Chevy Chase Once Played in a ’60s Psychedelic Rock Band and Was an Early Drummer for Steely Dan

By the early 1970s, actor and comedian Chevy Chase showed off his musical skills as a drummer in National Lampoon’s stage show Lemmings, which also helped launch the careers of fellow SNL cast members John Belushi and Christopher Guest. In Lemmings, which partly spoofed the 1969 Woodstock festival called Woodshuck and parodied artists like Bob Dylan and James Taylor, Chase performed John Denver’s “Colorado.”

In 1980, Chase also released his eponymous 1980 comedy album, where he parodied songs by Bob Marley (“I Shot the Sheriff”), the Beatles (“Let It Be”), and picked up songwriting credit for comedy pieces, including “Rapper’s Plight,” a play on Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight.”

Also an accomplished jazz pianist, Chase would often play and sing in comedic sketches, and parodied Bruce Hornsby’s 1986 No. 1 hit “The Way It Is” (as “The Way It Goes”) on a 2009 episode of the comedy series Community.

Aside from his musical spoofs, Chase was an accomplished drummer and jazz pianist, and started performing in bands many years before Chevy Chase made his debut on Saturday Night Live in 1975.

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Steely Dan

While studying English at Bard College in Hudson Valley, New York, during the mid-’60s, Chase started playing with schoolmates and future Steely Dan founding members Donald Fagen and Walter Becker.

“Chevy looked like a frat boy who’d wandered onto the wrong campus, but he was professional, talented, and compulsively funny,” Fagen recalled in his 2013 memoir, Eminent Hipsters, of his first impressions of Chase. Becker and Fagen first played with Chase at a campus Halloween party in 1967. “He kept excellent time and, at least that night,” added Fagen, “didn’t embarrass us by taking off his clothes or doing any of his Jerry Lewis bits.”

Before christening the band Steely Dan—named after the phallic sex toys (“Steely Dan III from Yokohama”) mentioned in William S. Burroughs’s 1959 novel Naked Lunch—Fagen and Becker were already playing together and went through several names, including the Don Fagen Jazz Trio, The Very Bad Jazz Band, and The Leather Canary.

Without knowing it at the time, Chase was the drummer in one of the band’s earliest iterations. “We started Steely Dan, basically,” Chase said on Marc Maron’s WTF Podcast in 2023. “I was [Fagen’s] first drummer, and I loved it. We started at Bard College. “I can’t remember the name of the little place that people would go and play guitars and sing. And we called ourselves The Very Bad Jazz Band. That was literally our name.”

Ultimately, Chase considered himself more of a jazz drummer and left the band shortly after. “I think I was a good jazz drummer,” he said. “I loved doing that kind of thing, and I did it many times later, too. I didn’t want to be a rock and roll drummer kind of guy, you know?”

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Chamaeleon Church

By the late ’60s, played drums and keyboards in the psychedelic rock band Chamaeleon Church, along with vocalist Ted Myers, guitarists and bassists Kyle Garrahan and Tony Scheuren. Initially started by Myers, who was in a band called the Lost, Chamaeleon Church formed in 1967 and became part of the Bosstown Sound, a name given to the psychedelic rock or pop bands coming out of Boston.

“At the same time, an as yet unknown Chevy Chase, who had been in a college band with Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, was lobbying me hard to form a band so he could be the drummer,” recalled Myers in a 2015 interview. “The final piece fell together when I ran into my old lead guitarist, Kyle Garrahan, on the streets of Greenwich Village, and the band was complete. We rehearsed and wrote songs for several months, then went into the studio with Lorber [producer, Alan Lorber] and cut the album.”

The short-lived band appeared on the ABC show, Preview, hosted by Batman actor Adam West, and recorded only one album, a self-titled release for MGM Records, before disbanding in 1968. Myers later went to work at Rhino Records, and Scheuren reconnected with Chase soon after the band split when he started writing music for National Lampoon projects, including Lemmings.

In 2000, Akarma Records reissued Chamaeleon Church, featuring two bonus tracks. The band’s music was also featured on the 1996 Bosstown Sound compilation albums Bosstown Sound, 1968: The Music & The Time, and Family Circle – Family Tree.

Photo: NBC/NBCU Photo Bank/Getty Images