The Rolling Stone Interview

RS # 1423

August 2006

By Rick Vanderhoof

I’m waiting alone in Bungalow # 3, at the Chateau Marmont, 8221 Sunset Boulevard, in Los Angeles. I’m waiting and I’m alone, it’s near midnight and it’s creepy. This specific city, hotel and room were chosen by Dusty Carr. He said that he wanted to tell me the truth tonight, and that would undoubtedly happen if the ghost of his pal John Belushi was sitting next to him.

After a few days of speaking with Carr, you get accustomed to such thoughts.

John Belushi did indeed die about ten feet from where I’m waiting. I can even see the bed on which he expired: it’s appears that they changed the sheets since then.

(When I requested this room for a celebrity interview, the Marmont’s front-desk staff gave me a really odd look.)

As promised, Carr opens the door at exactly midnight. He looks in my eyes and freezes. I’m thinking maybe he doesn’t recognize me, even though we spent the past two days together. His face tightens in shock and eyes roll to the ceiling. He shouts, “Jesus H. Christ Almighty! He’s here! John’s here!” This happens with a cigarette flapping on his lower lip (is it glued there?) and a highball glass, filled with iced Southern Comfort (I assume), remaining absolutely level with the floor.

His shock passes as quickly as it came. With surprising agility he flops in a thick-padded chair.

Carr & Belushi: party pals

He has a deep, Vegas leather tan: either that or his liver is finally beginning to fail. There’s something about his eyes, which the late Gram Parsons once referred to as “shattered windows on dark dream.” True enough. You get the feeling that he’s seen so many unwholesome things, that the actual gelatin of his eyeballs has been reformed in an unnatural way. He doesn’t look at you really, or through you, but around you. If you’ve ever seen Keith Richards up close, and I mean close, you get an intimation of the moment.

R.S.: How do you feel when one of your songs is covered?

D.C.: Depends who covers it. Are you talking about Springsteen doing ‘Walk With a Ghost’? Or who was it, Brian Wilson who did (She Belongs Now On) The Coastline?

R.S.: Not specifically. Covers in general.

D.C.: I love it when a beautiful woman sings one of my songs. That turns me on. I heard a bootleg of Annie Lennox doing ‘Slippin’ Away from Me’. It made me dizzy with seduction.

R.S. What’s the best concert you ever gave?

D.C. That’s easy. The Hammersmith Odeon, May, 1974. I went on after Deep Purple. I worked so hard that night that my spirit got damaged in some way. It was like I vomited part of my soul. I was never the same.

Carr: Hammersmith Odeon, 1974

R.S.: I’ve heard the bootleg of that evening. It is an incredible concert.

D.C.: Later that evening I shot a man in the leg, completely by accident, at a party near Buckingham Palace. I remember that Anthony Newley was there and a playwright named Tom Stoppard. I remember the revolver recoiling in my hand. It really kicked, I love that feeling.

R.S.: Speaking of violence, you want to talk about your war experiences in Vietnam?

D.C.: I don’t want to but I will. It’s your ticket flyboy. Ah shit, look, I cut myself on something. Fuckin’ hand’s bleeding. Just a second… Okay, there it stopped. Hey, you ever hear of the Tet Offensive?

R.S.: The South Vietnamese attacks on the North, kind of a turning point in the war?

D.C.: Right. It all began in early 1968. During Tet things started to go haywire. Okay, in late January 1968, I was hanging around the Chu Lai airstrip. My job was to teach PFs, that is, members of the South Vietnam popular forces, about American culture —which to me really starts with George Gershwin, goes into overdrive with Hank Williams, runs around Buddy Holly a little, hits a high-water mark with Sinatra, then implodes with the ascension of television in the late 1950s. So I had all these PFs singing ‘Summertime’ and ‘The Gal That Got Away’, you know, classic shit. But the big chief hears about what I’m doing, and gets so enraged that he sends me on permanent night patrol, so to speak. He wants my ass in a body bag. It turns out later that I was supposed to teach them about American history. Ah, fuck it, and fuck the army.

Carr on patrol. Vietnam. February 1968

R.S.: Didn’t they kick you out of the army?

D.C.: In a word, yes. I was a terrible soldier. I can’t tolerate being part of a large group. That’s death to me. I lose myself and get smothered. And the army is just a large group. To get out of the night patrols, I started singing all the time, so they thought I was crazy and ejected me. Good riddance. Anyway, I left Vietnam and joined the Beatles in Rishikesh, India. It was more horrible than Vietnam. India is the hottest country on the planet, and the loudest. Their food destroys your bowels, turning everything into thin pea soup.

