Two weeks after the Rolling Stones hosted Saturday Night Live in 1978, Lorne Michaels served as a character witness for Keith Richards as the guitarist battled a drug charge in Canada that could’ve put him in jail for life.
While Richards’ drug trial in Canada is a well-known chapter in his wild life, Michaels’ small part in the saga is detailed in Susan Morrison’s new biography, Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live (via an excerpt in Entertainment Weekly).
In 1977, Richards was arrested at an upscale Toronto hotel after Canadian Mounties found 22 grams of heroin in his suite. That was enough to charge Richards with possession for the purpose of trafficking, a serious crime that carried a sentence of seven years to life in prison. While Richards was able to post bond, he had his passport confiscated and was unable to leave Canada until he secured a special medical visa to undergo addiction treatment in the U.S.
By the time his trial came around in October 1978, Richards still wasn’t clean. When the Stones hosted (and served as musical guest) on SNL’s Season Four premiere, two of Richards’ skits were cut in rehearsal after he “didn’t appear to know where he was,” per Morrison’s book. The day of his trial a few weeks later, he reportedly did a bump of cocaine in a back room of the courthouse.
As for Michaels, he got involved at the behest of Mick Jagger, who asked the SNL honcho to return to his hometown of Toronto to testify on the guitarist’s behalf (Jagger arranged a private plane for Michaels, too). Along with taking the stand, Michaels took it upon himself to help clean Richards up, procuring a three-piece tan suit for the guitarist to wear during his hearing.
Michaels, however, was worried about potentially perjuring himself on the stand because he knew Richards wasn’t clean. But during his testimony, he was only asked about Richards’ creative endeavors. He called the guitarist “the catalyst of the band,” and spoke about his decision to choose the Stones over Muhammad Ali to host SNL, calling the group “the number one rock and roll band in the world.”
According to Morrison, Michaels later said, “Canadians would not want to put a real artist in jail.”
Richards eventually got off with a suspended sentence and a community service obligation that required him to play a benefit concert for the blind. (Famously, one of his other character witnesses that day was a young blind fan named Rita, whom Richards heralded in his 2010 memoir, Life.)
After that, Richards only returned to SNL once more, in 1988, when he served as the show’s musical guest. This past weekend, though, he did make a short cameo appearance on the SNL 50 special during Tina Fey and Amy Poehler’s audience Q&A bit. Richards asked about a scarf he left in a dressing room during that 1988 appearance before the camera cut to Zach Galifianakis, donning said gaudy scarf and declaring, “Look, it’s simply not here, OK! Can we all just stop looking! Next question!”
