By 1978, three years into his tenure at Saturday Night Live, John Belushi, 29, was obsessed with the trappings of rhythm and blues. He bought a dark-brown fedora, black Ray-Bans, and a dark suit coat. His pockets bulged with R&B cassette tapes. He would storm into the home of Bob Tischler, the National Lampoon Radio Hour producer, pull blues albums from his shelves, and play one song from each, leaving them in a teetering stack on the floor. At home, he would serenade guests with a frenetic barrage of 45s.
“What he was doing,” Judy Belushi, John’s wife, says, “was finding out which songs people responded to,” building a Blues Brothers setlist in his head.
John started visiting Manhattan clubs, dressed in his Blues Brothers getup, leveraging his celebrity to jump onstage with various bands to sing “Hey Bartender” or “Sweet Home Chicago” or some other blues standard, the same routine a teenaged Dan Aykroyd had followed back in Ottawa with his harmonica.
Lorne Michaels witnessed one of John’s sets. After John sang, Michaels offered, “Why don’t you warm up the show with the band on Saturday night?”
John alerted Dan, and together, they metamorphosed into the Blues Brothers. They purchased black suits and ties to complement the hats and Ray-Bans. They acquired a 1967 Dodge Monaco and painted it black. Someone dubbed it the Bluesmobile.
The Blues Brothers concept came mostly from Dan, the blues hound, who honored the great blues duos of the 1960s: Sam and Dave, who had scored monster hits with “Soul Man” and “Hold On, I’m Comin’”; and James and Bobby Purify, known for “I’m Your Puppet” and “Shake a Tail Feather.” The funereal black suits were “straight from Lenny Bruce, who said, ‘You’ve always got to wear a suit and tie, man, to fool the straights,’” Dan says. The hat and shades recalled urban bluesmen like John Lee Hooker, who had electrified the Delta blues with a driving boogie beat.
More broadly, formal dress linked the white bluesmen with the grand tradition of Black rhythm and blues. R&B icons of the pre-and postwar eras were always impeccably dressed, from Lonnie Johnson and Cab Calloway to B. B. King. By the 1970s, most white rock stars had ditched jackets and ties for torn jeans and tie-dye, but many Black artists had not. Even the King of the Blues knew better than to travel in slovenly dress, lest he be endlessly harassed by racist whites. Dress like you’re going to the bank to borrow money, B.B. said.
The sunglasses were less about race and more about dope. Musical artists Black and white wore sunglasses, even at night, to conceal dilated pupils and that bloodshot look. Dark sunglasses allowed John to hide the evidence of his debauchery. They freed Dan from the awkward business of eye contact.
Back in 1975, jamming with the Saturday Night Live band, John and Dan had harbored no real ambitions beyond living out childhood rock-star dreams. Now John shared Dan’s messianic zeal for spreading the gospel of rhythm and blues. As usual, John charged forward with boundless energy and impeccable instincts but no real plan. Dan, the obsessive Method actor, would write one.
The funereal black suits were “straight from Lenny Bruce, who said, ‘You’ve always got to wear a suit and tie, man, to fool the straights,’” Dan Aykroyd says.
On a Monday in April 1978, they met with Tom Malone, multi-instrumentalist and arranger for the S.N.L. band. They described the Blues Brothers, “two ne’er-do-well blues musicians who wore sunglasses day and night,” Malone recalls. “They were orphans with very little emotional response to anything. They lived in a cheap, tiny apartment next to the elevated train tracks in downtown Chicago. They drove an old Illinois state police car.”
“We thought it would be fun,” Dan explains, “to put together an act that venerated the African-American songwriters and the songbook and the artists in a way that had humor, which was always there, if you recall. The classic band leaders—Wynonie Harris, Cab Calloway, Jimmie Lunceford, Johnny Otis—they were great musicians, but they were funny too.”
When the Blues Brothers strode out onstage to lead the Saturday Night Live band in musical warm-ups before the April 8 show, they were auditioning for a gig as Michaels’s musical guests. They played “Rocket 88.” The next week, they worked up a version of “Hey Bartender.” John and Dan pushed to perform on the show. Michaels said he didn’t see anything funny.
