44 things this Chicagoan didn’t know about ‘The Blues Brothers’
CHICAGO — There are few Chicago cliches more overdone than the Blues Brothers.
Maybe hot dogs. OK, deep dish. The Bears logo. The Cubs logo. The Bean.
Then there’s that iconic silhouette — dark shades, black fedora, one thin guy, one meatball — an image so ubiquitous here, you’re more likely to run into it than the actual blues. “The Blues Brothers” movie, released in 1980, steeped in local lore forevermore, is often called the quintessential Chicago movie, and I’m certainly not alone in saying that if I never saw it again, nothing would be lost. It’s been drummed into my skin, bones and flab, indelibly. Which is why I instinctively rolled my eyes when I landed an early copy of this new history, “The Blues Brothers: An Epic Friendship, the Rise of Improv, and the Making of an American Film Classic.” Strictly for the tourists, I thought. What could this book possibly offer Chicago?
The surprise is, plenty.
Daniel de Visé, a native South Sider, now a finance reporter at USA Today (and a Pulitzer Prize co-winner for his Elián González coverage at the Miami Herald), has compiled the definitive one-stop history of the Blues Brothers band, the film and a touching dual biography of John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd, which Aykroyd refers to in the book as one of the great friendships, the ache still heard years after Belushi’s death.
It left me with so much to think about that, in the spirit of the Blues Brothers — in the spirit of not doing something unless you can overdo it — with input from de Visé and his absorbing cultural history, here are 44 thoughts, production notes and or just things that
