Yesterday started with me going thru my Spotify playlist titled Chaos, Karma & Cannabis. I have other names for it as well, names like Clean Kids Causing Catastrophe and Killers Creating Cages but this isn’t about what I name my playlists. This is about what I found in my playlist. It’s a song by Gordon Lightfoot called Sundown. I started thinking about the lyrics and wondering what it was about. I found it was all about Cathy Smith.

Who is Cathy Smith? I’m glad you asked. Here’s all that I know at the moment.

Cathy Smith was 16 years old in 1963 when she met Levon Helm and Rick Danko (members of a band called The Hawks). The band members were facing a drug bust in Toronto and Levon explained the situation to her. She blew the cop who was the chief witness and then told him she was 14 years old. The cop disappeared and charges were dropped.

Levon, Rick, and Richard Manuel left The Hawks and formed The Band. Cathy toured with them as a groupie. Levon mentioned on the Conan O’Brien Show back in 1993 that his very favorite song to sing every night way back then was “Short Fat Fannie” It was also the song that he used to tease Cathy with. She would turn red and run away cause every time he sang it, he would look over at her and grin.

One night a few months after she met them, they rented a few rooms in the Seahorse Motel down on the lakeshore. She ended up in bed with Rick Danko. In the middle of it, Rick found out she wasn’t on the pill and things stopped. He got out of bed and wandered on down the hall, then Levon walked in and climbed into bed. Six weeks later, Smith discovered she was pregnant with “the band baby,” named this as its paternity was unclear. Levon was the father, she insists, although she also says that she ‘didn’t belong particularly to Levon’. Richard Manuel offered to marry her, but she turned him down.

In 1968 The Band released a song called The Weight which apparently is about the load that one or all of them were carrying regarding the pregnancy, the baby, the guilt, ‘the impossibility of’ redemption and also a possible reference of somebody having the clap.

What happened to the band baby? !!!? I’m still looking for the answer to that. On to her next venture…

She became an employee and then mistress of Gordon Lightfoot in the early to mid-’70s. …I wish I understood the whole “mistress” scene a little better. Is every girl you cheat on your wife with considered a mistress or do you have to formally ask them on one knee to be your mistress? What if your mistress is also married, does that make you a mistress too? Wait… let me get back to the story.

In 1974 Lightfoot released a song called Sundown illustrating the volatile affair he was having with Cathy. It reflects the dark feelings he was experiencing at the time. “Sometimes I think it’s a shame / When I get feeling better when I’m feeling no pain.” It was all about Cathy and him drinking too much and being married to another woman. The way he describes it: “Well, I had this girlfriend one time, and I was at home working, at my desk, working at my songwriting which I had been doing all week since I was on a roll, and my girlfriend was somewhere drinking, drinking somewhere. So I was hoping that no one else would get their hands on her because she was pretty good looking! And that’s how I wrote the song ‘Sundown,’ and as a matter of fact, it was written just around Sundown, just as the sun was setting, behind the farm I had rented to use as a place to write the album.”

He was so jealous over her that he even fired one of his opening acts, bluegrass musicians Bruce and Brian Good, The Good Brothers, for “flirting” with Cathy.

Cathy was also cited in Lightfoot’s divorce papers. Gordon Lightfoot and Brita Ingegerd Olaisson were married for 10 years and divorced in 1973. Shortly after their affair ended Brita was awarded what was once considered the largest divorce settlement in Canadian history—$4,500 a month, which, in today’s dollars, works out to close to $290,000 a year. She died June 8, 2005 @ 70 years old.  Gordon is still alive. Smith just returned to Helm and the rest of the guys in The Band.

Well now I know more about what I set out to learn but the story continues. I had to see what happens next.

Around 1976, Cathy became a backup singer for Hoyt Axton who was a coke head. She sang on his song Fearless and started using heroin. She became the drug dealer to Ron Wood and Keith Richards. She moved to LA and became a full-time drug dealer to them and other entertainers. Then she met John Belushi on the set of SNL when The Band was the musical guest.

Saturday Night Live Season 2 Episode 6. October 30, 1976 with host Buck Henry and musical guest The Band. Lots of episodes actually look worth seeing more than once. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Saturday_Night_Live_episodes_(seasons_1%E2%80%9330)#Season_1_(1975–76)

Life went on like that for a while. I’m going to focus on one day that brought it all to a head. It would help you to remember the story of John Belushi and his cocaine addiction. He’d also occasionally combine it with heroin. In the early morning hours of March 5,1982, at the Chateau Marmont in Hollywood, Belushi was visited by friends Robin Williams, Robert DeNiro and Cathy Smith. I don’t know all the details but I do know Robin Williams was creeped out by Cathy and thought she was a lowlife. Belushi died. His death was investigated and was officially ruled a drug-related accident.

Two months later, on June 29, 1982, the National Enquirer headline came out: “I killed John Belushi. I didn’t mean to, but I am responsible.” Cathy admitted in the interview that she had injected Belushi with 11 speedballs and that she had given him the fatal shot. The case was then reopened and she was extradited from Ontario in June 1986, arrested, and charged with first-degree murder. A plea bargain reduced it to involuntary manslaughter. She served 15 months in prison from Dec 86 to Mar 88.

She was deported to Canada and worked as a legal secretary in Toronto and spoke to teenagers about the dangers of drugs. Smith co-wrote the book Chasing the Dragon in 1984 which told her life story.

Also in 1984 Smith appeared in the Bob Woodward book, Wired: The Short Life and Fast Times of John Belushi.

In 1989 she was played by Patti D’Arbanville in the film version of Wired (found here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHRaZdFOVvs).

She was arrested in Vancouver Jul 91 with two grams of heroin and got 12 months’ probation.  

In 98 she appeared in the E! True Hollywood Story on Belushi’s death.

She currently lives in Maple Ridge, BC.

Side note 1: Ronnie Hawkins’s band, The Hawks, consisted of Levon Helm, Robbie Robertson, Garth Hudson, Rick Danko, and Richard Manuel. All of them left Ronnie Hawkins and became the backing group for Bob Dylan and then went on to a career of their own as The Band.

Side note 2: Short Fat Fannie is by Larry Williams from 1957 – I found it on Spotify in his 1959 album Here’s Larry Williams.

Side note 3: What happened to the band baby? !!!?