OUR WRITER TAUGHT JOHN BELUSHI ABOUT PUNK ROCK AND THE DENIAL OF DEATH. BELUSHI TAUGHT OUR WRITER NOT TO TAKE SHIT FROM ANYONE.
Backstage at the Palladium, spring 1977. The New York Hell's Angels chapter had just roared up on its Harleys, several celebrities were disappearing behind various doors to get their noses packed, and the Grateful Dead's road manager made it clear he wanted me nowhere near the stage while the band was playing, even if I was officially at work. As an aspiring gonzo journalist, I was thinking I ought to be exhilarated by all this potential for social climbing and weirdness. But I wasn't. I was intimidated and lonely.
John Belushi was one of the celebrities. I had seen him hanging out at ROLLING STONE a few times, so I finally screwed up my courage and introduced myself. I remember being exceedingly grateful that he seemed to like me. We started exploring and eventually found ourselves on the roof. It was raining lightly and was very cold. John took no notice. We chatted about rock & roll, about coming to New York from the Midwest, about deadline stress. I ventured that I had it comparatively easy, since my deadlines were every two weeks in print and his were every week on live TV.
Squinting into the darkness, I was stunned to see tears shining in John's eyes. ``I can't take the pressure,'' he kept repeating. If John were still alive, he would be deeply embarrassed by the passage above. Except for a few greedhead businessmen and politicians, I never met anyone so reluctant to reveal personal vulnerability. He was truly the samurai warrior of comedy.
I've have always been flummoxed in the presence of crying, and I've have always been flummoxed by celebrities in a personal context. I can talk to anyone professionally, but on a personal level, a some little voice in my brain is always screaming, ``You're out of this guy's league!'' Here was the world's hottest young comedian breaking down, and what solace could I offer? Well, back then in those days I had two standard bits of advice for everyone in any situation, and I gave them: (1) Read The Denial of Death, by Ernest Becker, still one of my favorite books, and (2) see the Dead Boys at CBGB. Do you discern a motif in the story so far? Anyway, as far as I know, John never took my advice on the former, but within a few weeks we did go I did take him to CBGB for the Dead Boys. And that is one of my few contributions to history: Yes, I introduced John Belushi to punk rock. And he loved it for all the same reasons I did: It was brutal, unsentimental, riveting, contemptuous of middle-class hypocrisy, often hilarious, sometimes lawless. John knew great rock & roll when he heard it and made friends with the Dead Boys that night. In 1979 he played drums at a medical benefit after their regular drummer, Johnny Blitz, had been stabbed nearly to death.
Over the next year, I saw John occasionally at clubs and parties and once or twice at the Blues Bar, a dive he co-owned with Dan Aykroyd. We weren't close, exactly, but if you were a journalist, just having John not hate you was an accomplishment. A number of reporters speak bitterly of John to this day because he dumped food on their heads or spat on them. So it was with reluctance that I approached the writing of this profile. Sorting out one's obligations as a friend and as a journalist was especially excruciating in his case. The stakes seemed so much higher. Here are a few details that didn't make the article:
I remember checking into the Beverly Hills Hotel with John. My personal dress code at the time was based on the theory that if you worked for ROLLING STONE, most people would assume you were hip, even though you dressed like a slob. What could the Beverly Hills Hotel do to me? I was traveling with John Belushi, who was also dressed like a slob. So what if I had a bad haircut and was wearing grimy, shapeless bluejeans with a T-shirt that said, ROOT BOY SLIM & THE SEX CHANGE BAND: BOOGIE 'TIL YOU PUKE? So what if the desk clerk looked like he was going to puke as I signed the register? John, of course, got a beautiful suite. My room was slightly larger than the broom closet. I have a extremely vivid memory of opening the curtains to a gorgeous view of the garbage dumpsters. They smelled gorgeous, too.
I remember Dan Aykroyd stopping by my apartment one night in search of John. He was pretty drunk, and he immediately went to my bathroom, where he took a leak, all the while conversing with the door open. Thereafter my toilet had a certain magical aura.
I remember playing miniature golf with John, Steven Spielberg, Amy Irving and John Landis. Being socially as well as sartorially inept, I concentrated on the game and beat everyone by several strokes. When I'm in the mood to be depressed now, I think, ``If you lost the goddamn match and figured out something ingratiating to say to Spielberg, you'd be worth millions today.''
I remember going to Martha's Vineyard with John. We built model airplanes, ate lobster, went swimming, tooled around in the Bluesmobile and smoked opium, and I beat him at croquet. Jesus, I was a moron.
When I returned to New York, I was told that the previously scheduled cover story had fallen through, and I had two days to write a story that I thought would be given two weeks. From an artistic standpoint, I was severely bummed. Writing is a long series of small decisions, and I knew two days wasn't enough time to get them all correct. Duty nonetheless called, and I have never found anything quite as exhilarating as deadline adrenalin. Having the printers at a national magazine await your words, every minute costing thousands in overtime, all the editors and layout artists tearing their hair while you decide between a semicolon and a period - it's a charge.
