They went through the Saturday Night auditions together in the summer of 1975. It was a doubtful business for a number of reasons: Aykroyd still wasn't convinced that he wanted or needed this show. Also, the longer the auditions and the videotaped screen tests went on, the more both Aykroyd and Belushi began to fret about all the rigamarole of television. And for all of Lorne Michaels's initial enthusiasm about Aykroyd, he now seemed doubtful about hiring both of them for the cast. ("There was never any doubt in my mind that Danny was going to be on the show," Michaels recalls. "With John, there was what I feared might be an 'attitide problem'--that would be John's phrase. He was the only one that I wasn't absolutely certain of right away. I just didn't know if he would work in an ensemble. Chevy kept lobbying for John, and saying, 'He's a lot of trouble, but he's funny.'") Finally, word was getting around that the NBC executives were anxious about Aykroyd and Belushi--anxious that this very rough, very cocky, very unruly duo would develop separate channels of authority within the show. Comedic gifts aside, there was something harum-scarum about Aykroyd and Belushi when you saw them together.
But here they were, sitting side by side in Lorne Michaels's seventeenth-floor office at Thirty Rockefeller Plaza, and Michaels looking at them with fascination and apprehension, as though they were good bad boys indeed--Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, reckoning to cause trouble and high adventure in the executive hallways of NBC. It wasn't an inconceivable thought (nor did the eventual reality contradict such a comparison), for here was aykroyd--this bright-eyed, slingshot-happy, and halo-and-mischief twenty-two year-old whose face could spontaneously light u as if he were reading about doubloons in a priate book, and whose deep, blood-oath voice could erupt into the scariest Cave Hollow cackle this side of the river--who knew what kind of sly, fence-whitewashing operations he's set up at Thirty Rockefeller Plaza. And Belushi--bearded, anti-TV, potentially violent--well, it was questionable whether the man could be tamed, civilized for a national network TV audience. There were limits to what the NBC executives would approve for the cast of even an audacious late-night live comedy show that would be broadcast without censorship devices such as the trusty seven-second delay. And there warn't nothing like this harem-scarum Tom 'n' Huck pair in all of television--who knew when they'd slick up their swords and guns, hijack the show, and light out for the territory?
But this much was clear from the auditions and the video screen tests taped on September 17, 1975: They had unusual talent. Powered by a romantic sensibility that delighted in, among other things, mysticism, alien creatures, police uniforms, railroads, and darkness, Aykroyd's imagination was visionary. As a mimic and an impersonator, he was spontaneous and bizarrely original. Like a dish antenna, he seemed to be tuned in simultaneously to all the voices of the planet--and maybe even those beyond. Mid-sentence he could shift from one regional (or galactic) dialect to another with perfect pitch and fidelity. His characterizations (among those presented on videotape for Michaels: a French-Canadian lumberjack; a Louisiana crab 'n' gator fisherman recently held captive in a UFO; a halting Tom Snyder; a smarmy TV salesman for "a very personal product for men--Lloyd Manganero Deltoid Spray") were authentic and startling, chiefly because of the way he disappeared within them. Aykroyd was seamless; when he stepped into character, he zipped up the front and vanished.
Belushi, on the other hand, unzipped characters to expose himself, to put his own writhing soul on display. Beneath his gruff, marauding -highwayman exterior, Belushi was at heart urgently romantic, and therefore able to create within comedy an emotional life that waylaid one's attention, ambushed one's affection. His face was as beguiling and versatile as Aykroyd's voice. Capable of the facial equivalent of vocal mimicry, it was a protean, transnational visage which might turn up anywhere--on the Sphinx, the Mona Lisa, the Statue of Liberty, even Mount Rushmore. His eyebrows seemed destined to become national treasures. Physically, Belushi was an unexpected, brute presence in anyone's life. While Aykroyd was the more cerebral humorist of the two, Belushi was the more corporal. He had a sensual command of full-body comedy which allowed all one hundred and eight-five pounds of him to become a wild samurai warrior, slashing the air with a curtain rod for a sword--which is exactly what Lorne Michaels saw during Belushi's live audition that summer.
