44 things this Chicagoan didn’t know about ‘The Blues Brothers’
There are few Chicago cliches more overdone than the Blues Brothers.
Maybe hot dogs. OK, deep dish. The Bears logo. The Cubs logo. The Bean.
Then there’s that iconic silhouette — dark shades, black fedora, one thin guy, one meatball — an image so ubiquitous here, you’re more likely to run into it than the actual blues. “The Blues Brothers” movie, released in 1980, steeped in local lore forevermore, is often called the quintessential Chicago movie, and I’m certainly not alone in saying that if I never saw it again, nothing would be lost. It’s been drummed into my skin, bones and flab, indelibly. Which is why I instinctively rolled my eyes when I landed an early copy of this new history, “The Blues Brothers: An Epic Friendship, the Rise of Improv, and the Making of an American Film Classic.” Strictly for the tourists, I thought. What could this book possibly offer Chicago?
The surprise is, plenty.
Daniel de Visé, a native South Sider, now a finance reporter at USA Today (and a Pulitzer Prize co-winner for his Elián González coverage at the Miami Herald), has compiled the definitive one-stop history of the Blues Brothers band, the film and a touching dual biography of John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd, which Aykroyd refers to in the book as one of the great friendships, the ache still heard years after Belushi’s death.
It left me with so much to think about that, in the spirit of the Blues Brothers — in the spirit of not doing something unless you can overdo it — with input from de Visé and his absorbing cultural history, here are 44 thoughts, production notes and or just things that I did not know about “The Blues Brothers,” 44 years later.
1. The Blues Brothers began as a friendship. Belushi, a star of Second City Chicago, was visiting Canada, where Aykroyd was in Second City Toronto. Belushi sat in with the troupe, and one night at a bar after the show, Aykroyd, already a knowledgeable R&B fan, played some blues records for Belushi, who was more of a heavy metal guy. This was 1974. Aykroyd explained that he haunted blues clubs, bringing along a harmonica; Belushi had played drums in The Ravens, his old band at Wheaton Central High School. Belushi suggested starting a band. Aykroyd already had an idea for one. Four years later, by the time they debuted on TV — on “Saturday Night Live,” where Belushi had become a superstar — that friendship was drifting. The band would join them at the hip, eternally.”
2. The name “The Blues Brothers” was suggested by Howard Shore, who overheard Belushi and Aykroyd at that bar and later became “SNL” bandleader from 1975 to 1980.
3. The Aykroyd family had been in Ottawa since 1810. His father was a civil servant and engineer under Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. As a teenager, Aykroyd would sneak away to nearby Quebec and a small neighborhood full of music clubs called Little Chicago. He convinced bands to let him play harmonica. He was an uncanny imitator.
4. Belushi, like Aykroyd, did not have a blues-ready background. In Wheaton, his family was assumed to be Italian, and they never clarified; explaining they were Albanian was harder. Before trying on the rebel chic of Marlon Brando, he was a skilled debate club member and star linebacker. After a short stay at the University of Wisconsin, he enrolled at the College of DuPage, where he formed his first improv group, named West Compass Players in honor of Chicago’s seminal Compass Players.
5. For Aykroyd, his blues revelation, de Visé said, came as a teenager, “when he saw Sam & Dave do ‘Hold On, I’m Coming’ at the 1967 World’s Fair in Montreal.” For Belushi, it came from Aykroyd, but also, while filming “Animal House” in Oregon, he saw a band, the Crayhawks, fronted by guitarist Robert Cray and harmonica star Curtis Salgado, “who looked and dressed and sounded like a real-life Blues Brother,” de Visé writes. Belushi was inspired, immersing himself in blues and R&B. He brought up the Blues Brothers to “Animal House” director John Landis.
6. The sunglasses came from an old hack of seasoned musicians: You couldn’t see how stoned, tired or drunk they looked if they wore them. That would come in helpful during the production of “The Blues Brothers” movie, since Belushi was often stoned or drunk.
7. The suits were partly inspired by Lenny Bruce, Aykroyd told de Visé, but also, they connected the Blues Brothers to Black R&B performers who still wore formal suits on stage in the 1970s, at a time when rock musicians dressed in T-shirts and jeans.
8. The Blues Brothers were intended to be a tribute band, which means the small cottage industry of Blues Brothers tribute bands today — The Blooze Brothers, Hats and Shades, The Blues Brotherhood, et al. — are tribute bands that celebrate a tribute band.
9. While it may seem self-evident that, if they were founded today, the Blues Brothers would be quickly accused of appropriating Black culture, they were loudly accused of appropriation in the 1970s, too. “Especially in the alternative press,” de Visé said. “Some were outraged, and when the film came out, well, how offensive it seems to have James Brown and Aretha Franklin in bit roles behind white guys playing their music?” Except, it was done with humor and affection for the originators, who also played it funny on stage, Aykroyd reminds us in the book. “The result is,” de Visé said, “if you want to see Ray Charles or Aretha Franklin now, that movie is an extraordinary document.”
