The story of the epic friendship between John Belushi and Dan Ackroyd, the golden era of improv, and the making of a comedic film classic that helped shape our popular culture.

“They’re not going to catch us”, Dan Ackroyd, as Elwood Blues, tells his brother Jake, played by John Belushi, “We’re on a mission from God”. So opens the musical action comedy The Blues Brothers, which hit theatres on June 20, 1980. Their scripted mission was to save a local Chicago orphanage, Ackroyd, who conceived and wrote much of the film, had a greater mission: to honour the then-seemingly forgotten tradition of rhythm and blues, some of whose greatest artists – Aretha Franklin, James Brown, John Lee Hooker, Cab Calloway, Ray Charles – made the film as forgettable as its wild car chases. The Blues Brothers opened to outraged reviews, However, in the 44 years since, has been acknowledged a classic: it has been inducted into the National Film Registry for its cultural significance, even declared a “Catholic classic” by the Church itself, and re-aired thousands of times on television to huge worldwide audiences. 

The story behind any classic is rich, the saga behind The Blues Brothers, as Daniel de Vise, a Pulitzer-winning American journalist, reveals is epic, encompassing the colorful childhoods of Belushi and Aykroyd, the comedic revolution sparked by Harvard’s Lampoon and Chicago’s Second City, the birth and anecdote-rich, drug-filled early years of Saturday Night Live, where the Blues Brothers were born as an act amidst turmoil and rivalry. Daniel de Vise based his original research and dozens of interviews probing the memories of principals from director John Landis and producer Bob Weiss to Aykroyd himself. The Blues Brothers illuminates an American Masterpiece while vividly portraying the creative geniuses behind modern comedy.

Belushi, whose fat boy in Animal House (1978) had been memorably described by the films director John Landis, as “Cookie Monster meets Harpo Marx”.  In 1982, he was 33, two years before he starred with Ackroyd, his best friend, as Jake and Elwood Blues in The Blues Brothers, another movie by Landis. The movie began as an SNL sketch, grew into a live musical revue and became one of the biggest movies of 1980, grossing more than $100 million.

Arthea Franklin, Ray Charles, James Brown, John Lee Hooker, and Cab Calloway featured in bravura musical sequences and some questioned the optics of two white, musically limited comedians hogging the limelight with black legends reduced to cameos. 

Belushi, who is neither Italian nor Greek, but Albanian, did opium with Carrie Fisher and popped sedative pills like Tic Tacs. He at the age of 14, weighing 14 stones, became a football star at his Chicago High School, where he was homecoming king and vehemently opposed to drugs. But on entering Chicago comedy scene he was soon hoovering up LSD, PCP, mescaline and magic mushroom. On his 27th birthday he was presented with a cake in the shape of a Quaalude, the potent sedative pills and cocaine. During a Blues Brothers shoot Landis found a mound worth several hundred thousand dollars in Belushi’s trailer and flushed the lot. The cinematographer was asked why there are so few closeups of the cast. “Close-ups?  Have you seen their eyes?”, he replied.

It took its toll- on the Blues Brothers set Belushi inhaled from an oxygen tank between takes. He and his colleagues would joke about his premature death. When Lorne Michales, the boss of SNL, was told  that if his star performed that night he would have a 50/50 chance of survival, I can live with those odds” he said

Among the luckless souls hired to keep Belushi out of trouble were a former secret service agent and one of Steven Spielberg’s producers. Undeterred Belushi instructed the latter to drive him to the home of the Rolling Stones, Ronnie Wood, where events unfolded as one might expect. Paul McCartney booked him to do his Joe Cocker impersonation at Macca’s birthday party. To take the mind off the terror of shooting Belushi’s first sex scene in the blessedly forgotten rom-com Continental Divide he regaled the crew with names for his penis (“Hose of Horror, Mr, Wiggly”) and after appearing in Spielberg’s disastrous wartime satire 1941 he attended a wrap party where people wore badges reading, “John Belushi Born 1949, Died 1941”.

This is really a Belushi biography with Ackroyd in a supporting role. 

The lead-up to his death and its aftermath are charted with a  mixture of poignancy – Robert De Niro and Robin Williams were among the last people to see him alive. But neither send their condolences to his wife Judy.

The Blues Brothers : An Epic Friendship, the Rise of Improv and the Making of an American Film Classic by Daniel de Vise, White Rabbit, 400 pages, £25.