Stones: The Biography.
Marshall told the author that Mick visited him late at night following a party in the hope of finding drugs, and while he was trying to get clean at the time, the producer jumped into the Satisfaction hitmaker's limousine and they visited a “Buddhist heroin dealer, he knew who was at the beck and call of New York junkies twenty-four hours a day.”
The pair allegedly "shared a little gram of heroin,” but just 10 minutes later, Mick “collapsed on the floor.”
The author wrote: “Mick was out cold.
“Chess tried dragging him upright, even slapped him a couple of times, but – nothing. [Mick's] lips were turning blue.”
Marshall added: “I didn’t know what else to do. I was freaked. Mick Jagger’s gonna die in my f****** apartment.”
The producer called for an ambulance, and also rang former president of Atlantic Records Ahmet Ertegun, who quickly arrived with Faye Dunaway, who was married to J. Geils Band frontman Peter Wolf at the time.
The actress called a friend, who was president of the nearby Lenox Hill Hospital, and was able to "arrange a room where they could stash Mick so there would be no publicity."
Marshall performed mouth-to-mouth resuscitation until emergency services arrived, and when they did, Mick was put on oxygen “at which point he started breathing again.”
The book also details another brush with death the Paint it Black singer had following an altercation with drummer Charlie Watts, who died in August 2021.
The incident took place in Amsterdam in 1984, where the Rolling Stones had gathered to discuss their future and repaid some rifts.
Mick came home from a night out with Keith Richards and called Charlie's room at around 5am, shouting: “Where’s my drummer?”
Less than half an hour later, Charlie, dressed in a suit, stormed over and grabbed his bandmate by the collar as he shouted: “Don’t ever call me your drummer!”
According to the book, the sticksman “then he hauled off and belted Mick square in the jaw", but it almost had dire consequences as Mick nearly fell out of an open window into a canal.
Keith recalled watching the frontman fall “backward onto a plate of smoked salmon” and slide “perilously across a table toward an open window and the canal below.”
He added: “I just grabbed his leg and saved him from going out."
