The crystal method
Dan Aykroyd crafts a business venture out of a clever hoax
Joe Engle
When he’s not regaling fans with tales from the sets of The Blues Brothers and Ghostbusters, Dan Aykroyd is running a liquor company called Crystal Head Vodka. The fruits of his labor—tiny glass skulls filled with Russia’s favorite spirit—have been hitting the road of late, stopping at the west side Woodman’s, of all places, on Wednesday afternoon. While the company’s name is a reference to repeated archaeological cons, it's also a metaphor for a certain silly novelty factor that can liquefy human brains.
Manufactured from quartz crystal rocks in the mid-1800s and beyond, crystal skulls have been “discovered” all over the world for the past century. Touted as both Aztec artifacts and paranormal objects, these skulls could purportedly see the future, cure disease, and kill any sorry soul who double-crossed its owners. Aykroyd taps into this well of mystery on his product’s website, insisting that “alone, each [skull] is believed to house radiant psychic energy.”
Together, Aykroyd and his pile of skulls cast a spell over the Woodman’s crowd, inducing hundreds of spellbound fans to drop $50 on vodka-filled craniums—and plenty of paraphernalia from his movies. With a Sharpie and a flick of his wrist, he transformed each skull from a lousy piece of glass into autographed eBay merchandise—or at least one hell of a knickknack.
Decider’s census crew determined that nearly 200 dazed fans were lined up for autographs by 6 p.m., snaking from the store’s booze room to its romance-novel section. At the front of the line, Aykroyd looked as if he was dodging Xenu, dressed all in black except for a blue-flecked tie and a pair of thick sunglasses.
Stuffed into a corner beneath a “No Riding Under Carts” sign, Aykroyd signed autographs as his minions shuffled skulls, bottles of cabernet, and containers of Orangina (Aykroyd’s favorite vodka mixer, according to one of his staff). An additional crowd of about 50 milled about ogling, snapping photos with cell phones, and bewildering store clerks with requests for "triple-Herkimer diamond-filtered Newfoundland deep-aquifer pure-spirit” vodka.
Considering how much alcohol was present, the crowd was extremely well behaved, and the skull-signing table appeared to be free of bodyguards—unless you count the couple that stormed in dressed as the the Blues Brothers, complete with sunglasses and fake sideburns.
One question still remained, though: Why, short of a supernatural event or a stroke of lunacy, would throngs of people spend hours waiting to christen a fake, booze-filled skull? Munkarth The Lesser said it best in a recent Onion opinion column: “Things just taste better out of a skull.”
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