In Rod Stewart‘s new memoir, Rod: The Autobiography, the rocker reveals that he used to take cocaine anally, rather than risk destroying his nasal passages.

The former Faces man writes, via Spin:

…we started buying anti-cold capsules from the chemist’s, separating the two halves of the capsules, replacing their contents with a pinch of cocaine, and then taking the capsules anally, where, of course, the human body being a wonderful thing, they would dissolve effortlessly into the system.

In the book, Stewart also writes about losing his virginity aged 16 to an “old and larger” woman in a beer tent at the 1961 Beaulieu Jazz Festival, and how it partially inspired his song ‘Maggie May’.


Stewart later explains that he and Ronnie Wood turned down famous groupie Cynthia Plaster Caster’s offer to cast their penises because they were intimidated by the sizes of the examples they were shown, including those of Jimi Hendrix and Eric Burdon of The Animals.

“Obviously it would have been a pleasure and an honour,” writes Stewart. “However, Woody and I took a look at the rather challengingly splendid specimens on the table before us, considered for a moment the slightly more modest scale of our own endowments, and said, ‘Hmm. Nah, I don’t think so, thank you’.”

The book also clears up the urban myth about Stewart once ingesting so much semen that he had to have his stomach pumped. Stewart writes that his former publicist Tony Toon made up the tale after he was fired.

Stewart says that Toon “fed the press a story in which, as a consequence of an evening spent orally servicing a gang of sailors in a gay bar in San Diego, I had been required to check into a hospital emergency room to have my stomach pumped.”

He continues: “I have never orally pleasured even a solitary sailor… And I have never had my stomach pumped, either of naval-issue semen nor of any other kind of semen.”

Rod: The Autobiography is out now.