Was that Elwood Blues of the Blues Brothers or Saturday Night Live veteran Dan Aykroyd relaxing in Plano on Wednesday night? They’re hard to tell apart.
Mr. Aykroyd was in Dallas for a hard-hat media tour of the under-construction House of Blues in Victory Park.
Wednesday night, he headed up the Tollway to the Shops at Legacy, where he sipped on a Decadent Chocolate Martini, the signature drink at Martini Park.
Aykroyd’s Dallas past
Neither Dallas nor the House of Blues are strangers to Mr. Aykroyd. The actor’s sometime running buddy Isaac Tigrett founded the House of Blues and the Hard Rock Cafe.
In the mid-’80s, Isaac rented the penthouse of the Stoneleigh Hotel for four years. It was his HQ while he built the Hard Rock Cafe Dallas, and Mr. Aykroyd frequently crashed in Isaac’s guest room.
Ironically, the Dallas Hard Rock is scheduled to close forever on Saturday.
But back to the golden days: Much of the Hard Rock’s memorabilia collection was displayed in Isaac’s penthouse during the restaurant’s construction. Mr. Aykroyd was one of the guests at a Stoneleigh party in 1986 when Dallas-raised guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughan showed up at Isaac’s door to pay his respects – not to Isaac, but to a guitar.
Stevie Ray had come to visit Jimi Hendrix’s flying V guitar that Isaac had purchased to display at the Hard Rock Dallas. Stevie Ray spent much of the evening clutching the guitar as he mingled with Isaac, Dan and other guests.