BLUES BROS EXCLUSIVE!

TV shots. Magazine covers. Sold out concerts and a platinum album in four weeks. It was a class act. And those Blues Brothers, Jake and Elwood, were a couple of class guys.

Problem was they had trouble reading the fine print. So when the Feds were looking to save face and nosing around for some ass to hang after they’d fucked up trying to nail Sinatra on that Westchester Theatre scam, the brothers Blues were their perfect patsies. For one thing, Jake had already been up the river once. For another, he and Elwood were just sticking, it in everybody's face, what with the broads, the cars, the cases of beer, the fifth floor penthouse walkups on the South Side, and those fancy black suits.

The Feds wanted revenge for Sinatra, and when they walked in that stinky basement store and saw Jake leaning over the pressing machine whistling “My Boy Lollipop” and Elwood sitting over in the corner whistling bass and counting the cash, they knew they had it. A dead solid perfect front page show biz bust. After they read the boys their rights, they read them the fine print. Funny thing, it said so right at the bottom of their own album: "Warning: Unauthorized reproduction of this re-cording is prohibited by Federal law and subject to criminal prosecution."

Jake and Elwood were turning out Blues Brothers albums in more ways than one. And how! An unnamed source at their former record company said in reference to the extent of their crime: “If those dumb shits hadn’t been pressing up their own bootlegs, Briefcase Full Of Blues could have gone quadruple platinum by now!”

Jake Blues is expected to get three-to-five when he comes up for sentencing next week, though word is they’ll go lighter on Elwood as a first offender.

And that may be the ending to this tragically •American story of wild success and dire retribution, but it’s not the whole story. The whole story, the true story, of Jack and Elwood Blues has never been told for reasons that are not entirely clear. Maybe nobody cared to dig beneath the slick surface, to shatter the myth. Maybe Jake and Elwood didn’t want them to. And maybe it was just all too unbelievable how two white boys got the blues, the bread, and then . . . the Big House. Well, listen to this.

Jacob Allen Blaustein, an Austrian immigrant whose parents had died in transit to America when he was a young man, worked hard in a Chicago meat packing plant to bring home his 37 cents a day and to stay out of trouble. Trouble being that he himself should one day be tossed into the grinding machines and rendered edible. Jacob was a round and squat man who, it seems, bore such an uncanny resemblance to a side of beef when covered with blood from a day’s work that on more than one occasion a coworker, tired and confused from eleven hours of mind-numbing routine, had turned in Jacob’s direction, saying “What’s this?” and proceeded to toss the little man towards the meat hooks overhead. Indeed, Jacob’s trouble was that he was not uncanny at all. To avoid such lethal mistakes it was decided by all concerned that Jacob should wear a small American flag stuck in the crease of his cap in order to differentiate him from the meat. So he did, and it seemed to do the trick.

How cold was it, Johnny?

One of Jacob Blaustein’s few indulgences in life that left little room for such things was laundry. Despite the fact that he worked in the messiest circumstances imaginable, Jacob always arrived at work each Monday in a clean white shirt, the only one he owned. Though the other workers could never get their shirts truly clean of the gristle and the blood, Jacob always managed by splurging nearly a day’s pay for a one-day Chinese laundry service. He would spend 15 cents for cleaning, five cents for the rush, and five cents for the trolley ride across town to the only place that would do it on Sunday (his one day off) if he got there by eight a.m, (he would walk the four miles home). Having a clean shirt at the beginning of the week gave Jacob a sense of dignity, or so he told the girl behind the counter as he wiled away his day of rest at the laundry awaiting his shirt while other men spent their cash on drink, gambling, and loose women. Which brings us to Jacob’s second indulgence, the laundry girl herself.

Natsuki Nemesh Jackson was an exceptionally dark-skinned Oriental girl who worked in this Chinese laundry. Oddly enough, as she confided to her favorite customer," Mr. Blaustein* she was not Chinese at all, but Japanese— and not entirely that either. In actuality she was the product of a mysterious liaison between a legendary black New Orleans chanteuse and an equally legendary (in his own far-off land) Japanese warrior, said by some to have been a Samurai, or so the legend goes; unfortunately, they Both had disappeared by the time Natsuki was old enough to remember. Natsuki toiled long and hard in the laundry for a Chinese bo$s who hated Japanese but who had taken her on out of desperation. Her one indulgence was her weekly chats with Mr. Blaustein, who would bring in his hopelessly soiled shirts for cleaning. Each week for revenge against her hateful boss, Natsuki would steal a clean white shirt from a rich man’s laundry, and at the end of their day of flirtatious conversa/ tion would present the fresh shirt to Mr. Blaustein as if it were his own, thoroughly cleaned. Jacob never picked up 9n the switch. As Natsuki would say to herself, “Jacob is nice. Lovely, in fact. But he’s just too fucking stupid to ever know the difference.”

