Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi once tried to fool Rolling Stone into believing they had mowed down a man while riding high.
The comedy stars had a week off from “Saturday Night Live” after the 1976 presidential election and drove from New York to Jimmy Carter’s victory party in Atlanta and then to San Francisco. Aykroyd had been commissioned to write about the trip for the publication.
Wenner, the co-founder of the magazine, writes in his upcoming memoir, “Like A Rolling Stone,” about receiving a disturbing phone call after midnight.
A voice with a thick Cajun accent introduced himself as the sheriff of Plaquemines Parish in Louisiana, saying he had two men in custody who claimed to be working for Wenner.
“I had to tell the truth, but also avoid liability for what John and Danny had done,” writes Wenner, whose book will be released Sept. 13. “I didn’t know if they had destroyed a car or burned down a hotel. ‘They are, uh… an article for us to write,’ he told the sheriff. ”As freelancers. They’re not my employees . What’s the problem?'”
The officer further explained that there had been an accident: “The vehicle they were driving hit a man earlier this evening. We don’t know what will happen yet, but the man is in the hospital. These gentlemen were driving eighty miles an hour… And Mr. Way-nur, I must also tell you that when we searched their vehicle, we found what we suspect to be narcotics.’
Wenner asked to speak to Aykroyd, who explained that it was dark and that he had not seen the man who “bounced off the hood and went all over the car.
“He wanted to explain what the police found in their car, what they scored at Carter’s headquarters,” Wenner writes. “I told him not to tell me any details over the phone and to give me a few hours to find them an attorney in Louisiana.
“I was totally out of a stoned, slow-motion state and now faced with a manslaughter case, probably worse because of the drugs. I didn’t know what to do.”
But before he could formalize a plan, the “sheriff” came on the line again and described the stars of “Blues Brothers” as “nice guys.”
It all turned out to be a joke.
“Then Danny is laughing again,” Wenner writes. “Then he hands the phone over to John, who laughs too. I was had. They were f–king pros.’
The author also recalls more about his friendship with Belushi, who died of a drug overdose in 1982, including a visit to the comedian in 1977 when he was hospitalized with a broken leg.
“When I entered the room, I found him lying in bed, his leg in a cast suspended by wires,” Wenner writes of Belushi. “He reached to the top of the cast and pulled out a bottle of Coke.”