40 Year Itch: Hung Like a Hebrew National

The Return of Ron Fields (language)

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   The ultra - cool Bill Murray is late night progressive FM radio DJ Mel Brewer and Christopher Guest is Ron Fields, an English (?) manager who has found a new band in this track from National Lampoon's Goodbye Pop album. For reasons they will hopefully be apparent, this was one of the funniest things my high school friends and I had ever heard.

    The album contains hilarious takes on Bob Dylan, Neil Young and, with "Art Rock Suite", introduces us to Sid Gormless of Dog's Breakfast, an early version of Spinal Tap's Nigel Tufnel.

Murray and Guest also teamed up on this somewhat comedic preview of the 1976 Super Bowl.

40 Year Itch: Lemmings

In the Summer of 1973, National Lampoon released Lemmings, a soundtrack to its off Broadway show that mocked Woodstock. Future SNL stars John Belushi and Chevy Chase and Mockumentary master Christopher Guest were among the performers. Belushi did his classic Joe Cocker impression in what would now would fail the PC test with its jokes about Muscular Dystrophy (41:40). Chase plays adequate drums on most of the cuts and apparently pulled off a John Denver impression. Guest impersonated Bob Dylan ( at 7:45) and James Taylor ( at 26:00) . One year later a 30 year old TV executive named Lorne Michaels began searching for a cast for a show to be called NBC's Saturday Night.

It's not so funny today but in 1973 the show ran for 350 performances and the album peaked somewhere near #100 on the Billboard charts.

Meanwhile, in 1973, the magazine published the only thing they've ever had to apologize for: