So I’d tell everybody where to go. I’d give them a written invitation, and then I’d get on my bike and I’d zap down to our bar at Hudson and Dominic. It was this abandoned old wreck of a place–a longshoreman’s bar that I’d found as storage for my Harley, basically. I’d go down there and turn on the jukebox and make sure my assistant had roses out in the women’s can. The men’s can was just an open running trough of sewage–you walked in and there was a ditch under the urinal. You know–real funky. I rented the place for $435 a month, and it had armor on the windows. So we’d crank up the jukebox, which was, of course, the best rhythm-and-blues jukebox in the city. There was lots of James Brown, lots of Junior Walker. Incredible songs. And then we’d open up the bar, and the limos would start to arrive and line up and down the block.
I think the night the Stones were there we had Francis Ford Coppola tending bar. We had Bowie, ZZ Top and Keith Richards singing in the corner. So the place would start to fill up. And I would personally watch the door. I would eyeball everybody coming in, but we didn’t have to bounce too many people out because nobody knew where we were going. John [Belushi] was great at those parties. He would sing. He would be host. He would be charming with the ladies. Now, naturally, the cocaine was a good part of it, but at those parties he knew he had to keep himself together because he had a lot of guests, and he didn’t want to look too screwed up. So he used to kind of temper his consumption. It really was not until after he left the show that he got into this serious consumption and his wife, Judy, and I would be flushing vials down the toilet and hiding it from him. But those “Saturday Night Live” parties were wonderful nights. The jukebox was great, the bands, the conversation, the mix of people in the room. And I would routinely find myself closing the shutters at 10:30 or 11 Sunday morning.
