Before the Blues Brothers, Dan Aykroyd drummed behind Muddy Waters in Ottawa
Dan Aykroyd's love of the blues was no comedy bit. As a teenager in Ottawa he haunted Le Hibou, a club where touring blues greats played, and one night he sat in on drums for Muddy Waters. That passion later became Elwood Blues, and then a chain of music venues.
Ottawa's General Hospital is where Aykroyd arrived, on July 1, 1952. His father, a civil engineer, advised Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau on policy, and his mother, of French Canadian descent, worked as a secretary. After secondary school at St. Pius X and St. Patrick's, he took criminology and sociology courses at Carleton University but quit before graduating. Instead he worked Canadian nightclubs as a comic and for several years ran an after-hours speakeasy in Toronto called Club 505.
Le Hibou, run by Harvey Glatt, brought a stream of blues stars through the city. Aykroyd remembers hearing James Cotton, Otis Spann and Howlin' Wolf there, and says that when Muddy Waters's drummer left the kit one night and Waters asked for volunteers, he walked up and kept the beat. He credits the scene to Ottawa's mix of educated civil servants and college students hungry for blues culture.
In 1975 he joined the first cast of Saturday Night Live on NBC as a writer and one of the Not Ready for Prime Time Players, staying until 1979. His recurring sketches included the Coneheads and the Blues Brothers, and the show earned him five Primetime Emmy nominations and a 1977 win for variety writing. On film he played Elwood J. Blues in The Blues Brothers (1980) and Ray Stantz in Ghostbusters (1984), returning to that franchise repeatedly, and he made comedies such as Trading Places.
He showed dramatic range too: playing Boolie Werthan in Driving Miss Daisy brought him a 1990 Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor, and he appeared in Chaplin and Pearl Harbor. On television he led the sitcom Soul Man as Reverend Mike Weber. Away from the screen he co-founded the House of Blues venue chain and the Crystal Head Vodka brand.
Source: Dan Aykroyd
