PUTTING THE BAND BACK TOGETHER…
Hated by critics yet loved by fans, John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd’s inspired double-act in The Blues Brothers helped revive the careers of Aretha Franklin, James Brown and Ray Charles. But the offbeat musical comedy also set its star on the tragic path to
BY THE autumn of 1978, film executives at Universal Pictures would have put John Belushi on screen doing pretty much what he wanted. And what he wanted was to sing the blues. Belushi entered that summer as a rising star of Saturday Night Live, or SNL – the crazy, live, late-night TV show that captivated young America for 90 minutes every weekend.
He exited the summer as an A-list celebrity. He had performed in Animal House, a hit comedy film about lovable losers wreaking havoc at an elite college.
Now much of the nation knew Belushi as Bluto, the film’s lead animal, a volcanic blend of Harpo Marx and the Cookie Monster.
By October, Belushi’s face would grace the cover of Newsweek, one of America’s top magazines.
As the year wound down, it became increasingly clear his next film would feature the Blues Brothers. From the dawn of his career, in Chicago, Belushi had gravitated toward music.
A drummer since high school, Belushi had developed a dead-on
Joe Cocker impression by the time he entered Chicago’s famed Second City improvisational troupe.
The Cocker skit had helped him land a part in Lemmings, a send-up of the Woodstock festival, staged in New York in 1973 by National Lampoon, America’s countercultural humour magazine.
From Lampoon, Belushi had joined the founding cast of SNL, which debuted in the autumn of 1975 and set loose a new generation of improvisational comedians to run amok on national television.
At SNL, Belushi formed an enduring partnership with Dan Aykroyd, a Canadian performer steeped in the blues clubs around Ottawa and trained at the Second
City satellite troupe in Toronto.
Together, Aykroyd and Belushi worked up a two-man blues act.
THE Blues Brothers were a white version of a Stax-style R&B duo, like Sam & Dave, clad in funereal black suits with thin black ties, black hats and dark sunglasses. By 1978, Aykroyd and Belushi had the leverage to persuade SNL creator Lorne Michaels to put the Blues Brothers on television.They debuted inApril 1978, performing Floyd Dixon’s Hey Bartender andWillie Mabon’s I Don’t Know, in an iconic episode hosted by Steve Martin.
Some still regard it as the finest SNL episode ever staged.
Over the summer of 1978, as Animal House transformed his life, Belushi and Aykroyd spun the Blues Brothers from fiction into fact.
They built one of the world’s finest R&B ensembles, recruiting the crack horn section from the SNL band, pairing it with the Stax rhythm section, Steve “The Colonel” Cropper and Donald “Duck” Dunn, and topping it off with blues master Matt “Guitar” Murphy.
In September, the Blues Brothers Band played nine nights at the Universal Amphitheatre in Los Angeles, opening for Steve Martin.
Celebrities milled around backstage, jostling with suits from the studios, desperate to sign Belushi to their next picture.
He stayed with Universal, the studio that had delivered Animal House, and over the winter Aykroyd wrote a screenplay for a Blues Brothers film. In fact, Aykroyd wrote enough script for two films – a phone-book-sized tome that landed with a thud on producers’ lawns in the spring of 1979, wrapped in the cover of an actual phone book. The goofy plot had the titular Brothers, Jake and Elwood Blues, reassemble the band – “The Band!” – to play a benefit show to raise $5,000 to pay a tax bill and bail out the Catholic orphanage that had raised them.
Never mind that real Catholic orphanages didn’t pay taxes.
The real point of Aykroyd’s script was to shine a light on the R&B greats he had worshipped since childhood. Aykroyd had actually seen Sam & Dave perform at the Montreal World’s Fair in ’67, had somehow talked his way behind the drum kit to play a few bars with Muddy Waters at a smoky Canadian club.
By 1979, hard times had befallen the soul survivors. Aretha Franklin, James
Brown and their peers had been swept beneath a tide of arena rock and disco.
Some of the greats had resorted to recording disco songs, like Cab Calloway’s 1978 disco version of his classic Minnie the Moocher. Ever the fan, Aykroyd yearned to revive their careers.
John Landis, enlisted to direct The Blues Brothers, jokingly termed it Aykroyd’s “mission from God” and wrote that line into the script. Landis had already directed Animal House, proving himself an able Belushi whisperer.
