BLUES CUES
New book takes a worthy look back at a comedy classic that mattered
The Blues Brothers An Epic Friendship, the Rise of Improv, and the Making of an American Film Classic
Does The Blues Brothers deserve a book? In the pantheon of gloriously dumb movie comedies derived from Saturday Night Live and the National Lampoon, the 1980 John Belushi-dan Aykroyd R&B farce sits a notch below Animal House, Caddyshack and Ghostbusters. An absurdist demolition derby of a film, it's most memorable for spotlighting soul music legends such as Aretha Franklin and James Brown, and providing a loving portrait of Chicago at its smoggiest and seediest.
But is it book-worthy? Arguably not. Still, Daniel De Visé makes the case in his subtitle, The Blues Brothers: An Epic Friendship, the Rise of Improv, and the Making of an American Film Classic, that his book isn't just about a movie.
It's a triple-helixed biography of the main contributors to the counterculture comedy revolution of the post-'60s: SNL, the Lampoon and the Second City comedy troupe in all its stage and TV iterations. It's a tale of Hollywood excess — both budgetary and pharmaceutical — that beggars belief. And, at its essence, it's the story of a great American bromance, a partnership that was kept alive by one man's creative discipline before crashing on the rocks of another man's addictions.
De Visé, a journalist and the author of books on B.B. King and Greg Lemond, leans heavily on previously published group biographies: Bob Woodward's 1984 Belushi bio Wired; Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller's 2002 Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live; and two books by Belushi's widow, Judith Belushi Pisano, among others. But De Visé has gone back and talked to many of the principals as well as the secondary and tertiary figures, and he's read and listened to every interview. This is a well-researched book.
Better, it's a well-told story, one that rarely loses its focus on the larger picture — the many forces that came together to create comedy by the baby boom generation for the baby boom generation — while engaging the reader in a close-up view of two very different, very funny men.
The Blues Brothers goes back to its star duo's beginnings: Belushi's Chicago childhood as the class-clown son of Albanian immigrants, and Aykroyd's early years in Ottawa, where Tourette's syndrome made him the target of bullies. Both men rose through local comedy groups to star in their respective Second City outposts of Chicago and Toronto, but Belushi was tagged early on as a comic force of nature. By the time he met Aykroyd, he was scouting Second City Toronto for The National Lampoon Radio Hour, where he'd already become a breakout talent. On their first meeting, Aykroyd told a radio interviewer, he felt “the jump you get when you see a beautiful girl. It was a pit-of-the-stomach feeling.”
Belushi brought the manic slapstick to the first SNL cast, and Aykroyd brought the inspired weirdness — remember the Bass-o-matic? — and a deep, abiding love for R&B, which he quickly imparted to his new best friend. By the time The Blues Brothers movie came together in 1979, Belushi had become a movie star by way of National Lampoon's Animal House; the two had debuted their fedoraand-shades R&B alter egos, Jake and Elwood Blues, on SNL and Belushi's intake of cocaine and other substances had swollen to frightening proportions.
Indeed, everything about The Blues Brothers shoot, which forms the heart of De Visé's book, seems staggering even today. Originally budgeted at $5 million, under director John Landis the production ballooned to more than six times that much.
For the most part, critics in 1980 hated The Blues Brothers, but audiences embraced it, and it remains a peculiar artifact of Hollywood overkill, funny in its baffling too-muchness. The musical numbers are still the best part, and De Visé is wise to address the accusations, then and now, that the movie and the accompanying Blues Brothers concert tours and hit records represented white cultural appropriation of Black music at its most blithely entitled. But he also reminds readers that the careers of Franklin, Brown, Ray Charles and Cab Calloway were all in serious decline, and that the film gave them new audiences and renewed success that lasted well beyond the film.
The one thing the author fails to address — and it's hardly his blind spot alone — is how Belushi was allowed to destroy himself while the entertainment industry watched and fans cheered. The Blues Brothers set was awash in cocaine — it literally arrived packed in film-reel canisters — and while the studio hired a former Secret Service agent to babysit Belushi, the comedian had plenty of star-struck crew members and hangers-on to bury him in blow.
The story here isn't just about a film, a friendship and a comedy generation. It's about a man who became a commodity until it killed him. But that's another book.