Opening the Doors to House of Blues : Pop music: A concert is scheduled for the March 18 premiere of the new West Hollywood blues club and restaurant.

Aerosmith--whose hard-rock has always been steeped in the blues--is putting together and will be featured in a special concert March 18 to open the House of Blues, a new West Hollywood music club and restaurant that proprietors are confident will become a major feature of Sunset Strip night life. The Blues Brothers with Dan Aykroyd--along with Aerosmith a major investor in the club--will also perform.

The three-story club, being built on a site across from the Comedy Store on Sunset Boulevard, will consist of a 1,000-capacity music club, plus a 385-seat restaurant serving original fare based on traditional cooking, with an American folk-art decor. The first House of Blues opened in Cambridge, Mass., last year and a second will open in New Orleans next month.

Isaac Tigrett, who co-founded the Hard Rock Cafe chain and is the man behind the House of Blues, says that the March 18 show, with other performers to be announced, will kick off a week of events celebrating blues music and culture. Plans are still being set for other nights that week, but one will showcase various regional blues styles, with Booker T. & the MG’s, Carla Thomas and Son Seals among those lined up.

“This is the taproot of American music and the only musical art form that can claim continuous influence on the popular market from the 1920s on,” says Tigrett, 45. “The Black Crowes is a blues band, Led Zeppelin is a blues band, Eric Clapton had the biggest album of his career last year with an album featuring acoustic blues numbers. And we’re really excited about the young, hip blues acts that have come along.”

The club will showcase all branches of the blues, from rural roots to Louisiana Cajun styles and even to some reggae, and will also book some acts that are not blues-oriented.

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“We’ve got a lot of blues fans in the conventional rock world and the specifically blues world,” says Aykroyd, a blues fanatic who now hosts--in his Elwood Blues persona--a nationally syndicated “House of Blues” radio show. “We’re trying to keep the lesser-known bands that are out there alive and we want to develop new talent.”

Blues traditionalists may dismiss Aerosmith, the Boston hard-rock band, and the Blues Brothers, the act that began as a “Saturday Night Live” sketch with Aykroyd and the late John Belushi and later inspired a hit movie. But both have been longtime supporters of blues preservation and their music has been credited with helping to expose “real” blues artists.

“We’re in a very bizarre time right now where people don’t trust any of the institutions of the past--lawyers, politicians and so on--and people are looking out for things that are authentic and real,” Tigrett says. “And it doesn’t get much more real than an art form that has been around for almost 100 years.”

One of the institutions Tigrett came to mistrust was his own Hard Rock Cafe, the popular international restaurant chain known as much for its popular T-shirts as anything else. Tigrett and former partner Peter Morton opened the first Hard Rock in London in 1971, splitting in the late ‘70s with Morton taking the territory west of the Mississippi and Tigrett the rest of the world. Tigrett went public with his company, but by the late ‘80s allowed it to be sold.

“It was going too commercial, getting out of control,” he says. “It was not what I had hoped it would become.”

Tigrett promises that the House of Blues chain--which also numbers the Harvard University Endowment among its main financial backers--will not lose sight of its charter.

“This is not a Hard Rock Cafe,” he says. “We are not dealing with some mainstream, high-fashion, big-market selling phenomenon. . . . This is not based on T-shirts, caps and jackets. We will have a retail store, but we’ll be selling mainly blues records, videos, books and instruments.”

Says Aykroyd: “What we’re trying to do is education in a way that doesn’t shove it down people’s throats, and I think it’s so far worked well in Cambridge. People are coming back.”