R.S.: Let’s talk about friends not present. Was Buddy Holly a close friend of yours?

D.C.: Close enough. I toured with him on a Hank Thompson gig in 1957. I remember George Jones was on that tour. God I love Jones. Most of them are gone now except me and George, and George ain’t looking so hot, but he’s still got nice hair.

R.S.: Where were you when Buddy Holly died?

D.C.: Where was I? I was waiting for his fucking plane to land at the Fargo airport. It was snowing and the taxi driver and me were just sitting there. We waited for over an hour but no plane. We were expecting him and Waylon Jennings and maybe the Big Bopper, I can’t remember. I was supposed to join the Winter Dance Party Tour. I didn’t want to but I was broke and Dion Dimucci said it was good coin. Anyway, sitting there in that taxi we heard the news come over the radio. We didn’t say anything to each other. We just drove really slowly into town. In a way I’ve never stopped waiting for Buddy’s plane. None of us have. Ah shit, that seems like a million years ago.

Holly & Carr. NYC. 1958

R.S.: In a career that spans over sixty years, you must have seen a lot come, and a lot go.

D.C.: Is that a goddam question? Everybody sees a lot come and go. Never mind… There are some I miss more than others.

R.S.: Such as?

D.C.: I don’t know. Lenny Bruce, I suppose. Gram Parsons. Keith Moon a little. Jayne Mansfield a lot. She was a decent woman and she worked hard but didn’t have an ounce of talent. Her breasts were average for a woman with her build, but she had a massive rib cage. Dick Shawn was a funny guy. Rod Serling was on the ball. I miss Marlon Brando.

Carr & Mansfield. L.A. 1966

R.S.: Didn’t you spend time with Brando on his island in Tahiti?

D.C.: Yeah. Look, I don’t want to talk about Marlon right now. It’s too soon. He was a very spiritual man, very kind, very mean and fat, lazy, a genius. He had an old-world decency about him yet he was a creep—not in my books, you understand. But other people thought he was a creep. He was whatever you wanted him to be.

Carr & Brando. LAX. 1979

R.S.: Who’s the strangest man you ever met?

D.C.: Probably Maxwell Bodenheim, the poet. But nobody knows poor Max anymore. Everyone’s too stupid nowadays. I guess you want me to talk about celebrities, right? Because aren’t they the modern gods, and Hollywood is our new Mount Olympus? Screw it, I’ll give you what you want. Strange people? Roman Polanski. There’s definitely something missing. He’s a sick guy. I saw in Paris a few years ago. He hasn’t changed. He’s got a theory that John Phillips, of the Mommas and Poppas, had something to do with his wife’s murder, you know, Sharon Tate. I think he’s lost his mind. Plus, he stole fifty bucks out of my wallet.

R.S.: I thought you were going to say Keith Richards.

D.C.: Brian Jones was a lot stranger than Keith Richards. Brian Jones was very smart and very scared. Keith Richards isn’t the brightest light, but he’s a workhorse and he’s an honest man. He’s also a very ugly, small man whom women find irresistible. I saw him last year in Toronto and he looked like an exoskeleton, you know, like the crust of a human being. But his eyes are alive with a kind of spacey terror. When Keith dies the world will shudder for a second.

Gruesome twosome. Carr & Richards. NYC. 2003

R.S.: What will the world do when Bob Dylan dies?

D.C.: When Dylan dies, the world will get lighter because that guy has a heavy soul. Last year I was planning an album, ‘Dusty Does Dylan’, Bob actually wanted to play on the whole thing! He didn’t want attention. He didn’t want to be mentioned. He told me his songs are so old it’s as if somebody else wrote them! I think he just wants to play with a band, aside from Bono and that fucking horrible U2. Do you realize that Bono now has enough money to pay off all the African debt? Why doesn’t he just do that and shut up and return to the peat bog from where he crawled?

R.S.: If you could bring someone back from the dead, who would it be?

D.C.: You mean someone I knew?

R.S.: Of course.

