The Blues Brothers Are Likely No More
This past weekend saw the return of one of the most oddly-specific fan conventions in existence: Blues Brothers Con.
Fans of the classic 1980 comedy gathered at Chicago’s Old Joliet Prison, where Jake Blues was famously incarcerated, to watch Dan Aykroyd and Jim Belushi (or “Elwood” and “Brother Zee”) shambolically cover classic songs to a crowd of die-hard fans… who Aykroyd made sure to avoid eye contact with at all costs.
The second Blues Brothers Con will also reportedly be the last. Staging these events hasn’t exactly been a smooth process. The first concert was supposed to happen back in 2020, in order to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the film, but had to be delayed because of the pandemic. The follow-up was scheduled for 2023, but was ultimately pushed back due to the SAG-AFTRA strike.
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Dedicating this year’s belated con to the late Judith Belushi Pisano, John Belushi’s widow who passed away last month, Aykroyd told the audience that the show marked “the closing of the chapter in the Blues Brothers’ history because we just lost Judy,” adding that, “there would be no Blues Brothers as we know it, without her creative input, she was a full participant in everything that was done.”
If Aykroyd’s speech made it sound like this weekend was the end of the road for the Blues Brothers, that’s because it very likely was. Last year, when announcing the concert’s postponement on social media, Belushi Pisano noted that the next Blues Brothers Con would feature “Dan Aykroyd’s final performance as Elwood.”
So there you have it. The Blues Brothers are likely no more.
In retrospect, it’s pretty odd that this concept wasn’t abandoned decades ago. Following John Belushi’s death, whatever chemistry legitimized the premise of two white comedians performing mediocre renditions of classic R&B tunes in front of a disproportionately killer band quickly fizzled out.
Aykroyd’s attempts to replace his old partner with Belushi’s brother Jim and/or John Goodman never came close to clicking, and just served to illustrate how threadbare of a concept the Blues Brothers was to begin with, and how it really only succeeded thanks to the unique personalities of its two leads during a certain moment of pop-culture history.
More than a decade after Belushi died, Aykroyd’s painfully sweaty attempts to keep the franchise alive only alienated the public. There was the notoriously bad sequel Blues Brothers 2000, Aykroyd's radio show, performed in-character as Elwood and multiple awful Blues Brothers video games. At least the animated series, featuring the voices of Jim Belushi and Dan Aykroyd’s brother Peter, never made it out of the pre-production phase.
And just last year, Jim Belushi claimed that Aykroyd was still trying to make more Blues Brothers movies, including one in which the According to Jim star would play a lost Albanian sibling who “doesn’t speak English.” He also pitched a gender-swapped spin-off called The Blues Sisters, presumably after one too many Crystal Head vodkas.
So while It may seem like Aykroyd is done with the Blues Brothers for now, as the Ghostbusters series has proven, he’s not exactly great at letting go of beloved/profitable ideas.
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