The week after that, when Malone asked about their plans, John and Dan said they were done: “We’re wasting our time if Lorne won’t let us on.” The fate of the Blues Brothers hung in the balance.
And then, Michaels relented. He emerged from a Wednesday read-through and announced that the show was a few minutes short. What the hell were they going to do?
John and Dan pounced: “The Blues Brothers!”
“We have nothing worthwhile to put in those three minutes,” Michaels sighed. “You guys might as well make fools of yourselves.”
That Saturday night, April 22, 1978, marked the real debut of the Blues Brothers on Saturday Night Live, not in bee costumes but clad in jazz-junkie chic, and again backed by the powerhouse S.N.L. band.
Jake and Elwood Blues stormed through “Hey Bartender” as if their careers depended on it. The performance ushered in the strongest 90-minute episode in the brief history of Saturday Night Live, maybe the finest 90 minutes Michaels and his performers would ever deliver on the stage of Studio 8H. This was the episode where host Steve Martin would trot out “King Tut,” soon to be a million-selling single, and an instant-classic sketch titled “Theodoric of York, Medieval Barber.”
Getting the Band Together
In the summer of 1978, John and Dan got the film producer Bernie Brillstein to find a contact in the record business. Brillstein found Michael Klenfner, an executive from Atlantic Records, the longtime label of Aretha Franklin and Sam and Dave and Ray Charles. Klenfner visited John and Judy. They talked for hours, Klenfner recalled, “about how great the S.N.L. performance had been and how we should do a record.”
Klenfner took the idea to Jerry Greenberg, president of Atlantic. “Jerry,” he urged, “this is gonna be fucking huge.” The label president was unmoved. Klenfner arranged to have the Brothers meet Ahmet Ertegun, the label co-founder.
The meeting quickly soured. The label president turned to John and Dan and said, “You guys oughta cut a disco cover of ‘Stairway to Heaven.’” Disco had colonized the charts that summer, with Andy Gibb’s “Shadow Dancing” leading the assault.
Dan pulled Michael Klenfner out of the meeting. “What the fuck are you doing to us?” Dan hissed. They walked back in. Klenfner said, “That’s not gonna fly.” The boys wanted to cut an authentic blues album. “And they want to do it live.”
Bernie Brillstein negotiated a $125,000 contract with Atlantic. He set the Brothers up to open for Steve Martin in a nine-night stand at Universal Amphitheatre in Los Angeles in the fall. Martin’s own fame was exploding, thanks largely to his appearances on S.N.L. John and Dan would earn $17,000 for the shows: “birdseed,” in Bernie Brillstein’s parlance. But the extended engagement offered several chances to capture a live show for a Blues Brothers LP.
Back in New York, John approached the S.N.L. pianist Paul Shaffer. “We want you,” he said.
“To play piano on the record?” He knew the Blues Brothers were about to make one.
“No, to be our band’s musical director.”
Shaffer politely reminded John that he had no band.
“We’ll put one together.”
John, Shaffer, and Dan assembled a band. The first hire was Steve Jordan, the S.N.L. drummer. The Brothers tapped S.N.L. saxophonist Lou Marini and trombonist Tom Malone. Malone recruited trumpeter Alan Rubin. And John and Dan found Matt “Guitar” Murphy, a blues master who had played with Howlin’ Wolf. The New York players convened at John’s apartment for a band meeting. John laid out his vision in a 40-minute spiel. “O.K.,” he said at the end. “The business meeting is over. Let’s hang out.”
At this, Malone recalled, “John pours six quaaludes into his hand, puts them in his mouth, takes out a bottle of Courvoisier, glug, glug, glug, glug. He hands me the bottle, and it’s half empty.”
“We have nothing worthwhile to put in those three minutes [of S.N.L.],” Lorne Michaels sighed. “You guys might as well make fools of yourselves.”
In the weeks following the Blues Brothers’ debut on S.N.L., Dan and John talked about creating short films to air on the show, featuring the Brothers in character acting out various scenes. Up in Canada during summer break, Dan fleshed out a backstory for Jake and Elwood Blues. For Dan, fully occupying a character, disappearing into a role, meant scripting a creation story, even if it remained inside his head.
