One of my three all-time favorite movies is The Blues Brothers. The other two are Casablanca and The Apostle. I like them for various reasons, but it took me a while to figure out that there’s a common theme that runs through them. Flawed human beings – as we all are – are trying to do the right thing. Rick Blaine in Casablanca gives up his seat on a late-night flight to safety to Victor Laszlo. Sonny, later known as The Apostle E.F., in The Apostle starts The One Way Road to Heaven Church to lead souls to Jesus.
And in The Blues Brothers, Jake and Elwood Blues put the band back together so they can raise $5,000 to save the Chicago orphanage where they grew up.
The new book The Blues Brothers: An Epic Friendship, The Rise of Improv and The Making of an American Film Classic, which was released in March, talks about the making of the movie, which was released on June 20, 1980. That story, however, doesn’t even start until well past the midway point of the book.
The early lives, careers and friendship of John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd, the stars of the film, are captured in the earlier pages, though Belushi’s life is covered in more detail. That’s understandable, considering he was the star of the film. Dan Aykroyd was happy to cede the spotlight to Belushi, not only in this film, but in other projects on which they collaborated and in real life, as they evolved from being relative unknowns cast in the first season of Saturday Night Live to becoming huge celebrities.
They were both music lovers, and wanted to use the film to introduce some legendary musicians to a new, younger audience. They insisted on screen time for James Brown, Cab Calloway, Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin and John Lee Hooker, great entertainers whose careers had been in a lull.
And, as the book says in its epilogue, this new audience embraced those folks, giving their careers a much-needed jumpstart.
The book goes on to look at their career struggles post-Blues Brothers movie as well, as they found it tough to top that classic film.
Belushi and Aykroyd attained their success on SNL beginning in the mid-1970s, and it seemed, at least in their world, that drugs were everywhere. And as we know, drugs unfortunately played a major role in the life and early, tragic death of Belushi in 1982, when he was only 33. The days leading up to that are covered in this book as well. I knew how it ended as I was reading, but I was still bummed as I read about Belushi’s final days.
Daniel dev-a-say, the author of The Blues Brothers has also written a book about the blues legend B.B. King, whose manager never told him he was up for a role in the film, and was disappointed when he found out years later, as well as books about the cyclist Greg Lemond and a behind-the-scenes look at The Andy Griffith Show and the friendship between Andy Griffith and Don Knotts, the author’s brother-in-law. He is also a reporter at USA Today, and was part of a Miami Herald reporting team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2001.