In 1923 Jacob Blaustein and Natsuki Jackson were married. A year later the union produced a child, a son, and they named him Jacob Allen Blaustein, Jr. And in another year, there was another son, El wood Meatlaundry JSlaustein, named for the biblical tree and the parent’s two jobs, as Jacob insisted. (NB: There is still some dispute whether the marriage produced yet a third son, Meatloaf Blaustein, so named by Jacob in an uncharacteristic fit of sarcastic wit when Natsuki quit her laundry job to be a full-time house wife. L All was sweetness and light in Chicago for those first five-and-a-half years until one day in 1929.

Jacob Blaustein kissed his wife and his sleeping children and walked out of bis door at five a.m., as usual, on the morning of October 27th, As usual, he worked hard all xthat day until he was suddenly interrupted by a voice coming from the loudspeaker in the vast packing room. It was the vice president of the company, and in solemn tones he announced that the company president had perished that afternoon by his own hand. All work stopped. A few of the workers grinned surreptitiously and joshed each other, but Jacob stood at rapt attention. “I would ask you,” the voice continued, “for a moment’s silent prayer in remembrance of our fallen leader, and I have ordered that all flags on company property be lowered to half-mast in due respect.”The voice paused. Jacob was deeply grieved though he had never met, not even seen the man who paid him 37 cents a day for his grueling labor. Jacob was grieved at all men’s deaths. As he mouthed a prayer for the man, Jacob Blaustein remembered to doff his cap and remove the flag tucked into it. This he furled about its sticks carefully, lovingly, and placed in his trouser pocket. After a minute, the voice came back over the loudspeaker, coarser than before: “Now get back to work, ya goldbrickers!”

Jacob Blausteiri did not return home to his young family that night. His body was never recovered, or, at least, it was never recovered whole. No doubt someone in Iowa noticed the funky tasting Spam but neglected to complain. It was hard times all around.

Deprived of her husband’s love, comfort, and paycheck, Natsuki Blausteiri was forced to forego housewifery and take back her old job. When no neighbor could be found to take care of the children, she was forced to remand them to the care of the Rock Island City Orphanage, just outside of Chicago. Of course, she hoped that if she worked hard and save diligently, she would be able to retrieve them, perhaps within the year. Within the year, an inventor in New Jersey revolutionized the cleaning business by concocting a liquid substance called Naptha. Not only did Naptha make soap and water obsolete for most fine washables, it could also get you higher than a kite, as many laundry workers discovered that year, if you snorted enough of it. Jacob and Elwood Blaustein were never to see their mother again. Irrevocably bereft, Natsuki Blaustein spent most of that year and some of the next higher than a kite, and in the fall of 1930, she keeled over dead in the laundry from scorched lungs.

... ancient blood had begun to boil, albeit , slowly...

Space marches on.

Jacob and Elwood Blaustein refused to be separated, though many childless couples wishing to adopt had suggested to the nuns that they would be more than happy to take Elwood, but hot Jacob, whom they said “looked like a side of beef.” Jacob, known as Jake to the other boys at the home, grew churlish. Elwood, embarrassed per haps, grew silent. Beneath their lower lips grew black, greasy hair (and remember, this was Only 1939, a full 34 years before Gregg Allman would make his hideous mark on men’s facial couture!). Contrary to some popular myths, there was no music, illicit or otherwise, to be heard at the Rock Island City Orphanage. “Music,” instructed Sister Marie JeSus de Comedo as she extracted the left timpanal membrane from an unwitting and horrified volunteer with a horse hypo, “is the mind’s pink jism. Be done with it!”

In the summer of 1942,. shortly before Jake Blaustein’s 18th birthday, it became clear that the boy was not only not going to be adopted, but that he would soon be conscripted into the massive and infinitely perilous military maneuvers then taking place over .about half the planet. Elwood could stay safely within the orphanage until he turned 18 in another year, but quick action was in order for Jake’s situation.

