The Tapes Archive

Interviewer: There’s gonna be a Blues Brothers movie, right?

John Belushi: Yeah.

Interviewer: You’re writing it?

Dan Aykroyd: I’m writing it as we speak.

John Belushi: Sweet Home Chicago’s gonna be in it.

Interviewer: Is this the script for it?

Dan Aykroyd: This might be, in here.

John Belushi: Well, this is kinda a basis and it’s, well…

Dan Aykroyd: We just wanna get everybody who’s out there. We wanna get Luther Allison, we wanna get–

John Belushi: We wanna make the movie–

Dan Aykroyd:  Son Seals man, we wanna get–

John Belushi: The guys who are still around. With the, whatever, we could go on and on.

Dan Aykroyd:  Just to do bits in the movie, where they play not… They play either guys who are holding down day gigs or who play the blues at night and who are like… Well we envision a scene maybe, if Ray Charles would do it where he’s a blind pawnbroker and we go in. We need an electric piano, because we’re going on the road and we need this piano, and we try to rip him off but there’s no way he’s gonna let us steal anything. And he demonstrates a piano, and he can play a tune. Do a number on the piano, so the movie hopefully will have salt and pepper like that all through it.

John Belushi: He does things like “get on the right track, baby.” stuff like that. Or lonely street, all these great tunes. Ray Charles was a great inspiration to us when he did our show. He always said stuff like–

Interviewer: That was a good show.

John Belushi: “I am hipness.”

Interviewer: He did some great sketches on that show, too.

John Belushi:  He’s wonderful!

Dan Aykroyd:  He did, he did, he really did, man. He worked with us–

John Belushi: He’s great! He learned all of his lines in one morning, and we were reading them off cards on Saturday. Here’s this blind guy who knew his lines…

Dan Aykroyd: That was amazing, and plus–

John Belushi: He said “never go faster than the music, never get there before the music gets there.” Lot of people tend to play blues too fast. We talked, he just said “don’t worry, keep going at it”–

Dan Aykroyd: For that show, Lorne Micheals and Howard Shore decided to get together his old horn section and the Raelettes. So they hunted and flew them all in. I think they got everybody.

John Belushi: Yep, Fathead Newman and everybody.

Dan Aykroyd: And they played behind him for the show. It was so hot.

INTERVIEWER: Do you have favorite shows? Are there standout shows in each of your minds that–

John Belushi: Favorite shows?

Interviewer: Favorite. Are there little gems that stand out in your mind.

Dan Aykroyd: Every show, everyone of those Saturday Nights has got like a real turkey or a couple of turkeys in it, and a couple of gems. You tune in

– So we don’t hit every week.

John Belushi: You don’t hit every sketch, you don’t hit every week.

Dan Aykroyd: But it’s usually worth checkin’ it out, flippin’ back to every once in a while.

John Belushi: I’ll tell you what, it takes about six shows to get our stride. Every year–

Interviewer: You mean six shows into a new season?

John Belushi: Sure, every year people say, “well, you didn’t have what you had last year.” because you go from week to week, you judge it from week to week. I used to get real depressed. I’d think, “oh god, who we got on the show this week, this turkey.” And we do our best, the writing’s weak, and we go and do it, and it’s a terrible show, and everybody wants to kill themselves after the show. Everybody wants to quit–

Dan Aykroyd: And then people run up and say–

John Belushi: And then the next weekend, everybody’s like, “hey, that was great.” and the next week, you’d have a show and it’d be great. And we all go, “eh, we have a great show.”

Dan Aykroyd: We just do the best we can. In the live situation, that’s all we can do.

John Belushi: The critics can say whatever they want I don’t really care I don’t wanna hear–

Dan Aykroyd: At this point they’re gonna have to hose us out of the building to make us leave.

John Belushi: I don’t care.

Dan Aykroyd: They’re gonna have to throw me right off the job, because I wanna stay there.

John Belushi: I could leave the show, they say, “leave the show.” Why should I leave the show if I like doing the show? It’s hard, but you don’t leave something because it’s hard.

