Dan Aykroyd: The Rolling Stone Interview, cont.
The more one knows about Daniel Edward Aykroyd the more it seems there is to know. Beyond each door in his makeup is another door, slightly ajar, that opens on a room leading to still another. The complexity of the man is staggering. Yet certain constants emerge from the fabric of his web-footed personality.
"I don't want to wax poetic about it, says Michael O'Donoghue, "but Danny gives you a real solid bounce. You feel he's really there and you can trust him."
"You wonder how everybody on Saturday Night Live seems to handle the pressure," Peter Aykroyd muses, "and Danny he seems to deal with it like it's a nine-to-five gig: 'I walk in, I write my scenes, I do my thing, I get out.' When things get bigger, as with the 1941 film, I think he can deal with it because 1941 is just another clear-cut job. He sets his own timetable.
"Now he's starting to get recognized on the street, he's going to become a personality. In the ego sense, I think he can handle it real well; no problem. I guess people don't handle stardome because of some insecurity and he's pretty damn secure."
Later in the evening I find myself sitting with Aykroyd in a quiet room on the top floor of Jefferson Starship's Airplane house in San Francisco as the New Year's Eve bash for the Blues Brothers begins to wind down. Danny is ruminating on a variety of subjects ranging from the invention of stucco to paint, to the genius of car customizer Ed "Big Daddy" Roth and the flaws in the design of the NASA space shuttle, when his clever, curly-haired girlfriend, Saturday Nigt Live writer Rosie Shuster, ambles by. They speak briefly, and when Shuster departs Danny's talk turns to their relationship.
"Lorne [Michaels] and Rosie were married," he volunteers softly, "and--it's so strange--I go out with Rosie and have been for a while. We're an "in-house" group over at Saturday Night and , hey, I'm a hetero, ya know? When you spend twelve, thirteen hours together at a stretch writing that show, there's a physical attraction and a magnetism sometimes."
"You know what I mean, he says, nudging me playfully, and then turns to watch Rosie bound down the stairs to the second floor. "She's a good girl," he says a little sad, "Life is a funny deal."
I am finally beginning to feel that I understand this Man of a Thousand Faces when he dons another one, abruptly shifting the topic of conversation to, of all things, crime.
"I took a lot of crime-related courses in college, " he says stiffly, as I gulp from a bottle of champagne offered by a passer-by.
I took a course in criminology, one in correctional policy, one in deviant psychology. It was a program heading toward a career in prison classifications. I worked for the penitentiary service one service as one of my summe jobs and wrote a thick manual--it may still be in use--on personnel placement for the solicitor general's facility in Ottawa.
There's always going to be crime; I mean, I know this. I saw the graphs for Canada over a period of ten years on the flow of prisoners adn recidivists and there's no bell curve there. It's either a holding pattern or it gradates upward."
"Why is that," I ask, still uncertain why he brought it up.?
"It's simple," he says with the curt detachment of a prison warden. "It's Robert K. Merton's sociological theory; probably the most tangible bit of knowledge I've gotten form all my training: the theory of 'illegitimate means.' When people from low-income groups see a TV or a car advertised they usually don't possess the legitimate means to get it. Frustrated, they have to resort to illegitimate means; so they pull a cheap job, a heist, a robbery, maybe break a pete."
"A pete?"
"Yeah, a pete, a safe."
"Hmmmm," I mull, beginning to wonder whether Aykroyd isn't trying out a new character on me. " Did any of this data/experience rub off on you?"
"On me? Well, I'll say this. My grandpa was a Mountie, and I have my experiences through research, among other things. I've noticed that, in street crime, you have officers always forcibly restraining suspects that are being arrested. But in any situation where the criminal has a skill, as with a good pete man, there's a moment between the arresting officer and the skilled criminal when it's all over and he's been caught and everything relaxes. There's no tension any longer; they light cigarettes and share a smoke.
"At this level, you see, they're kindred spirits; part of the same huge business. It's an art, a craft , an industry like any other!
"But say, he says with a sudden smile, offering me a joint as he slips on a pair of Ray Ban No. 5022-G15 sunglasses. "So, what did you think of the way we played "Jailhouse Rock" tonight?"
Interview by Tim White
Transcribed by L. Christie
