Jake Blues. Elwood Blues is his brother.
And a Coke.
The Country Bunker patrons likely would have been receptive to some tasty selections like I Can’t Stop Loving You (Ray Charles), Cold, Cold Heart and Hey Good Lookin’ (Hank Williams), Pistol Packin’ Mama (Al Dexter), San Antonio Rose (Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys), and Crying Time (Buck Owens), and I would not be surprised if Jake and Elwood knew all of them. They didn’t grow up in a vacuum.
Yep. I used to run the soundboard for a friend’s band. His deal with the venue was cash plus free drinks. At one venue the owner wanted me to pay my bar tab since he didn’t consider me to be part of the band(and honestly, it was sort of a scam on our part). He presented me with a grossly inflated bar tab. After many “fuck yous” shouted back and forth, the bar owner relented.
Well, the bar lady never charged them for the first round, so they figured beer was like, complimentary, you know, for the band.
Plus any number of tunes by Jimmie Rodgers, the “father of country music” (whose tunes were mostly just 12-bar blues). Example.
So if the first round was free, that’s 23 beers each!
75 cent drafts of Bud in Carbondale back in the mid-80’s - I think the point of the joke is that it is a ludicrous amount of beer.
It’s also probable that at least as much was spilled as was drunk.
What is this “$3 beers = $1.50 beers back then” nonsense? The Blues Bros wouldn’t cotton to drinking anything but the cheapest COT(crap-on-tap) available. At a shit-kicker bar like that, they were probably guzzling 50 cent Schlitz or whatever passed for PBR back then.
You’re mistaking a band for a band’s audience. The band was drinking Bud - you can clearly see the bottles all around them in the scene. Draft beer gets warm and gamey too fast for most bands to want to drink it on stage, but you can put three or four unopened cans or bottles to the side and not have to get a refill for a while. The crowd, on the other hand, was obviously downing whatever was cheapest on tap. (Schlitz, probably, going by the neon.)
[chuckling] Naw, nawnawnawnawnaw.
So what was the price of a bottle of Bud in a shitkicker dive in 1980?
The ability of some musicians to put it away is astonishing. I remember the Jazz Lives series on NPR a couple of years back mentioning Oscar Pettiford being capable of playing brilliantly in a condition where it was a small miracle he could even hold the bass, let alone play it. There are many similar stories about Dexter Gordon, Lester Young, Dizzy Gillespie, Bird, among many others.
Paul Quarrington writes about consuming a stunning quantity of alcohol and drugs in his rock career in the 70s and early 80s, and I don’t see any reason to doubt him…
That being said, I doubt the writers meant that to be taken literally so much as taken as a passing reference to the band’s phenomenal capacity for self-indulgence.
i have a bit of a problem imagining someone being able to drink 48 beers in an evening. in fact, i have a bit of a problem imagining a “regular sized woman” drinking 24 in a day.
Folks here have brought up all these points, but I think its the combination thats supposed to make the situation more than the sum of its parts.
They drank a shitload (but not impossible amount) of beer.
The owner of the dive was trying to shaft them by charging them in the first place (or even overcharging).
The Blue Brothers were stupid/desperate enough to work for such a dive with a sleazy owner in the first place. And they were also dumb enough to not really understand/verify the terms of the contract.
All this was combined to make everyone look bad, get some laughs/reactions, and set up a situation that lead to conflict, even more problems, and just generally moved the story along.
I don’t think they had a contract with the bar at all. As I remember the scene they are driving around with Jake telling them they have a gig. As the band is getting fed up Jake sees Bob’s Country Bunker and says that’s where they are playing.
Well, having looked over a few menus from that time period, I’m going to say between $1 and $2. Especially on a weekend night, when you wouldn’t expect a special, after happy hour.
Could very well have been a literal memory of a bartab from a music gig. Don’t forget, half the actors were professional musicians, and the stars were talented amateurs. And SNL had a sort of collaborative writing routine at the time anyhow.
Yes. That doesnt really change the basic point does it? It actually makes it even more. Jake is a real screw up, probably always has been, and yet the band members STILL trust this dude.