I park my old wounded Mustang at a meter on 47th Street, between Indiana and Prairie, in front of Queen of the Sea Fish: Gumbo-Filet-Chicken. Beyond the alley is the Welcome Day Center for retarded children. A few, their eyes sadly somewhere far away, are being directed aboard a double-parked school bus by a social worker. Across the street in a row are Sweetback's Cocktail Lounge, a dead, iron-gated storefront, Honey Wigs and Loans Palace, with an Aztec pyramid of fine, unclaimed watches agleam in tis window. From an outdoor speaker from the record shop next to Queen of the Sea, disco gushes into the street.
I get out of my Mustang and lock it. No sane car thief would touch it with a stick, since it looks like it's been stolen and abandoned twice already. But I'm fond of it, and this is a tough neighborhood.
I feel like Kolchak the Night Stalker, a fellow Chicago reporter and pursuer of the bizarre and supernatural. And I am in these unfamiliar precincts on this clear Alpine October day because unreality has dripped 47th and Prairie. It's known by many names, but most call it...The Blues Brothers movie.
It's been impossible to be in Chicago this autumn and not hear stray, horrible reports of the monster's movements. It's at Cooley High breaking all the windows. It just dropped a Ford Pinto 200 feet into the Chicago River. At dawn, one Sunday morning, it had all the cop cars in the world chasing a beat-up ex-black-and-white around Lake Shore Drive. It's even gone marauding into the far "burb," reportedly destroying an entire shopping mall out near Rockford. And now it's striking again at 47th and Prairie
Using their best S.W.A.T. tactics, the Chicago police have cordoned off the four square blocks surrounding the "event" and closed them to traffic. Squad cars sit in the middle of intersections, their blue bubble-gum lights silently bleep-bleeping. Closer in, a police line of sawhorses keeps the gathered crowd storefront, where the monster has momentarily stopped.
On the outside, beyond the police sawhorses, there are all these black people, local folk doing what comes naturally, which is to say gawking like crazy. Asks one guy of his buddies, rhetorically amazed: "They shootin' a movie here on Forty-seventh? What's the worl' comin' to?" "Shit, I grew up on Forty-seventh! Why ain't I no fuckin' movie? "'Cause yo' face break the fuckin' lens, that's why!'" Short Fat Fannie in an acre of polka dots: "I've got to see Robert Redford!"
What's curious about this is that all these Chicago black people have gathered to gawk at all these white people from California who, inside their charmed sawhorse circle, are running around hollering at each other, talking urgently into two-way radios, messing with all this outer-space equipment, making themselves a movie about...black Chicago music.
You tell me
In the changing light, cameramen's assistants in Sassoon jeans keep putting thick monocles to their eyes and squinting into the sun. Says one to another, passing the time, "D'ya know what a Pygmy whore is?"
Other guy shakes his head no.
"A little fucker about this tall!".
His hand measures off knee-height as he waits for his friend's laugh.
Instead, the other guy looks around nervously and pops right back: "Y'know, this isn't exactly the neighborhood for that."
Whaddaya mean? It's like a block party"
Over on the corner, where the real people are standing, there's a fading, monochromatic street mural painted on the brick wall--stylized WPA people standing, around a large, curled 2001 fetus floating in the middle of things. Not bad, but mere reality. Across the street where the cameras are pointing--zowee! The corner storefront has become a Chicago pawnshop, Hollywood style. Ray's Music Exchange. Ray Charles, proprietor. The mural on its wall fairly leaps out and feels up your eyes. Portraits of R&B greats colorfully ablaze on a psychedelic background. The very best street art money can buy.
Two director's chairs sit in the middle of the street. John Landis and Robert K. Weiss are stenciled on their backs. Weiss is the producer. He's the bearlike fellow wandering around in the fatigue cap, elaborately tooled cowboy boots and a Chicago cop's leather jacket with the patch that says Chicago Police still on it. New Hollywood. Landis is the one who's leaping about and shouting a lot. Still not even 30; yet, with the enormous success of Animal House, he's already something of a Wunderkind. But he looks less like a hotshit young director than a grad student in Paper & Pulp Technology. With dark horn-rims, a full beard, blue down vest, saggy-ass Levi's and long-haul hiking boots, he suggests Buddy Holly newly returned from a backpacking trip--not the head honcho on what, at $30 million-plus, is one of the highest-budgeted comedies in history.
