Defend the Indefensible: The Blues Brothers

Product placement problems, you think?

I need some clarifcation from an older person:

What was the appeal of this project?The movie obviously is a cult object and a funny comedy, so I don't need that explained to me. I'm talking about Blues Brothers ca. 1978-1979, which became such a marketable thing that it WARRANTED a movie.

The SNL "sketches" weren't really funny ever, but still got a RECORD ALBUM that was POSITIVELY reviewed in Rolling Stone and so-so review by Xgau and other places. Why did people like this shit? Was it like how people who don't like metal buy the Deathklok album?

But I assume the Deathklok album has jokes on it? I didn't listen to that because I like actual metal bands and funny TV shows

good question. the whole weird... '80s... white guy blues... "thing" is just... so bizarre to me

it was all the mega popularity of SNL, the music was just incidental. the blues bros albums are comedy records, and like you say not very funny ones. this is probably where the original show and certainly belushi "jumped the shark" and got self-indulgent. people ate this shit up,though, at least for awhile. i worked in a record store in 1978-79 and there was a mini comedy boom then, steve martin sold lots of records too which was also mystifying. he's been good in movies since but his comedy was meh. the blues bros were like the cheech and chong of the late 70s, only they were coked to the gills. the blues bros movie actually being OK was a surprise.

comedy albums -- you listen once or twice and file em away forever. i remember ragging on people who bought the blues bros album. went all "high fidelity" on these fraternity and sorority types. telling em to buy aretha and howlin wolf instead.

i was only 12 or 13 when the blues brothers came around, and i had no idea then what Stax records was or implied (i.e. some of the best r'n'b ever recorded, mostly in the sixties. uniting blacks and whites, somewhat, theoretically). i think they(Belushi and Aykroyd) deserve kudos for having good musical taste, and for bringing Booker T/mg's back into public conciousness. the movie is silly, not to be harsh, but it's not very funny.

it was all the mega popularity of SNL, the music was just incidental.

I was 13 back then and this is very OTM.

3 comedy records i ever owned

blues bros. - got it when it came out, i was 12. really liked it but was confused at first because there was no "comedy" as such, except maybe for "rubber biscuit"

a steve martin album, can't remember the name but one side is him playing bluegrass tunes on banjo

bob & doug mackenzie - the one with the geddy lee song

buying all those records was tied to be really into snl/sctv.
m coleman otm

it was all the mega popularity of SNL, the music was just incidental. the blues bros albums are comedy records, and like you say not very funny ones. this is probably where the original show and certainly belushi "jumped the shark" and got self-indulgent. people ate this shit up,though, at least for awhile. i worked in a record store in 1978-79 and there was a mini comedy boom then, steve martin sold lots of records too which was also mystifying. he's been good in movies since but his comedy was meh. the blues bros were like the cheech and chong of the late 70s, only they were coked to the gills. the blues bros movie actually being OK was a surprise.

― chief rocker frankie crocker (m coleman), Saturday, November 14, 2009 5:27 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

you're insane re: steve martin

John Landis on the movie and Aretha:

https://deadline.com/2018/08/john-landis-aretha-franklin-the-blues-brothers-reminisces-john-belushi-dan-aykroyd-1202447056/

This bit is really revealing:

LANDIS: What’s important to remember about that movie is, it was John and Danny’s intention to exploit their own celebrity of the moment, and focus a spotlight on these great American artists because rhythm and blues was in eclipse. To give you an idea, MCA Records, Universal Records, refused the soundtrack album.

DEADLINE: Why?

LANDIS: They said, who’s going to buy this music? And then, one of the great accomplishments of The Blues Brothers came when we recorded live John Lee Hooker on Maxwell Street, which is gone now. We had Pinetop Perkins, all these legendary people, recording John’s song “Boom Boom.” And when we ended up making a deal with Atlantic Records, Ahmet Ertegun himself wouldn’t put John Lee Hooker on the album. He said, he’s too old, and too black. It was very gratifying when the album went platinum.

That interview was a good read. Thanks!

still love this film a lot. interesting to see Landis mention how '60s and '70s cinema opened up opportunities for directors, not bc it's an original quote but bc he's discussing it in relation to The Blues Brothers! But I think he's right; this is 130+ minutes, it's a showcase for a side of Chicago that was really not seen in films, and musicians who were not exactly big sellers, and it's really weird in an off-kilter nonsensical way that's not a million miles from something like Repo Man, just really meandering and odd and more about tone and weird performances and specific moments and surreal bits and incredible music. they even both feature cameos from kinda square blonde superstar musicians of the '70s (Jimmy Buffett/Joe Walsh.) And every time I'm staying at the old family house in IL and I go visit my brother, I drive down the stretch of road where the police cars all piled up in the ditch.

I really can't get with cutting away from Cab doing "Minnie the Moocher" to, y'know, Belushi and Aykroyd crawling through a sewer.

I'm pretty sure that was my first exposure to real soul and blues musicians

it's a showcase for a side of Chicago that was really not seen in films

This was largely due to Daley. For whatever reason, he never allowed films to be shot in Chicago. Jane Byrne, though, threw the doors open in order to attract as much film business as possible. This was, if I'm not mistaken, the first major release to be shot in Chicago in years, possibly decades.

This is a pretty good history:

https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2013/01/making-of-blues-brothers-budget-for-cocaine

And I can't remember where I read it, but supposedly Cab Calloway was livid at having to do his standard arrangement of "Minnie The Moocher." He wanted to do a disco version, in order to hopefully get a hit out of it.

I also found it interesting how Landis described each musical number as being different deliberately so he could do one of each type. Something I'd never noticed, and now it makes me want to watch the movie again.

At least Cab realized one half of his dream

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1Sm_RjYOnQ

the first major release to be shot in Chicago in years, possibly decades.

well, not the first, and certainly not decades... there was Medium Cool (shot around the '68 Dem convention, released in '69), and a fair amount of The Sting, The Fury and quite a few others in the '70s:

https://www.cityofchicago.org/city/en/depts/dca/supp_info/chicago_film_office6.html

I've never seen this movie (somehow), but omar's post makes me want to. (Also -- I'm a "Repo Man" fanatic, yet don't think I knew that Jimmy Buffet had a cameo! Or maybe I once knew and forgot...)

the blues bros albums are comedy records, and like you say not very funny ones.

This is straightup wrong. If anything John & Dan took their little novelty act a little too seriously. I'm pretty sure all those Stax guys in the band didn't think they were playing on a comedy record.

well, not the first, and certainly not decades...

I figured/hoped you'd be the one to correct me. Ordinary People was strictly in the suburbs, as was much of My Bodyguard. My recollection of those is that there's a handful of shots -- if that -- of recognizable Chicago locations. Can't speak to the other films on the list, though.

I remember as a kid hearing the "Steve Cropper and Duck Dodgers!" shout-out at the end of "Soul Man" and then, a decade later, figuring out that they were the Stax band when discovering Otis Redding. Definitely heard the Briefcase Full of Blues versions before the originals.

(Also filmed in Chicago around the same time: Steve McQueen's The Hunter, with a car plunging into the river from Marina City.)

also in 1980, My Bodyguard

there's one Chicago scene in Ordinary People, Sutherland talking to a co-worker with the river in the b.g., I think? The Sting is split between dressed Chicago locations and backlot sets.

And Thief!

yeah, Thief was '81

I'm sure there was an uptick in film production once Daley was out, but there hadn't been a ban or anything.

Thief soundtrack > Blues Brothers soundtrack

Willie Dixon's in Thief!

I'm sure there was an uptick in film production once Daley was out, but there hadn't been a ban or anything.

True, it wasn't a ban; it was just Daley being typically dickish. This piece goes into some detail:

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2010-06-16/entertainment/ct-live-0616-blues-brothers-20100616_1_jane-byrne-blues-brothers-mayor-richard-j-daley

One place the Cab Calloway/disco story that the Escape Goat mentions above is told is Cynthia Rose’s (excellent) little 1990 book Living in America: the Soul Saga of James Brown. She quotes Landis — I think from some big promo feature at the time, not her own interview — as follows: “The day we recorded Minnie the Moocher’ was the 50th anniversary of the day Cab had written it – and he wanted to do it DISCO. I said, ‘Cab, disco sucks’ – it was written on all the cameras, ‘Disco sucks’. I said, ‘Cab, we want to bring back rhythm and blues.’ He took me aside and said ‘John, I’ve done ‘Minnie’ Dixie and I’ve done it Charleston and I’ve done it rock and I’ve done it MOR.’ He listed every fucking form of music for the last 50 years and he said ‘John – you do ‘Minnie’ for what the people want. You do music just for yourself and you’re jackin’ off.”

