The Blues Brothers Are Trying to Change With the Times

Before he arrived at the Old Joliet Prison south of Chicago, now the Joliet Area Historical Museum, Erik Devereux made sure his ensemble was in appropriate Blues Brothers order. The basics weren’t a stretch: The 61-year-old teacher at the University of Illinois-Chicago already owns a black jacket and pants, a dark tie (a little wide for the occasion but workable), and white socks and sunglasses. The black fedora was another matter, so he hired a haberdasher in the city to make one for him.

But despite all his preparation, Devereux was skeptical when he first saw an ad for what was billed as Blues Brothers Con — a daylong gathering and concert for fans of the music side project started by John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd more than 40 years ago. “I said, ‘This can’t be true — this has to be a practical joke,’” he says. But Devereux bought in, and in his Jake and Elwood-inspired garb, he’s now on the grounds of the prison turned museum where the opening scenes of 1980’s The Blues Brothers were filmed (Devereux has himself seen the movie at least 20 times, first with his dad).

He has plenty of company. On this late-summer day, the prison yard is already sprinkled with hundreds of lawn chairs. Eventually, about 5,000 other Blues Brothers diehards will fill the space and line up to buy merch including T-shirts and Blues Brothers lager. (The latter is hawked  by women dressed as nuns, near signs that read, “We are on a mission from God to serve you,” playing off the most famous line of the movie.) As with Devereux, men, women, and even toddlers are dressed in dark suits, white shirts, and hats; a woman in the crowd is done up like the waitress Aretha Franklin played in the film. As Luke Pisano, the son of Belushi’s widow Judy Belushi Pisano, says, the event is “the Disneyland of the Blues Brothers.”

Today’s event is actually the second Blues Brothers Con, which is surprising in and of itself: After all, 46 years have passed since the fictional white duo — who were saluting duos like Sam and Dave while dressed in sunglasses and suits  — debuted on Saturday Night Live. The Blues Brothers were one of pop music’s wackiest flukes, hatched by Belushi and Aykroyd during their time on SNL. The idea of two comedians playing “ne’er-do-well musicians who wear sunglasses day and night” — in the words of longtime Blues Brothers trombone and trumpet player Tom “Bones” Malone — seemed to be a gag, even to SNL honcho Lorne Michaels. But in 1978, Belushi, as lead singer, and Aykroyd, as harmonicat, took it seriously enough to hire an all-star band to back their covers of blues, soul and R&B classics. Music and film critics scoffed, and some accused the two white comics of cultural appropriation, but Briefcase Full of Blues, the band’s debut album, sold more than 2 million copies. Two years later, The Blues Brothers movie grossed over $50 million at the U.S. box office.  

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By the time Belushi died of a drug overdose in 1982, the Blues Brothers routine had run its course. But defying all laws of pop music gravity, what felt like a one-note shtick way back during the presidency of Jimmy Carter has become one of the most enduring brands in show business. Aykroyd and Jim Belushi, John’s brother, continue to perform as the Blues Brothers at corporate events, private parties, and now Blues Brothers Con. Elsewhere around the country, or even the globe, fans can watch the Blues Brothers Revue, an officially licensed tribute band with an ersatz Jake and Elwood, or catch members of their band, called the Original Blues Brothers Band, play vintage repertoire. At Universal Studios in Orlando, Florida, a Blues Brothers tribute act performs several times a day; a Blues Brothers show takes place regularly at theaters in Branson, Missouri, Las Vegas, and Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, and sometimes on a Norwegian Cruise ship. Fans can buy Blues Brothers Coffee, too, along with merch like phone cases, hot sauce, trucker hats, and weed. Jake and Elwood, and Belushi and Aykroyd, are even the subject of a detailed bio, Daniel De Visé’s The Blues Brothers: An Epic Friendship, the Rise of Improv, and the Making of an American Film Classic.

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Saxophonist “Blue Lou” Marini, another founding member of the band who plays in Europe with the Original ensemble, has seen the Blues Brothers’ global appeal up close. At a recent show in Denmark, dozens of men and women, dressed like Jake and Elwood, danced in front of the stage. “There are at least five bands just in northern Italy that have been doing it for 20 or 30 years,” he says. “They all find some name that relates to the Blues Brothers, and one or two of the guys are wearing suits. Belushi must be somewhere up there laughing his ass off.”

In July, Judy Belushi Pisano, a fierce protector of her husband’s legacy and the Blues Brothers brand, died at 73 from endometrial cancer. Given how integral Pisano was to the operation — “contributing to the look, the mythos, the legend, in terms of building it up into what it became,” Aykroyd tells Rolling Stone — that should have been the final blow to the legacy. But even before she was diagnosed with cancer, Pisano had begun laying the groundwork for ways to introduce Jake, Elwood, and the music they championed to millennials and Gen Z.

At first thought, the idea seems overly optimistic. Can a boomer-culture memento be reintroduced to an audience that was barely alive when the belated and largely forgotten movie sequel, Blues Brothers 2000, was released? In an era of TikTok pop stars, what will be the appeal of roadhouse-R&B to a generation whose sense of music history could likely begin with Britney Spears? “There’s a link to the blues somewhere, somehow,” says Akyroyd. The current Blues Brothers team is about to find out how strong that link is.

IN A DESERTED ROOM BEHIND a makeshift stage at Joliet Prison, which closed in 2002 and is now a popular tourist attraction, Curtis Salgado is taking in the fandom he helped inspire. “I’m looking around and everyone’s dressed as a Blues Brother,” says Salgado, whose intense mug is framed by white wisps of hair. “I didn’t realize how big it is. I’m as stunned as you are.”

Now 70, Salgado, wearing a dark-hued jacket of his own, will play a blues set at Blues Brothers Con right before the current Aykroyd/Jim Belushi version of the Blues Brothers takes the stage. In 1977, Salgado was regularly gigging with his band in and around Oregon, when, during a show at the ballroom of the Eugene Hotel, a drug dealer tugged on his pants. “I’m in the middle of singing a song,” Salgado recalls. “I tell him to get the fuck off. He says, ‘Belushi’s here and wants to meet you.’ I don’t know what a Belushi is.”

Since he was generally working clubs on Saturday nights, Salgado hadn’t seen SNL. But Belushi approached, shook Salgado’s hand, and told him he loved what he was doing. “Then he goes, ‘I have a friend named Dan Aykroyd — he plays harmonica too,’ and I thought, ‘I don’t give a shit,’” Salgado says. “Every hippie in Eugene plays harmonica.” The two wound up talking, especially about Animal House, the 1978 movie Belushi was filming in the area, and later, Belushi sat in with Salgado and his band, which included a young Black blues guitarist named Robert Cray, who ended up being cast in the movie. 

Salgado remembers the fans losing their minds when Belushi took the stage. “He’s like the Beatles,” Salgado says. “They’re going apeshit. I’m like, ‘Who is this guy?’” But Salgado wasn’t impressed with Belushi’s voice when the comic slipped into his SNL-renowned imitation of Joe Cocker. He told him he needed to take singing more seriously and suggested Belushi learn Floyd Dixon’s “Hey Bartender.” The next time Belushi returned, he nailed the song. 

As Judy Pisano would also acknowledge, Belushi invited Salgado over to the house the couple was renting during the Animal House shoot and asked him to bring his blues, soul, and R&B records. Belushi told Salgado that he and Aykroyd were forming a band. “We’re thinking of calling it the Blues Brothers,” Belushi told him, and asked Salgado what he and Aykroyd could do for the working musician. Says Salgado: “I said, ‘Give credit where credit is due.’”

Belushi and Aykroyd tried out the Blues Brothers act in a few clubs, including New York’s Lone Star Cafe, where the two talked Willie Nelson into letting them join him onstage. Malone was dubious when the comics told him about the idea. “John was from Chicago but didn’t really know anything about Chicago blues — he was a garage rock drummer,” Malone recalls. “But Dan was part of the blues scene in Chicago. They wanted to play ‘Rocket 88’ by James Cotton, so I wrote an arrangement and we rehearsed it with the Saturday Night Live band.”

At first, Michaels wasn’t amused by the skit and the Blues Brothers never made it past pre-show rehearsals. But Jake and Elwood finally got their chance in April 1978 when Michaels informed the cast that the show was running three minutes short. “John and Danny jumped on him — ‘Lorne! The Blues Brothers!’” Malone recalls. “Lorne said, ‘We have nothing worthwhile for those three minutes, so you guys may as well make fools of yourselves.’ He put us on at the end of the show. The rest is history.”

At a club in Eugene, Salgado watched on a TV over the bar as SNL pianist Paul Shaffer, imitating music impresario Don Kirshner, introduced the “Blues Brothers” and gave a shout-out to Delgado. “I’m thinking, [Belushi] is not a very good singer, and [Aykroyd] is not a very good harmonica player, but as front men, they’re killing it,” Salgado says now. “People came up and said, ‘He ripped you off.’ But I don’t look like that. I don’t act like that. I wasn’t angry. I don’t have a chip on my shoulder about it. I was just stunned.”

Belushi and Aykroyd’s act grew more serious when Steve Martin recruited the Blues Brothers to open a string of shows for him in Los Angeles in September 1978. Instead of sticking with the SNL house band, the comics assembled a combo that included Shaffer, Malone, Marini, former Stax Records mainstays Steve Cropper and Donald “Duck” Dunn, Chicago blues player Matt “Guitar” Murphy, and future X-Pensive Winos drummer Steve Jordan. (Belushi and Aykroyd had seen Cropper and Dunn in Levon Helm’s RCO All-Stars the previous winter and instantly decided to recruit them.)

“I was a kid, so I was extremely excited about the entire thing,” Jordan, who now plays drums for the Rolling Stones following the death of Charlie Watts, tells RS in an email. “John and I lived walking distance from each other, so I spent a lot of time with him, listening to songs he was interested in doing. It wasn’t all straight up blues, it was a mash up of R&B and blues.”

To up their own game, Aykroyd and Belushi hired a vocal coach, choreographer, and, for Aykroyd, a veteran Chicago-blues harp player. “We had to step up a little in everything,” Aykroyd says. “Even though we’re playing characters, it’s got to come off as real.”

Thanks to their repertoire, which included Sam and Dave’s “Soul Man,” and musicians who played with a retro, horn-fueled swagger rarely heard on the radio at the time, the Blues Brothers easily won over Martin’s crowd. Belushi hurtled himself into the role of lead singer Jake, and Aykroyd acquitted himself on harmonica and what became a trademark goofy, knees-to-chest dance. As the musician closest to the audience, Marini peered out into the crowd and spied Jack Nicholson, who lifted up his own shades and mouthed “wow.” As Jordan writes, “We knew we were gonna kick some —, because of the actual band members. But people were shocked when they heard the band. It wasn’t comedy, but their reaction was funny as heck! People were blown away.”

For whatever reasons — Belushi and Aykroyd’s stature as rock-star comics or a public already growing weary of disco and unfamiliar with rarely covered songs like “Soul Man” and King Floyd’s “Groove Me” — Briefcase Full of Blues (recorded during those L.A. shows) was an instant success, and Belushi’s fantasy became a reality. With it came a barrage of slings and arrows.

“Duck and I got a lot of flak,” says Cropper, the white Memphis guitarist who had worked with Black stars like Otis Redding and Wilson Pickett. “They said, ‘What are you guys up there doing, playing with a couple of crazy comedians?’ I said, ‘Get out of here.’ They didn’t know that John, before Second City, was fronting a band, playing drums and singing, and Dan was really playing harmonica. ‘Really?’ They didn’t believe it.” Jim Belushi, meanwhile, recalls Stephen Stills griping to him that the Blues Brothers might be making fun of actual white blues guys like himself.

Some of the sharpest criticisms came from the press that, until then, had championed Belushi and now accused him and Aykroyd of cultural appropriation. The two maintained that they always credited their sources (Jordan says Belushi was “obsessed” with Taj Mahal’s version of “She Caught the Katy”). But after one particularly critical story in 1979, Belushi agreed to a call with SoHo Weekly News writer Steve Bloom to address those who accused him of reviving minstrelsy — the age-old American practice of white artists performing exaggerated and stereotyped depictions of Black American entertainers, often in blackface.

“It’s just weird,” he told Bloom. “Why would I do these things? What am I, fucking [blackface entertainer] Al Jolson? I mean, God!…The people who are watching me understand why I do it and the band members do. As for the other people — I think there’s a certain amount of jealousy, you know, because I’ve been on television, I’ve had a Number One record and a big movie hit [Animal House].”

When Bloom asked him to respond to one particular criticism — that Belushi and Aykroyd, who based the Blues Brothers partly on the routine of Sam and Dave, were getting rich while “Sam and Dave can hardly afford the dry-cleaning on their lime-green suits” — Belushi couldn’t restrain himself. “I read that,” he exploded, going on to threaten the writer. “If I ever see that cocksucker I’ll fucking cut his balls off and put them in his mouth.”

For Sam Moore and his then partner, the late Dave Prater, the remake of “Soul Man,” one of their biggest songs, was a mixed blessing. Shortly after the Blues Brothers version was released, he and Prater were playing a club on Long Island. As they were leaving the show, Moore recalls, some college kids yelled out, “Hey, Sam and Dave, y’all do that song better than them!” 

“Dave hit the ceiling,” Moore tells Rolling Stone. “He said, ‘No, man, that’s our song!’ The guys said, ‘Yeah, okay, all right.’ I said, ‘We recorded it whether you want to believe us or not.’” 

Moore says he and Prater didn’t get much extra work out of the exposure (“If anything, believe it or not, it buried us,” he told the Gary, Indiana, Post-Tribune in 1994), and that Prater, who was particularly upset about the Blues Brothers, nixed an offer for Sam and Dave to appear in the first movie. But Moore, who was battling a drug addiction at the time, did wind up bar-hopping with Belushi, and Aykroyd later recruited him for the Blues Brothers 2000 movie and booked him for some live shows. “On one hand, ‘Soul Man’ was good for us,” he says. “On the other hand, it’s an albatross around Sam Moore’s neck. Hopefully, one day I can hear somebody say, ‘It was Sam and Dave singing, not John and Danny.’ I don’t know.”

Eventually, the criticism subsided, and filming got underway on 1980’s Blues Brothers movie, an over-budget buddy comedy directed by John Landis, with cameos by Franklin, James Brown, Ray Charles, and other influential R&B singers. A soundtrack album, and a national tour to promote the film, followed. “You’re thinking, ‘Okay, they want to do this gig out in Los Angeles,’” recalls Marini. “Then the record is released and it’s a big hit and all of a sudden they’re talking about going on tour and you’re making a movie. The whole thing was like a rocket ride.”

BY 1982, THE ROCKET WAS COMING DOWN TO EARTH: A third Blues Brothers album, Made in America, didn’t sell well, and the routine seemed to have worn out its frathouse-blues welcome. Belushi’s fatal overdose, at the Chateau Marmont in L.A. in March of that year, seemed to seal the project’s fate. “As far as an active performing entity, that was done,” Aykroyd says. “I never thought I’d play in that band again.” In an unintended reminder of what Aykroyd was doing when he heard the news of his friend’s death — writing a script for Ghostbusters, with Bill Murray eventually in the role intended for Belushi — a couple waiting in line for autographs at Blues Brothers Con are dressed in full Ghostbusters jumpsuits, complete with proton backpacks.

But even if Aykroyd assumed that his musical act with his late friend was history, the Blues Brothers universe kept pulling him back in. In 1984, he was coaxed into reviving Elwood when his friend Isaac Tigrett opened a Hard Rock Café in New York. “I wore a blue jacket and no hat, the shades, dark shirt,” he recalls. “Not doing the Blues Brothers look at all. Not trying. Shaffer was there. I had a band there. Then I went out onstage, and the response was great. It works no matter who’s singing it.” In honor of the Blues Brothers, Aykroyd and Tigrett opened the first House of Blues club in 1992, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Nearly a dozen more have since followed.

According to Aykroyd, Blues Brothers knockoffs — ironically, an imitation of a duo who were themselves an imitation of Black blues and soul singers — began popping up around the country. “There were always imitation bands from the very first appearance on SNL, and then down on through the first record and first movie,” he says. “We saw people starting to go out and do the material and sort of imitate the Jake and Elwood characters.” 

The trend ramped up after Belushi’s passing. Two teenage brothers, for instance, called themselves the Junior Blues Brothers. The Jake and Elwood characters and their logo (designed by Pisano) were trademarked entities, but bands across the country would still replicate their imagery and routine. Cease-and-desist letters were regularly sent to unauthorized acts. “Every time we thought we were finished,” Pisano said in 2004, “someone else would put on a ‘Blues Brothers’ show.”

Pisano had always been deeply invested in the Blues Brothers, partly due to the fact that she and Aykroyd were joint owners. According to her son Luke Pisano, Bob Woodward’s controversial 1984 Belushi bio Wired also played a role in Pisano’s interest in keeping the Blues Brothers active — the family wanted to frame Belushi’s legacy in a more positive light. “Back in the Eighties, drug overdose was very taboo. And I think she felt, and our family feels, that was quite an unfair account of John’s life,” he says. “I think she felt a personal mission to make sure that wasn’t how this whole thing was remembered.”