D.C.: Why ‘of course’? How the fuck would I know what you mean? Don’t answer that… Okay, let me think. I think Elvis died way too young, but I suppose he had nothing left to give, so it was his time. Plus, he wasn’t very interesting to talk with. Kinda dumb. The trick to staying alive, by the way, is to get engaged to new things. I wouldn’t mind talking with Che Guevara. I’d like to tell him that he was going to become a cultural icon, because when I knew him he was just a hairy, violent communist. Too bad Nat King Cole kicked so early. I miss Romy Schneider. She was an incredible beauty and I had arranged to meet her in Paris in May of ’82. But she croaked. Let’s see, I guess I might bring back Gram Parsons—because I never really appreciated him. And I would like to tell him I’m sorry about feeling that way. And I would like to tell him that inserting an ice cube in your rectum can’t cure a morphine overdose—because that’s what his stupid friends did when Gram kept nodding off in The Joshua Tree.

Parsons & Carr. Onstage 1969.

R.S.: Weren’t you with him when he died?

D.C.: He wouldn’t be dead if I’d been with him. He died alone. They all die alone. I was passed out in a camper about five hundred yards away. We played together a little in 1969 in the southwest. Listen, the early 1970s was a bad time. A lot of people died because they couldn’t handle drugs. And not just famous people like Hendrix and Joplin. You need a strong personality to handle drugs. Keith Richards has one. John Lennon had one. I have one. But most people are weak, petty little shits who can’t resist temptation. The guys who last, the Hefners, the Dylans, the Tony Bennetts—they are people know how to pace themselves. Life is a marathon, not a sprint. Shit, I remember when Bennett could toss more cocaine up his nose than the entire Bolivian army. But—and it’s a big but—he knew when to stop.

R.S.: It’s been said more than once that you have an uncanny knack to know famous people.

D.C.: I don’t look at it that way. I think it’s obvious that famous people have an uncanny knack for knowing me. I’ll give you an example. When I was a kid I had an agent who was pals with a guy named Johnny Hyde. Now Hyde went on to discover Marilyn Monroe in the late 1940s. That’s when I met her. She was older than me, but she really glowed. In person, she was kind of fleshy and pale, but she actually gave off a sensual heat. Anyway, we hung out for a while in the mid-50s. You asked me about people I’d like to bring back from the dead. Well, wouldn’t it be great to see Marilyn Monroe walk down the street? We’d all fall to our knees again. She was extremely feminine. Delicate. Smart. What a princess. Not like the tattooed skags we have today. I miss her.

Carr & Monroe. L.A. 1958.

R.S.: Is there any truth to the rumor that you and Monroe were married?

D.C.: I hate talking about Marilyn Monroe because whenever I do, something in me prevents me from lying, and I’m uncomfortable with that.

R.S.: Alright. Do you miss James Dean?

D.C.: No, I don’t miss him at all. It’s been fifty years, plus, Dean wasn’t a fully formed human being. He was still a goofy kid when he died. I think his appeal is that he thought he was cool and hip, but he wasn’t, and our hearts go out to him. He was just an Indiana farm kid who was likely gay but didn’t know it. That reminds me. You asked me before about strange people. Sal Mineo was very fucking strange.

Dean and Carr rapping, 1954

R.S.: Didn’t Diana Rigg famously call you the strangest man of the century?

D.C.: Yes she did, but only because she doesn’t understand that during his lifetime, every man will have a need for plastic explosives. She never got that simple concept. There is absolutely nothing wrong with small quantities of explosives if they’re used for constructive purposes. Shit, I think ‘strange’ is performing Shakespeare every night—like she does. Can you imagine the boredom of doing that? And she calls me strange? Unfortunately I miss her too. But she’s no fun anymore.

Carr & Rigg: mutual strangeness

R.S. What did John Belushi mean to you?

D.C.: He was a pal I suppose. A little bit anyway. I met him through Hunter Thompson. There was something about Belushi that made you want to be around him. I’ve noticed that people who are going to die young can have a weird glow about them, a certain energy. John had it. Janis Joplin sure had it. Jim Morrison was soaked in it. I could see it in Kurt Cobain’s eyes. Johnny Ace had it. It’s like a little bit of them has already left the world; that they’re becoming phantoms. Hey, you just feel that? The air got very cold for a second, then very warm. You know what that means? I got to go because John has left this room. He was here but he left... Anyway, I’m tired of talking about the past. And I’m tired of talking to big, important ‘Rolling Stone’, so there you go, you sloppy fruit. Ciao for now.

And with that Carr threw open the door on a noisy, warm L.A. night and vanished in a cloud of cigarette smoke. I haven’t seen him since. Nobody has.