Interviewer: Is it still fun after the fourth year?

Dan Aykroyd: Sure, sure. On air, once it gets on the air, once you’re on live, it’s a lot of fun.

John Belushi: It can be, no matter how mad I get during the week, or crazy, or when I quit, when that show goes on live, I’m smilin’ the whole time.

Interviewer: How democratic is the process of Saturday Night Live?

John Belushi: As it can be.

Interviewer: By that I mean, selection of guest host, selection of musical artist, are these choices–

Dan Aykroyd: Everybody says yes or no, everybody pitches in, yes or no.

John Belushi: If you want to, you put down the heavy hand.

Interviewer: So it’s pretty much a whole group process?

John Belushi: Yeah, as much as it can be on a TV show.

Dan Aykroyd: It’s like a family, it really is, it really is. It’s not like some of those mills in Hollywood, where the writers are isolated from the performers, the scripts come out and they’re delivered by messenger 23 blocks away to the studio, and they come in and the cast looks them over, and the writers don’t have any process or say. On that show, every writer, if he chooses to, can produce his own piece. Go out there, and that’s what Lorne Michaels has done. He’s saying, “listen, these are the facilities, you can learn how to produce if you want to.”

John Belushi: That’s what we did with the Blues Brothers. We got the contract to do it, that we would do just what we wanna do. We do what we wanna do. You know, like if anybody suggested, “well we wanna do this song, this song,” I listen to everybody. We listen to who to get for the group, what group to get, and say “yes, yes.” And then go and do what we wanted to on our own. You can’t be forced to say, “you have to make a single.”

Dan Aykroyd: We had a meeting–

John Belushi: Either we’ve got the goods or we don’t have the goods. You do what you do, you can’t try something…

Interviewer: But on a particular show, isn’t time allotted to each one of you? Because everybody gets a spot.

Dan Aykroyd: Oh, you mean the Saturday night show?

Interviewer: On the Saturday night show, I mean.

Dan Aykroyd: It depends how it’s written. Depends who gets what, and how the writers feel, who can do the best job in whatever scene.

John Belushi: Sometimes I like to do as little as possible, cause last year I was flying back and forth doing movies, and I just said, “please, don’t give me anything.”

Interviewer: But this season you’ve been doing quite a bit on the first bunch of shows.

John Belushi: Yeah, they been throwing me in there.

Dan Aykroyd: Oh sure, sure.

John Belushi: Like a barbed wire.

Interviewer: People who are into Saturday Night Live are so into it. And there’s a tremendous fascination, not only with the show, but with the whole process of live 90 minutes every week. I think most people are aware that it’s a tremendous undertaking.

John Belushi: I would not do television if this wasn’t live.

Dan Aykroyd: Yeah, there’s no way–

John Belushi: The slime primetime stuff is not for me or for us, we don’t do that stuff. Live TV is exciting.

Dan Aykroyd: There’s a risk there, you know?

John Belushi: Taped TV is not exciting. The live album was exciting to do, a live show is exciting to do, exciting to hear. That’s why this album is exciting.

Dan Aykroyd: So I guess people pretty well know that he’s Jake and I’m Elwood. These are the characters, the alter-egos we take on. Because the whole thing is a theatrical thing, we come from a background of… We worked in Second City, which is an improvisational theater school. I might say it’s a school, because it teaches you how to write on your feet. We used to go out, the process is very simple, we do a set show, and then go out and improvise after, that is go up the audience, and one actor would go out and say, “okay, ladies and gentlemen, we’re going to do some off the cuff scenes. Give us an occupation.” Some guy yells out lawyer. “Okay, give us a place.”

John Belushi: I got bathroom.

Dan Aykroyd: Bathroom, in a bus station. So, then we proceed to do a scene about a lawyer in a bathroom of a bus station.

Interviewer: Could I try it with you two now?

Dan Aykroyd: No, no, those days are past.

Interviewer: Okay, okay, just asking.

Dan Aykroyd: Because you can die, you can die if you improvise.

John Belushi: You die! See that allowed you, at Second City they expect you to fail about half the time.

