Used to be, the Stones would only get busted for drugs.  So when I heard last month that my ol' pal and co-author Ronnie Wood got hauled in for assaulting his 21-year-old girlfriend in England, I knew it was cause for alarm.  In all the time I spent with the Woodman, I never saw him display a tendency toward violence.

Obviously, this was the booze working, but not by itself.  Woody, at 62, is going through something of a midlife crisis.  He's thrown away his marriage to Jo, one of the few stable people in his life, and that explains why the Woody of today is different from the Woody I knew in the 1980s and '90s.  (Today would have been their 25th wedding anniversary.  They'd been with each other since 1977.)

As I recently told an interviewer for the Wall Street Journal, Ronnie has a touch of ADD.  He's all over the place, mentally and physically, and it's hard for him to say no to anything.  Which is exactly where Jo would come in.  She'd try her best to keep him away from the bad influences and from taking things too far.  She's also the one who threw him into rehab several times.  He could not have survived the last three decades without her.

I'm not sure who he'll listen to at this point.  (The judge, by the way, let him off with a slap on the wrist.)  Reports say that Keith hasn't spoken to him in a while, but I have no idea if that's true.  All I know is that I haven't had an in-person conversation with him in five years.  (I was about to send him a note with my book recently, but he moved into a love nest with his cocktail waitress and I couldn't get their address.)  My fervent hope, however, is that after years of having people take care of him (his wife, his roadies, his managers, his co-authors), he'll finally take care of his own damned self and get back into rehab (among other long-term therapies).

My blind optimism tells me that he'll straighten himself out, which will be a good thing for him and his family, and that he'll be well enough to tour with the Stones in 2010/11, which'll be a good thing for the rest of us.  The blogosphere and British tabloids, however, are currently rampant with rumors such as "Stones to replace Wood."  They're all baseless and premature, but hopefully those rumors will help scare him straight.

Woody, the ball's in your court.