Dan Aykroyd
speaker
980 appearances
4 recordings
4 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard 27 May
Dan Aykroyd’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
So good.
It's quiet, and this is a fortress here, David.
I love writing more than anything. You're left alone. You know, you do three hours in the morning, you write three hours in the afternoon, go pick up a kid from school and write at night. And after nine hours, you come out with seven pages and then you're moving on.
Well, the first records, of course, were, you know, The Beatles and The Stones. And then I think the seminal record for me was the East-West record that Paul Butterfield did in the late 60s with Elvin Bishop and Michael Bloomfield. And from then on, I began to go out and try to search the bins in the record stores for blues artists and then started listening to John Lee Hooker.
And we had a tremendous booking process. agent in Ottawa, Canada, where I grew up. That's the capital of that great, great nation. And my parents worked for the government up there. And I was a kind of a son of government workers up there. And there was a club called Le Hibou, which was right on Sussex Drive near where the prime minister lives. And we had a booker there named Harvey Glatt.
And he brought in all of the great blues stars of the age. So that as a teenager, I jammed behind Muddy Waters when S.P. Leary refused to take the drum kit. And he said, is there anybody out there that's a drummer? And I walked up and I started to play and Muddy turns to me and he goes, keep that beat going, boy. You make Muddy feel good. I mean, this was part of my early exposure.
And then I saw Paul Butterfield and Charlie Musselwhite and You know, all these great players. And it was, I guess, just through the insight of this guy who was, you know, booking for the college crowd up there. And then listening to the black radio stations in Boston and Detroit and New York. This was, you know, these were sort of all part of my exposures, I guess.
Well, my dad used to pour over the newspapers and look for... record collections that were used. So he would go and he'd see that some guy in Ottawa or Hull or where we were living there, would be selling 100 records. He'd just go out and buy them all. So we were listening to anything from Glenn Miller to Mario Lanza, lots of Broadway soundtracks and stuff.
But I think my father really influenced me when he started to get into the Jack Hilton, Ray Noble, Freddie Gardner, English swing band music. That was really something because, you know, the value of horns was there. And then later, as I started to buy, of course, was the Beatles and the Stones and the Animals and then the Paul Butterfield record.
But my dad was into the swing band music, as many people were in Canada at that time.
And seeing guys on stage in my high school imitating Mick Jagger. imitating the animals.
I wanted to be Paul Butterfield and Charlie Musselwhite, and I used to
walk around in a long trench coat, a long brown trench coat with shades, and I'd slick my hair back, and I'd try to find any little band up in the bars up in the Gatineau and up in Ottawa and Hull and where I was living, and I would get on stage with them, and they'd be country bands, and I would turn to them and say, well, can you do it like this?
And I would kind of show them a basic, you know, 8, 10, 12-bar blues pattern, and then we'd just take off from there. And, of course, I was posing as Paul Butterfield. Yeah. Absolutely. And then my friend Gary O'Dwyer, who is now a school principal up in Coburg, Ontario, he was pretending to be Eric Burden. And I had, you know, the math whiz in class in grade 11 was pretending to be Mick Jagger.
So everybody was posing and it was all based on rock and roll and music and blues then, all of it.
I played harp mostly and sang. Yeah, the drumming was sporadic, but, you know, I filled in. for bands now and again when I was growing up.
In 1973, John came up to Canada to recruit for the National Lampoon Radio Hour. And I was in Second City with Gilda Radner and with John Candy. And John came in to Toronto, and he joined us on the set of the Second City stage, and we did an improv set.
And then we went back to my very famous speakeasy called the 505, which opened after 1 o'clock after the Liquor Control Board of Ontario closed most of the bars in the province. We had a bar at the corner of Queen and River at 505 Queen Street, and all the streetcar drivers and cops from, like, outlying regions and waiters and waitresses and dancers would come to drink.
And I had a record on by the Downchild Blues Band out of Toronto, Donnie Walsh, an incredible seminal artist out of Canada. And John and I were listening to it, and John said, what is this? It's a great record. I said, oh, it's just a local blues band. Blues, huh? I'm from Chicago. I hear the blues now and again, but I'm into heavy metal, he says.
I said, well, John, you show me heavy metal, and I'll show you the blues. So we started to kind of talk about it and listen, and Howard Shore was there that night. He's, of course, the great Oscar-winning composer of the Lord of the Rings trilogy music. He was the original musical director on Saturday Night Live, and he was in Toronto.
Showing 941–960 of 980 · page 48 of 49
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