Dan Aykroyd: But the thing is, it taught us how to wear hats and glasses, and to work with costumes, and to be uninhibited, you know? Really, it’s a theatrical thing. Like Greek theater has the mask, well the Blues Brother have the shades and the sunglasses.

John Belushi: And the soul patch.

Dan Aykroyd: And the soul patch, and the suits.

John Belushi: The suit!

Dan Aykroyd: The suit is important, it’s a uniform, and without it the act would be nothing.

John Belushi: I’ll tell you how the suit came about. I mean the idea for the suit.

Interviewer: The dark suit or the black and white?

John Belushi: Well I created this character called Shelly Baillis.

Dan Aykroyd: On a piece a couple of years ago, called “Beatnik Cafe”.

Interviewer: That character, I don’t know.

John Belushi: It’s a minor thing.

Dan Aykroyd: We did this beat cafe, that’s right–

John Belushi: I play the most paranoid comic in the world. Okay, now, what happens is a lot of the paranoid comics and paranoid jazz musicians in the 50s, a lot of them were shooting speed. Like Lenny Bruce type guys.

Dan Aykroyd: They wore shades!

John Belushi: No, they wore shades, but they wanted to look inconspicuous.

Dan Aykroyd: And straight, they wanted to look straight, so they wore suits.

John Belushi: They wore black suits with black ties and white shirts, it made them look like insurance men, hoping that they wouldn’t draw attention to themselves, and they’d wear these black hats, and they always wore sunglasses, day and night. With these little soul patches underneath their lip.

Interviewer: They blew their cover with it, I think.

John Belushi: So they draw attention. It’d be one o’clock in the morning, and they had these dark shades on. So it basically looks like a 50s hipster junkie.

Dan Aykroyd: Yeah, but it also could be the Blues Brothers. Also, with the suits and the car they drive, which is an old Dodge Police Interceptor, they look like cops.

John Belushi: Cops.

Dan Aykroyd: They look like hit men, they look like chauffeurs, like limousine chauffeurs, with the dark suits.

John Belushi: They look like rabbi, some guy thought we were.

Dan Aykroyd: They look like Hasidics.

John Belushi: Hasidic Jews, right.

Dan Aykroyd: God, there’s so many dimensions to the costume. But the fact is that the simple thing is that Jake and Elwood aren’t any of those things, they’re just musicians. And they may look threatening, or straight or heavy, but they really just wanna play the music.

Interviewer: How some of the characters come about, the more famous ones, of you people. Like the Coneheads, was that born in a writers meeting–

John Belushi: It was born in Danny’s brain.

Interviewer: Born in your brain, Danny, huh?

Dan Aykroyd: Well, I mean, the Coneheads… I was intrigued by video, by the fact that most screens are a certain height, and people’s heads are a certain height on the screen, and I figured, why not fill up another 3 or 4 inches there, on a 21 inch screen. So I’m fascinated with circus pinheads, I don’t know. They suffer from oxycephaly, which is a form of water on the brain, okay? And in France, at certain times, there were roustabouts, that were pinheads, that were mentally deformed, and a little simple, but they were very strong. And they would move the machinery, and move the equipment, and move the circus around, and put up tents and stuff. As well as being in the freak shows, so basically I thought, cause they’re beautiful looking, at least I think so. I figured, you know, why not get these beings happening on television, give them the little capes they used to wear in the French circus exactly, have that look exactly.

Interviewer: That’s great.

Dan Aykroyd: And just put them from another planet. So originally, Tom Davis and I were gonna do this thing, “Cruising Cones from Outer Space”, where these guys come down and try to pick up these girls in a convertible. In a big, out of production scene that just couldn’t have been possibly produced, and Lorne Michaels said, “no, no, no, take the Coneheads, they look so strange, put them in a suburban living room, make them a completely normal kind of family. So that’s where Beldar’s speech comes from. “People of Earth, we were sent here to establish a Protoid Fuelling Station on this planet, but I forgot my speech.” He forgot the speech he was supposed to give over the loudspeaker at the UN when he landed his saucer and they crash their saucer into Lake Michigan.

