How Lorne Michaels helped keep Keith Richards from a life sentence after the Rolling Stones hosted “SNL ”(exclusive)

Saturday Night Live kicked off its fourth season in 1978 with one of the show's most unconventional emcees to date, the entire Rolling Stones band, pulling double duty as host and musical guest. But what transpired after the episode was just as surprising as the hosting choice.

In the new book Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live (out today), author Susan Morrison outlines SNL co-creator Lorne Michaels being asked a favor by friend and Stones frontman Mick Jagger: help keep Keith Richards from a potential life sentence over a drug charge in Canada. Michaels agreed to travel to his hometown of Toronto to take the stand on behalf of the guitarist who'd fronted the sketch show earlier that month.

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In an excerpt shared with Entertainment Weekly, Morrison takes readers behind-the-scenes of Michaels' internal conflict over worrying he may have to lie under oath to protect Richards, whose substance abuse the SNL boss had witnessed firsthand. It also details the wild antics of the "Gimme Shelter" rockers' hosting gig, including a network censor being unable to get Jagger to put on underwear beneath his famously tight trousers.

Read an exclusive excerpt from Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live below.

On a Sunday in October 1978, Michaels found himself back home in Toronto, trying to find a tailor shop that was open. He had flown in after a bumpy episode of SNL hosted by Frank Zappa. Mick Jagger had arranged a private plane; he’d asked Michaels to come to Toronto to testify as a character witness in Keith Richards’s heroin trial. The year before, Canadian Mounties had busted Richards as he nodded out in the presidential suite of Toronto’s Harbour Castle Hilton; they’d found twenty-­two grams of heroin, enough to charge Richards with intent to traffic, a crime that could carry a life sentence. When Michaels landed, he went into producer mode, helping to get Richards out of his pirate getup and into a tan three-­piece suit, so that on Monday he would look presentable when the matter of Her Majesty the Queen, and Keith Richards commenced.

Richards arrived at the courthouse through a back entrance, wobbly in his new duds, which he wore with white socks and a loud tie. The Canadian prosecutor wanted a tough sentence (the minimum was seven years), arguing that the Rolling Stones’ lyrics promoted drug use. Richards’s lawyer portrayed his client as a troubled artist, comparing him to Vincent van Gogh and Sylvia Plath. In the courtroom, he quoted from a biography of Baudelaire, maintaining that true art comes from “pieces of the shattered self.”

Michaels, a local boy made good, was an ideal character witness. The week before, in New York, he’d been jumpy; he was pleased to be asked to do a favor for his close friend Mick, but what if he had to perjure himself? He knew that Richards wasn’t clean. (In a back room at the courthouse, Richards took a quick snort from a bag of coke he had in his pocket.) Seated in the Toronto courtroom, Michaels fixed on the portrait of the queen looking down at him and Richards. He said to himself, “I’m Canadian. I’m not going to lie.”

He didn’t have to. When he took the stand, he was asked only about the defendant’s creative role in the Stones; he responded that Richards was “the catalyst of the band.” He said that he chose the Rolling Stones over Muhammad Ali to host his show’s fourth-­ season opener, because the Stones were “the number one rock and roll band in the world.” In a decision that surprised many jurists, Richards got off with a suspended sentence and an order to play a benefit concert for the blind.

“Canadians would not want to put a real artist in jail,” Michaels said later. Whether the outcome was due to his testimony, or to the intercession of a blind teenage superfan who had made a private appeal to the judge, is impossible to know. Within hours of the verdict, members of the press corps were making “blind justice” jokes.

Michaels came to view the episode as an example of How Things Work, as opposed to what they look like on the surface: he believes that the Mounties who arrested Richards weren’t in the hotel that night to make a bust, but to keep an eye on Margaret Trudeau, the fifty-­seven-­year-­old prime minister’s twenty-­eight-­year-­old wife, who was in another hotel room with Stones guitarist Ronnie Wood. The bust happened almost by accident. He refers to that kind of larger perspective as “having a wide shot” on a situation. Richards sent Michaels a thank-­you note, on stationery from a Jamaica hotel.

Two weeks before the trial, Richards had been at the RCA Building preparing to act as host, with the rest of the Stones, on SNL’s season premiere. A memo had circulated beforehand, about recruiting the audience: “No sophisticated ‘Elaine’s’ upper east siders, no moms and pops, no showbiz folks, just young rock and roll fans.” The directive came from the Stones. Like Michaels, the band wanted to maintain its nonconformist cred, even though its members were verging on gentility. (Days before the band showed up, Michaels arrived home from a trip to Paris and ordered a lightning-­ fast sprucing up of the dressing rooms that the band would use; furniture was cadged from executive offices all over the building.) In the end, the concern about a glut of society types rattling their jewelry was misplaced.

Tickets were so closely guarded and security so tight that there were empty seats just before air, and NBC pages scrambled to fill them. (Henry Kissinger had a secretary call to request tickets for his teen-age son, David; [Al] Franken happened to pick up the phone and explained to the former secretary of state that he “could have had the tickets if he hadn’t bombed Cambodia.”) The band appeared in sketches—­ Jagger interviewed by Aykroyd as Tom Snyder, and Charlie Watts and Wood as customers in the Olympia Cafe “cheeseburger cheeseburger” sketch. Richards was scheduled to be in two pieces, but his parts were cut when, in rehearsal, he didn’t appear to know where he was. The censor had waged a failed campaign to get the costume people to ask Jagger to wear underpants beneath his tight, stretchy orange trousers. (The male cast members needed prodding in this regard, too. Franne Lee, whose staff helped with quick costume changes, once posted a sign reading ALL CAST MEMBERS MUST WEAR UNDERWEAR ON SATURDAY.) The censor did not have the foresight to request that Jagger refrain from licking Ron Wood on the mouth during the song “Respectable.”

From LORNE by Susan Morrison. Copyright © 2025 by Susan Morrison. Reprinted by arrangement with Random House, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

Related: The 10 best Rolling Stones songs of all time, ranked

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