In this case, I broke down completely the night before it was absolutely-without-fail-due. Stomach cramps, headaches, profuse sweating, uncontrollable shaking, verbal paralysis. I called my editor, Harriet Fier, and demanded that she bring Pepto-Bismol to my apartment and mop my fevered brow. This is why I never quite made it as a gonzo journalist. Where Hunter would have gobbled more amphetamines and a tab of windowpane, I opted for Pepto-Bismol. On the other hand, thanks to Harriet's brilliant editing and brow mopping, I made the deadline. Upon publication, John didn't spit on me, a great victory, although I still wish I'd had a couple more days to think when I re-read certain passages.
THE LAST TIME I SPOKE WITH John, I was interviewing Michael O'Donoghue in his town house for a profile that appeared in Mother Jones. John telephoned from Los Angeles, and we talked about the emergence of slam dancing at punk shows. Having been fired recently from ROLLING STONE, I was depressed, and John heard it in my voice. ``Don't take shit from anyone,'' he said. And those were his last words to me. The news of his death, on March 5th, 1982, was devastating but not surprising. I had heard his addictions were progressing to a frightening degree. The samurai warrior had a lot in common with Sid Vicious. And O'Donoghue had predicted, with typical lack of euphemism, John's demise in my article.
What is John's legacy? Primarily his work on Saturday Night Live. In the mid-Seventies a large portion of energy left rock & roll and exploded in comedy. Richard Pryor, Steve Martin, Lily Tomlin, Robin Williams, Monty Python, Second City, the SNL cast, were all operating at a level the music business hadn't seen since the late Sixties. John had the Burn, that charismatic flame in the eyes that only the greatest artists in any field possess. If he'd sobered up and spent more time studying his craft, he could have been another De Niro or Brando. As it was, he never quite figured out that TV-skit acting and movie acting require different techniques. His movies weren't great. Most movies with the original cast members of SNL haven't been great. The energy went someplace else.
I thought Bob Woodward's biography Wired worked as a warning against drug abuse, but Woodward lacked the perspective to see why anyone could have loved John. I loved him because he didn't take shit from anyone. And he was howlingly funny. His tragedy came in never realizing that drugs aren't rebellious, a common flaw in counterculture heroes.
So the energy went someplace else. As my old football coach used to say, ``What goes around, comes around.'' And what's coming around, after this Eisenhower-style era, is the Sixties. When the Nineties get heated up, they're going to make the Sixties look like a nursery school. If there's such a thing as reincarnation, John Belushi has already appeared somewhere in the Midwest and is giving his grade-school teachers hell until the real action starts.
DRESSED IN ARMY FATIGUES and a white T-shirt, Belushi looks capable of handling any sort of violence. Or starting it. His face gives the permanent impression of demented anger lurking barely beneath the surface - an impression reinforced just now by an incipient beard (now that he's off Saturday Night Live for the summer) and a potbelly of the sort usually associated with redneck sheriffs. When he plays the samurai or the crazy weatherman on TV, the effect is hilarious, but up close it's disconcerting. I've known the guy for over a year and have never been quite sure he wasn't about to crush my knees with a brick.
``The same violent urge that makes John great will also ultimately destroy him,'' says Michael O'Donoghue, a writer for three seasons on Saturday Night Live.
``I appeared with John once on Midday Live [a local New York talk program hosted by Bill Boggs]. '' ``Boggs kept asking him to do an Elvis Presley imitation, and I knew John had no ending for it. Finally he agreed, and to get out of the bit, he picked up a glass of water, threw it at Boggs, hit him in the chest and knocked over a table full of plants. You should have seen Steve Allen's face. It turned into the Hollywood Wax Museum. I don't see John ever becoming that stable. He's one-hundred-percent Albanian, you know, the only one you're ever likely to meet. I tell him Albanians are gypsies whose wagons broke down. I have this vision of him with a goose under his arm, trying to sneak out of the room. Yes, that is John: an Albanian goose thief.
``He's one of those hysterical personalities that will never be complete. I look for him to end up floating dead after the party. Comedy is a baby-seal hunt.''
Belushi's schedule this past season was overwhelming. On Sundays after the TV show, he flew to location (Durango, Mexico, for Goin' South; Eugene, Oregon, for Animal House; and Los Angeles for Old Boyfriends) and flew back on Thursdays for Saturday Night Live rehearsals. Because three days of stubble was required for two of the movies and outlawed on the show, just keeping his shaving schedule straight was complicated enough, let alone learning his lines. To keep his life together under such circumstances, I suggest to him that he must be on a more even keel than he was during the first two years on the show.
``Those were very hard times . . . uh . . . very tough, dealing with fame and success, while trying to fulfill your responsibility to the audience,'' he says. ``The trick is knowing what you want to do and then resolving to do everything you have to to get there.''
Does that mean his self-destructive tendencies are under control?
``I think it . . . uh . . . I don't know. It comes along with a certain kind of lifestyle, which you don't change after becoming well known. Everything becomes more heightened, takes on more urgency, and the tendency to self-destruct heightens, too. I'm learning to cope and not deny my own success, but I still think it's not happening a lot. I get nervous, and I am capable of doing something to blow it. A lot of actors have that problem.''