Chevy Chase
By 1980, Chevy Chase had long left “Saturday Night Live,” got into an infamous backstage brawl with his replacement Bill Murray, and started working in earnest in Hollywood, cranking out hit films. However, he also decided to record and release this oddball self-titled album on Arista that year. Chase, no stranger to recording music (he was once briefly a drummer for Steely Dan and released an album with psychedelic group Chamaeleon Church in 1968), worked with stalwarts such as Tom Scott on this little number, featuring song parodies and lots and lots of drug-fueled jokes.
While some of those jokes are indeed funny, such as the album closing “Rapper’s Plight,” the parody of “I Shot The Sheriff” featuring such lines as “I shot the sheriff / After toking all the PCP” are about as lame as they read. The Alvin and the Chimpunks style of the cover of “Let It Be” is completely fucking stupid as well. Yet there are some laughs to be had in the Barry White send up “Never Gonna Sing for You” and zero laughs to be found in the parody of Randy Newman’s “Short People” and the Donna Summer spoof “Love to Have My Baby” in which Chase is seemingly having an extended orgasm in falsetto, but is really just pretending to be a woman going into labor and giving birth. Yeah. Not so funny.
I wound up finding this album at a record store for $3.99 in the cutout bin when I was in the seventh or eighth grade. I remember taking it home and thinking I could never play it for my mom with all that drug-related shit on it. She wound up asking me if it was funny and if I enjoyed it. I told her I did, even though I thought the same bulk of it was lame that I do now. God only knows why Chevy made this monstrosity. Something tells me it was that ego of his that still seems to be in full effect these days even when he’s trying to play a newer, humbler Chevy. Well, that and all the drugs. Kids, this is proof positive that cocaine can really fuck you up and cause you to have lapses in judgement and make poor business decisions. