Joe Walsh was terrified to party with John Belushi: “You did not know what was going to happen”
Long before he joined Eagles and helped them become a world-famous outfit, Joe Walsh was already rubbing shoulders with A-list musicians. A storied guitar player thanks to his work with the James Gang and Barnstorm, his gritty fusion of hard rock and funk earned him many prominent fans. This saw him deeply ensconced in the world of rockstar behaviour years before ‘Hotel California’ materialised.
While Walsh was an adherent of the countercultural spirit of free love, drugs, and the rest, like every other musician of the era, he might not have gained the notorious penchant for hellraising he long had if it wasn’t for one man in particular: Keith Moon. The American got to know the madcap Who drummer when the James Gang opened for the British legends in Europe after they released 1969’s Tommy. ‘Moon the Loon’ took an instant liking to him and, almost overnight, was showing him the ropes of rock ‘n’ roll destruction.
On that tour, Walsh and Moon became fast friends. That run proved consequential for the former’s life trajectory, with him evolving from a normal human being to a storied hellraiser. He would take to rockstar behaviour like a duck to water, and just a few years later, in the mid-1970s, would be so synonymous with carnage that Elton John, no stranger to tearing it up himself, would be scared to even stay on the same hotel floor as him. To be fair to the ‘Rocket Man’ singer, the fear was warranted; not long after their 1975 tour, Walsh would tear through his manager, Irving Azoff’s hotel room with a chainsaw.
While Moon was the facilitator of Walsh’s infamous hard living, another figure was his tag-team partner: Saturday Night Live (SNL) star and comedian John Belushi. Best known for his work in The Blues Brothers, Belushi developed a cocaine addiction while working on SNL, and it would become so fraught that he would be kicked off the set on numerous occasions. The comic’s lifestyle was so intense that it caused health problems, and although he tried to clean up, he died in 1982, aged 33, after taking a speedball, a mixture of heroin and cocaine.
When appearing on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert in 2017, Walsh reflected on his years of hard-partying, saying: “All the things that you’ve heard are true. I don’t remember a lot about it, but the depositions and court and police reports… I had to do it.”
He also looked back on his times with Belushi, describing partying with the comedian as both “scary” and “terrifying”. He explained: “Now it’s funny, but at the time, both of those gentlemen, it was terrifying. You did not know what was going to happen.”
He told an anecdote where Belushi became his SNL character, Samurai Futaba, outside the walls of 30 Rockefeller Plaza. While the character is undoubtedly dated and majorly offensive, it speaks to the outlandish essence of the era that Belushi was able to do it unrestrained in public. Not only that but where he did so is also astounding: Benihana’s, a Japanese restaurant.
“I went to Benihana’s once with John Belushi,” Walsh said, “and he decided he was going to be the cook. He went full-on Samurai. It was messy.”
That incident was just the tip of the iceberg for Walsh and Belushi. When they first met in Chicago, they incurred a $23,000 bill for hotel damages. There really was no limit to their chaos.