To Michaels, they seemed like fictional boy heroes sprung to life. He was struck by the four-year difference in their ages: "For me, Danny was a boy. He had the best of youth. He had total enthusiasm, total dedication, and honor--all the virtues of the old youth novels. Danny also had the Catholic good boy/bad boy, altar boy/criminal thing, but on the whole he was reliable and honorable and decent, and in no way corrupt. Not that John was corrupt, but next to Danny's youth and enthusiasm, John seemed to possess almost older-boy stuff. He knew his way around. He had street smarts without coming from the streets. Also, he loved Danny--always."
To Aykroyd and Belushi, it seemed that all this audioning had been going on too long. They were impatient. Did they have the job or not? What was this producer doing? (In fact, Michaels had already selected them, but had to wait for executive approval.) They figured that either they were going to be the last cast members hired, or that only one of them, probably Aykroyd, would be hired--Belushi had made such an impression telling a TV producer, who loved television, that television was garbage. ("Lorne dicked us around for so long, and John and I were quite embittered about it, but that was great too, because it sort of unified the two of us.") As it turned out, both were hired and both were the last to sign their five-year contracts; Aykroyd remained skeptical about the show's longevity.
Saturday Night had its debut in October 1975. During the first two months that it aired, Aykroyd commuted between the set of a motion picture in Canada and the NBC studios, sleeping, when he was in New York, on a foam slab at the foot of the bed in the small apartment that Belushi was sharing with his girl friend, Judy Jacklin. (John and Judy, high school sweethearts, were married in 1976).) Danny was welcome at the foot of John and Judy's bed indefinitely, so he decided not to get his own apartment until he was sure that this show was going to fly.
By Christmas, the word was out, mostly among younger New Yorkers who knew what was in and therefore treated it like a secret that the rest of the world had yet to discover: The best place to be on Saturday night was at home in front of your television, tuning in to this hip new comedy show which began at eleven-thirty, precisely the hour when you were supposed to be out somwhere, partying. But that didn't matter now, because this show was like a party--a wildly funny unpredictable, slightly out-of-control party--to which you were invited back every Saturday night. It was also the kind of party everybody talked about the morning after, reciting the most seditious lines of topical satire, so you didn't want to miss out on any of it. Most of all, it was the kind of party you had to be at because it was happening right now, live. Even the established New York Times called it "the hottest, hippest, most daring comedy show on television"; the press secretary of the President of the United States (Ron Nessen), of all people, appeared as one of the show's guest hosts; and the Nielsen ratings, which awarded the first broadcast a 23 percent share of the television audience, were climbing every week.
Still, Aykroyd and Belushi were not convinced. Okay, so the ratings and high-priced advertising slots were great for NBC, but for themselves, as performers, they wanted to know if their material was hitting out there--in the heartland. Never mind the holy ratings; the only way to get real audience feedback was to go out there themselves...as investigators. They'd been cooped up all year long with this frantic weekly pace at Thirty Rockefeller Plaza, so when the show's first summer break came around, they decided to light out for the territory--to hit the slab and drive across America, polling every summer-session student in every college town they could find.
From Dependable Driveaway they were loaned a car which they were supposed to deliver to an owner in California in no less than five days. The car was in rough shape. A big blue Oldsmobile 98 sedan, it has beaten up side panels, chewed-out upholstery, and a coat hanger for an aerial. Aykroyd, the take-charge, automotive authority in this pair, tinkered under the hood, installed a citizens-band radio and a tape deck, and they were set to go. There was no discussion about who would drive. Aykroyd didn't allow Belushi behind the wheel once during the entire journey. For one thing, Belushi was an erratic driver, prone to multiple distraction. For another, high speed was essential, and Aykroyd's ability to sustain fast, direct, long-distance, endurance driving was legendary (he had once driven from Toronto to Los Angeles, a distance of 2, 523 miles, in thirty-four hours). Anyway, Belushi didn't care who drove--just as long as the fuckin' tape deck works, man...
