Live From New York - James H. Miller [134]
BILL MURRAY:
When John died, it was like, “Oh God, what a drag this is going to be. What a drag this is.” And when they said he died of an overdose, my brother Brian said, “He died from four beers.” The guy was a real short hitter behind the bar. Really, four beers would put him into like an absolute delirium. He didn’t have a high threshold in some ways. Because he was a finely tuned instrument, it didn’t take much to set him a-kilter. The fact that he died was like, “Oh Christ, why’d you go and do that?”
When you’re with somebody who does stuff which is either incredibly pleasing, incredibly amusing, or incredibly disappointing in some way, you’re sort of glad it’s not you that did it, because it could have been any one of us goofing off somehow. We’ve all been through stuff, and we’ve pushed limits and crossed lines in order to establish where the line was, sort of, or to reestablish the line. So when he died, I think it was, “Okay, now someone has crossed this line here; where does that put us? Where does that leave us? What does that say?” Because he really was the icebreaker in so many ways. He was the first one to come to New York from Chicago of our group. He was the first one to do a lot of things. He really was a leader in so many ways that the idea that he was the first to die was probably not surprising. That he was the first to do anything was not a surprise. That’s really the truth.
John’s funeral was great theater. It was our first funeral together, and there were TV cameras, and it’s like, “Whoa. There’s nothing funny going to happen and these cameras are here.” And Danny did the motorcycle thing, and the night before I think we’d gone out on John’s property and fired shotguns at the moon and stuff and tried to do something sort of epic that involved howling and sort of displaced rage.
God, the song James Taylor sang — chills. “Walk Down That Lonesome Road,” you know that one? It’s chilling. He sang it with his brothers and a sister, I think. All the press and everything were at a fencepost like a hundred yards away. When he sang that song, it was just, “Ooooh okay. That is the lesson, I guess.”
Whenever I hear it, I’m right back there at John’s grave.
EDIE BASKIN, Photographer:
Right after John died, People magazine called me and asked, “Do you have some pictures of John when he was doing the sketch with the powdered sugar doughnuts?” They wanted me to give them pictures of John with powdered sugar all over his nose so it looked like he was doing coke. I said, “You’re sick. Good-bye.”
GARRETT MORRIS, Cast Member:
One time I saw his picture in People magazine, and he was like a balloon. I thought, “Oh my God.” I couldn’t believe it. I was worried about his heart or his circulatory system. During the previous two years or so, I was thinking he personally didn’t like me, because he was saying a lot of things that just were uncharacteristic. And then when I saw the picture in People, I began to realize what had happened.
The way I found out he died was an L.A. Times lady got my number and had the nerve to call me and tell me he was dead and then try to elicit a response. She didn’t take into account at all that it broke me up. I said to her, “Look, I don’t want anything about drugs or anything.” And she said, “Well, I don’t let people put restrictions on my interviews.” And of course I hung up, because I didn’t want to have AT&T sue me for using words like — well, “motherfucker” is not a four-letter word, it’s a twelve-letter word, but I was going to call her a motherfucker at least twelve times.
TIM KAZURINSKY:
The day Belushi died, I went in to help out with making calls, because I was very good friends with the Belushi family. John and I were supposed to have had dinner on March third, to celebrate my birthday, and he was in L.A., and he killed himself March