Finally, between takes, when publicist Saul Kahan tells him I'm here, Landis comes bounding over to say hello. He is probably the most pleasantly manic individual I've ever met; my guess is that there's a little Labrador retriever in him. My simple corny question, "How do you like Chicago?" launches him into an unsolicited testimonial on the visual wonders of the city. He tends to talk in machine-gun bursts of !!! "It's a great city!" he says. "Beautiful! But nobody know it! Do you know why? It's because they never let anybody make movies here! Back in the Fifties they shot an Untouchables segment here, and it showed a cop taking a bribe. Daley saw it, and after that, he wouldn't let anybody in! But Chicago's great! And this movie's gonna let people know that!!!"
The scene I've been invited to watch them shoot isn't the usual felony-level mayhem. It doesn't even involve Belushi and Aykroyd, the actual Blues Brothers. And it isn't even funny--well, not ha-ha funny. But it is fairly strange, at least you've lived in Chicago as long as I have. This neighborhood is presently part of the South and West Side black ghettos, Chicago boasting the distinction of having several. It's knifepoint poor and gritty--the very stuff of horrible suburban nightmares about the lurking terrors of the city. It's turf that even North Side white trash such as myself generally, and wisely avoid, except for occassional expeditions to the blues clubs--excursions regarded by nonbeliever friends not as necessary religious pilgrimages to the source, the fountain, but rather as wantonly unhinged exercises in courting death. In Chicago mythology, these are some of the original mean streets.
So it is both wonderful and weird to hear playback speakers crank up a Ray Charles original that could have been yanked out of his Hit the Road Jack period in the early Sixties, to hear that music fill the street, and then to see, pouring exuberantly from Ray's Music Exchange, dancers, dozens of them, spilling into the street, filling this rough intersection with joy unconfined and well choreographed. Dear Lord, it's just like Martha and the Vandellas prophesized! People actually dancing in the streets! Life as it ought to be! Pardon my exuberance; I know these people are getting paid to do this. And between takes, these spontaneous, happy-go-lucky creatures all stand around checking their watches, sipping coffee and shivering their asses off, since the temperature's been dropping all day and and white poofs of clouds increasingly interrupt the bright sunshine. I mean, on film this may look like just another Busby Berkeley Strike Up the Band production number extravaganza. But live on the spot, it's terrific. People actually dancing in the streets! Regular grim reality has been put on hold, suspended, while an alternate reality takes over, if only for moments on a single afternoon.
Many weeks later, I conduct a much-postponed interview with Dan Aykroyd and ask him to supply his version of how this fantasy world came about. He tells me, with very little prompting: "John and I used to warm the audience up at Saturday Night Live with it. He used to sing rock stuff, and he introduced me to the Allman Brothers and Led Zeppelin. I introduced him to James Cotton and some of the white blues bands that were working up North, like the Lamont Cranston Band. He picked up on the blues thing and I picked up on the rock thing, and we decided to put an act together.
"We just decided we'd go out and sing a couple of old blues numbers--and why don't we wear the suits that you wore when you were doing Roy Orbison? That was the discussion. John did Roy Orbison once. He wore the thin tie and white shirt and black suit. And then the shades, you know? And we just added the hat to it and the digital watches and the locked briefcase...
"And from there it was just kind of obvious. A sort of myth began to evolve about these characters. We talked about where they'd come from in Chicago, everything. And I went away and thought about it; John went away and put together the band. I started to write it up, and afterward we both came back to the city. "He had a rough idea of who he wanted in the band, although the band wasn't set yet. At the time we sold teh story to the movies, we didn't know who was gonna be in the band at all. It was just all sort of conceptual. So we sold it on the phone. They said fine, we'll do it. Then Landis came in and talked to me at Saturday Night one night, and siad, I want this, this and this in the movie. I took some notes, and said, fine, you'll have it. And I sort of cut the script to what he wanted--including of course, the thought and myth that we knew.
"So from the beginning, it ws like Landis and I putting it together. Landis saying, I want the biggest car chase ever at the end of the movie, and I went, o-kay!. And I said, well, I want to jump a swing bridge. And he said, fine. And you know, I turned in a three-hundred-plus-page script."