So up here on the flight deck of the front seat, Aykroyd was in command--aviator sunglasses shielding his eyes, a six-pack of cruising-brewskis resting on the seat, accelerator pedal pressed to the floor--piloting this slugged-up sedan west by southwest. Belushi rode shotgun, which is to say, in the seat of the fearless co-pilot. There would be no idle passengers on this trip. This was no hokey little sightseeing excursion. This was a mission. There was important information to be found out here, local color by the mile, and local characters at every turn in the road--truckers, waitresses, toll-booth trolls, motel hags, subruban shopping-mall snoids, and then, suddenly, when Belsuhi flipped on the two-way radio, there were all these voices, filling up the car with the sound of genuine American citizens, drawling back and forth in this new radio language, the twangy lingo of the road.
Neither one of them had ever used a citizens-band radio before. It was a romantic revelation, a gold mine for a pair of professional mimics. Here was this chatty little machine, humming and crackling with all these gritty, ballad-sad, lonely, all-night cafe characters who were trying to avoid the law. This as the Voice of America--the Voice of Blue Collar Squalor!--and best of all, the two of them could talk back whenever they liked. This was the instrument with which to take America's humor pulse. They didn't know the official CB-vocabulary so they just started yammering away, passing the microphone back and forth, improvising comic bits, impersonating state troopers, experimenting with these drawling, twangy voices. This was incredible--better even than the National Broadcasting Company because they were receiving instant feedback from a far-flung audience. Down in Tennessee, for instance, a no-nonsense trucker with a smooth, charcoal-distillery voice cut in on one of their routines to say: "You boys from New York there gon' take trip over side of this mountain you don't stop foolin' around on the tow-way." Then they realized: Here they were--junior pilots--causing trouble for the senior guys out on the road.
Like campfires and candles, the lights of the nighttime road has a mesmerizing effect, providing the kind of itimacy by which life stories unravel. When Aykroyd wasn't absorbed by learning CB-talk ("Ten-four, good buddy, you got the Black Top Vampire back here...") and when Belushi wasn't wound up, singing along with the Allman Brothers tapes ("...I was born in the back seat of a Greyhound bus, rolling down Highway 41..."), they talked. "We talked about women," Aykroyd remembers. "We talked about Judy and how close John felt to her. He was extremely faithful. He was crazy about her. We talked about our pasts; how come we were in this business; why we liked the things we did. Our interests were juvenile for the most part--machines, cars, the road, meeting good people, travel, watching for UFOs--everything that any good, healthy red-blooded North American boy would like. We loved being on the move, in transit. We were always on a UFO watch."
While they drove, Belushi reminisced about the time when he and his mother and sister had seen some kind of unidentified flying object above a drive-in movie theater in Wisconsin. He described the way this thing had hovered over the drive-in with winking lights and chasing lights and glows and hums. Belushi who was neither an avid UFO researcher nor an embellisher of his own life stories, remembered how he had felt sick to his stomach. Aykroyd replied that stomach sickness was a symptom common to most people who had reported encounters with UFOs. "Oh, yeah--really?" said Belushi, wonder-struck. "That sort of confirms it then, I guess." Awed, they kept their eyes peeled to the wide night sky.
Late at night, they headed for off-road motels, always choosing the scariest, Psycho-type Bates Motel, and always taking just one double room (never separate accomodations) and one pastry-soft king-size bed in which they'd "crash right out like a pair of old geezers." (The following year, they chronicled their second cross-country drive for Rolling Stone, reporting under a dual byline on such archane bits of Americana as he recently discovered toxic fumes at the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel in Philadelphia where, Belushi, armed with a gas mask, had trouble securing a double room: "'Full!"' Belushi screamed. 'With what--corpses? Isn't this the Bellevue-Startford? The Legionnaries' Disease hotel?' The clerk quietly mentioned other hotels, but Belushi was adamant. Planting himself in one of the bulky leather armchairs bolted to the lobby floor, he vowed to stay until he got a room. An hour passed. 'Somebody must have died by now,' he suggested to the clerk.") In New Orleans they stayed with Aykroyd's old friend, David Benoit, who had broken away from his illustrious Canadian family to become a merchant seaman, pipe welder, and steeplejack. ("He had that blue-collar thing which I like in people, and John accepted him right away; it was great to see my close friend, Benoit, and this new friend just click and get along.")
From New Orleans, they took off, with fresh six-packs of Dixie beer and a curl of reefer smoke, across bayou roads overhung with Spanish moss. Then up to Arkansas where they pulled into the University of Little Rock, hoping to scare up some excitement and gauge the reactions of the students to Saturday Night. Unannounced, unshaven, unarmed (but resembling, Aykroyd would later say, the two killers from In Cold Blood), they prowled around the Little Rock campus, figuring that sooner or later somebody would recognize them as famous TV stars. All they were getting were blank looks from kids probably supposing them to be a pair of maudlin alumni back for a nostalgia romp. It was amazing: Nobody knew who they were--nobody! Belushi was even resorting to guerilla tactics: ambushing the cafeteria, sticking his face into classroom windows, bouncing his eyebrows up and down. No recognition. Finally they accosted a group of students--went right up and polled them on the spot. Hey, do you guys watch Saturday Night?...Have you ever heard of Saturday Night? (You morons...) But no-o-o-o-- they had not seen it, though a few of them chirped up about hearing something about a Howard Cosell show called Saturday Night Live.
Well, that was it! Now they really were convinced that this thing at Thirty Rockefeller Plaza was...just a job.
During the next two seasons, it all changed. Even the name expanded: Saturday Night Live was now so well known that the confusion with the Howard Cosell variety show was inconceivable, even in Little Rock. Thirty million people were regularly tuning into the show week after week. The Not Ready for Prime Time Players--Aykroyd, Belushi, Jane Curtin, Garrett Morris, Bill Murray, Laraine Newman, Gilda Radner--were now as well- or better-known than many of the show's guest stars. It had become a a job just trying to put the show on every week, what with all the extracurricular activities around the studio: the newspaper interviews; the magazine cover-story personality profiles; the autograph maniacs; the skinny-tie and upturned-jacket-collar Studio 54 scones who wanted to hang out till dawn, blowing tootski in the offices after the show.
Aykroyd avoided all that. "He didn't want to be famous," says Lorne Michaels. "He was a little frightened of it all. I kept telling him he was getting the biggest break of anyone because he was just allowed to get better without having to deal with the kind of problems Chevy had to cope with--by being on the cover of magazines and being called the next Johnny Carson. So Danny had three quiet years of enormous growth in the shadows because after Chevy left the show, John and Gilda were the next two to catch the glow." Aykroyd continued to live and work as he always had, and to ride his prize hog out on the slab whenever he got the chance. No lear jets or limousines for this man of the road.
Late one night after the show, Aykroyd strode into Lorne Michaels's office to say goodbye; he was going up to Ontario for two days, driving straight through on his motorcycle. Michaels, for the first time, responded parentally: Maybe Danny shouldn't be traveling that way now. Maybe it was too dangerous. He was, after all, an integral part of a hit show on NBC. Aykroyd told Michaels not to worry, and went into a long bit about how the "Lorne Michaels Video Shield" would protect him on the thruway. "I remember just laughing," says Michaels. "We all had this sense that nothing could happen to us. We all just knew that we were the center of the earth--that this was a charmed period of our lives. It was such an innocent time. Nothing bad was going to happen."
To be a performer on Saturday Night Live circa 1977 was to be at the center of the hip-comedy universe. The seventeenth floor of Thirty Rockefeller Plaza (known as "Thirty Rock") was where it was happening--it being whatever mysterious alchemy turns a combination of base talents into gold. For a time, Thirty Rock had the kind of electrifying aura that momentarily surrounds a hit Broadway play, a victorious political campaign, a World Series championship team. Moreover, it was all happening on live national television--to a cast of very young performers.
