The Blues Brothers

Original Soundtrack

Adelaide Cabaret Festival, Festival Centre, 14 June 2019

Side 1

Rawhide ANDY GRIFFITHS

Think MAGGIE BEER

Boom Boom DAVE GRANEY

Side 2

Jailhouse Rock JULIA ZEMIRO

Think KWEEN KONG

Everybody Loves Somebody OMAR MUSA

In October 1975, the TV show we now know as the live sketch comedy juggernaut Saturday Night Live aired for the first time. Saturday Night Live was the Hey Hey It’s Saturday of America, but instead of Daryl Somers, it produced the finest comic actors of a generation. In its first episode, the newly assembled cast, including the likes of Chevy Chase, Gilda Radner, Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi, dressed in cheap party-supply store bee costumes, and did a sketch about a couple of bees wondering if their new baby would be a drone or a worker. The bees would become recurring characters throughout the first season of Saturday Night Live, in increasingly ridiculous scenarios.

One week, though, the show ended with the SNL band all inexplicably dressed as bees, led by Dan Aykroyd playing credible blues harmonica as John Belushi unconvincingly sang his way through a cover of the blues song “I’m a King Bee”. There was no punchline – beyond trouncing on the song’s metaphor by singing it as an actual bee – and apart from Belushi stumbling and rolling around on the stage, it was delivered straight. Aykroyd was privately thrilled – he was a serious blues nerd, who had run an after-hours blues bar for celebrities since his Toronto days – and he’d found a way of getting to perform his all-time favourite music on the show. But nobody much liked it – what was it? It wasn’t really a comedy sketch, and if it was a musical act, why were they dressed as bees? The Saturday Night Live producer wasn’t going to let them do that again. But a few years later, he did.

Jake and Elwood Blues – The Blues Brothers – appeared on SNL early in 1978, in matching black suits, black trilbys and dark sunglasses, pulling simple choreography and belting out the song “Hey, Bartender”. By the end of that year, they’d released a live album, which went to #1 on the Billboard charts and was nominated for a Grammy, and they supported The Grateful Dead on New Years Eve at the final ever concert staged in San Francisco’s famous Winterland Ballroom. And just a year after that, they were starring in one of the most expensive comedy films ever produced, co-written by Aykroyd with the director John Landis, and credited, no less, with reinvigorating interest in the rich traditions of American rhythm and blues. To achieve these unlikely spoils, Aykroyd and Belushi had to work out how to be taken seriously as musicians while also playing fictional characters in a way Saturday Night Live audiences would find fun – that was the acid test.

And by acid test, I mean the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Because to get from nervous bees to the cult classic film The Blues Brothers, we owe a debt to Ken Kesey, author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and counterculture legend of the ’60s, who with his friends the Merry Pranksters had famously crossed America in their psychedelic bus. They’d also ushered in the day-glo hippie era by conducting the legendary Acid Tests, LSD parties with The Grateful Dead as the house band.

No, we’re not all on acid right now. You heard me right. The story of how the Blues Brothers were imagined into being takes us to Eugene, Oregon, in 1977. John Landis had struggled to find somewhere to shoot the gross-out National Lampoon movie Animal House, a comedy about warring college fraternities starring John Belushi in his breakout film role as the human equivalent of a belch. The search for suitable locations led to Eugene, which had plenty of impressive university frat houses, and crucially, it had one next door to a dilapidated old place perfect for the movie’s party animal misfits.

In fact, Eugene was Merry Pranksters country. Ken Kesey grew up there and was now living out his years just down the road. The National Lampoon writer responsible for Animal House, had based the movie on his own wild bunch of friends, who tried in their own more beer-fuelled way to emulate the Merry Pranksters. He was thrilled to discover that the old house that would serve as the “Animal House” itself, had been once rented by several key Merry Pranksters. This had to be the place. Landis, Belushi and co. descended on Eugene.

The filmmakers scouted Ken Kesey himself to play the professor – though the role eventually went to Donald Sutherland. Unsurprisingly the acid pioneer Kesey – perhaps one of the few people on earth who could have looked upon John Belushi as someone who was moderate with drugs – got on with the actor famously. In late-night sessions at Kesey’s house they even cooked up ideas together for skits on Saturday Night Live, for which Belushi was flying back to New York on the weekend to film.

Eugene also had a thriving blues music scene, and the party band in Animal House included seriously good local players. Though they were just miming in the movie, at the end of a day shooting they’d play for the actors and crew, or head to a local hotel and jam into the wee hours. Belushi – whose love of blues had been carefully cultivated by his obsessed friend Aykroyd – loved these sessions. And at one of them, he fatefully introduced himself to the harmonica-playing band leader, Curtis Salgado. They bonded fiercely over the music, and Salgado – who’d never seen SNL and didn’t know why Belushi was treated like a star – taught the actor some songs, including “Hey Bartender”. Belushi joined Salgado’s band The Nighthawks onstage to guest on some vocals, and Salgado soon talked Belushi out of singing everything in his well-known SNL guise as a Joe Cocker parody, and told him to find his own voice.

The Nighthawks were serious hepcats – they dressed like old blues guys, in dark suits and trilbys. Salgado, a white guy with a little jazz patch, was rarely seen out of his black sunglasses, and he carried around a briefcase with his music charts in it, sometimes with an unexplained set of handcuffs attached. The keyboard player, DK Stewart, had a souped up old cop car, still in the black and white paint and with the siren on it, and he’d drive Belushi around in it sometimes, and tell him wild stories about why it was from time to time members of the band had to bail each other out of jail.

And so it was, that while filming Animal House John Belushi saw the light – a band. He and Aykroyd had to get a band together. A real one. White guys could sing the blues, but they had to mean it. Just months later, Joliet Jake Blues and his brother Elwood made their debut on Saturday Night Live, in what became their trademark suits, hats and sunglasses. The comic actors and mismatched best friends – Belushi the free-spirited Ernie to Aykroyd’s geeky upright Bert – had found their muse.

This then, is the story of the birds and the bees. Not the kind for which you’d get a rap on the knuckles for mentioning in front of Sister Mary Stigmata, but… the recurring characters buzzing about on Saturday Night Live on the one hand, and cuckoos, in the form of Ken Kesey, whose psychedelic legend fatefully lured the production of Animal House to Oregon, where Belushi met Curtis Salgado, for whom the janitor played by Cab Calloway in the eventual film was named. Belushi and Aykroyd dedicated their best-selling album Briefcase Full of Blues to Curtis, which is fitting considering they were dressed to look him on the cover. And if you think all this was a questionable appropriation, wait’ll we talk about the music.

For now, it’s 9913 miles from Adelaide to Chicago, we’ve got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it’s dark and we’re wearing sunglasses. Hit it.