Dan Aykroyd
Appearances
First Date Follow Up - The Jubal Show
Why is Lyla ghosting Aaron?
I love writing more than anything. You're left alone. You know, you do three hours in the morning, you write three hours in the afternoon, go pick up a kid from school and write at night. And after nine hours, you come out with seven pages and then you're moving on.
Fresh Air
'SNL' Turns 50: Aykroyd, Franken, Zweibel & Lovitz
Well, the first records, of course, were, you know, The Beatles and The Stones. And then I think the seminal record for me was the East-West record that Paul Butterfield did in the late 60s with Elvin Bishop and Michael Bloomfield. And from then on, I began to go out and try to search the bins in the record stores for blues artists and then started listening to John Lee Hooker.
Fresh Air
'SNL' Turns 50: Aykroyd, Franken, Zweibel & Lovitz
And we had a tremendous booking process. agent in Ottawa, Canada, where I grew up. That's the capital of that great, great nation. And my parents worked for the government up there. And I was a kind of a son of government workers up there. And there was a club called Le Hibou, which was right on Sussex Drive near where the prime minister lives. And we had a booker there named Harvey Glatt.
Fresh Air
'SNL' Turns 50: Aykroyd, Franken, Zweibel & Lovitz
And he brought in all of the great blues stars of the age. So that as a teenager, I jammed behind Muddy Waters when S.P. Leary refused to take the drum kit. And he said, is there anybody out there that's a drummer? And I walked up and I started to play and Muddy turns to me and he goes, keep that beat going, boy. You make Muddy feel good. I mean, this was part of my early exposure.
Fresh Air
'SNL' Turns 50: Aykroyd, Franken, Zweibel & Lovitz
And then I saw Paul Butterfield and Charlie Musselwhite and You know, all these great players. And it was, I guess, just through the insight of this guy who was, you know, booking for the college crowd up there. And then listening to the black radio stations in Boston and Detroit and New York. This was, you know, these were sort of all part of my exposures, I guess.
Fresh Air
'SNL' Turns 50: Aykroyd, Franken, Zweibel & Lovitz
Well, my dad used to pour over the newspapers and look for... record collections that were used. So he would go and he'd see that some guy in Ottawa or Hull or where we were living there, would be selling 100 records. He'd just go out and buy them all. So we were listening to anything from Glenn Miller to Mario Lanza, lots of Broadway soundtracks and stuff.
Fresh Air
'SNL' Turns 50: Aykroyd, Franken, Zweibel & Lovitz
But I think my father really influenced me when he started to get into the Jack Hilton, Ray Noble, Freddie Gardner, English swing band music. That was really something because, you know, the value of horns was there. And then later, as I started to buy, of course, was the Beatles and the Stones and the Animals and then the Paul Butterfield record.
Fresh Air
'SNL' Turns 50: Aykroyd, Franken, Zweibel & Lovitz
But my dad was into the swing band music, as many people were in Canada at that time.
Fresh Air
'SNL' Turns 50: Aykroyd, Franken, Zweibel & Lovitz
And seeing guys on stage in my high school imitating Mick Jagger. imitating the animals.
Fresh Air
'SNL' Turns 50: Aykroyd, Franken, Zweibel & Lovitz
I wanted to be Paul Butterfield and Charlie Musselwhite, and I used to
Fresh Air
'SNL' Turns 50: Aykroyd, Franken, Zweibel & Lovitz
walk around in a long trench coat, a long brown trench coat with shades, and I'd slick my hair back, and I'd try to find any little band up in the bars up in the Gatineau and up in Ottawa and Hull and where I was living, and I would get on stage with them, and they'd be country bands, and I would turn to them and say, well, can you do it like this?
Fresh Air
'SNL' Turns 50: Aykroyd, Franken, Zweibel & Lovitz
And I would kind of show them a basic, you know, 8, 10, 12-bar blues pattern, and then we'd just take off from there. And, of course, I was posing as Paul Butterfield. Yeah. Absolutely. And then my friend Gary O'Dwyer, who is now a school principal up in Coburg, Ontario, he was pretending to be Eric Burden. And I had, you know, the math whiz in class in grade 11 was pretending to be Mick Jagger.