There was danger here, weekly risks overcome by a willingness to try something new and unsafe--an unheard-of combination of taped comedy-variety broadcasts. So intense was the mystique--the atmosphere of a daring, secret society out on a limb--created by the Not Ready for Prime Time Players, that four years later, Mark O'Donnell, one of the second wave of SNL writers, described those who replaced the original cast as being like "younger brothers who had inherited the fun, scary tree house which the cool older brothers had made and then abandoned to find fun elsewhere."
One particular tree house at Thirty Rock was built by Aykroyd and Belushi. They took an office together, and moved into it like Tom and Huck building a secret fortress. Aykroyd had bunk beds installed in there. ("I insisted that a shower be installed, too. It was really great. That office up there, man! That shower! There'd be white towels everywhere. It was obviously a place where people felt they could get away from the rest of the show because John and I always represented kind of a satellite.")
Aykroyd also kept a stash of gold coins. Late at night, he'd take them out and make strange, piratical, incantatory sounds; his spooky cackling, Cave Hollow laugh would float out into the hallway, awakening the other writers on the floor. Sometimes, there were so many people staying overnight at Saturday Night Live that the place was like a big sleep-away summer camp with bunk beds and ghost stories and neat activities. ("Working around the clock, a certain kind of bonding happened," recalls Lorne Michaels. "The male bonding was an important part of the show because this was just after the white heat of the women's movement. The women on the show were very strong, and it seemed that it was the men who were in disarray at the time, in the sense of not knowing where they were and how they stood. And along came Danny and John who were both very much guys' guys.")
They frequently spent the night there, holing up for days at a time. Hey, it was easier not to go home. Besides, who wanted to go home anyway? This was fun. Here you were in your own tree house, with your best pal in the top bunk, staying up all night, trying out funny gags and sketches on each other (and the NBC camp counselors loved it!--the ratings were climbing like summer fireworks). Why, you could even have wicked fun in the tree house scaring the girl campers: Like the time Jane Pauley, the prim, trim, cute-as-button host of NBC's Today show had an elevator encounter with James Downey, one of the SNL writers, who was coming out of Aykroyd and Belushi's shower at 5:30 A.M.--half naked with only a painter's drop cloth covering up his thang--scaring poor Jane almost to death. ("She stared at me in horror," Downey recalls. "She shrieked," Aykroyd reports gleefully, "she shrieked!").
Oh, there was considerable fun to be had in the outlaw treehouse with your best pal. Guerilla stuff and camp hijinks and ambuscades. You could, for instance, lean out the window with a bullhorn and bark crowd-control commands down to the little stick people on Fifth Avenue. And in winter you could order pizza up to the treehouse, put the pie outside on the window ledge until it froze hard as a discus, then wing it out over the skating rink and the Christmas tree in Rockefeller Center. ("John and I used to do this--out over the rink--! We'd make sure no people were out there 'cause it could have sliced somebody's head off. Then we'd aim for the rink--woozzzh!") And it the camp counselors played dirty cabin tricks, there was only one thing to do: scare 'em with some psychic numbers and satanic oaths, the kind of cabalistic stuff that means a man is marked. One time when an NBC executive held back four hundred dollars that Aykroyd had earned by writing for an SNL special, Aykroyd got some red paint and nails, and stayed up most of the night outside the executive's office, painting bewitching, diabolic slogans on the walls--I AM THE DEVIL! I AM BEELZEBUB!--which had the entire executive wing of NBC spooked for days. ("They couldn't understand why he would do something like that," Belushi told Rolling Stone writer Timothy White, "but I could understand it. And they'll think twice before they take money out of his pocket again.")
