Broken In Brief: Keith Richards coldly adds Michael Jackson’s name to list of musicians he’s outlived

TOP OF A COCONUT TREE—Today representatives for the Rolling Stones announced that, as has been his customary ritual, that nigh-immortal guitarist Keith Richards, 65, added the King of Pop’s name to a list of musicians he had outlived. The entry was made in between fits of laughter, coughing, and intermittent bouts of lucidity.

“We were informed through his handlers and translators that Mr. Richards not only scrawled Jackson’s name in the book but made reference to reports of his death relating to drugs, before making a nearly unintelligible remark about Mr. Jackson being a ‘grotty little week kneed Nancy’,” revealed Stones spokeswoman Theodora Mitchell. “The tome of course is the same leather bound book that Mr. Richards, during a brief bit of sobriety in 1978, discovered was in his possession and evidently turned out to be a diary that he had been writing in for the previous decade. As is customary we are told he inscribed Jackson’s name on the list, which now reaches nearly 40 pages, with a pen he crudely made out of chunks of black tar heroin.”

The list is something Richards started when, during a routine physical for the 1989 Steel Wheels Tour, a physician remarked to the guitarist that his blood legally qualified as a poison, that his physiology resembled some sort of hybrid between a undead zombie and a piece of beef jerky, and that casual estimates put the number of times Mr. Richards should have died in the “low thousands.” It was at this point that Richards created the list as a defiant means of marking his ability to survive decades of fame, money, and constant intoxication inside the music industry and chart his progress as what he called “God’s perfect specimen.”

Sources close to Mr. Richards note that after putting Jackson’s name down he went back to sleep, but not before asking his staff to send a snide bouquet to the funeral and asking his assistant to remind him to send a note to Amy Winehouse expressing his admiration for her lifestyle.