The Lonesome Road!
I have always felt a connection to John Belushi unlike any other among actors and stage personalities of my time. We all have our favorites but Belushi held a special place with me. We were born in the same year of 1949, in the winter, and Belushi would pass away of a drug overdose on this date, thirty years ago, while he was filming a movie with the unlikely name of “Noble Rot” whose very name combined with Belushi’s co notated lost fun at the theater that we will never get to see or remember along with his other famous films, “The Blues Brothers” and “Animal House”.
John Belushi was a tragic figure because of the immense talent that he possessed, lost at age 33 at the beginning of a career that was just beginning to flower into what Dan Aykroyd, his comedic partner and close friend, thought might lead to roles and productions on Broadway. It is so sad, really, that we will never get to see what John Belushi might have developed into as an actor, comedian, possible writer and producer, musician, and so many other things that he might have explored along with his many fans over a long, full life that was never meant to be.
John Belushi came to fame with the ensemble cast of the still running NBC series “Saturday Night Live” and one could just see the twinkle in his eyes as he ran the gamut of characters such as the samurai warrior gone amuck to the owner of the hilarious little hamburger stand where he repeated each order “Cheesebugie, cheesebugie, cheesebugie” and “Fries, fries, fries,” There were other tragic characters on Saturday Night Live, chief among them the memorable Gilda Radnor who would die of cancer not so many years later. However, none of them approached Belushi and Aykroyd when they played the unforgettable Blues Brothers and their mission from God! Saturday Night Live was just the beginning for these two as they would take their characters to the big screen in an entire two hours plus devoted to blues and their irresistible and incomparable brand of often spontaneous comedy. Their version of Rawhide at the country music venue that they played in “Blues Brothers” where they were housed behind barbed wire and suffered the indignity of being pelted by beer bottles until they found the proper song stands at the forefront of wild comedy to this very day. To show Belushi’s penchance for stand up comedy, he played the character Joliet Jake Blues without a word being spoken throughout most of the entire film.
John Belushi had a connection to southern Illinois where I live because his brother Jim Belushi had attented Southern Illinois University, my alma mater, and, it is almost certain that John himself had driven down the Interstate from Chicago on at least one occasion to party in a college town--Carbondale, Illinois--known too much for that sort of thing. Although John Belushi had a great deal of talent it was the drugs and the partying that did him in in the end. His drug use kept increasing and the autopsy on his body revealed that he had taken a massive dose of cocaine and heroin in the bungalow out in Hollywood on the day that they found him dead. He had done the film “Continental Divide” not long before that in which he played a hard bitten chain smoking Chicago newspaper reporter who has to escape town to avoid being cut down by the mafia. In that film he, among other things, gives up his cigarette habit as he falls in love with the mountains and Blair Brown as a environmentalist eagle watcher. It is sad indeed that this could not have happened to Belushi in real life and that all we have are the haunting images from that film that displayed the enormous and complex talent that continued to emerge right up until the day that he died.
Drugs, alcohol, and the world that they control have deprived us of so many talents over the years and it is indeed tragic to know and not know what we had and what we, as the collective viewing public, have lost over these many years. At Whitney Houston’s funeral one of her body guards gave a short eulogy in which he reminded the audience just what sacrifices that performers make, despite all of the money that so many of them make, for their craft and for their fans. Perhaps it is, all to often, the lack of a solidly grounded real world combined with the money to buy any physical pleasure that one desires that leads so many of them to the ends that they arrive at--alone and just a bit to far from any real help that could save them from themselves. And, we are left, thirty years later, to still sometimes mourn the great unrealized gifts that we never got to see and experience.
We have had a good life but it would have been sometimes better if John Belushi had been around to make us do what so many cannot achieve--make us both anticipate and have a good genuine laugh along the way. As we look at this world and the many sadness’s that it holds, these are increasingly more precious commodities that we hold closer and closer to our heart.
We miss you John!
IOVHO,
Regards,
Joe
To say that "God exists" is the greatest understatement ever made across space and time.
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