Interviewer: They’re just kinda hung up here?

Dan Aykroyd: Well, they’re just hung up, they’re stuck on the planet, they get these communiques, nobody’s gonna help them, it’s tragic.

Interviewer: Where did “but, no” come from?

John Belushi: I have no idea, I’ll tell you what.

Interviewer: Really?

John Belushi: I wrote one one time and… I just put it in one time, during the editorial.

And the next time I did one, I was working backstage, writing it with Brian Doyle-Murray, one of the writers who I worked with at Second City, who was now on our show. And I was doing the edit, I was writing it out. I was backstage, and I wrote the thing, and I finished it. And he said, “don’t you do that ‘but, no’ thing?” I said, “what?” He said, “don’t you do ‘but, no’?” I said, “when did I do that?” He said, “you did it last time, on the show.” I said, “what do you mean ‘but, no’?” “You know, you go, ‘but, no,’ that thing.” I said, “I don’t remember.” He said, “well put it in here somewhere.” So we stuck it in. I said “okay, boom.” I stuck it in, and the next time I did it, I said, “but, noooo.” And God I got a reaction, I couldn’t believe it.

Dan Aykroyd: You see, it’s rhythm, because Steve Martin’s thing, “excuuuuse me.” “But, nooooo.” It’s a rhythmic thing, it’s like a key that people can go . It makes sense and they can say it.

Interviewer: And it just connects with whatever that place is that makes you laugh. It stimulates it for whatever reason.

John Belushi: I know where the samurai comes from.

Interviewer: Where?

John Belushi: I saw it on television one time. I saw Toshiro Mifune in Sanjuro and I had never seen a samurai movie. And it was just before I was on the Saturday night show. I was watching it, it was on channel 13, educational station in New York, was showing Japanese movies. And one week they showed Sanjuro three times. So I just happened to have it on. I looked at this guy and I went, “oh my God.” It was Toshiro Mifune. And he’s all . And doing all this stuff that I couldn’t believe, and the sword fighting was fabulous. I watching it, and then it came on again and I watched it again, and I was fascinated. I was watching it and I was going . I watched how he walked and stuff, it was funny and…

Dan Aykroyd: Plus there’s an amazing physical similarity when he puts his…

John Belushi: Yeah, so I would put my hair up.

Interviewer: Did you see, when you were watching the thing on television, you could almost kinda see yourself– No, nothing like that?

John Belushi: No, no way did I think I could do that. I didn’t know. So I just got doing it around the house.

Dan Aykroyd: You grab your hair, like in a fist almost.

John Belushi: I grab my hair like this. I would take this broom, this broomstick that we had in the house, and I’d stick it in my belt, and I’d sneak up on my wife. And I go . And scare her and stuff, and I’d start talking to her . She didn’t know what I was talking about, I’d just do it. I’d go up to my cats with a sword, . And they didn’t know what was going on. When I went in to audition for Saturday Night, I didn’t wanna go and audition with something that everybody knew. Most of my friends were there auditioning, so–

Dan Aykroyd: It was a cattle call, you wouldn’t believe, there were hundreds of people.

John Belushi: There were a lot of people who came in, but when I went in for mine, like 50 people came in the room, to get me on the show, I mean. I had a lot of good friends who helped me.

Interviewer: Oh, so samurai predates Saturday Night Live.

John Belushi: Just barely, yes. But I mean, I didn’t do it in any other show, so. I walked in there and they didn’t know what I was gonna do, and they were hoping that I would show this producer who didn’t like me, Lorne Michaels was not nuts about me. I had what you call “a bad attitude” about TV, and so… I was kind of a punk. “This is not very good, but I’ll do your show.” I was that kind of attitude. I said, “I’ll let you have me on your show.” The worst way to try to get a job. So I went in and I just… He said, “what are you gonna do?” I said, “I don’t know, I’ll do about four minutes.” And I brought my robe, and I put this robe on, and I took my shoes and socks off, and I had this ballet bar I stole from this rehearsal studio. Those little brown poles? And I had a rubber band, I put my hair up and stuck this thing in my robe, and I turned around and went . And I started just walking around the room, with this pole.

