The night Ronnie Wood needed to be dragged away from a fire: “I didn’t care”

You don’t need me to explain to you that The Rolling Stones were a wild bunch.

Their antics are now infamous in rock and roll history for having been so over the top, and it seemed that throughout their time at the peak of their popularity, everywhere they went, they’d be treated like the harbingers of chaos that they were. Nobody partied to excess quite like the Stones, and nobody has done so since.

While a constant party seems like a great thing to indulge in, there are, of course, plenty of downsides to being wired all the time and preventing yourself from falling asleep through incessant drug abuse. The powders and chemicals were in abundance at a Stones party during the 1960s, ‘70s, and even beyond, and while not all members were as notorious for their substance-fuelled escapades as the likes of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, the reputation still came with the band as a whole.

For example, the band’s elder statesman, drummer, and constantly beleaguered mainstay, Charlie Watts, essentially found himself being recruited as a minder for certain members of the group while they ventured into week-long drug binges, and sometimes, this task was perhaps even too much for him to handle by himself. Regularly burdened by having to look after guitarist Ronnie Wood after he joined in the mid-1970s, there was one incident where the absence of his watchful eye almost led to Wood being in an impending catastrophe.

During a period of freebasing cocaine on a regular basis, keeping himself awake for stretches of five days at a time, Wood was regularly off in a daze while Watts was keeping tabs on his behaviour. However, constantly being off in his own little world meant that he also wasn’t particularly receptive to things occurring around him, which put him in a significant amount of danger on one night when Watts wasn’t around to save him from himself.

“Charlie Watts would come over and sit around for hours watching [saxophonist] Bobby Keys and me in the bathroom,” Wood hazily recalled in his autobiography. “While I was high, I didn’t care about anything else. There was a huge fire one night, and luckily it took a U-turn on my block and missed us.”

The night Ronnie Wood narrowly escaped a deadly wildfire
While Watts wasn’t present on this occasion, Wood was fortunate enough that his chauffeur at the time had pulled up outside the house to warn him of the blaze, allegedly screaming: “The fucking canyon’s on fire!” to the dazed guitarist.

“Eventually, he yanked us out of bed and told us we could take only what we could carry,” Wood continued. “I took some paintings and a few guitars. Outside, the sky was black with smoke and there was fire everywhere. A few days later, I read that the fire caused $70 million of damage, destroyed 38,000 acres, burnt down 200 houses, injured 50 people and killed three. For some reason, we were the lucky ones. Our house was the only one on the block that made it.”

Among those homes sadly damaged and destroyed by the fire was Neil Young’s beach house, which Wood claims perished entirely aside from the fire irons. It’s a tragic tale, and one that Wood was lucky to escape with the help of his chauffeur, but it’s also a tale of warning that should ward anyone off taking things to excess quite as much as The Rolling Stones did.