One late-summer day, John and Dan telephoned Sean Daniel at Universal. S.N.L. made short films. Universal made long ones.
Elwood, not Dan, took the receiver. He told Daniel the legend of the Blues Brothers: two orphans on a quest to reunite their band and raise $5,000 to save their orphanage. Elwood called it a “mission from God.”
“Sounds like a movie to me,” Daniel said.
Word had spread through Hollywood of a possible Blues Brothers film. Every studio wanted it. “It was on me to make sure it was made at Universal Studios,” Daniel recalls.
“We’re doing this,” Daniel told Elwood. “Don’t go anywhere.” Bernie Brillstein took the phone and closed the deal.
Now, someone had to write the Blues Brothers story. Dan was already mapping it out in his head. The time had come for field research.
“I need some cash,” he instructed.
“We can get you an advance,” Daniel replied. They settled on $20,000, an advance on a screenwriting fee, not for a short film, but for a full-length motion picture.
“I need a remaindered California Highway Patrol car.”
“O.K.,” Thom Mount at Universal replied. “We can get one of those.”
“I might need two or three months on the road, but I’ll bring back a script.”
“Sounds like a movie to me.”
On the morning of September 9, the filmmaker John Landis wed Deborah Nadoolman, his longtime girlfriend, in a small ceremony at their home. After exchanging vows, the couple hosted a reception for John and Dan, other friends and loved ones, and most of the band. “I learned one thing,” Landis says. “Never be the host of your own wedding.” That night, the happy but exhausted couple took their parents to see the Blues Brothers.
The lights dimmed. The capacity crowd exhaled a collective roar. The musicians took the stage. Paul Shaffer counted in “I Can’t Turn You Loose,” the Otis Redding hit. Dan summoned his radio-pitchman baritone and spoke from the wings:
“Well, here it is, the late 1970s going on 1985. You know so much of the music we hear today is preprogrammed electronic disco. You never get a chance to hear master bluesmen practicing their craft anymore. By the year 2006, the music known today as the blues will exist only in the classical records department in your local public library. So tonight, ladies and gentlemen, while we still can, let us welcome, from Rock Island, Illinois, the blues band of ‘Joliet’ Jake and Elwood Blues, the Blues Brothers!”
Dan strolled out. John bounded from the wings in a triple cartwheel. Five thousand fans leapt to their feet, and suddenly, everyone knew Steve Martin’s opening act was no joke.
“Tonight, ladies and gentlemen … from Rock Island, Illinois, the blues band of ‘Joliet’ Jake and Elwood Blues, the Blues Brothers!”
Many in the sold-out Universal Amphitheatre audience had arrived with gag arrows through their heads in totemic tribute to the headliner, the hottest comedy act in America. Yet, for 40 minutes on that September night, the crowd forgot all about Martin. The Blues Brothers played their parts to perfection, transfixing patrons with reverent dance moves John choreographed over the churning rhythms of the world’s finest Memphis soul band.
After the set, the first in a nine-day residency, the scene backstage unfolded like a rock ’n’ roll dream. Dan and John pulled drummer Steve Jordan into their trailer and popped a bottle of Dom Perignon. A knock sounded at the door, and Mick Jagger and Linda Ronstadt walked in. Jackson Browne, Joe Cocker, and Henry Winkler milled around outside. Walter Matthau pocketed a Blues Brothers button for his kid.
Two days later, in the Los Angeles Times, rock-music critic Robert Hilburn paid John and Dan the respect of covering them as a serious act, “a lively, surprisingly authentic tribute to the spirited blues style of people like Muddy Waters and the R & B flash of Sam and Dave.” He even praised John’s singing, “a gruff, intense vocal style that is able to convey both the plaintive and mocking undercurrents of the blues.”
Every night onstage, John would scale the scaffolding that held the stage lights and “make it down, 24 bars later, in time to sing,” Paul Shaffer says. “It didn’t look safe.”
But the amphitheater run went off without a real hitch. The biggest scare came on the night someone in the sound booth took a telephone call and heard a familiar voice: This is Bob. Could you turn it down a little? Bob Hope owned a sprawling estate near the Universal lot. The band turned it down.