I’d half-remembered this so I looked it up – it’s art of a slightly more intricate argument she’s making over several pages, but The Blues Brothers less as a source of soul’s renewal than a source of its gentrification, fully acknowledging (as Brown readily did) that it was excellent news for his career at a tricky juncture — he was able to switch labels with a much-improved contract and find a refreshed audience to tour to.

The Landis in this quote is a bit of a self-congratulatory dick — plus disco doesn’t suck — but at least he allows Cab the last word: in another claim, I assume from the same promo-facing source, he describes the film as “a true musical which would use every great rhythm and blues performer we could get — an epic surreal picture of AMERICA with the brothers as Christian Crusaders bringing back the blues!” And Rose goes on to suggest that the 80 yuppification of soul — its repositioning into “deep music as shallow accessory” — began here, less in the music itself than in how it was being used, in films and adverts and the career moves of much younger British groups and performers. There was a LOT of money sloshing round, plus a lot of coke — without saying anything outright about this Rose segues straight from Brown’s renewed early/mid 80s success to PCP and so on. And she quotes Gerri Hirshey, no less (I think this is Rose’s interview) being reminded by this revival of the segregated frat-house party world of the 60s: “There was a lot going on in the early 80s – that’s why I could sell my book. But […] the Blues Brothers thing – although they offered work again to a lot of people who wanted it – was very like the original redneck circuit. Where frat-boys had soul acts play their affairs cause they wanted a total party mode. And only this real, serious music could provide it.”

So anyway, after rereading this, I rewatched BB, expecting greatly to dislike it — the 80s is when I started out as a music-writer and UK writing abt black music at that time, positive or negative, mostly drove me nuts, as a blether of clichés and bad framing literally cutting it off from a wider audience.

And I… didn’t hate it! It’s kind of OK, actually. The framing can be a bit dismal — great musicians reduced to a backdrop for the clowns of yesteryear — and it is pretty self-congratulatory in places — but Ayckroyd and Belushi are physically so much the original hipster doofuses that they mostly actually disarm this? Ayckroyd’s silly dancing makes me smile still, as does his odd muppet-y accent. And then there’s the point being made by several people up-thread: no doubt actual real 80s yuppies watched and enjoyed this film (it was a big big hit) but so did a whole army of non-yuppie 11-year-olds, and for them the experience of Aretha or Hooker or was pretty much uncut.

And maybe (as a consequence) it outlasted what was a bit exhausting and problematic abt the 80s?

I’d never thought of the “love-song to Chicago” dimension before, so I watched it with this in mind. And, well, maybe: I’m not sure Landis is the film-maker I’d pick to pull this off. It begins — actually a bit startlingly — with a sequence of blasted industrial landscape that literally reminded me of the opening of Blade Runner (tho day not night) and made me wish I was having this material pointed at me by someone who could better frame a shot, or a gag, or a scene. There are hilarious moments — usually a performer perfectly hitting their mark with the camera competently aimed their way — but anything sustained for more than a minute or two usually gets the air knocked out of it at the edit. I love the weird physics-defying moment when the nazi car is suddenly wildly airborne (another reminder: the flying car in Repo Man), but the unbending car-chase and pile-up is really only funny conceptually, and the filming of it really only a step beyond basic.

(Landis isn’t really the film-maker I’d pick to pull anything off, tbh: I think he’s a terrible film-maker. He was young at this point but it’s not like he went on to get better.)