In the mid-Eighties, the Belushi estate and Aykroyd gave their okay for Blues Brothers impersonators to be included in a campy “Legends in Concert” show in Las Vegas, alongside Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, and Hank Williams clones. “It was a little schmaltzy,” says Wayne Catania, a Canadian drummer and Belushi look-alike who played Jake during some of those 12-minute sets. “They had the dancing girls and stuff. But the money was impressive.”  

But the knockoffs continued, to everyone’s exasperation. “Jake and Elwood are characters, so it became very complicated with impersonators,” Luke Pisano says. “We don’t want to stop them. We want to support real music. We don’t want to be the bad guys. But how can we support these wonderful musicians who are extremely talented and looking for a place to make money while at the same time be able to make it legitimate and make them the official one?”

In 2004, Judy Belushi Pisano and her then-husband, Victor Pisano, attempted to center the Blues Brothers story in one official venue by producing The Blues Brothers Revival, a proto-jukebox musical. The plot involved Jake stuck in purgatory and Elwood, working with a crew of gospel singers, trying to get him into heaven. After opening at the Chicago Center for the Performing Arts, it received mixed reviews and closed. 

The upside, though, was the launch of an official Blues Brothers tribute act that continues to this day, with Catania as Jake and Kieron Lafferty as Elwood. “The idea behind it was, if there are going to be a lot of people ripping off the asset out there, let’s sign one to a deal where we have something in writing acknowledging that we own the IP,” says Luke Pisano. “And let’s make it the best show so that people stop going to see anybody just dressing up like the Blues Brothers.”

As Catania recalls, Judy Pisano wanted to make sure the show accurately captured the work of her late husband and Aykroyd. “She would say, ‘Jake liked sugar in his coffee, but Elwood liked it black,’” he says. “That made it come alive in my head. All those moments in time that I spent [with Pisano] planted the little nuances of these characters within me.” Two decades after he and Lafferty were recruited, the authorized Blues Brothers salute can be seen playing at state fairs and clubs, and Catania, 66, still can’t fully explain it. “You know, that’s a billion-dollar question. I do know it makes people happy, and I can say that from the reactions I see when I’m onstage,” he says. “We’re lucky that we get to experience it and see it and, God, I’m even luckier that I get to travel, even as a fake one. I became the only legal Jake, which was an honor.”

WHEN SHE GRADUATED HIGH SCHOOL in Virginia, this past spring, 18-year-old Helen Rumsey had one request for her family: She wanted to attend Blues Brothers Con. As a kid, she’d watched Ghostbusters, loved it, and sought out other films by its stars, eventually leading her to The Blues Brothers. She found the movie a little slow, but it grew on her, and her love of classic rock, including blues-influenced bands like the Rolling Stones, made her appreciate the music. “It’s about how genuine they are, especially Dan,” says Rumsey, wearing a fedora in a tent at Blues Brothers Con. “The music is just more soulful.” Her dad Kevin, who made the 11-hour drive with his daughter to the festival, says that Helen and her friends back home watch the movie every six months.

For the current team running the Blues Brothers franchise, fans like Rumsey represent the future of the nearly five-decade-old brand after some false starts. In the Nineties, plans to introduce Jake and Elwood to a new generation failed to launch. An animated series, featuring the voices of Jim Belushi and Aykroyd’s brother Peter, was prepped but never aired. Blues Brothers 2000, which found John Goodman filling in for John Belushi, only grossed $14 million and was considered a flop.

The jumpstarting of the brand began taking root almost a decade ago, when Luke Pisano created an Instagram and later TikTok pages for the Blues Brothers. “At the time, it was like, ‘Look, no one’s doing this. We don’t want this brand to die, and this is a really easy way to keep in people’s minds and just build a following,’” he says. A clip from the first film, of Jake and Elwood scarfing down food at a swanky Chicago eatery, has 100,000 views on TikTok — aimed at a generation that associates the Blues Brothers less with cultural appropriation and more with a funny movie musical. (“They were incredibly progressive,” says veteran fan Devereux of the film and the original Blues Brothers. “They tried to kill a bunch of Illinois Nazis, which was a problem back then.”)

In legal papers in 2014, Pisano asserted that the Blues Brothers were a valuable asset, but, she said, it was “impossible to predict with any degree of accuracy what income stream they might generate in the future.” Five years later, she recruited Ashley Austin, whose company, Artist Legacy Group, works with the estates and intellectual property of DMX, Sam Cooke, and Bill Haley. Blues Brothers Approved Ventures, the parent company that works on licensing and approves tribute bands, now includes Austin as brand manager along with Luke Pisano and Aykroyd’s daughter Stella. Together, they’re working on various ways to make anyone under 30 care about Jake and Elwood. Projects underway or in the talking stages include a documentary, a pinball machine, and another attempt at a jukebox musical. Blues Brothers beer will arrive this fall. 