With money pouring in, the Blues Brothers opened a business office on Fifth Avenue in the Flatiron district, with a secretary, a lounge, and a reception area designed like a travel agency to throw off groupies and autograph seekers. “Every day John was in town, he’d storm into the office barking, ‘Get me the Jenkins file. Please!’ Then he’d burst out laughing,” says Karen Krenitsky, the secretary.
Briefcase Full of Blues dropped around Thanksgiving. John and Dan had rejected record-company pleas to put their names on the cover. They remained in character, offering “very special thanks to Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi” in small print on the back. The first pressing of 50,000 copies sold out in a week. By early 1979, the album was climbing toward the top of the Billboard 200 album chart. Neither of the two postwar blues giants, B. B. King or Muddy Waters, had cracked the top 20.
A knock sounded at the door of their trailer, and Mick Jagger and Linda Ronstadt walked in. Jackson Browne, Joe Cocker, and Henry Winkler milled around outside. Walter Matthau pocketed a Blues Brothers button for his kid.
Between Blues Brothers gigs, film shoots, and S.N.L. episodes, Dan somehow found the time to crisscross the upper Midwest, seeking visual inspiration for his script. Piloting a former cop car, his dream ride, Dan “basically took the trip that he wanted the Blues Brothers to take in the movie, and he took lots of photos,” said Bob Weiss, a big, bearded producer who had worked with John Landis on Kentucky Fried Movie. Already, Universal executives were planning for Landis to direct, and Weiss to produce.
Dan returned and assembled a crude slideshow from color Xeroxes of photographs he’d snapped on the road. “There’s Joliet Prison, there’s the Bluesmobile, there’s the Curl Up & Dye salon, there’s the bridge over the Chicago River,” Weiss recalls. “Danny had a pitch that went with the slideshow. This was a very hard movie to explain. You saw that it was kind of a postmodern, soulful Midwestern odyssey.”
Dan had photographed men in broad-brimmed hats and wide-lapeled suits on Maxwell Street. He had visited the Old Joliet Prison, where the fictional Jake Blues earned his nickname. Other shots showed shadowy streets beneath the Chicago El tracks; a late-1970s Chicago police car; various drawbridges and swing bridges, set pieces for an epic car chase; and a giant air-raid siren that sat outside Dan’s old elementary school, its cinematic value yet unknown. One shot pictured Dan himself, exiting a fleabag hotel.
“Jake” was close to John. “Elwood” came from Elwood Glover, a talk-show host whom Dan considered the most boring man on Canadian television. Jake and Elwood had grown up in the Rock City orphanage, a name that vaguely suggested Rock Island or Rockford, a pair of Illinois cities oddly named, as most of the state was pancake flat.
The nuns tormented the Brothers by day. At night, they sought solace with Curtis, the Black janitor, who taught them the blues. (The boys named Curtis after Curtis Salgado, an Oregon bluesman who had partly inspired the act.) They formed a band and crisscrossed the prairies in their jet-black Bluesmobile. Then the cops busted them, sending Jake to Joliet Prison. The band scattered to day jobs. Jake sat in his cell, dreaming of busting out and getting the band back together.
“This was a very hard movie to explain. You saw that it was kind of a postmodern, soulful Midwestern odyssey.”
On New Year’s Eve 1978, the Blues Brothers band traveled to San Francisco for an epic show, opening for the Grateful Dead at a farewell party for Bill Graham’s legendary Winterland Ballroom. John and Dan arrived in character. At this stage of their careers, neither man would answer a reporter’s question unless the inquisitor directed it to Jake or Elwood. Timothy White of Rolling Stone tagged along and played along, eventually submitting an entire article that treated Blues Brothers fiction as fact.
Backstage, they spoke of their movie script, which Dan had half finished, under the working title “Joliet Jake.” He was working off a simple treatment that John Landis had crafted from Dan’s Blues Brothers backstory.
“We play ourselves,” John explained. “Here’s a simple synopsis: It starts with me getting out of jail after three years, and I expect the band to still be together.”
