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.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
at that time and had dropped by the bar and he said, yeah, you guys should start a band and you could call it the Blues Brothers. And we just went, bink, bink. And we started to correspond. I didn't go back to New York with John.
He'd managed to get Gilda to go back with him, but we kept in touch on the phone and we started to look at material and develop material and we did our first gig in New York in the Lone Star Cafe and our backup band It was Willie Nelson with Mickey Raphael, one of the greatest harmonica players ever. And Willie understood what we were trying to do, like so many that came along and joined us.
They understood that, okay, these guys aren't the greatest musicians or singers or dancers, but what they are are great front men. and they love and respect the music. So the hat and glasses are from the John Lee Hooker album House of the Blues. He wears those shades and that hat on the cover there. The suits, the black jacket and thin tie and white shirts were because...
You know, a lot of artists in the 60s kind of, you know, who were progressive and maybe were getting in trouble with the law, like Lenny Bruce wanted to look straight. And so it was kind of trying to get that IRS look together to kind of fool the straights was where that came from. One of my first jobs in broadcasting was working for CITY TV.
In Toronto, which was this whole new concept in urban television that really, basically today, your news desk, your news desks across America, Channel 7, 4, 2, wherever you want to be, network. with the graphics and the, the presence of the, the, the, the, the seemingly sort of active presence of the newscaster. This is from Moses Nimer, C I C I T Y TV.
He basically changed the whole format and the whole delivery of, of, of news in North America. And I worked for his station. I was a game show announcer and I also did the, uh, uh, the, um, you know, the shot box announcing. So I actually had to do that fast rap stuff for, you know, for car companies and beer companies and all that.
So, sure, I was actually doing it professionally when I first started out. I was hired by none other than Ivan Reitman, who we went on to do the Ghostbusters thing together.
I was, yeah. I was a mailman in Toronto when I first moved there. I knew I wanted to go to Toronto, work with Lorne Michaels again. I had gone there to do a special with him when I was 19 years old. Went back to Carleton University. Couldn't concentrate. You know, I had to be in show business. Dropped out of school, much to the chagrin of my parents.
I got a job driving mail truck in Toronto, and then I shifted to the broadcasting. And, yeah, I was a shot box announcer for about a year there with City TV and hired by Ivan Reitman and recommended by Lauren. Lauren said, you should hire this kid. So Lauren Michaels has been instrumental in my career from, you know, basically age 17.
People remember. Yeah.
Oh, yeah. No, no. My aunt, the late Hélène Goujon, she was a lovely woman, my mother's sister. She was, in fact, the Julia Child of Canada.
She had, yeah. She had a television show and a cuisine shop in Montreal during the 60s. And she – I went to her house for lunch and she was a master gourmet chef and she was very well known for – she was on the – uh, the network, the TV up there.
And, uh, she said she was making a fish soup and I saw she dropped the whole fish into the blender with the bones and everything, you know, she said, Oh no, no, no. Where are the bones? You pick the bones out. Like you're reading a filet. Don't worry about it. And I never forgot that.
And then, you know, many years later, I was sitting with Paul Simon and Lorne Michaels and Elaine and Chevy and John and I were there at Belushi Simon, Paul Simon, me, Lorne and Chevy. And we're sitting there, uh,
And, you know, we were just kind of laughing over things, and I was thinking about that, and, you know, we were eating a meal, and I thought, yeah, I got this idea for, you know, a scene, you know, basimatic. And when I said that, Paul Simon, you know, who's probably one of the most brilliant people ever in entertainment, he started to really laugh, and it's hard to get Paul to laugh.
You know, because he's so intellectual, so smart. You know, you got to be at a certain level. When he started to snort, I said, man, I got something. If I can make Paul laugh, it's this easy. And I went away and I wrote the scene based upon that night and my aunt's real experience with the fish in a blender. And I remember a woman wrote me a letter. She was very upset.
that I would change the molecular state of the fish from solid to liquid on television. She was really, really upset about that. And I wrote her back, and I said, well, you know, this was actually the way that my aunt made fish soup.
Starring the not-ready-for-prime-time player, Dan Aykroyd.
Football is kind of nice. They changed it a little bit. They moved the hash marks in. Guys found them and smoked them anyway. That's right.
For how long?
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