Yes, I’ve been trepanned. That’s quite an interesting experience, especially for my brain surgeon, who saw my thoughts flying around in my brain.

The line plays on Richards’s long-cultivated persona of reckless survival and dark humor. By treating a serious neurosurgical procedure (trepanation) as a wry anecdote, he converts bodily vulnerability into a joke about creativity and consciousness—his “thoughts flying around” literalizes the metaphor of a mind in motion. The punchline also shifts attention from patient to surgeon, implying that the real “interesting experience” is witnessing Richards’s famously unruly inner life. More broadly, it exemplifies rock-star mythmaking: near-disaster is reframed as entertainment, and medical reality becomes another story that reinforces the legend of endurance and eccentricity.