I like how anti-police it is in its otherwise fairly unpolitical way. I like the way it punches nazis (and lets us know it knows they have contacts in the police — arguably its most political moment). It has good lines — though Repo Man (somehow a curiously related film for me, except unimpeachable better) has far far more. I kinda dislike the smugness of the shots it takes at music that isn’t R&B: not just disco but Latin and of course country. The Good Old Boys scene is high-end cartoon stuff obviously, and ‘Rawhide’ is a great tune, but the idea that Murphy and Cropper and Dunn etc know no country tunes is total Landis-land projection, and grinds my gears a little.

unbending s/b unending i think, and “deep music as shallow accessory” isn't a quote despite the quotemarks, just me being coy abt my redux

Wow that was great and not even behind a patreon paywall, thanks. I was in high school what that movie came out, waiting for Gerri Hirshey to write Nowhere To Run, and did not like the BB phenomenon at all. If I rewatched movie again I suppose I would have a similar reaction to what you describe.

While I was working on
Redd's Roster of Restaurants of the Old Weird New York
I found out about this, which may be of some interest:
http://www.nysonglines.com/dominick.htm
http://www.oocities.org/hollywood/lot/2976/brotherjohn.html
https://tribecacitizen.com/2011/06/28/nosy-neighbor-where-was-the-original-blues-bar/
https://tribecacitizen.com/2011/07/06/nosy-neighbor-update-blues-bar/

Remembered berating my homeroom classmates about listening to them in 1977-1978, then recalled that the film was made after Animal House and checked and saw that the movie came out in 1980. I had a Christopher Priest moment of doubting my recollection until it swam to the surface that there was previously an album and I see that Briefcase Full of Blues was out in 1978.

Booming post, mark s. I definitely need to revisit the Rose book.

I’d never thought of the “love-song to Chicago” dimension before, so I watched it with this in mind. And, well, maybe: I’m not sure Landis is the film-maker I’d pick to pull this off.

Much as the problem with the Blues Brothers phenomenon means that their version of "Soul Man" (and not Sam & Dave's) gets played on Chicago "classic rock" radio, and their "Sweet Home Chicago" (and not Magic Sam's) is (or was, at least through the '90s) played at every sports celebration in the city, the problem with Landis filming, for instance, the long-gone Maxwell Street market means that brief scene is by far the most visible documentation of something with a long and rich history that many others could have done much more with, given the opportunity.

Thanks for that, mark s. People were recently giving me shit because I'd somehow never seen so much as a minute of this film. Guess I should check it out.

lol i will never learn how to spell aykroyd properly

also briefcase full of blues went double platinum tho presumably at least some of that was after the film? i mean the backing band had earned this i guess but

i think Briefcase had maybe less legacy sales than you'd think...

The sweet spot of the Blues Brothers' audience was 17 to 24 i imagine, maybe a little younger at the early end. Like Animal House, the film probably did best in areas where the R rating wasn't enforced.

disco does suck btw

(I think of TBB not as an '80s phenomenon, as they started doing opening bits on SNL in '77 and the film came out in June '80, but as the tail end of the '70s necessarily-compromised attempt at debauched pop multiculturalism)

"yuppies" weren't identified explicitly as a phenomenon in America til around '84, so i look at Ferris Bueller as a more blatant outgrowth of that trend.

lol i will never learn how to spell aykroyd properly

the problem with Landis filming, for instance, the long-gone Maxwell Street market means that brief scene is by far the most visible documentation of something with a long and rich history that many others could have done much more with, given the opportunity

1) Name names - who could have "done much more with" the Maxwell Street market in a movie context?
2) Explain how and why anybody else would have ever been given the opportunity.

Literally the only director I can think of who might have been interested in something like that would be Michael Mann (who's from Chicago) and then he'd probably just have turned it into the backdrop for a car chase or two white dudes having a stone-faced conversation with each other. So, same difference.

The issue isn’t Landis’ relative ineptitude in itself so much as it was a relative ineptitude that got the opportunity to document Maxwell St — within the context of a multimillion Hollywood film — that other directors didn’t. It’s like saying “name singers who could’ve sung ‘Soul Man’ better than Aykroyd and Belushi.’” I can’t be positive, but I bet there might be a couple.

Of course no one else would’ve been given the opportunity — why would a huge budget be thrown at a competent director (maybe one with ties to the community and phenomenon they’re filming) to document a years-long weekend tradition on the south side of Chicago?

I think what you're looking for is a documentarian like Fred Wiseman or Les Blank.

'zackly

isn't John lee Hooker onscreen for about 45 seconds?