Jacob Allen Blaustein, Jr. squeezed off one round from the barrel of his purloined Colt .45 revolver into the face of the orphanage’s Mother Superior. Though Chicago’s sizable Catholic population was not amused and the boy narrowly avoided the hot seat, Jake had beaten the army. As he packed (under the hostile eyes of accompanying police detectives) for his 25-years-to-Hfe term in Joliet, Jake cheerfully threw his arm around his visibly upset younger brother, chucked him under the chin, ^nd said, “Aw,, c’mon, El. It’s not/oreuef!” Elwood Meatlaundry Blaustein was not to see his brother again for 17 years.

My Farmer, My Lover was the critical cult hit of the season...

When Elwood left the orphanage a year later, he didn’t encounter the problems his brother had With the military. An army aptitude test suggested that the quiet Blaustein brother was “too stupid” even for the wartime army and “near catatonic, to boot.” Elwood was so disappointed (unlike Jake, he felt deep patriotic stirrings) he wore his underwear on his head for a week before pulling himself together and heading down to his father’s old meat packing plant with his fly down to apply for a job.

The meat packing plant would take anybody in those days, and so Elwood; became gainfully (more or less—daily wages now hovered arouncf the 63 cent level at the plant) employed. Highly placed government sources conspired not to apprise Elwood of the occurance of the Korean War, so that episode in American history passed him by much as the rest of his life did: hazily. Except for one brief shining moment in 1956 when a budding impresario among his co-workers billed young Blaustein as “Elwood Presley, Prince of Rock ’n’ Roll,” and put him onstage at Chicago’s Aragon Ballroom with a hambone for a guitar and a piece of gristle for a pick, the Fifties flew by and soon enough it was 1959 and Elwood was waiting outside the gates of Joliet State Penitentiary for his beloved brother to be released. (The ambitious co-worker/impresario, incidentally, was ticketpunched to death by rabid Presley fans who felt they had been bilked.)

“See?” said Jake, referring to his last conversation with his brother 17 years before;. “It wasn’t that long.” But prison had changed Jake, as Elwood dimly detected. The older brother was even paunchier and much wiser. As if to confirm this last, Jake > confided to Elwood on the way home: “Ya know, El, I leatned a lot in prison. But most impojftantly, I think, I learned that a man—be he black, white, yellow, red, or green—should never shoot a nun in the face with a .45! It’s just dumb!” Jake got a far-away look, lik6 Elwood. But there was another change, too. Elwood thought that Jake had gotten friendlier in prison. Years later a pseudonymous prison memoirist was to seemingly corroborate this opinion in a short chapter entitled “Other S^x.” “This Blaustein character,” he would write, “was the best white fuck I ever had.”

As far as Jake—Joliet Jake to his prison pals—was concerned, there wasn’t much to the Sixties. “We’re young,” he would tell Elwood as they worked side by side now at the meat plant. “We can just wait this out.” What he was waiting for was and is unclear. Something big, no doubt. “A meteorite?” suggested Elwood in a rare moment of volubility. “Nah,” replied Jake. “A UFO?” Elwood continued. “Nah.” his brother reiterated. Elwood fell back in reticence and absentmindedly traced his finger around the greenish-black stain which obscured . part of the fleur-de-lis pattern on his shirt. Jake belched and wondered if maybe his little brother wasn’t dipping into the Naptha himself.

By 1970 Jake Blaustein was 46 years old, and, cagey as a spud, still waiting in his and 45-year-old Elwood’s .dingy studio apartment with the one-legged sofa and at the, meat plant—for something to happen. As luck would have it, something did. There was nothing that Jake Blaustein enjoyed more than Johnny Carson and The Tonight Show, especially the jokes about Doc Severinsen’s clothes. When Johnny would turn to Doc in the middle of the monologue and say, “What are you? The travelling poodle salesman?” or “What are you? Kate Srqith’s handkerchief in heat?” Jake would howl like a wounded hound in a sheer delight and then shout back at the television, “How cold was it, Johnny?!’ The part Jake liked least about the show was the end when they brought out the guys who wrote books. Still, he would watch garnely just in case Johnny got off a real zinger. So it happened that Jake Blailstein was watching the night they brought out Trumart Capote. Sure, Capote had been on before, but Jake didn’t remember him (he never remembered the authors and was always happy when they got bumped ’til next week), and thought, “Oh, here’s another book schmo.” Apd then Truman Capote, in between the blahblahblahs, said sonnething that changed Jake’s life. Truman Capote said: “Actors are stupid people.” Suddenly—and for the first time in his life—Jake Blausteip had a calling. He mouthed the words bvery and over again to himself. “Actors are stupid people. Actors are stupid people. Actors are stupid people.” And then he looked at Elwood who had fallen asleep on the floor with his finger in his nose.