Fresh Air
'SNL' Turns 50: Aykroyd, Franken, Zweibel & Lovitz
So everybody was posing and it was all based on rock and roll and music and blues then, all of it.
Fresh Air
'SNL' Turns 50: Aykroyd, Franken, Zweibel & Lovitz
I played harp mostly and sang. Yeah, the drumming was sporadic, but, you know, I filled in. for bands now and again when I was growing up.
Fresh Air
'SNL' Turns 50: Aykroyd, Franken, Zweibel & Lovitz
In 1973, John came up to Canada to recruit for the National Lampoon Radio Hour. And I was in Second City with Gilda Radner and with John Candy. And John came in to Toronto, and he joined us on the set of the Second City stage, and we did an improv set.
Fresh Air
'SNL' Turns 50: Aykroyd, Franken, Zweibel & Lovitz
And then we went back to my very famous speakeasy called the 505, which opened after 1 o'clock after the Liquor Control Board of Ontario closed most of the bars in the province. We had a bar at the corner of Queen and River at 505 Queen Street, and all the streetcar drivers and cops from, like, outlying regions and waiters and waitresses and dancers would come to drink.
Fresh Air
'SNL' Turns 50: Aykroyd, Franken, Zweibel & Lovitz
And I had a record on by the Downchild Blues Band out of Toronto, Donnie Walsh, an incredible seminal artist out of Canada. And John and I were listening to it, and John said, what is this? It's a great record. I said, oh, it's just a local blues band. Blues, huh? I'm from Chicago. I hear the blues now and again, but I'm into heavy metal, he says.
Fresh Air
'SNL' Turns 50: Aykroyd, Franken, Zweibel & Lovitz
I said, well, John, you show me heavy metal, and I'll show you the blues. So we started to kind of talk about it and listen, and Howard Shore was there that night. He's, of course, the great Oscar-winning composer of the Lord of the Rings trilogy music. He was the original musical director on Saturday Night Live, and he was in Toronto.
Fresh Air
'SNL' Turns 50: Aykroyd, Franken, Zweibel & Lovitz
at that time and had dropped by the bar and he said, yeah, you guys should start a band and you could call it the Blues Brothers. And we just went, bink, bink. And we started to correspond. I didn't go back to New York with John.
Fresh Air
'SNL' Turns 50: Aykroyd, Franken, Zweibel & Lovitz
He'd managed to get Gilda to go back with him, but we kept in touch on the phone and we started to look at material and develop material and we did our first gig in New York in the Lone Star Cafe and our backup band It was Willie Nelson with Mickey Raphael, one of the greatest harmonica players ever. And Willie understood what we were trying to do, like so many that came along and joined us.
Fresh Air
'SNL' Turns 50: Aykroyd, Franken, Zweibel & Lovitz
They understood that, okay, these guys aren't the greatest musicians or singers or dancers, but what they are are great front men. and they love and respect the music. So the hat and glasses are from the John Lee Hooker album House of the Blues. He wears those shades and that hat on the cover there. The suits, the black jacket and thin tie and white shirts were because...
Fresh Air
'SNL' Turns 50: Aykroyd, Franken, Zweibel & Lovitz
You know, a lot of artists in the 60s kind of, you know, who were progressive and maybe were getting in trouble with the law, like Lenny Bruce wanted to look straight. And so it was kind of trying to get that IRS look together to kind of fool the straights was where that came from. One of my first jobs in broadcasting was working for CITY TV.
Fresh Air
'SNL' Turns 50: Aykroyd, Franken, Zweibel & Lovitz
In Toronto, which was this whole new concept in urban television that really, basically today, your news desk, your news desks across America, Channel 7, 4, 2, wherever you want to be, network. with the graphics and the, the presence of the, the, the, the, the seemingly sort of active presence of the newscaster. This is from Moses Nimer, C I C I T Y TV.