It is early December before I next encounter the Blues Brothers monster. Like nearly everyone else I know, it has moved to Los Angeles. I get on the plane and fly for four hours through dismal slate skies over a continent frozen solid and frosted with snow, until reaching the final western mountains, covered with a fuzz of evergreens resembling a three-day beard on a pioneer's cheeks, and into...sunshine. That peculiar, alien L.A. white, like spoiled mayonnaise. Flowering begonias and rampant ivy beds border the freeway, and there are blond people everywhere, strolling along at sweatpoint in cutoffs and T-shirts--proof of a friend's theory that L.A. is populated by the descendents of generations of dumb, beautiful hillbillies who came to Hollywood to be stars and wound up as re-born dog groomers, gas-station attendants and car-battery salesmen.
I know it's corny to pick on L.A., but it really is a lot of fun. On the Budget Rent-A-Car radio--which, here on the rim of the future,is AM/FM stereo inside a stick-shift Toyota Liftback wagon--the two pick-hit FM stations seem to have melded into one. The one at the left is into Terminal Mellow--when they really want to tear things up they put on a J.J. Cale cut. Another, at the far right, among the other monorities, has a format that seems to be an all New New Wave non-stop marathon--the squarest they get is a Blondie cut.
Welcome to Southern California.
They're shooting the climactic concert sequence at the venerable Hollywood Palladium on Sunset. Among landmarks, it forms a triangle with the round Capitol Records tower and the low, brown theater that's home to the Merv Griffin Show, in front of which I park my Rent-A-Toyota. I walk toward the Palladium lobby and notice that much of the crowd seems to be splitting, drifting outside. Many end up in an accidental line, which sparks the interest of a blond surfer type. He asks, "They gettin' paid?"
This being Hollywood, the crowd, you see, isn't actually people, it's paid extras. Someone tells me , with great pride, that while half the audience were winners of a listener's contest on KMET, the other half were recruited from a local unemployment office. Whispers my source, looking around first: "We wanted, you know, black people."
Once Saul, the publicists designates me a real person to a persistent security guard who has detained me, I go inside and much happens. They're taking a long break in shooting to relight the stage. Landis rising, manic, comes bopping over. He's in the same saggy jeans, but is now sporting a complementary saggy blue blazer. He's all over the place, explaining, with a dropping-arm gesture, how Cab Calloway was terrific yesterday: "Fifty years, right on the floor."
I take this to be, if somewhat obscure, showbiz praise, and don't find out until seeing rushes the next day that he's referring to a low twirls during Minnie the Moocher, which C.C. patented an easy 50 years ago, and which he still athletically executes.
Even the crowd loved him," he tells me. "I thought they'd be disappointed."
Then he relates that he's fooling them at the moment. The Blues Brothers are due to come out shortly. Indicating the audience, he says, "They don't know it, but I've got every camera trained on them! John and Danny are going to do Soul Man--the least favorite of their songs--and I'm going to shoot reaction shots!"
Still lots of !!! in Landis' vicinity.
But first the door prizes.
Since the rare reward of this experience for the members of the crowd is about $25 for the day and a lot of dull hanging out, the potential restless beast must be appeased. So they will be fed some door prizes during this one of the many glacial lulls--and then there will be a song from the very BBs...
Saul, meanwhile, is introducing me to everyone in sight.
I am confronted with a white-haired gent with huge bony hands.
"This is Shotgun Britton. He did Citizen Kane, Grable, you name it."
Shotgun rips off a couple of opening blasts about how great Cab Calloway is, how he used to see C.C. right here in the Palladium, years ago. Then he tells me, "Shit, I been doing this fuckin' thing for fifty years. I'm comin' out with a fuckin' book. It's called Quarterback with a Powderpuff!"
Shotgun is a veteran makeup man and what we call an easy interview.
"I ws a football player. Hardin-Simmons in Abilene, Texas. Joan Crawford got me int his business. I knew her father. He used to live across the street from me in Abiline, Texas. Tom LeSeur. Fuckin' Tom. He never left Texas in his life. I called up his wife when he died. And she said, 'Shotgun, he never left. He never saw his daughter.' And these people are writin' about that. I'm one of the sons of bitches who signed the goddam adoption papers for Christina--and that cunt writin' that book. I didn't ever read it. I don't need anybody to tell me what Joan Crawford did. She did more for me--cameramen and electricians and gardners and grips and sound...than any son of a bitch in this motion-picture business.