TURN TO PAGE 66

BLUES BROTHERS

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 50

Jake and Elwood Blaustein rolled into New York City three days later with 49 dollars, a change of clothes each, and a mission. No sooner had they stepped off the Scenicruiser at the ? Port of Authority terminal than Jake struck his first bonanza: two fine • looking gold wristwatches, guaranteed for life, for only 22 dollars including, believe it or not, the sales tax! “So whaddya think of that?” Jake said to Elwood as he handed him his watch. But Elwood was too busy to respond, remembering what Jake had told him, “Actors are . . . Actors are ...”

After a fitful sleep in Central Park, Joliet Jake with brother Elwood in tow, attended his very first audition. It was for an/off-Broadway family movie, as far as Jake could tell, because the place they went wasn’t on Broadway and there were a lot of goats and pigs hanging around. When his name was called, Jake stepped out of the crowd, pushing Elwood in front of him, and shouting at the tpp of his lungs: “How cold was it, Johnny?” When the producer asked him to take ' off his clothes, he did so readily. “OK, you’re hired.” “Hired?” Jake asked. “But not without my brother . . . ?” “OK, OK,” said the producer, “your brother too.” And so began Jake and Elwood Blaustein’s rise to fame.

My Farmer, My Lover was the critical I cult hit of the season with Jake and Elwood proclaimed as the screen’s greatest comedy duo since Stan and, Ollie. ‘*With silence and virtually no body movements,” wrote one ecstatic reviewer, “Elwood Blaustein displayed a range of human emotions that is simply unavailable to our so-called ‘great actors’ with their comparatively broad, cartoonlike strokes. And if brother Jake said, ‘How pold was "it, Johnny?’ one more time to that llama, I, think I would have soiled my dainties laughing. Bpffo performances!”

During that first year in New York, the brothers were making a quite respectable living as professional actors but, as the critics knew and Jake only dreamed, bigger things were in the offing. Then bne day the call came in from a man at NBC.

The proposed weekly show was to be called Saturday Night Live, and everybody, it seemed, wanted Jake and Elwood in the cast very much. The audition would be simple, the NBC people told the brothers. “We’re giving you the run of the properties department, and you pick whatever props and costumes you want and come out and give us a little conflict improv. That’s all.”

“Huh?” said Jake softly. The producer, \the director, and a Couple of network executives waited by the front of the stage for Jake and Elwood to reappear. Minutes passed. Then an hour. Then another hour and another. The anticipation in the air was palpable —“What’d they do? Break for lunch?” —when after almost four hours Elwood Blaustein appeared at center stage—in his street clothes. “I couldn’t find nothin’ to wear,” he said quietly. The little audience fell over themselves in hysterics. And then Jake emerged to deliver the coup de grace. Joliet Jake Blaustein had somehow sensed that the Main Chance had come, and, somewhere within him, ancient blood had begun to boil, albeit slowly. When he finally appeared besidq his brother on stage, Jake had magically transformed himself into the Samurai warrior of his distant heritage and, as if gifted with tongues, was shouting “How cold'was it, Johnny?” in Japanese. The laughter that greeted his performance was so intense and prolonged that a full half hour passed before anyone called an ambulance for the producer who, it was discovered, had died instantly of a heart attack, smiling. Jake and Elwood \vere in.

The new producer suggested a few small changes in the act, especially their names. “Blaustein. Blaustein,” he repeated, pacing before the stage with his 'fist to his forehead* “It just won’t do. Too ethnic for TV. And I’ll tell you what, I want to play down the brothers angle, too. I don’t think the audience will see it.” “Ya mean we gotta change our names?” Jake asked. “Like in show business?” Everyone laughed. And they laughed harder when Jake came up with “John Belushi” (“Well, my mother was part Japanese”) and Elwood became “Dan Aykroyd” (“ ’Cause Jake says it’s hard to spell”), but they let it go at that and, of course, Saturday Night Live was the smash hit of the decqde. Soon the Blaustein brothers were being cast in big movies, too, with girls instead of llamas and pigs and whatnot, and in the space of 18 months they were about as rich and famous as two immigrant’s sons from Chicago could be in America.