Fresh Air
'SNL' Turns 50: Aykroyd, Franken, Zweibel & Lovitz
He basically changed the whole format and the whole delivery of, of, of news in North America. And I worked for his station. I was a game show announcer and I also did the, uh, uh, the, um, you know, the shot box announcing. So I actually had to do that fast rap stuff for, you know, for car companies and beer companies and all that.
Fresh Air
'SNL' Turns 50: Aykroyd, Franken, Zweibel & Lovitz
So, sure, I was actually doing it professionally when I first started out. I was hired by none other than Ivan Reitman, who we went on to do the Ghostbusters thing together.
Fresh Air
'SNL' Turns 50: Aykroyd, Franken, Zweibel & Lovitz
I was, yeah. I was a mailman in Toronto when I first moved there. I knew I wanted to go to Toronto, work with Lorne Michaels again. I had gone there to do a special with him when I was 19 years old. Went back to Carleton University. Couldn't concentrate. You know, I had to be in show business. Dropped out of school, much to the chagrin of my parents.
Fresh Air
'SNL' Turns 50: Aykroyd, Franken, Zweibel & Lovitz
I got a job driving mail truck in Toronto, and then I shifted to the broadcasting. And, yeah, I was a shot box announcer for about a year there with City TV and hired by Ivan Reitman and recommended by Lauren. Lauren said, you should hire this kid. So Lauren Michaels has been instrumental in my career from, you know, basically age 17.
Fresh Air
'SNL' Turns 50: Aykroyd, Franken, Zweibel & Lovitz
Oh, yeah. No, no. My aunt, the late Hélène Goujon, she was a lovely woman, my mother's sister. She was, in fact, the Julia Child of Canada.
Fresh Air
'SNL' Turns 50: Aykroyd, Franken, Zweibel & Lovitz
She had, yeah. She had a television show and a cuisine shop in Montreal during the 60s. And she – I went to her house for lunch and she was a master gourmet chef and she was very well known for – she was on the – uh, the network, the TV up there.
Fresh Air
'SNL' Turns 50: Aykroyd, Franken, Zweibel & Lovitz
And, uh, she said she was making a fish soup and I saw she dropped the whole fish into the blender with the bones and everything, you know, she said, Oh no, no, no. Where are the bones? You pick the bones out. Like you're reading a filet. Don't worry about it. And I never forgot that.
Fresh Air
'SNL' Turns 50: Aykroyd, Franken, Zweibel & Lovitz
And then, you know, many years later, I was sitting with Paul Simon and Lorne Michaels and Elaine and Chevy and John and I were there at Belushi Simon, Paul Simon, me, Lorne and Chevy. And we're sitting there, uh,
Fresh Air
'SNL' Turns 50: Aykroyd, Franken, Zweibel & Lovitz
And, you know, we were just kind of laughing over things, and I was thinking about that, and, you know, we were eating a meal, and I thought, yeah, I got this idea for, you know, a scene, you know, basimatic. And when I said that, Paul Simon, you know, who's probably one of the most brilliant people ever in entertainment, he started to really laugh, and it's hard to get Paul to laugh.
Fresh Air
'SNL' Turns 50: Aykroyd, Franken, Zweibel & Lovitz
You know, because he's so intellectual, so smart. You know, you got to be at a certain level. When he started to snort, I said, man, I got something. If I can make Paul laugh, it's this easy. And I went away and I wrote the scene based upon that night and my aunt's real experience with the fish in a blender. And I remember a woman wrote me a letter. She was very upset.
Fresh Air
'SNL' Turns 50: Aykroyd, Franken, Zweibel & Lovitz
that I would change the molecular state of the fish from solid to liquid on television. She was really, really upset about that. And I wrote her back, and I said, well, you know, this was actually the way that my aunt made fish soup.