The tree house was also a terrific place to work. "It just made our friendship better," says Aykroyd. "It was obvious: This was where we could work together." During the second year, in addition to their duties as performers, Aykroyd and Belushi wrote sketches together and shared writing credit. In one of their more interactive pieces, Aykroyd played a double-duty disk jockey, switching back and forth between AM (frantic voice, bubble-gum music, Wonder Bread commercials) and FM (mellow voice, classical music, whole-wheat health-bread commercials); Aykroyd wrote the AM part and Belushi wrote the FM part. They were a compatible, though not ideal, writing team. "John was never patient as a writer; Danny was meticulous," Lorne Michaels recalls. "The things that John was not good at, which was detailed stuff, Danny was. John had an impatience with detail; Danny once wrote a sketch based on the schedules of freight-train routes in American, which he had memorized. John didn't have the attention span for writing a sketch, whereas Danny would stay there until he died for it."
Aykroyd enjoyed spending long hours alone seated at a typewriter. His ideas took shape on paper. He loved clarity. On a show that required not so much absolute discipline as absolute self-sacrifice, Aykroyd was industrious, prolific, absolutely dependable. "Danny was disciplined, but he was mostly driven," Jim Downey remembers> "It wouldn't be unfair to anyone else to say that Aykroyd contributed more than any other individual to the show, when you take into account his writing and his performing. He was there every week working at full tilt for six days." Though equally fertile with ideas, Belushi was, for the most part, a conceptualist. While Aykroyd like to fashion comic ideas with clear-cut precision, Belushi liked to keep them mysterious. Some of Belushi's best concepts began in rhapsody or in improvisation, and were put down on paper afterward. "In many ways, Danny and John were opposites," says Downey. "Aykroyd was attracted to words. He was one of the performers in the cast whom you could trust with a long speech. Belushi was different. He didn't like written words; he didn't trust them.
Nevertheless, during the season in which they were writing together, Aykroyd was determined to turn Belushi into a lover of the written word--a disciplined writer who would sit down at a typewriter for hours. "It was a gift I knew I enjoyed so much, and it made me feel good and gratified and deeper than just being a performer, so I really wanted John to learn how to do that himself. I feel so bad about it now because it was the only time I can remember yelling at him. I really gave him hell. It was a sad thing."
And it was a tremendous fight. When Aykroyd was mad, he held back nothing. He went straight to the heart of the problem with direct, confrontational analysis. He didn't go into character or use a mimicked authoritative voice. He was himself--a booming, lashing presence, and he came down hard on Belushi. Aykroyd's position was: Write your stuff and then perform it. Accomplish yourself as a writer--that adds a little more respect to the profession if you have to be in show business. Work with pencil and paper--at least it shows you're literate. Do not lose your integrity. Buckle down, man. The night mystery, the disco fever, has got to stop--. "--If you're not going to be a writer," Aykroyd shouted at Belushi, "then don't pretend you are one."
Belushi suffered visably during this explosive lecture. He was hurt. Before he lashed back at Aykroyd with a tirade of his own, an expression came onto his face--around his eyes and cheeks, but mostly on his mouth--a look of uttered vulnerability that Aykroyd would never forget.
The tension dissolved a few hours later. Belushi was sorry. Aykroyd was sorrier. Both felt wretched about the whole thing. Yet it hadn't been a useless fight. Afterward, Belushi did buckle down somewhat, though it was clear that he had no taste for the long hours at the typewriter. Finally, too, they were both glad that they'd come through a rough patch like that one without causing an irrevocable rift in their friendship. "We got it out quick," says Aykroyd. "It didn't fuck the relationship up. John and I used to have disagreements and arguments, but they were diffused very, very quickly because we both could take a good scolding from each other, which is sometimes what we needed. He snapped me in line, I snapped him in line."
They never argued again about writing. During the third season, they disbanded their tree house and took separate offices because Aykroyd wanted to be alone to write. (Aykroyd was so dedicated to his writing duties on the show that in 1977 when Universal Pictures asked him to join Belushi in the cast on National Lampoon's Animal House--and offered him the part of D-Day, the hot-rodding, motorcycle character, which Doug Kenney had written especially for Aykroyd--Aykroyd declined saying, "I've got to stay here--I love the writing too much.") There was no bitterness about their new office arrangement at Thirty Rock. Aykroyd made sure that Belushi knew he was always welcome in Danny's new tree house: he installed another set of bunk beds. ("The bunk beds were there for him")