Dan Aykroyd: They loved it, they loved it.

John Belushi: They hired me, that was it.

Dan Aykroyd: We were the last two to get hired out for that show, because they weren’t sure. We had reputations of questionable dependability and…

John Belushi: Violence and…

Some Lady: What was your reputation?

Dan Aykroyd: Well, I sort of like to slip between the raindrops, as it were.

Interviewer: Well put.

Dan Aykroyd: There was a reputation that I wouldn’t show up for gigs and that I sometimes said I would be there, and wasn’t there an..

John Belushi: That you were crazy.

Dan Aykroyd: And that I was crazy, yeah, and that no one quite knew what to expect next. I know how to disappear and appear, fast. And this kinda puts people off, you know? So they weren’t sure. I was kinda like the amoeba that they couldn’t pin down. And when you do put your thumb on them, they slip out from under you. So you know what, Lorne had to talk me into it.

Interviewer: Now how many people auditioned, did you say? 50?

Dan Aykroyd: Ah no, there were hundreds of people.

Interviewer: Really? For how many jobs?

Dan Aykroyd: For a week!

Interviewer: For how many jobs?

John Belushi: Seven.

Dan Aykroyd: For the not ready for primetime players.

Interviewer: Seven, was that the number in his mind?

Dan Aykroyd: The repertory company he wanted.

Interviewer: That’s amazing, and going on four years out of the seven there’s only been, what, one change, right?

John Belushi: One drop out.

Interviewer: Chevy Chase, so now you’re six.

Dan Aykroyd: That’s right.

John Belushi: No, Bill Murray came in.

Interviewer: Oh, and Bill Murray came in after Chevy left, right?

John Belushi: Bill Murray was almost in, he was like the eighth guy that went–

Dan Aykroyd: See we all knew each other. Gilda, and Billy, and Brian, his brother, and I all worked together up in Canada. John worked with Gilda and Bill. We all knew each other. Basically, I guess Lorne just had to look around for other talent, and finally grabbed the people he knew were ripe and ready to do it, you know? And we went to school, we knew what we were doing. We were established and ready to handle a live environment, because of all the shows we’d done at Second City, and plus, our ability to think on our feet, to come up with material, dialogues, relationships.

John Belushi: And act, you have to learn how to act.

Dan Aykroyd: Yeah, that’s right.

John Belushi: You gotta learn how to act, you have to learn how to do impressions, you have to learn how to sing.

Dan Aykroyd: Everything.

John Belushi: You have to learn everything if you wanna be in this business, it’s not a question.

Dan Aykroyd: The Second City audition, in fact, and it’s a standard thing. Everybody who does it has to go in, they talk to you and then they say, “come through that door and come through as five different characters, one at a time. And do one minute in each character’s voice mannerisms, okay?”

John Belushi: I didn’t do that.

Dan Aykroyd: You didn’t have to do that? Boy, I did. I did.

John Belushi: You were real bad at first, too.

Interviewer: I mean all this stuff is–

Dan Aykroyd: Thanks a lot!

Interviewer: All this stuff is great, I mean, live television. There had to have been times over the years where things just went completely off the page and out somewhere.

John Belushi: Not very often.

Interviewer: Not very often?

John Belushi: I’ll tell you what. You don’t want to improvise, you don’t wanna have to improvise with something, it’s nice to have–

Dan Aykroyd: You got a booth full of technicians.

John Belushi: You got a booth of technicians, you got 5 cameras, you got the other actors on stage.

Dan Aykroyd: They want you to be there and they want you the line to be there when they cut, so you can’t pull any…

John Belushi: You can’t pull the stuff, like Frank Zappa did the other day.

Dan Aykroyd: But you can be ready, you can be ready if something happens.

John Belushi: You can be ready, but you don’t blame it on other people, you don’t do that.

Interviewer: No, but sometimes it must happen just by accident, like somebody gets weird, or something.

