Everyone was all too willing to believe that Keith Richards snorted his father’s cremated ashes mixed with a bit of cocaine to dull that burnt corpse taste. Now the 63 year-old Rolling Stones guitarist’s manager claims he was just joking around when he told UK music magazine NME that the “strangest thing” he tried to snort was his father.

“The strangest thing I’ve tried to snort? My father. I snorted my father.

“He was cremated,” recalls Richards of father Bert, who died at 84 in 2002, “and I couldn’t resist grinding him up with a little bit of blow. My dad wouldn’t have cared.”

Describing the moment, the musician says, “It went down pretty well, and I’m still alive.”

It sounds pretty convincing to me, but Richards’ manager is doing some backpedaling. She says he was just joking. “Said in jest,” she explained via e-mail to MTV news, “I can’t believe anyone took [it] seriously.”

Richards would have to be pretty creative to make that up on the spot. I mean, who would think of that spontaneously? Maybe he considered it and never really did it, but I’m inclined to think it’s true.

Richards said in the NME interview that he’s lucky to survive after years of substance abuse, but that he doesn’t recommend that other musicians follow his bad example. He also said that he was dissapointed to fall off the number one spot in the top ten list of “who’s likely to die.”

The guy looks like a mummy version of one of those troll dolls. He must have some amazing genes to be able to withstand all the damage he’s done to his body. His dad lived to be 84, so he’ll probably stick around for 20 years or so.