10. Universal, the studio, did not want Ray Charles, James Brown, Cab Calloway or Aretha Franklin in the film. Their careers, particularly Calloway’s, looked over. (Instead of Franklin, they wanted Rose Royce, of “Car Wash.”) After the movie was a success, each had a comeback. As Brown told People, the film “gave us all another chance.”
11. B.B. King was sought for the movie; indeed, the idea for this history came to de Visé while working on a biography of King. He asked Landis why King didn’t appear in the film. King had been asked. His manager said he was busy. King learned this years later.
12. Some members of the Blues Band doubted Belushi’s sincerity — at first.
13. Looking again, with fresh eyes, decades later, Belushi does stand out as the weak link musically. Aykroyd, a natural method actor, buries himself in Elwood Blues; the band — particularly, Steve Cropper and Donald “Duck” Dunn — were hallowed R&B veterans who had played on some of the original recordings this new band was covering. But Belushi’s singing is harsh, even phony. “He’s unquestionably a weak link,” de Visé agreed. “But his strength was the performance, and when they toured, they got ecstatic reviews based on Belushi as a frontman, not as an accomplished soul singer.”
14. Lorne Michaels, creator of “SNL,” was iffy on the Blues Brothers, so Belushi and Aykroyd first became Jake and Elwood with the “SNL” band, warming up the live show.
15. Two-and-a-half years later, Michaels asked them to warm up the show again. This went over so well that, two weeks later, the Blues Brothers debuted on “SNL,” in a 1978 episode hosted by Steve Martin. Pianist Paul Shaffer introduced the Blues Brothers with a wink to appropriation and sincerity, saying they just flew in from Chicago’s South Side and “are no longer an authentic blues act, but have managed to become a viable commercial product.”
Shaffer was set to act in the Blues Band when it jumped to movies, but “SNL” star Gilda Radner was developing a concert album, with hopes of a concert film, produced by Lorne Michaels. Out of loyalty to both, he opted out and chose the Radner project.”
16. Aykroyd wrote the first draft of the screenplay, later credited to him and Landis. If you ever wondered why the plot hinges on a Catholic school unable to pay taxes even though Catholic schools are tax-exempt, so did de Visé. Aykroyd, a Canadian, had never heard of that loophole, but swore that when he was in Second City in Chicago, he saw a story about it in a newspaper. De Visé couldn’t find that article. (I couldn’t, either.)
17. Fittingly, for one of the first days of production, the very first images in the movie were shot: A sweeping, billowing industrial hellscape of South Works steel mill on the Calumet River. Landis said they shot over the plant without permission, and cinematographer Stephen Katz told de Visé that they were “hanging out the door of the chopper” with the camera. Security for the factory eventually noticed and shot at them.
18. De Visé’s history, scene after scene, is a queasy taxonomy of a very different era of film production. “You could say standards were looser,” he laughed. “Safety standards were more impressionistic. Plus, the amount of drugs readily available … And when they shot the trashing of the shopping mall, there were so many cars, inside a building, crew had to step outside because they were complaining about the toxic fumes in the place.” 19. That mall sequence — in which the Blues Brothers lead cops in a high-speed car chase at an indoor shopping mall — was filmed at the Dixie Square Mall in Harvey, which had been closed for a year when the production restored many of its storefronts.
20. While shooting the mall scene, Belushi disappeared. Aykroyd told de Visé he noticed a “path kind of leading out of the weed-strewn parking lot into a suburban neighborhood.” It was so late he knocked on the door of the only house with lights on. The homeowner answered, stepped back and revealed Belushi asleep on his couch.
Chicago Stadium, sang from the stage: “Looking for Belushi / Let’s go get some sushi.” (Belushi obliged.)”
21. Belushi was paid $500,000 for the movie; Aykroyd was paid $250,000.
22. For the duration of the four-month Chicago production, Belushi and Aykroyd were put up in Astor Towers on the Gold Coast and given one entire floor each.
23. Universal paid Chicago police officers $16.50 an hour to work on the movie. Official squad cars cost the studio $30 a day each (and had to be returned with full tanks of gas). For crash scenes, the film bought more than 60 retired police cars, for $400 each.
24. The climatic Daley Plaza sequence — featuring helicopters, tanks, National Guard — cost Universal $3.5 million. Driving the Bluesmobile through the glass windows of the ground floor of Daley Center cost $17,000. The scene was shot over Labor Day weekend, to ensure crew could replace the glass before employees returned Tuesday.
25. My favorite line in the film is when, headed downtown, with a path of destruction in their wake, Belushi casually mentions to Aykroyd that Daley Plaza is “where they got that Picasso.” A note of subtlety in a comedy that gets decidedly mad, mad, mad, mad.