John Belushi: I said the “F” word. A couple times by mistake, it’s stuff like that. It’s just by mistake, it’s nothing…

Interviewer: What’s the relationship between Saturday Night Live and NBC? And the standards of practices, is that what call the–

Dan Aykroyd: We have an understanding woman and an understanding man who alternate the duty on the board at Saturday Night. Now, they sit there and the writers will put in stuff in the script and generally they’re very reasonable.

Interviewer: They seem to be.

Dan Aykroyd: And they sit there and and the writer–

John Belushi: We explain it to them.

Dan Aykroyd: We explain the context in which something is written, and if they disagree with it and think that certain words like bulges or head cream or blowmaster, I mean, I’ve mentioned hair products here, really. Blowmaster and head cream, they’re hair products folks. And if she doesn’t think they’re hair products, or he, the other guy, doesn’t think they’re hair products.

“Hey, bartender.” Well, they’ll object to it, and sometimes we lose with them, sometimes we win. And “Hey, Bartender”–

John Belushi: Went ballin’ the other night, started drinking and I blew each and all of my friends.

Dan Aykroyd: I blew each and all my friends, which means–

John Belushi: It felt so good, I had to blow again.

Dan Aykroyd: But he bought them all a drink, that’s what the lyrics mean.

Interviewer: That’s what it really means.

Dan Aykroyd: It really means that. They’re pretty understanding. It’s gone as high as the president of NBC, who’s had to hand down a verdict, because Lorne takes it that high, he really fights for it.

John Belushi: See, if you don’t fight for it, you’re not gonna get anywhere.

Dan Aykroyd: Won’t get it on the air.

John Belushi: You won’t get it on the air.

So if you just sit there like a lot of shows do and say, “oh, well, it’s the censors,” well, you gotta go to the censors, you gotta show ’em, you gotta explain it to ’em. You gotta argue your point. And you fight, all the way down the line. Don’t just give up.

Interviewer: Are there any really funny fights? I mean like a story of any fight?

Dan Aykroyd: Wonderful meetings where Lorne is there, and the censor, and then the supervisor of the standards and practices branch. And then his supervisor, and maybe a vice-president of programming.

John Belushi: Maybe a lawyer.

Dan Aykroyd: And they’re all sitting there and talking about pussywhip. Deciding whether pussywhip should be a commercial or not, or what is it?

John Belushi: Pussywhip is what’s for cats–

Dan Aykroyd: The desert topping for cats.

John Belushi: “Colonelingus”

Interviewer: That’s right, Kentucky Fried Chicken show.

Dan Aykroyd: So that’s what they talk about there. They sort of adjust their ties nervously and flinch and smile, it’s really great.

John Belushi: It’s in good fun, it’s a wholesome show, it really is.

Interviewer: No way!

John Belushi: Who cares! You don’t like it, turn it off!

Dan Aykroyd: That’s right, the thing about TV is, once you buy your set, it’s free.

John Belushi: And don’t send any criticism, I don’t wanna hear it anymore.

Dan Aykroyd: You don’t have to buy it you know! When you watch TV you can sit there and the thing is you can turn it off any time you like. That’s the beautiful thing about it, and you don’t have to buy the hairspray and the cheap cars that they’re building today that only go 50,000 miles, and one large car company I might say here over the air, offers as an option, a 50,000 mile power train warranty that they used to give away in cars 10 years ago. That’s what this country’s coming to, I don’t like it, i’m getting out.

Interviewer: I get the feeling that out of all the not ready for primetime players, you two are maybe really close friends.

John Belushi: Yes.

Interviewer: When did you two meet? Do you go back a long way?

John Belushi: Actually we met on the show.

Dan Aykroyd: We met up north briefly, and backstage at Second City briefly, and I think we did a couple of sets at Second City as well. We improvised together and…

John Belushi: I was doing up there.

Dan Aykroyd: Yeah, John, I think he wanted me for the radio show, you wanted me to come down, for the National Lampoon Radio Show, and I–

Interviewer: That’s on the record album.

