In 1979, Aretha Franklin released an album that stalled at number 146 on the sales list in the United States. That same year, Ray Charles had to settle for playing in small venues or café-theaters. The industry wanted disco music, and even the Rolling Stones or Rod Stewart were encouraged to dance to it. But then two white comedians arrived, dressed in jackets and wearing sunglasses. They were John Belushi and fellow screenwriter Dan Aykroyd. Although they didn’t even know how to play that music particularly well, in 1980 the duo was determined to return the throne to those black stars who still deserved another dance. And they did it with one of the most unexpected comedies in cinema. In the process, they would save the blues. They were the characters Jake and Elwood Blues, that is, the Blues Brothers.
“There was Van Halen, Kiss, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin… There was no room for Aretha and James Brown to do big shows. But, of course, let’s not forget that the film was basically made by three white men, including director John Landis. They set out to save all these black myths. And the only reason they let them do it is because John Belushi was seen as a giant at that time,” explains American journalist and writer Daniel de Visé, author of the recently published book The Blues Brothers. Rogues at full speed (Kultrum Books). The 440 pages of the volume They review the dizzying career and friendship of Belushi and Aykroyd until they triumphed with the film. Shortly after that success they would separate forever.
“It was strange that two television stars, with no demonstrated musical abilities, would reinvent themselves as the singers of a band of rhythm and blues, They recorded an album that was among the best sellers and went on tour. There were no precedents. They weren’t better singers than me,” highlights the writer, also author of BB King. king of the bluesbiography where the idea for the new book came from.
“When I saw the Blues Brothers on television for the first time in 1978 I didn’t know what was going on. They arrived in Europe as a movie, but in the US they were presented as a kind of sketch five minutes into the program Saturday night Live (SNL). We didn’t know if they were real singers or characters, if it was humor or music,” De Visé recalls in a video conference with EL PAÍS. To delve into the history of this phenomenon full of drugs, improvisation and Rock And Rollthe author conducted more than 100 hours of interviews, including with Aykroyd and director Landis.
It all started almost as a joke. Belushi had become famous by imitating Joe Cocker and practicing samurai moves in studio 8H at Rockefeller Center, where filming is still taking place today. SNL. But the two friends, experts in comedy improvisation dens and co-workers and misdeeds on a program that revolutionized television, had always actually dreamed of performing as a music band in smoky clubs.
One day, their love for music, and for messing with it, went one step further and they decided to create the Blues Brothers, although not even to get them on the air. It was an improvisation to encourage and warm up the audience of the program by playing with the band. They just wanted the spectators to clap louder. Aykroyd picked up the harmonica and Belushi began to spin around. “I didn’t know anything about harmonica tones. It was something totally incredible. Then we heard Belushi sing, and it was also incredible,” the musicians who accompanied them remember in the book.
Despite their lack of musical aptitude, a few weeks after their debut on television the couple had even built a crazy story about the legend of the Blues Brothers: they were two orphans with a “mission from God” who sought to unite a band to raise five thousand dollars and save an orphanage. That ended up being an impossible 324-page script. Eclectic, crazy and out of order, the script was a train wreck only blessed by the success of American style rampage (1978).
But all that became Rogues at full speed in a classic. A work that could be almost suitable for the TikTok audience today, divided into independent fragments and with musical performances by some of the greatest in the world. soul. What’s more, even the Church considers it a Catholic classic. The film has been recommended again and again in the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano.
John Belushi, unrestrained and taciturn due to drug consumption, died shortly after that great success, in 1982, at the age of 33. The most uncontrollable actor of his generation (and that’s saying something) had people from the SNL dedicated to ensuring that his mismatch did not get out of control of the NBC network. One of the most important figures was and is Lorne Michaels, head of the legendary program since 1975. SNL It will celebrate 50 seasons on the air in 2024 and a film directed by Jason Reitman will now recreate those first years.
Neither Lorne Michaels nor anyone else knew where Belushi’s excesses would end up, whether in a stranger’s refrigerator or at a tycoon’s party. “My whole life is being directed. They set my schedule and I have to be where they tell me,” said the comedian. De Visé adds in the book: “Cocaine gave him energy. The barbiturates helped him sleep. The doctor urged him to see a psychiatrist. John replied that he was too busy.
His anger was equally excessive, and he paid it out in the studio with the women on stage. “Women are not funny,” Belushi told her colleagues. He didn’t let the screenwriters write his sketches—he refused to read them in rehearsals—and soon his war against the female cast came to the fore. De Visé has a theory that he paid with them for the frustration he felt when “his wife, Judy, wanted to have a career as an artist. “He wanted her to fulfill the traditional role of a caring woman.” In any case, decades would pass until the set of SNL experienced true equality at the hands of Tina Fey or Kristen Wiig. It wasn’t just Belushi’s thing.
De Visé believes, however, that to understand Belushi it is best to turn to his two soul mates: Dan Aykroyd, his work partner, “the office husband,” and Judy Belushi, his great love since adolescence and later author of his biography. “They were both in charge of taking care of him, keeping him safe,” she says about this character drawn as a child who never grew up and who even self-boycotted the job interviews he wanted to get.
“You have no idea how hard it is to be me. “Everything will be so much better when he’s dead,” John told Judy in an argument. Belushi, that boy who spent his adolescence as an athlete who neither drank nor took drugs, ended up being a superhero, a mythological presence who saved comedy and the soul, but not to himself.
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