Dear Juan; what happened?

David Sherman

Juan Rodriguez made a paella like no other. Recipe inherited from his father. He could turn a phrase like few others. His knowledge of rock ‘n’ roll, unparalleled, but he knew more than a thing or two about jazz and blues. He was a star in the small, cosmic world of early rock journalism. A magazine named him one of the country’s most influential.

As a young man, he was one of my heroes. You saw a show, you waited to see what Juan had to say about it the next morning in the Star or Gazette.

He was a tall, perhaps beautiful man, killer smile, great raconteur, good sense of humour with a seemingly uncontrollable thirst. He had vices not uncommon among journalists in the 70s and 80s, but alcohol was a singular love.

The drink slowly killed him. Took his movie star looks and smile, destroying his pancreas, taking a leg, shutting down his kidneys. Born in England in 1948, he died last week.

When I joined the Gazette in the 70s, we shared a tiny office, the few computers allotted to the entertainment department and an affection for marijuana, a habit shared by a small coterie who would slip away from our desks or the entire building to indulge. As long as we filed by Thursday night, no one cared where we were or what we did.

But for Juan, weed was an appetizer. His appetites ran to the common mind-altering substances of the day, but alcohol was his soul mate.

He was not alone. Newsrooms everywhere in the day were packed with hard-drinking, coke-snorting deskers and photographers and journalists, perhaps raised on the exploits of Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway.

Juan did not see me as an interloper. But why would he? He was a star in his own right, having been invited personally to attend The Last Waltz, The Band's iconic swan song turned into a timeless concert film by Martin Scorsese.

Despite me being assigned to cover more and more of his territory, he was cooperative, complimentary, encouraging. Why was I interviewing B.B. King and Muddy Waters and Mose Allison and so many others? Where was Juan?

And, of course, being all of 25, I wanted to be like Juan, write like he did, smoke like he did, drink like he did. Perhaps the writing was sometimes close, the rest I stood not a chance and quickly abandoned the ambition.

There were war stories Juan liked to tell and tell and tell. When he savaged a local Italian pop singer, he received death threats. When he took the rap for another local Italian rock star, claiming the hashish found during a raid was his and not the musician’s, he received a call suggesting his problems with a managing editor could be resolved in ways left to the imagination.

Asked to cover a Canadiens’ hockey game for whatever reason, he happily did. Watched the game, went back to the office and filed. Unfortunately, hockey is three periods and he left after two. The beer was free in the press room at the Forum and Juan had had his share. And then some.

I can’t remember if the story was published but Juan dined out on the tale for the rest of the years I knew him.

Juan, like many at the paper, was two people. The sober Juan and the inebriated Juan. The latter could be warm and friendly and caring, depending on how indulgent he had been. The former, if hungover, alienating and dismissive. In between, he was hospitable and affable and would happily make you his paella of renown. Pay for the ingredients and give him your kitchen, invite a few friends and Juan would make magic.

Your kitchen would perhaps resemble London in the post-war years of his childhood, but the paella was worth it.

As are many, Juan was a complex, mysterious man of great talent and multiple contradictions. Women moved through his life, none stayed long. He loved to write, admired the best of it in any and all of us, suggested reading this and that, a man who cared for his craft and admired the skill of others.

At the same time, he allowed the demons to inhabit and take root, shackle his talents, destroy his loyalties, push people away, make “friends” wary.

When he drank away his journalism career and national reputation, he headed for San Francisco. There might have been a woman there, it was a long time ago, but he made a living writing questions for edition after edition of Trivial Pursuit. Its co-founder, a Gazette photo editor and drinking buddy who also allowed the booze to get the better of him and the riches earned by the game he helped invent, said, “Money just lets you choose where to be miserable.”

Many of us watched Juan crash and burn and did nothing but, perhaps, enable. Laugh at the old war stories, share drugs, watch him drink over the line without a word of caution.

Back in the day, it seemed harmless. If it was worth doing, it was worth doing to excess. Ha ha ha.

From San Francisco, he told me, during weekly slurred calls, he was downing two bottles of wine a day. When he couldn’t stop, his body did. He returned to Canada a shell of what he had been, needing insulin to replace function of his destroyed pancreas but determined to overcome and continue writing and keep on fighting the damage done to what had become his nemesis, his body.

But there was also a strain of bitterness that blossomed -- unacceptable opinions of racial enmity or misconception, perhaps the illness that was devouring him and chipped away the physical had done the same to his intellectual integrity.

His language had alienated me, but the man needed to write and needed money so I gave him work when I could, as did others.

When I was no longer in a position to hire him to write for whatever magazine I was editing, he no longer called. And, neither did I.

Last I heard, a Montreal musician had inherited real money and helped Juan. But, it was too late. The past had caught up with what was only a shadow of what he had been, a dark abstract of what he could have been.

Those who knew him in his prime, when his eyes could light up a room, his phrases would sing, his opinions mattered, will remember him for that. And maybe for what could have been.

And wonder always, what happened?