BIRTH OF THE BLUES BROTHERS
In his tiny, Queen St. E. apartment, Dan Aykroyd gave John Belushi his first taste of the blues that sparked SNL duo,
Unnoticed by passersby and often unmarked by plaques, numerous Toronto addresses with big parts to play in cultural history sit mostly uncelebrated. In our series Local Legends, we tell you about them and put them on your mental map.
In a century-old row house in Toronto’s east end, a budding comedian named Dan Aykroyd partied with friends into the wee hours, then climbed the steps to his bedroom upstairs to sleep it off. It was there that the Blues Brothers were born.
Aykroyd, an Ottawa native, came to Toronto in the summer of 1969 with writing partner and comic collaborator, the late Valri Bromfield, and moved into 505 Queen St. E. near River St.
The pair had been hired by legendary Saturday Night Live producer Lorne Michaels, who was then developing comedy for the CBC.
“We moved into 505 and it became sort of the headquarters for afterhours parties,” Aykroyd recalled in a recent interview.
When Aykroyd joined Second City in Toronto in1973, Club 505, as it was known, became the comedy troupe’s “after-hours hangout.”
“I lived upstairs and my brother (Peter) lived under the pinball machine,” Aykroyd cracked.
But he dismisses the term “booze can” for the main-floor antics, preferring a more genteel term.
“We were open after 1 a.m. (last call at the time). It was more like a ‘key club’ — it was friends of ours, friends and family, that could get in. We rocked, we raved. It was a great experience to have a window open and having a party going on at 4 in the morning,” he said.
Besides the comedy talent, special guests over the years included actors like Jack Nicholson and musicians such as Paul Shaffer and fellow Canadian composer Howard Shore.
Aykroyd can’t remember the exact date in1974 when he first met the late John Belushi, later to become Jake Blues, but it was a snowy winter night. Belushi was in town from New York, where he was working the National Lampoon Radio Hour, a syndicated comedy show spun off from the humour magazine, and hoping to “raid” Second City talent, like late comedian and future SNL castmate Gilda Radner.
“He wanted to get Gilda and me to come down to New York to the Lampoon. We didn’t want to go; we had a good life here. (Second City alumnus) Dave Thomas and I had a radio commercial company that we were doing. We were writing stuff and having so much fun, so we didn’t want to leave. He managed to get Gilda to go,” Aykroyd said.
(It’s a matter of historical record that Aykroyd, Belushi and Radner were all part of the original cast of SNL, the Not Ready for Prime Time Players, when the show premiered in 1975.)
But on that cold, wintry night at 505, Belushi heard some cool music and asked his new friend what it was.
“The Downchild Blues Band record Straight Up was playing and John asked me, ‘What is that?’ I said, ‘It’s a local blues band.’ And he said, ‘I really like that,’ ” Aykroyd recalled.
“And I said, ‘Well, you’re from Chicago, you know about the blues.’ And he said, ‘Well, I’m into heavy metal and that.’ The next time I saw him, he had 300 (blues) records.
“That was really the night we came up with the Blues Brothers,” Aykroyd said, referring to the wildly successful 1978 musical sketch on SNL that later spawned the 1980 movie co-written by Aykroyd, as well as the band, which has continued to tour intermittently since Belushi’s untimely death in 1982.
Back in the 1970s, Toronto was still a fairly sedate and buttoned-up town, so the parties did not go unnoticed by local police.
“I met many nice police officers who would say, ‘What’s going on here?’ One of them, Richard Crook, he was a cop on the beat. One night, we were having this raucous party and I look outside, it was a blustery night, and there was this old Polish woman or Ukrainian woman walking by,” Aykroyd said.
“I said, ‘Who’s that poor old Ukrainian woman?’ And it was Ricky. He was bundled up with a scarf around his head and gloves and I said, ‘That guy’s going to freeze to death.’ We brought him inside and we’ve been friends ever since.”