Dan Aykroyd: No…

Interviewer: Oh, the show. The syndicated show.

Dan Aykroyd: That’s right.

John Belushi: It was on about 200 stations.

Dan Aykroyd: Good humor, good humor, good start.

John Belushi: And I was the director, and I wanted Danny on there.

He came, and Gilda came, and Billy came. And I guess we, thrown in a situation, went toward each other more as protection.

Dan Aykroyd: Yeah, when we were being sort of up for the job, and they didn’t want us, and we weren’t sure what was gonna happen. I crashed at his house.

John Belushi: For about four months.

Dan Aykroyd: Well actually, for the first, yeah. For the first year of the show

John Belushi: We weren’t sure if it was gonna go on.

Dan Aykroyd: None of us were sure it was gonna go on past seven shows. He had a slab of foam there at his place, and it was in the closet, and he rolled it out, and I just bunked in there, and crashed at his place, and the cats picked at my feet at night, and I mean joys of joys. But it was wonderful, and Judy, his wife, who’s an angel in human form.

John Belushi: Wasn’t my wife then.

Dan Aykroyd: That’s right, I guess, no, cause you just got married, but your old lady, your whatever. She just treated me fine, like I was a brother.

John Belushi: So we’d take trips, like Dan and I would get sick of the show, or we’d get a DriveWay car.

Dan Aykroyd: Like a car you deliver to someone on the West Coast.

John Belushi: We take it and just burn it across the country in 3 days, listening to radio, just to get away from everything, and then it was kinda, we weren’t that well known. And we did couple trips cross country.

Dan Aykroyd: We spent a lot of time on the road…

John Belushi: Out on the road. I think we think alike.

Interviewer: Would that be hard to do now, being as well known as you are? Would it be a hassle?

Dan Aykroyd: Oh no! You just put it to the floor.

John Belushi: Keep driving!

Interviewer: You just don’t stop, you don’t eat.

John Belushi: You don’t stop, we don’t stop, you know what I mean.

Dan Aykroyd: Yeah, that’s the essence.

John Belushi: So part of the Blue Brothers comes outta when we were on the road. We talk about song, we played music, I get a tape deck and just crank it up and listen and that was fun. He’d drive like a madman and…

Dan Aykroyd: He turned me on to the Allman Brothers, and I turned him onto Ride of the Valkyries. Wagner, you know, which you’d never heard. As we were sailing across the Nevada mountains– Just fantastic.

John Belushi: I did that.

John Belushi: Yeah, I did that in that one show, was it the Ray Charles, where I listen to great music, where I just stood by

Dan Aykroyd: Oh yeah, the phonograph.

John Belushi: The phonograph. They didn’t know I was gonna do that on the air, because I was… See, sometimes you don’t know what we’re gonna do until we get there, ’til we’re on the air, and I go, “oh God, how am I gonna end this thing?” And I start , and I go, “horses, you know…” And this and that, and then screaming and going into lines from combat. Throwing things, and then there was a stereo, I don’t even know how much it weighed, it must have been 200 pounds, and I finally picked it up, and threw it on the ground to end the scene. I said, “wow, sorry, I didn’t know how to end it.”

Dan Aykroyd: He’s an expert at rants, the update rant that he does–

Interviewer: The rant and the rave.

Dan Aykroyd: And then the windwill, where he just whips around in the chair and whips back. The man is extremely durable, and for anybody, if the Blues Brothers, if it stays together, if things work out, and if we come to play whatever town you’re hearing our voices at–

Interviewer: In your town.

Dan Aykroyd: In your town, yeah. You should try to catch the act because Belushi, the moves.

John Belushi: Aww really, look at the dances you do in Soul Man.

Dan Aykroyd: Oh, I know, but I mean, your flips and everything, and aw jeez.

Interviewer: Wish you could do flips on the radio, it would be great.

John Belushi: Well the thing is, you can can hear hear us dancing in Soul Man. In the middle I start cheering, and that’s cause Danny’s dancing. I move back. Whoa! I can’t believe it.