In the spring of 1979, Landis and Aykroyd courted the rhythm and blues pantheon.
They persuaded Aretha to play a diner owner and wife of Matt “Guitar” Murphy, and Ray Charles to play a pawnshop owner who sells the Blues Brothers some gear.
James Brown was cast as the Pentecostal preacher who inspires the Brothers on their quest, John Lee Hooker appeared leading a pick-up band on Maxwell Street, and Cab Calloway – the orphanage’s janitor – would open for the Brothers at their big charity gig.
A few of the greats turned them down: BB King was booked. Little Richard had found God. Muddy Waters fell ill. Star Wars actress Carrie Fisher – who would also appear in The Empire Strikes Back, released that same year – came on board as the unnamed estranged girlfriend of Belushi’s Jake.
Filming commenced in July 1979 in Chicago, where Aykroyd had set the film, for it was home to Belushi, and the blues.
The cast and crew worked hard and partied harder. Studio heads would later protest that stories of pervasive cocaine on the set were exaggerated. Not by much. No one binged like Belushi. He had developed a cocaine habit during his years with National Lampoon and SNL. It got steadily worse. Belushi had given 100 per cent on Animal House, Landis said: On The Blues Brothers, he couldn’t give more than 75 per cent.
Those dark glasses hid the evidence of excess. It didn’t help that groupies and Bluto fans offered coke wherever Belushi went.
When the star stumbled forth from the clubs after last call, a Chicago police car would collect him like a taxicab and whisk him safely home.
By the time The Blues Brothers wrapped in early 1980 in Los Angeles, the production was weeks late and millions of dollars over budget. But it was finished and, as anyone who had seen the dailies knew, it was good.
Yet, when The Blues Brothers hit cinemas in June 1980, the reviews were dreadful. The New York Times called it a “long, bloated saga”. The Los Angeles Times termed it a “$30million wreck”.
To critics, the film emblemised overspending and waste by the Hollywood studios, although a $30million budget sounds positively quaint today.
Filmgoers did not agree. The Blues Brothers earned $7.9million in its first week, second only to The Empire Strikes Back. And John Landis’s car-crash musical would subsequently become one of the first big films to earn more overseas ($58million) than in the United States ($57million).
Even the critics warmed to some of the musical numbers.
Sure enough, The Blues Brothers would help to reinvigorate the careers of Aretha Franklin, James Brown and the others. In late 1980, Franklin and Brown performed on SNL on consecutive weeks.
RAY Charles played the Louisiana Superdome. Franklin then sang for the Queen Mother at the London Palladium. Aykroyd’s mission from God stood fulfilled. The Blues Brothers Band staged a valedictory tour across the States, with a final gig at the Universal Amphitheatre on August 1, 1980. No one knew it then, but Aykroyd and Belushi would not perform as The Blues Brothers again.The duo made one more film together: Neighbors, a black comedy, released in 1981, that failed to rekindle the magic.After that, Belushi’s drug use accelerated.
Early in 1982, he settled into a bungalow at the Chateau Marmont, the fabled castle on Sunset Boulevard, ostensibly to work on a new script. He died there on March 5, 1982, of an overdose, aged just 33.
In the decades since, Belushi and The Blues Brothers have gained currency. In 2015, Rolling Stone named Belushi the greatest of 145 cast members in SNL history, “the first rock & roll star of comedy”. Aykroyd ranked fifth.
In 2017, the BBC added The Blues Brothers to a list of 100 greatest comedies. In 2020, the Library of Congress inducted the movie into its National Film Registry, flagging it as a work of historical gravitas.
Now, 40-odd years after its release, The Blues Brothers endures as perhaps the greatest work of Aykroyd, Belushi and Landis. It’s the quintessential Chicago film, a noir valentine to the city of blues.
The Blues Brothers has matured into a classic while remaining every bit a cult film, embedded in popular culture in much the same way as Monty Python’s Holy Grail, Pulp Fiction and Spinal Tap.
Tell your friends, your colleagues, or your Instagram followers that you’re getting the band back together… and you will be understood.
●●The Blues Brothers: An Epic of Friendship, The Rise of Improv and the Making of an American Film Classic by Daniel de Visé (White Rabbit, £25) is published on March 28. For free UK P&P, visit expressbookshop.com or call Express Bookshop on 020 3176 3832