A new comic book, scheduled for publication next year, will reveal more about Jake and Elwood’s backstory and introduce new characters set in modern times. As part of his inspiration, Pisano — who is co-writing it with Stella Aykroyd and writer Jim Werner — looked to the Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse movies, which incorporated more ethnically diverse new characters (like Miles Morales, who has Black and Puerto Rican ancestry) and their storylines. “Out of any brand that has attempted to bring its IP to a new generation and make it authentic, they’re the gold standard,” Pisano says. “By the end, it doesn’t even matter who’s Peter Parker and who’s this new kid. It’s the same kind of idea, and it just feels so authentic. So now you have an opportunity to take Jake and Elwood and move those characters forward.”

Back at Blues Brothers Con, Jim Belushi is puffing on a cigar after commandeering a golf cart on the prison grounds. Starting with following in his brother’s footsteps on SNL, Belushi left his mark as a sitcom actor and dramatic one as well; he’s just completed a role in the upcoming Kristen Stewart-directed film The Chronology of Water. But he admits he was reluctant to join the Blues Brothers when Aykroyd asked him two decades back. “I said, ‘No, it’s too weird — I can’t do that,’” Belushi says, before launching into a perfect impersonation of Aykroyd’s stiff-robot voice: “‘Ah, Jimmy, no, no, Jimmy. It’s like a law firm and one of the partners dies, and the brother or the son comes in and takes over for that role. It’s the same thing. Every actor wants to play McMurphy in Cuckoo’s Nest. And if you get the chance, you do it. Just because other actors did it doesn’t mean you can’t do it. I mean, look at Shakespeare.’”

Inhabiting the role of “Brother Zee” Blues, a lost cousin of Jake’s, Belushi recalls his first show in the band, at a House of Blues. “The crowd was jumping, having fun,” he says. “Music was blaring and it was lifting my arms up. And in that moment, I was like, ‘Oh, John, I get it! Thank you, brother.’ Danny was passing a gift.” (“I gave him a whole new way of making a living, which he loves,” Aykroyd says, with just a glint of SNL huckster Irwin Mainway in his voice.)

Now 72, Aykroyd is the sole original keeper of the Blues Brothers flame following the deaths of John Belushi and Judy Belushi Pisano. Wearing half his Blues Brothers costume (white shirt, loose tie) and a baseball cap before showtime, Aykroyd knows his time as the deadpan, mysterious Elwood is starting to wind down, and Pisano’s death the month before has added a poignant note to the festival. “I’m wistful and contemplating things in a bittersweet filter, because we just lost Judy,” he says. “She was our blues sister. So tonight, it’s sort of my goodbye to Judy, and closes a chapter some 40 years later.”

What exactly does that mean? Aykroyd takes the quickest of sighs. “It means that, you know, a new generation is going to pick up and keep the tour and the memory alive,” he says. “There’s some solid, beautiful things that came of it. And so it’s on to them. I’ll play these concerts as long as I don’t have to do it from a chair. But the administration of it, I think it’s time for a new generation.”

Could there be a Blues Brothers today, white guys singing Black music, in the more sensitive 2020s? “Look at Jack White,” says Aykroyd. “Of course it depends upon the musicianship. But if you can pull it off, then go ahead and do it. Eric Clapton is the example I always use. Why can’t he play the blues? That’s not appropriation, that’s celebration when he plays that music.”

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That said, Luke Pisano says a 2024 version of the Blues Brothers can transcend the characters’ original look and could potentially be played by artists of color, akin to the ones from whom Belushi and Aykroyd first took inspiration. “You’re assuming that the Blues Brothers would be two white guys, right?” he says. “I think the Blues Brothers could be anybody, especially when you’re talking about the blues, which is such a Black art form for Black voices.”

But plans for a reimagined Blues Brothers remain in the distance. Right now, at Old Joliet, Aykroyd is getting ready to become his version of Elwood once more. He shifts his gaze to a nearby prison wall, the barbed wire still in place. “Look at where we are,” he says. “Imagine looking up and going, ‘There’s no way out of here.’ It’s 1908 and you’ve been busted for a candy store robbery and you’re here for 15 years. There it is. You’re not getting out.”