Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi in 1978: Two Guys Who Weren't Sure the Show Would Last Seven Episodes

In early 1978, Dan Aykroyd was 26 years old and sleeping on a foam slab on John Belushi’s floor. Not metaphorically. Literally a slab, rolled out of a closet at night, while Belushi’s cats picked at his feet. The show they were both on had been running four seasons and neither of them was completely sure it had a future. This is the context for a newly unearthed interview from The Tapes Archive, a conversation so loose and alive it sounds less like press and more like two guys talking in a car at 2 a.m. Which, given their cross-country road trips in delivery cars they were supposed to drop off in California, is basically what their friendship was.

What makes this thing worth an hour of your life is the total absence of myth-making. Aykroyd and Belushi in 1978 are not yet monuments. They’re two mid-twenties weirdos from the Second City circuit who got hired almost by accident, after hundreds of other people auditioned for seven jobs. Belushi walked into his SNL audition with a stolen ballet barre, a rubber band in his hair, and what he cheerfully calls ‘a bad attitude’ about television. Lorne Michaels, he admits, was not particularly enthusiastic about him. ‘I was kind of a punk,’ Belushi says. He got the job anyway. The samurai sketch that made him famous was born months earlier in his apartment, sneaking up on his wife with a broomstick and yelling fake Japanese at his cats. Neither of those things felt like career planning.

I didn’t wanna go and audition with something that everybody knew. Most of my friends were there auditioning.

The Part Where They Explain How Everything Actually Happened

The origin stories here are genuinely good. Aykroyd traces the Coneheads to a fascination with circus pinheads, specifically French roustabouts with oxycephaly who worked the freak shows. He was also, he admits, thinking about how much dead space there is at the top of a 21-inch television screen. Lorne Michaels eventually told him to take these alien cone people and put them in a suburban living room instead of the grand UN landing scene Aykroyd had originally imagined. Good note. The ‘but, no’ catchphrase, meanwhile, turns out to have been an accident. Aykroyd didn’t remember doing it the first time. A writer named Brian Doyle-Murray had to remind him. They stuck it back in. The audience lost its mind.

I said, ‘I don’t remember.’ He said, ‘well put it in here somewhere.’ So we stuck it in. I said ‘okay, boom.’ I stuck it in, and the next time I did it, I said, ‘but, noooo.’ And God I got a reaction, I couldn’t believe it.

Belushi’s account of discovering Toshiro Mifune in Akira Kurosawa’s Sanjuro is the best stretch of the whole interview. Channel 13 in New York was running Japanese films, Sanjuro came on three times in one week, and Belushi just kept watching it. ‘I looked at this guy and I went, oh my God.’ He started walking around his apartment doing it. Grabbed his hair into a fist. Got the broomstick. Scared the cats. There was no plan, no bit, no pitch. Just a guy alone in his apartment doing something that made him laugh, until eventually it became one of the most recognizable characters in the show’s history.

Live or Nothing

The clearest through-line in the conversation is how much both of them need the liveness. Not the show, exactly. The liveness. Aykroyd says flatly that he would not do television if it weren’t live. Belushi says no matter how angry or crazy the week gets, the moment the show goes on air, he’s smiling. They describe taped television with a kind of physical disgust, the same way a musician talks about lip-syncing. The Blues Brothers album they’re promoting at the time of this interview is, they insist, exciting specifically because it’s live. The upcoming film, which Aykroyd is writing as they speak, will work because it will have that same salt and pepper quality, their phrase, of something that could fail.

I would not do television if this wasn’t live. The slime primetime stuff is not for me or for us, we don’t do that stuff. Live TV is exciting. Taped TV is not exciting.

By the end, they’re talking about the Blues Brothers movie, Steven Spielberg’s 1941, Ray Charles learning all his lines in one morning while the cast read off cue cards, and a road trip across Nevada where Aykroyd played Wagner for Belushi for the first time at full volume. None of it sounds like two people building a legacy. It sounds like two people who found each other in a city where they didn’t have jobs yet, decided they thought alike, and just kept going.