Interviewer: Now you guys are gonna make a movie together.

John Belushi: Which one, do you mean 41?

Interviewer: “1941“, Steven Spielberg‘s new movie, this is just now getting–

John Belushi: It’s an acting gig.

Dan Aykroyd: Yeah, right, right. Well, it might be a little help rewriting.

John Belushi: The nice thing about this is I get to play a P-40 pilot. You know the World War II planes, with the flying tigers–

Dan Aykroyd: A P-40…

Interviewer: Like in all the old World War II movies.

Dan Aykroyd: Yeah, I think it had a Merlin V-12 engine, might’ve been an Allison. Here in this country–

John Belushi: And then Danny drives 

Dan Aykroyd: I drive an M3 tank, which was a Chrysler product, and as far as I’m concerned, any movie that lets me get up on top of an M3 tank and fire a 50 caliber machine gun, I’m going to go and do it!

John Belushi: Any movie that lets me fly a fighter plane, head straight to Hollywood Boulevard, I’m gonna do it!

Dan Aykroyd: That’s right.

John Belushi: And crash through the Grauman’s Chinese Theater, I’m gonna do it. I don’t care about dialogue, one bit.

Dan Aykroyd: No sir. That’s right.

Dan Aykroyd: And I drive down Santa Monica Boulevard, sort of over traffic, blowing out street lights.

John Belushi: We share in the movie, too, he plays–

Dan Aykroyd: Let’s not give too much of it away, because that’s gonna be fantastic, it’s really gonna be wonderful.

Interviewer: It’s Spielberg’s first movie since “Close Encounter”.

Dan Aykroyd: Yes, it’s a definitive, it’s the way war movies should’ve been back then, with all the language and relationships that couldn’t have evolved, because there was a strict moral standard happening in the 40s, and it’s a look at a frenzied state of mind in 1941 in L.A. Because it’s based on true incidents.

John Belushi: True incidents.

Interviewer: When are you gonna shoot this?

Dan Aykroyd: Soon.

John Belushi: By the 20th?

Dan Aykroyd: This month, next month?

Interviewer: Wait a minute, how do you shoot a movie and do Saturday Night Live at the same time?

John Belushi: I did 3 movies last year.

Dan Aykroyd: Well you fly in, yeah.

John Belushi: Plus we did a record, and how did we do it? It can’t be done, if you think about it you won’t know.

Interviewer: Maybe you better not talk about it.

Dan Aykroyd: It’s robot time, you just turn on a automaton switch, and

John Belushi: You get through it.

Interviewer: I’ll just ask, where are they shooting it, that’s the only thing I’ll ask about it.

Dan Aykroyd: L.A.

John Belushi: Yeah, L.A.

Dan Aykroyd: Lower Alabama.

Interviewer: So you’ll be on the shuttle.

John Belushi: Yeah.

Dan Aykroyd: We’re gonna be on that old shuttle at Sky .

John Belushi: I’d fly out on Sunday to Eugene, Oregon, I’d have to go to San Francisco, go to Eugene. On Wednesday, I go from Eugene to San Francisco, back to Saturday Night, go back, boom, bang. I had to go to Durango to do that… Don’t be baited to go see Going South, cause I’m not in it much.

Interviewer: Is it still out, is it still in the theaters?

John Belushi: Who knows, who cares. Anyway.

Dan Aykroyd: Well you were, don’t belittle yourself. You looked real cute.

John Belushi: I never saw the movie!

Dan Aykroyd: He had a gold tooth in his mouth.

Interviewer: You must look nice in Chaps.

John Belushi: I don’t want people to be baited and think I’m in a lot of the movie.

Dan Aykroyd: He looked great, he looked great. He did a decent job, he did his job.

John Belushi: Little bit of an exploitation on their part. They did that cause… Well, Hollywood is filled with a lot of slime. And I’m not gonna mention any names–

Dan Aykroyd: You know who you should play on this show? You should play–

John Belushi: They’ve got ice water going through their veins, let’s face it!

Interviewer: More of our conversation with Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi coming up.