Still something nagged at Jake’s thoughts. Elwood’stoo, but he couldn’t properly articulate it. “A meteorite?” he said to his older brother. “Nah. Listen, will ya,' El,” Said Jake. “I’m 54 years 6ld and ybu’re 53 and already we’ve just about done it all. Meat. Prison. OffBroadway movies. TV. Big movies. But I thirtk there’s still something missing ...” Jake pondered long and hard on the problem. All of a sudden he spoke again. “Listen, El, \ think I got it: something we can do that we haven’t don^ and be brothers again in the bargain.”

NBC thought it was a bad idea. The movie moguls were aghast. Their new manager said it just wouldn’t work. “But iPyou gotta do it,” he told them, “fof godsakes don’t do it as Blaustein. Too damn ethnic.” But “Blaus” didn’t work; Elwood just couldn’t say it right. After weeks of haggling, their manager leapt from his chair shouting, “I got it!” And then, pointing towards the window, Shecky Armstrong said to Elwood: “What color is the sky?” To which Elwood, after his by now trademark pause, responded: “Gray?” “The Gray Brothers?” said Jake. “No, not now, moron! Most of the time.” And so Jake and Elwood Blaustein became the Blues Brothers. Joliet Jake and Elwood Blues. At Icing last they were brothers again for all the world to see and over everybody’s violent protests they went ahead and made their final dream come true. Against all odds and all the j experts’ adviqe, the Blues Brothers Chinese Laundry opened in Chicago. •In a month it was the hippest cleaning joint in town, a goldmine! “Mom would ■ have been proud!” Jake said, beaming, as he and Elwood stood side by side over a big vat of petroleum naptha doing the squishy-squashy.

“I can’t wait to get back there,” Jake told me last week in an exclusive jailhouse interview where he awaits : sentencing. “Laundry i^so exciting. It’s the most exciting business in the world. • In all humility, I’d have to say that laundry is my life. You know, it runs in my family.” I asked Jake why he and Elwood ever consented to leave the laundry and return to show business to recQrd Briefcase Full Of Blues. Jake revealed that he had never wanted to do it, but that, unbeknownst to them, Shecky had the Blues Brothers in a contractual bind. tAqcording to this,” he explained, “we had to make a . record album for Armstrong or he could maybe close the laundry down. When I told him that music is the pink jism of the mind and that besides, I didn’t know nothiq’ about it anyway; he said just to leaye it up to him. He’d get some old three-chord blues songs together, simple stuff, put us in front of a crack studio band, and after that there was nothin’to it. He said Elwood didn’t even have to learn no words. So maybe I’ve picked up on something since I’ve been in the biz, so I say to him, ‘We get total artistic control?’ And he says, ‘That’s right. You choosy the suits.’ OK, I figure, sounds good enough to me, if it’ll save the laundry. Armstrong says, ‘Well make a bundle!’ Turns out me and El were natures all along. GuesS it was in the blood from our granny.”

“But what about this bootlegging business, Jake?”

“Hey, why not? We do pressing at v the laundry. I figiire it’s no problem to do up a few records when business is light.”

“And the girls, the cases of beer, and cars, the fifth-floor walkups?”

“It was a lot of money coming in on the side. So a guy goes a little crazy. So maybe a guy and his brother get a little high on that naptha. Strong stuff.”

“How is Elwood?”

“Best white fuck I ever had.”

“I mean now.”

“Oh. OK. Hey, we’ll be outta here in no time and back at the laundry where we belong. The Blues Brothers, don’t count us out. Say; what paper are you from?”.

. “Crime Magazine.”

“This gonna be a cover story? You know, forget it: no cover, no talk. That goes for El, too. I ain’t been around laundry this long by being dumb, ya know. So what about' it? We get the cover?”

“No problem, Jake.”

Softly at first then louder, Jake Blues began to whistle. It was a haunting air.

“What’s that?”

“That’s music. ‘My Boy Lollipop.’ You know, music has come to mean a great deal to me.” A

“Is there some particular significance to that song?”

“Hey, man, it’s my roots. Japanese music. Dig?” ■ ^ ,