The Blues Brothers (6.20.80) was about John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd having dry, sardonic fun with the “white musicians looking to generate authenticity by performing the Chicago blues” concept.
This kind of thing was originally personified with utter sincerity by the scowling, grittily-posed, Rayban-wearing Paul Butterfield Blues Band.
The Blues Brothers act was nervy and funny when I first saw Belushi-Aykroyd perform it on Saturday Night Live in April 1978. They doubled down on this when I saw them live at Carnegie Hall later that year (or was it sometime in ’79?).
But the coolness went all to hell with the release of John Landis‘s Blues Brothers flick.
What was it about this Universal release that obliterated and suffocated? Oh, I don’t know. Maybe the fact that it was an unfunny, over-emphatic, overproduced super-whale that was made on cocaine (or so the legend went)?
I asked Landis about this wildly inflated, pushing-too-hard aspect when I interviewed him in ’82 for an American Werewolf in London piece.
It was over breakfast at an Upper East Side hotel (Landis was hungrily wolfing down a plate of scrambled eggs and home fries), and I said that the “enormity” of The Blues Brothers seemed “somewhat incongruous with the humble origins of the Chicago Blues.”
That hit a nerve. “It wasn’t supposed to be a documentary about the humble origins of the Chicago Blues!” Landis replied. But the essence of the Chicago blues wasn’t about flamboyant energy and huge lavish musical numbers and car chases or mad slapstick, I said to myself. And your movie seemed to take that Paul Butterfield pose and amplify it beyond all measure or reason.
I didn’t literally say this to Landis, of course, but he knew what I meant. Nor was I impolitic enough to call it “a cocaine movie” but that’s what it damn sure felt like.
As Landis argued with me the Universal publicist sitting at the table started making “no, no” faces, indicating that I should tone it down.
In any case I mostly hated The Blues Brothers from the get-go, and here it is 45 years later and after giving it a fresh re-watch last night, I’m still not a fan.
