By the end of the 1980 comedy The Blues Brothers, “Joliet” Jake Blues, played by late comedian John Belushi, and his brother Elwood (Dan Aykroyd), find themselves behind bars and make the best of it by performing Elvis Presley‘s “Jailhouse Rock” for the roomful of inmates with the prison band. Nearly a minute and a half into their performance, one recognizable inmate, played by Joe Walsh, jumps on the table and makes the entire room start dancing around.
“I start the riot in the final scene of ‘The Blues Brothers,’” recalled Walsh in 2018 of his cameo in the film nearly 40 years earlier. “The part of the movie they were filming in L.A. there were hours between set changes and John [Belushi] would call me up and say, ‘I can’t sit here. I have nothing to do. Can you come over and hang out?’ So I did. I hung out in the trailer with Danny [Aykroyd] and Belushi and they decided they had a scene for me in the movie. So that’s how that happened.”
Along with Walsh, The Blues Brothers also had cameos by director Steven Spielberg, who plays the Cook County Assessor’s clerk, Chaka Khan as a singer in the Triple Rock choir, Twiggy as a woman in a Jaguar convertible, Blues Brothers director John Landis as a state trooper, and more.
Before Walsh got a part as an extra in the movie, he and Belushi became close friends after first meeting years earlier when the Eagles were on tour in Chicago. Belushi came to Walsh’s hotel room and didn’t leave for two days.
Videos by American Songwriter
[RELATED: The Best Song Joe Walsh Said He Wrote Post-James Gang and Before the Eagles]
“He wanted to show me how cool Chicago was, and he took me out to the finest restaurant,” remembered Walsh. “There’s a whole story with that, with how they wouldn’t let us in because of the way we were dressed. So we went and spray-painted our jeans black and went back. Then we did about $28,000 worth of damage to my hotel room.”
In a 2017 interview with Conan O’Brien, Walsh recalled the notorious string of partying with Belushi that resulted in a hefty hotel bill for damages. “When he [Belushi] came over, pretty much, you just canceled all your plans for the next 24 hours,” remembered Walsh. “And he came over to my hotel room, and we stayed up for a couple of weeks that night.”
Walsh continued, “We had access to the penthouse suite and we didn’t know it was the owner of the hotel’s private apartment. There was really nice artwork, so we didn’t want to mess with that, but we didn’t like the wallpaper, so we took the paintings down tore all the wallpaper off, and put the paintings back on.
When the Eagles broke up in 1980 due to internal fighting—and following the onstage row between Glenn Frey and Don Felder that year during a fundraising show in Long Beach, California—Walsh continued with his solo career, releasing There Goes the Neighborhood in 1981, just a year before Belushi’s death at age 33 of a drug overdose.
“I didn’t really want to admit it had ended, so I just kept the same mentality and lifestyle,” revealed Walsh on the Eagles’ break. “And the way I wound up was that the only thing that mattered to me was not running out of cocaine—and also vodka. Vodka, cocaine, and Camel Light cigarettes. Those three things.”
During the Eagles break, Walsh said he stopped writing and taking care of himself and fell deeper into his cocaine addiction. “I burned bridges,” he said. “I was not dependable. I didn’t make any sense a lot of the time. Musicians didn’t really care to work with me anymore. I had an ‘I don’t care about anything’ attitude.”
[RELATED: 5 Songs Joe Walsh is Proud He Wrote Before Joining the Eagles]
If he wasn’t awake, Walsh said he was drinking and he’d spend most of his days searching for dealers to front him cocaine even though he owed them for previous batches. “I was just empty,” he said. “I was godless and I took it about as far as I could go. And I’d seen buddies go away. Keith Moon took it all the way.”
He continued, “Belushi, he had gotten sober. And I helped him do it. He said, ‘Look, I gotta quit. Do you know a sober companion?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I know somebody. But you’re gonna hate me for getting him for you and you’re gonna hate him. But he’ll get you clean.’ And John was doing great. Then he fell off the wagon, and on and on.”
Photo: Musician Joe Walsh of the rock band ‘Eagles’ performs onstage with an acoustic guitar at the Omni Theatre on June 20, 1977, in Atlanta, Georgia. (Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)
Leave a Reply
Only members can comment. Become a member. Already a member? Log in.