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Bullseye with Jesse Thorne is a production of maximum fun and is distributed by NPR. It's bullseye, I'm Jesse Thorne.

Before I get into my interview this week, a question,

how would you explain the Blues Brothers

to a person who had never heard of them?

Like a team who was born the same year the iPhone came out or a monk that lived in a monastery her whole life or I don't know a space alien.

Think about it. It is not easy. You have these two guys wearing suits and sunglasses, Jake and Elwood Blues. They wear dark suits and stingy brim fedores. They sing in a kind of blues soul revival band and also they are played by actors

The late John Belushi and my guest Dan Ackroyd

But wait that space alien might say.

Dan Ackroyd and John Belushi are comedians.

Do they play funny songs or something?

No.

When they perform live, they do a very sincere, very capable tribute to Chicago and Memphis blues music.

They save the funny stuff for when they're off stage and even then if you've seen the movie you know this, the jokes aren't really joke

you get a lot of high stakes absurd situations a lot of car chases and a series of

very fun funny deadpan one-liners. That's all to say that the Blues Brothers is a very weird idea, but also a weirdly enduring one.

The Blues Brothers have spanned well over four decades, three albums, two movies,

countless live shows, a string of performance venues around the country country and now an audio documentary.

In Blues Brothers, The Arc of Gratitude, Dan Ackroyd tells the story of how the band formed

...