Is there good reason to write a whole book about The Blues Brothers? Daniel de Visé does not contrive a definitive “yes” in his zippy study of a late 1970s phenomenon that – from this side of the Atlantic, anyway – still defies easy explanation.
The covers act of that name (let’s start there) was a blokeish creation of supernova-hot comics John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd. Neither had much of a voice, but their celebrity on Saturday Night Live, then not yet entirely dreadful, helped them draw the most gifted musicians of postwar rhythm and blues into the backing band. The Brothers’ 1978 album, Briefcase Full of Blues, made No 1 in the US. How? “Disco was dying and new wave hadn’t started yet. There was nothing on the radio,” Aykroyd says here.
Briefcase Full of Blues appears in few lists of greatest 1970s albums, but John Landis’s The Blues Brothers, a ruinously expensive spin-off film, does still have purchase. That project does not begin forming itself until halfway through the book. Before then we get efficiently structured outlines of Belushi’s US-Armenian upbringing, his early sporting prowess, improv in Chicago and arrival at the first incarnation of Saturday Night Live. Nothing here will win over those allergic to the scrappy NBC talent funnel, but de Visé does argue successfully for its role as a cultural marker. “It is probably the first network show produced by and for the television generation,” critic Tom Shales remarks.
The description of the film’s shooting is a mass of drug-fuelled chaos. We hear a lot (a lot!) about the narcotic consumption that ultimately led to Belushi’s death from an overdose in 1982, but get little on the psychological pressures that led him to such excess. The Blues Brothers, all car chases and blaring brass, emerged in 1980 to indifferent reviews and healthy US box office.
Some felt black co-stars such as Aretha Franklin, Cab Calloway and James Brown were used as mere spear carriers for the white duo. But Brown was among several all-time greats who had their careers boosted. “These young people never heard of me,” he said of the film. “If they like it maybe they’ll come hear us play.”
They did come. Franklin, Calloway and Brown profited from a second or third wind. For that, if nothing else, The Blues Brothers deserve this diverting celebration.
