The thing that killed John was not a habitual element in his list of pleasures. I believe he was being led into an experiment, and that he was being assisted in a flirtation with this new and dangerous substance. The packs a day, a bottle of Courvoisier, la Cocaina, maybe. But Jones was not his Jones. The Los Angeles Times reported that two "movie producers" claimed that John was shooting this stuff for two years. People, the man who grasped me, danced with me, met my eye and planned the future was not a junkie. As a prop, the hypo made us laugh. It was not a tool in his life.
The Sixties and the Woodstock legacy applied a subcultural legitimacy to the consumption of drugs for both mind expansion and mind impairment. John and, in fact all of us from Saturday Night Live, were participants in that new social phalanx. It was the touch of the hippie, the beatnik, the hipster that helped us to impart a weird, novel approach to our work.
John and I often discussed the roots of hip comedy in the Bohemian and American beat scene. He did a character called Shelly Bayliss; a guy in a black suit, white shirt and white tie...with shades on...a stoned hipster in a suit...a suit to fool the cops...shades to hide the eyes. Wear a suit, look straight and everything will be all right. Add a hat and Elwood and you have the uniform of the Blues Brothers. Again, poor, low-life criminals, J.D.'s depicted with a sociological angle. The crosses on our hands...Ask any con, when a white man wears that cross, he is the low one on the inside scale. The junkie's cross. We picked those uniforms because they were the roles we were playing. We were playing guys who had nothing, who always had to start at the bottom and work up. These were roles, not the way we wanted to live our lives. John knew the full implications of the hipster's addiction, and it's not the way he wanted to go out.
The John I knew could only have been assisted into oblivion during the course of an experiment. He hated needles and could never have inserted a hypo into himself. He wasn't that good a mechanic.
The full rewards of knowing and being with John will never be totally understood by even those who loved his work, don't care how he died and are just sorry he's gone. To these people, I say his sweetness and generosity were as big as his appetite for life.
There is a picture of John that ROLLING STONE has agreed to run in this issue. It was taken during a recording session with Ray Charles in Chicago. John is smiling and has put his hand up to his mouth because he has slipped up on a note. It captures his essence. This is the John I'll remember--a powerhouse with a big, warm, sensitive, vulnerable guy inside.