26. Production shut down so much of Chicago that, after one fraught July weekend, Chicago Tribune columnist Bob Wiedrich wondered how many motorists were being trapped in traffic jams on the Eisenhower Expressway and Lake Shore Drive during a national energy crisis. (Gas was averaging $1.03 a gallon, about $4.30 in 2024 dollars.)
27. Other than Mayor Jane Byrne — who OK’d many of the largest scenes after decades of resistance to Hollywood production by Mayor Richard J. Daley — Landis’ most powerful ally was legendary Chicago attorney Sidney Korshak, whose clients had included Al Capone and Jimmy Hoffa. Korshak was friends with Universal Pictures chief Lew Wasserman, so Landis asked Korshak to smooth the wheels around town.
28. The car jump over the bridge on 95th Street at the beginning of the movie had to be performed twice because Landis was not satisfied with the car’s landing the first time.
29. To shoot the Bluesmobile racing beneath the CTA tracks, a camera was strapped to a car headed westbound on Lake Street, going 110 miles per hour. It was done in a single take.
30. As often as it’s noted that “The Blues Brothers” is a time capsule of a Chicago no longer recognizable, the Maxwell Street scenes play like a short documentary of a lost city. Hand-painted wooden signs, white plumes of smoke wafting off grills, bustling crowds.
31. Those streets, crammed with extras, also played witness to another sort of Chicago documentary: A Chicago police officer assigned to the set shouted into a bullhorn that the mostly Black crowd would go to jail if they didn’t obey Landis, which caused Landis — “What are you talking about?” — to loudly call out the cop for racism.
32. Considering how many interiors in the movie were shot on the Universal backlot, the film plays like a testament to how influential the eye of a good location scout can be. Ray Charles’ pawnshop was in Bronzeville (but the interior was shot in Los Angeles). James Brown’s church was the now 107-year-old Pilgrim Baptist of South Chicago on East 91st Street (but interiors were faithful reproductions of the church, also shot in Los Angeles).
33. The young female gospel singer that Landis cuts to several times during the James Brown church sequence is the great funk singer Chaka Khan, a native of Hyde Park.
34. That’s the famed Chez Paul in River North where the Blues Brothers perform a sliding parallel park. But the restaurant interior was so degraded by 1979 — “cracked wallpaper, peeling paint, a hundred little horrors cloaked by soft candlelight,” de Visé writes — the production rebuilt the dining room at Universal.
35. Those are real prisoners in real jail cells in the Joliet Prison scenes.
36. De Visé solved something I always wondered about: When the Bluesmobile breaks into pieces across from Daley Plaza, the effect was achieved by pre-cutting an entire car into dozens of chunks, then stitching it back together and holding the whole thing in place with a steel cable. When a special-effects guy tugged the cable, the car collapsed.
37. The mural outside Ray Charles’ pawnshop in Bronzeville — which was painted for the movie, and, at the insistence of Landis, included an image of B.B. King, so that the blues legend could kinda still be seen in the movie — was lost in 2020 when the building was demolished after a fire. The space had housed an actual pawnshop since 1946.
Belushi was watched by a Texan named Morris Lyda, tasked with keeping him off drugs. Later that job fell to a former Secret Service agent Belushi hired on the recommendation of Joe Wash.”
38. By the time production wrapped in Chicago, Landis told de Visé that Belushi almost died two times from drugs: “We ended up taking the door off his room and calling the paramedics, because he had basically overdosed.”
39. The ground zero of drug use during production was the Blues Bar that Belushi and Aykroyd built in Old Town as a private club, in a small space behind Earl of Old Town on Wells Street. The city closed it down in 1982, the same year Belushi died of an overdose in Los Angeles. He was 33.
40. The last time the Blues Brothers played the Chicago area was June 1980, at Poplar Creek Music Theater in Hoffman Estates. They opened and closed with “I Can’t Turn You Loose.”
41. Soon before he died, Belushi got into punk and gave away his blues records.
42. Personally, that last detail is probably the saddest. I wish I could say that I was cool enough as a kid to just listen to Otis Redding and Sam & Dave, but it’s probably the Blues Brothers that led me to that rich wellspring; in high school, among my prized possessions were all seven volumes of “Atlantic Rhythm & Blues 19471974” (on vinyl). De Visé remembered something similar: “I first saw the movie on a bootleg videotape from a store near my father’s house, but what I remember is it didn’t make me want to buy a Blues Brothers record. It made me want to buy ‘The Best of Sam & Dave.‘ Which is what I think Aykroyd wanted this to do from the start.”
43. When Aykroyd got the call that his partner had died, he was writing the dialogue for the pair’s next big-screen blockbuster, “Ghostbusters.” (Belushi’s part was taken by Murray.)
44. “The Blues Brothers” became the first film spun off “SNL.” “All the years later, is there a better one?” de Visé asked me. “There’ve been good, lots of bad, but this is better than it had any right. I think Gene Siskel in the Tribune nailed it when he said they delivered one of the best comedies ever, period. He wrote ‘Boy, is that ever a surprise.’ ”