This I take as criticism of Mommie Dearest, which I haven't read . I try to get his considered assessment of how things are going on this one.
These two guys are a rare breed," he says of Aykroyd and Belushi, "the bright people. They're bright, you know. They can perform if they're bright." He speaks highly of Landis, too. I ask him if there have been any problems, fuck-ups, feuds, whatever, but Shotgun knows better than to piss in the tent. He does, however, say cryptically of Landis, "John's gonna step on his cock if he ain't careful. It's a jungle out there." Then he adds, "They're rookies you understand. There's not a two-hundred hitter on the ball club. I'm very flattered they call me the Stargell--in this league, if you know what I mean."
As a closer Shotgun says, "I was under contract to Jane Russell for ten years. And so I say, I've had ten years with Jane, ten years with Bob Hope and ten years with Frank Sinatra. That's thirty years of my life, and I've got about forty more. Somebody says, 'When you gonna retire?' I say, 'When I get your age--if you want to try me, well, let's go to Fist City.'"
Colorful
Through the tall curtains at the back, separating the lobby from the hall, come uniformed troopers with bayoneted rifles at the ready, a mix of Illinois State Patrolemen and the National Guard. The crowd, like a good crowd, whistles and boos as they file in. Onstage, Landis explains through a bullhorn, "These are real people, like yourselves--not the police! You don't really see 'em--they're just hear to be scary!"
Suddenly, the Blues Brothers hit the stage. As happens sometimes at rock concerts, a tangible rush fills the air as they make their appearance in full sinister regalia--cheap, black K Mart parolee suits, shades and hats... All seriousness, Elwood offers up the locked briefcase chained to his arm. While the band vamps, Jake produces the key, and Elwoods harp is ceremoniously produces from inside. Jake briefly reverts to Belushi, who checks out the crowd and says through the microphone, "What an attractive crowd! They pass out those hash joints I rolled?" Cheers, shouts of "No, where are they?"
Aykroyd, finding a live mike and a captive audience before him, launches into spontaneous SatNiteLive shtick and begins auctioning off a Styrofoam coffee cup. "We got five hundred, who'll gimme six...?"
Guy in audience: "How much do you go for?"
Aykroyd: [deadpan] "Seven dollars and ninety-eight cents' worth of chemicals. Just cut me open and see."
And Belusi can't help observing through his live mike, "Cheesh! Lotsa good-looking girls here!" Hands in pockets. "How many here from Chicago?" Scattered cheers. Belushi: "Hyde Park? Elwood? South Side?"
Belushi and Aykroyd fill the dead time by introducing various luminaries, beginning with Landis. Then Shotgun is brought onstage and Aykroyd announces, all seriousness: "Citizen Kane...Notorious......Jane Russell's makeup man for years..." Like he's reciting a pedigree. Then Belushi does the honors for John Candy, the very large SCTV gourmet and playboy Johnny LeRue, playing Mercer the parole officer in this one. For the third time, Belushi observes into the mike, "There's some very attractive women here. I can't believe it..."
I can't either.
Standing by the stage when they finally begin shooting the crowd-reaction shots, I have a chance to check out the audience.
And there's something wrong.
This is supposed to be an Illinois R&B show crowd. Pick your fantasy 19-year-old heartthrob, and somewhere among these 2500 people, there he/she/it is --gorgeous people of all genders and persuasions. The first few rows are salted with 150 professional extras, so the people in them are especially beautiful. There's a busty young Grace Kelly in the second row and , near her, a tall, thin, heartbreaking girl with a Modigiliani neck and lean model's arms and a pair of denim honeybuns that won't quit.
Pick your fantasy, like I said.
I especially like the girls dressed in what look like spray-on iridescent slacks. They look like sexy dragonflies and glow-in-the-dark green beetles in Forties wraparound heels. One with, well, tits is identified to me as a recent Oui model who, in the absolutely factual story accompanying her pictures, was definitely described as a bona-fide Israeli but, today, at least appears to be a would-be actress in Hollywood with a not so would-be chest.
More waiting and milling.
Then it's door-prize time, with Belushi and Aykroyd pulling slips of paper from a clear-plastic globe, announcing the numbers and waiting for the lucky winners to come up and claim their prizes, just like at Bank Nite.
Announces Aykroyd, "Mitch Bell will take home the stereo. He says he's going to burn it in celebration of the Eighties. And now we have a...live goat..."
