Jake And Elwood Blues

My thoughts on our favourite brothers of blues and the 1980 movie they star in

[jakeandelwoodblues]

I've made so much fun of the clearly single guy at the Country Bunker during Stand By Your Man.

I now feel awful for making so much fun because he's wearing a wedding ring, which means he's either getting cheated on or his wife died 😭

[jakeandelwoodblues]

I just wanted to thank everyone for such a warm welcome back. I think it's been something like 5 years since I started this blog and I'm so happy I didn't delete it cause I never stopped thinking about these boys.

I'm also now 5 years older so if the anon who bullied me off in the first place wants to throw down again, I've got 5 more years' worth of pithy comebacks

[jakeandelwoodblues]

We'll never have music back to the state it used to be if musicians stop giving themselves odd nicknames

I'm begging these people to call themselves Blue and Duck and Bones and The Colonel and Guitar and Too Big and Murph and Mr Fabulous please the ecosystem is dying

[carryonlikewedidbefore]

The idea is that your band members or friends give you the nickname. So really the task is up to everyone else to assign epithets to musicians.

(Can you really imagine someone walking up to the group and saying "call me Mr Fabulous" and not immediately getting mocked)

[jakeandelwoodblues]

You're so right.

Everyone, give your friends ridiculous nicknames please the ecosystem is dying

(Also it means that the band looked at this exhausted sass bucket and were like "dear God he's fabulous")

[jakeandelwoodblues]

We'll never have music back to the state it used to be if musicians stop giving themselves odd nicknames

I'm begging these people to call themselves Blue and Duck and Bones and The Colonel and Guitar and Too Big and Murph and Mr Fabulous please the ecosystem is dying

[jakeandelwoodblues]

Okay so this record company executive, or as I call him, The Most Convenient Character Of All Time. I have a thought process that explains him well:

He went from head bouncer "back in the 70s" to president of the biggest record company on the eastern seaboard in under a year. I, for one, call bs.

He proves the fact he's a bouncer because he knows the building

He proves the fact he's a record producer by offering the brothers 10k

But he doesn't give his name or a contract of any kind

And he catches them mid-show

Which makes me think he's not a record producer at all

So who is he?

He works for Curtis

Curtis has been raising boys at least 30 years at the orphanage, likely longer

Record exec was in the neighborhood enough to see the posters for the show, which means he was in the area that Curtis was

He could be quickly and likely easily roped into a scheme to pass along the cash

Now where the cash came from, I have two theories

Theory A: it's the gate money that just got quickly bundled and passed along

Theory B: Curtis has been saving up ever since the property got assessed. Maybe legally, maybe not. If legally, he likely didn't have quite enough to pay off the taxes and needed to supplement the missing cash with gate money. If illegally, he obviously couldn't just hand over the cash and needed a way to launder it (for lack of a better term), so he sent the brothers on a religious journey so they could get credit for collecting the cash

Why do all this?

Curtis needs that orphanage and obviously cares about the kids who need it too. He just needed a way to get enough money and present it as legally gotten funds so that he wouldn't get fired

[jakeandelwoodblues]

5 years. It took 5 frickin years.

And it took watching the stupid Elvis movie to figure out they call him Bones cause he plays the trombone!

[jakeandelwoodblues]

Maybe it's a little morbid, but I like to imagine that the in-universe Matt and Aretha were like their real world counterparts and stayed together until their late 80s, when they died almost precisely 2 months apart

[jakeandelwoodblues]

I've come to terms with the fact that some moments of the movie look strange or exaggerated because the moments are told to us by the characters in them, not by the director or the omnipresent narrator or the writer.

Examples include:

Jake not having any background when he leaves prison because Elwood's never been to Joliet beyond visits so he doesn't know what's inside

Curtis performing in pristine attire with a gorgeous set because he's imagining himself as a high class blues singer with a big band backing him

The Nazis falling from 2 miles up instead of like 50 feet because of how far the fall felt to them

But the one I can't explain is why Curtis's audience changes. The only answer I can come up with is that he had some kind of beef with the original audience and imagined a better one for himself

[jakeandelwoodblues]

God decided that the audience had to go. Simply had the incorrect vibes

[jakeandelwoodblues]

What's the disorder where someone tells you explicitly not to watch The Blues Brothers anymore so out of spite you watch it 11 days in a row? Asking for a friends

[jakeandelwoodblues]

I've come to terms with the fact that some moments of the movie look strange or exaggerated because the moments are told to us by the characters in them, not by the director or the omnipresent narrator or the writer.

Examples include:

Jake not having any background when he leaves prison because Elwood's never been to Joliet beyond visits so he doesn't know what's inside

Curtis performing in pristine attire with a gorgeous set because he's imagining himself as a high class blues singer with a big band backing him

The Nazis falling from 2 miles up instead of like 50 feet because of how far the fall felt to them

But the one I can't explain is why Curtis's audience changes. The only answer I can come up with is that he had some kind of beef with the original audience and imagined a better one for himself

[jakeandelwoodblues]

The 8 band members crowding into the single car at the end of the Bob's performance is a metaphor for a clown car in order to reflect the fact that they're deciding to stick with the band even though it's an ultimately stupid decision

[reactionfaces]

[enigmaticandunstable]

The Blues Brothers (1980)

[baronafanas002]

Elwood and jake getting their vaccine

[comominimo]

The Blues Brothers by Martina Esposito.

[f-lorenzo]

The Blues Brothers

[speakspeak]

Cab Calloway plays Curtis (homage to blues musician Curtis Salgado), the orphanage janitor and music mentor in Blues Brothers (1980).

[muppet-hell]