20/06/2023
The Blues Brothers
“They're not gonna catch us. We're on a mission from God." - Elwood Blues (Dan Aykroyd)
On June 20th, 1980…the movie “The Blues Brothers” had its general release.
The film was a hit, and has since become a classic. In fact, it was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant." This took place in 2020.
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“The mission began in Aykroyd's teenage years as a young Canadian frequenting the blues bars of Ottawa where he grew up. His dad, Peter, worked as a bureaucrat in the Canadian government, for many years on the National Film Board.”
"Music was a huge part of our lives," Aykroyd explains, a 45-year-old Cuban cigar stuck in his mouth during an interview in New York. "Every weekend he'd look in the paper to see which record collections were being sold, and he would buy secondhand records. I grew up listening to Fats Waller and Jack Hilton." But as he grew older, Aykroyd gravitated to a small blues bar called Le Hibou, where all the great blues stars came to play. "I would be there every weekend when I was 14 or 15," Aykroyd says. "I got to see Muddy Waters, and even jammed behind him one night." The blues legend had gotten impatient that his drummer was taking too long on a break, so he invited anyone in the audience to fill in, and Aykroyd jumped up. "He gave me the beat, and he said, 'You keep that beat going.'"
“The weekly excursions exposed Aykroyd to Howlin' Wolf, James Cotton, Cary Bell, Paul Butterfield and Charlie Musselwhite, the mouth harp, or harmonica, genius. Aykroyd's fascination with Musselwhite led to his first dabbling in the harmonica, which he continues to play today as part of the Blues Brothers band. But his more extensive, in-depth education in the blues came during his abbreviated tenure at Carleton University, where he connected with Doug Tansley, a man who worked in the university's audiovisual department. "One night I went to his apartment and he had a wall of blues albums," Aykroyd exclaims, waving his hand at a 20-foot wall. "I mean, it was…floor to ceiling, wall to wall, every conceivable blues album…. I started at the beginning of time and listened to Ma Rainy, Big Bill Broonzy, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Mississippi John Hurt, Son House."
“Getting Aykroyd talking about the blues is akin to turning on a faucet. There's such a mastery of blues's history that he can spill out a CliffsNotes—like monologue in a few sentences. Unprompted, he ranges from the slave trade origins of the music, to field hollers sung while working, to the Saturday night front porch serenades with "a cheap Chinese harmonica, a cigar box banjo, and gut bucket bass and a washboard." He weaves in the influence of black gospel music with its piano and organ components, to the evolution of the Saturday night juke joint. The narrative spans musical events in America, east of the Mississippi from Appalachia to the Mississippi Delta and eventually to the urban centers of the mid-South and North, such as Memphis and Chicago. Aykroyd could expand each topic into a lengthy oral defense for a post-doctoral dissertation.” - Gordon Mott (Cigar Aficionado)