Instead, they give away headphones.
"That's all for now," says Aykroyd, "but a little bit later, we'll be giving out a few ounces of radium.
We all sit around some more and sweat some more, while one light is adjusted in the back booth. David, the assistant director--his function being, among other things, to be some combination of drill sergeant/cop/managing editor/conveyor of bad news--takes this opportunity to inform the crowd of something:
"There's been a fire or two in the papertowel basket in the bathroom. So, to be sure that the building doesn't burn down--listen to what I say--there will be a policeman outside the bathroom. So, in case a lot of fire and smoke pours out of the bathroom, we can call the fire department. They--he, she--will not go in the bathroom unless there is an emergency. I am being clear about this, I hope? We don't want to start fires--that's all we don't want to do."
They are ready to shoot at last, and Landis explains again to the crowd what it's doing here: "This is not a rock-'n-roll concert. I have to stress that again. This is the Palace Hotel in Lake Wazapamani, Illinois, and you've come to see a rhythm-and-blues review. They get pretty rowdy once they start, but this is not a rock concert--it's a very different thing. If you have a bag or a book or a newspaper, put it under your seat, OK? If you have a knife or gun, you're under arrest. If you have drugs, I'd like to buy them..."
He's trying to get the crowd not to react to the vamping band and the entrance of the Blues Brothers. The joke is that the audience sits on their hands and couldn't care less.
"You're not impressed at all", Landis tells them. "Who are these guys? From the CIA?"
Adds Aykroyd, after all have crossed their arms and sit rigid: "Everybody should look like Secret Service Men--a little menace, kinda hostile. Very, very still. Like death. This will be a major laugh to audiences around the world, and this is your laugh."
Yet another delay. I'm beginning to wonder how people in the glamorous movie business puts up with the boredom. Landis starts rapping to the audience like they're all one friend of his and they're hanging out getting high and trading stories. He tells them about shooting in Chicago and having 56 cop cars at his disposal.
"Can you imagine the power? I could say, 'All right, you guys, get in your cars and go do this--'" He adds an an afterthought, "It was one of the high points of my life."
I can dig it. Like other unwitting longhairs during the famous '68 Chicago convention, I've never forgotten or forgiven being tear-gassed and chased through alleys by Chicago's finest. We Serve and Protect. Right--each other. I'd never particularly trusted cops but, in '68, I discovered I had a reason.
Landis tells me later, "I don't trust police. Except when I'm suing people. Then I go, 'Hey, if you can't trust the police, who can you trust?' In Chicago the police were told to cooperate with us a hundred percent."
I think, but do not say, that this just might be because Murphy Dunne, who plays one of the band members, just happens to be the son of George Dunne, who, as President of the Cook County Board of Commissioners, pretty much ran the city for Mayor Daley, and who is still probably the most powerful person in the city government after Jane Byrne. Murphy is talented and a nice guy and all that, but still, in Chicago these things don't hurt. I flash on this as Landis continues:
"So I found myelf in the position of saying, 'Say, can I have that sidewalk cleared? And they were yelling at everyone, 'All right, move your fucking asses off the sidewalk.'
"There was an officer, and I won't say his name, but I had himon Maxwell Street. We got into a fight on the set. It was real interesting. I arrive on Maxwell Street, and there are like six hundred extras. They're almost all black. And the guy's got a loudspeaker. This is how he starts the morning: 'All right, if anyone fucks up, I'm gonna put them in jail! Do you understand me? You're going to jail!'
"And I'm going, 'Hey, wait! What are you talking about? They're going to work for us!'
"And he turns to me and says through the loudspeaker, 'You don't understand these people. We're not dealing with normal people.'
"And I shout, 'What are we dealing with, Negroes?' And we had this huge screaming match. It was incredible."
Anticlimactically, after all this waiting and preparation, the crowd does its take in two quick tries. Landis tells them, "Boy, are you good. Thank you."
Aykroyd says, "I'm gonna go give Belushi a message now, and then we'll be back and do a few songs for ya."
Cheers as they split to their star Winnebagos on the street. And I decide to quit for the day. The endless hanging out is driving me crazy. On the way out, one of the surfer extras is telling a bored girl, "You just gotta resign yourself to the whole thing; that's what I did." He adds as an afterthought, "I woulda stayed home and got high all day anyway."