Live From New York - James H. Miller [62]
HOWARD SHORE, Music Director:
I wasn’t great friends with John. As one musician to another, I don’t think he felt a real respect from me for what he was doing musically. A lot of the players in the band I created for the show had real careers in rhythm and blues and had made great records, important records, and our whole lives as musicians were steeped in this tradition. Yes, we were on a television show, but being musicians was really our life. So comedians who were kind of tinkering in music were not always taken seriously by us.
When the band did warm-ups for the show, some members of the cast wanted to get involved. I knew Danny from Toronto, so I let him do a few things. Then Danny wanted to bring John into it and I said okay, and I did a couple of things with Danny and John. I used to introduce them as “those brothers in blues, the Blues Brothers.” I think John looked to us as more serious musicians, something he wanted to be.
DAN AYKROYD:
When Carrie Fisher did the show, we used the Blues Brothers to warm up the audience, but we had played a couple of times prior to that. We played with Willie Nelson as our backup band, and Mickey Raphael on harp, and Willie Hall, and then the Uniforms at the Lone Star, and then we had Duke Robillard and Roomful of Blues playing behind us as well. We wanted Duke to be our backup man, but he was with Roomful of Blues, and I think he felt that Belushi would dominate, so he kind of backed off that gig. And we ended up recruiting through Tom Malone, the horn player in the SNL band; we ended up getting Steve Cropper and Donald Dunn, and Lou Marini and Alan Rubin and Matt Murphy. Matt Murphy we found in a bar on Columbus Avenue, and we heard him play. He was playing with James Cotton, and we said, “We want this guy in the band.” And then Cropper and Dunn, they had to be convinced, because they weren’t sure that we could acquit ourselves to the music. But they saw the respect, the reverence we had, and that we wanted to do a Memphis-Chicago fusion band — which ultimately the Blues Brothers turned out to be, doing Chicago electrified blues, and Memphis Stax R&B, and that was our set. They came on, and we did the first appearances with Carrie Fisher and then with Steve Martin.
JOHN LANDIS:
Lorne was hysterical that Chevy was making a movie, and he refused to give me Danny for the part of D-Day in Animal House. He refused. He wouldn’t release Danny and he told him, “You have to be here and write or I’m going to fire you.” He threatened Danny, and it was ugly. And by the way, that’s what happened on The Blues Brothers later, which is he wouldn’t release Paul Shaffer, who was a member of the band, who was the star, who put the band together.
As the stakes got higher, the atmosphere at SNL grew more fractious. Actors fought for airtime and for the attention of writers. After Chevy Chase’s ascent, and then Belushi’s, appearances on the show came to be looked upon by many performers as auditions for movie careers, as if the show itself were no longer the object all sublime.
Many of those who were there for those first five gold-standard years look back not in regret but in rueful resignation, or a kind of pained joy. Some had required chemical stimulation merely to maintain the show’s mind-bending schedule, working through the night, especially Wednesday and Thursday nights, and virtually living in the building. Taking a cue from Dan Aykroyd and his office bunk beds, Anne Beatts famously demanded that the network install a hospital bed in her office during a contract negotiation and got her wish. They and their cohorts were not just the staff of a TV show. They were still a commune, a subculture, and most of all, a family; sadly,