“He got three years on a five-year rap,” Dan broke in. “Armed robbery at a gas station.”
John continued, “But anyhow, the film is about finding the band members and trying to get it all back together again.”
“We hunt them down like cops, like detectives,” Dan said.
Word of Dan’s progress would have set off celebrations inside the Black Tower at Universal. “Without a script, of course, we didn’t know if we were gonna make a movie,” Thom Mount said. “All we had was a writing deal with Danny. That was the only thing on paper. We had a development meeting every week. I would say, ‘Where are we on Blues Brothers,’ and we would all look at each other, like Have any of us heard from Danny?”
The Blues Brothers played a raucous hour-long set at Winterland. At the end, John took a glass of champagne from an outstretched hand. He drained it in one long gulp. John had warned the band not to eat or drink anything offered by outstretched hands. At length, John apprised Judy that he was tripping.
Back in New York, on January 24, 1979, the couple celebrated John’s 30th birthday, dining alone in the Reich Palace. A few days later, Briefcase Full of Blues reached No. 1 on the Billboard album chart.
“John pours six quaaludes into his hand, puts them in his mouth, takes out a bottle of Courvoisier, glug, glug, glug, glug. He hands me the bottle, and it’s half empty.”
Dan was spending every free moment finishing his Blues Brothers script. “I wrote a lot of it at the Blues Bar,” he remembers. “I wrote a lot of it at the farm in Canada. I wrote a lot of it at S.N.L.,” toiling inside his 30 Rock office. He emerged from one writing session and asked Paul Shaffer, “What’s the most dramatic Catholic imagery imaginable?”
“The stigmata,” Shaffer replied. Dan retreated to his desk and wrote down a character name, Sister Mary Stigmata.
“I really didn’t know how to write movies,” Dan said. “I was told that most screenplays were 120 to 150 pages long, but when I sat down to write Blues Brothers, there were so many descriptive passages in there, just paragraphs and paragraphs of shots and concepts and ideas. Eventually, it kind of ballooned up.”
With the script nearly finished, Dan returned to 30 Rock one day and could not find his only copy. After a frenzied search, he spotted the pages in a stack of old S.N.L. scripts, headed to the shredder.
“I really didn’t know how to write movies.”
In late March, Bob Weiss took an anonymous phone call. “Be on your property tonight,” the caller said, then hung up. “It had the tone of a ransom call,” Weiss says. He recognized the voice.
Some hours later, Weiss heard something land in his yard with a concussive thud, a sound “equivalent to, I’d say, five copies of the Sunday Times,” he says. Weiss walked outside and found a thick parcel wrapped in the cover of a Los Angeles telephone book. Inside, he found Dan’s script, dated March 22 and titled The Return of the Blues Brothers. The credit line read, “Scriptatran GL-9000.” He telephoned Sean Daniel.
“The good news is, the first draft finally got here,” Weiss said. “The bad news is, it’s 324 pages.”
Dan also dropped off copies at the homes of Landis and Daniel, each one wrapped inside the cover of a different telephone book. “It was classic Aykroyd,” Daniel says.
Inside the Black Tower, Thom Mount tore through the massive tome. As a rule of thumb, one script page translates to a minute on film. At 324 pages, Dan had written more than five hours’ worth of movie. He had, in fact, written enough for two movies. He had scripted long narratives for every musician in the Blues Brothers band.
“The characters were wonderful, the scenes were great, the ideas were fabulous,” Mount said. And yet, “with all the insane flying-through-the-air cars and destruction of property, the movie was not going to be cheap.”
The screenplay opened with a Blues Brothers concert at a hotel in fictional Falls End, Wisconsin, in the summer of 1982. From there, it leapt forward to Jake’s release from prison, a few years later. Many familiar scenes are already here, albeit in elongated form, and with names and plot points that would change in later drafts.
Mount asked Landis what he thought of Dan’s script.
“It’s daunting,” Landis said.
“Do you think we can get it made?”
“Yes,” the director replied.
Released on June 20, 1980, The Blues Brothers opened to mostly savage reviews, except in Chicago. But the film was a hit. Four decades later, it is embraced as a cinema classic.
Daniel de Visé is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and author
