By the time I was 20, I'd amassed a vast collection of used records, tapes and CDs featuring Cab Calloway, Ray Charles, John Lee Hooker, Aretha Franklin, Willy Mabon, The Chips, Floyd Dixon and more. Soon, I was leaping from one artist to others. I found an incredible Pop Staples/Steve Cropper/Albert King collaboration "Jammed Together":

youtube.com/watch?v=8Sarzs8VRS…

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Within a few hops, I'd found my way to Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee and thence to the immortal James Cotton:

youtube.com/watch?v=kl4IcMlrJw…

I started skipping Rocky Horror to see the house band at Chicago's on Queen Street, and from there found my way to the weekend jams at Grossman's:

torontobluessociety.com/venue/…

8/

It's not an overstatement to say that The Blues Brothers altered my life, changing the music I listened to and the way I understood the musical ancestry of everything that went into my ears. Indeed, the effects that The Blues Brothers had on my life are so pervasive that I effectively stopped noticing them.

9/

When I put on a Memphis Slim album, it doesn't occur to me that the reason that music is on my hard-drive has something to do with that worn-out VHS cassette in my parents' living room in the 1980s.

Standing there at the counter at Diesel Books for an hour, sneaking peeks at the back cover of de Visé's book, set me to considering exactly how this weird and remarkable phenomenon came to be.

10/

I knew a little, of course - my friends and I used to trade the information that Aykroyd came from a family of famous Ontario Tories the same way we would have gossiped had his father been a famous serial-killer.

11/

And no one could escape some of the more salacious details of Belushi's death, though I absorbed most of what I knew via one of the greatest short stories I've ever read, Bradley Denton's "Calvin Coolidge Home for Dead Comedians," about Belushi and Lenny Bruce leading a revolt in Comedian Hell:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Calv…

12/

So I bought a copy off the receiving table, straight out of the box, and I've finally gotten around to reading it, and holy *moly* is it fascinating! I confess that in the months since I brought it home and stuck it on the TBR shelf, I'd mostly forgotten why I'd picked it up and had started to view it as a book full of production trivia, and when I picked it up this week, it was with an eye to skimming it quickly before putting it out at the curb in my Little Free Library.

13/

Instead, I found myself utterly engrossed in a brilliantly told, brilliantly researched tale that left me with a much deeper understanding of - and appreciation for - the cultural phenomenon that I was (and am) swept up in.

14/

De Visé devotes the first third of the book to snappy, revealing biographies of Belushi and Aykroyd, who grew up in very different milieux, and were of very different temperaments, but who both found their way into comedy just as the tradition of Borscht Belt comics and variety shows were giving way to a younger, weirder kind of comedy, a mixture of Monty Python, National Lampoon and improv.

15/

These biographical sketches are short, but they don't shy away from nuance - Belushi's parents, for example, are simultaneously painted as loving and also reckless and self-involved. De Visé gives the lion's share of attention to Belushi, but he doesn't stint on detail about Aykroyd, strongly implying that "Danny" is on the spectrum, with a deep collection of "special interests" and a deep discomfort with eye contact that accounts for habit of wearing sunglasses.

16/

As the two men find their way into various pioneering comedy projects - Second City, National Lampoon radio shows - they start to inch towards Lorne Michaels, and thus to each other. As de Visé painstakingly traces the ups and downs of their comedy careers, he paints a vivid picture of the wild swings of talented, striving artists at the start of their careers.

17/

By the time we get to the SNL chapters, the show itself becomes the star, and its rocky early days strongly echo the struggles of the comedians we've followed to its stage.

The actual production story of The Blues Brothers movie doesn't start until more than halfway through the narrative. By that time, we've been set up with the way that filmmaking, comedy, popular culture, and politics have all changed to make The Blues Brothers movie a possibility.

18/

De Visé shows us how Belushi had won over a long list of household names in the entertainment industry, and how Aykroyd's meticulous, obsessive nature honed and directed Belushi's wild talent.

The actual production of, and reception to, The Blues Brothers movie arrives in the book as a kind of extended climax and denouement, and yes, there are *tons* of funny bits of production trivia and gossip in this section.

19/

From winning over the mayor of Chicago (who reversed a decades-long policy of all-but-total prohibitions on filming permits in the city) to dropping a Ford Pinto thousands of feet, to the garage where, every night, dozens of surplus police cars that had been crashed that day were refurbished and gotten into shape to be crashed *again* the next day.

20/

And while all of this is going on, de Visé gives us a vivid portrayal of Belushi's spiraling addiction, the disease that is killing him right there, in front of everyone who loves him. That story carries over into the film's aftermath, as it is laboriously cut from more than three hours (it was originally intended to be shown with an intermission!) and released to hostile critics and an adoring public.

21/

These are the final days of Belushi, something we all know and can see coming. But even as Belushi approaches his final days, we learn how The Blues Brothers movie had created a legacy. It was Aykroyd who got Belushi into the blues, and the schtick they did about wanting to preserve this music from a world that was set to bury it and forget it wasn't just for the movie.

22/

Aykroyd and Belushi wanted to bring the music back. They couldn't stand that the likes of Cab Calloway, Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles and James Brown were playing county fairs and half-full night clubs. They wanted the music to escape from history and *live* again. And they succeeded.

23/

In a "where are they now" coda straight out of the closing credits of Animal House, de Visé documents how the artists featured in the movie - and the musical traditions they represented - experienced a *massive* revival following the film's release, which the musicians themselves credit to the movie.

24/

Which is where I came in, I suppose. That's how I got here, in this form, with a hard drive full of R&B, blues, country swing, jazz, boogie woogie and jump blues that vie with Talking Heads for play in my shuffle.

25/

This isn't a book about a movie; it's a rich and engrossing tale of an extraordinary creative collaboration that found an unlikely foothold at just the right time and place. It's a sensitive, funny, and revealing account of Belushi, Aykroyd, and the comedians, impresarios and friends in their orbit. Even if you didn't wear out a VHS cassette and memorize the whole damned movie, you will find something surprising and delightful in these pages.

26/

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel *Picks and Shovels*.

Catch me at the #TUALATIN Public Library TOMORROW (Jun 22):

tualatinoregon.gov/library/aut…

More tour dates (#London, #Manchester) here:

martinhench.com

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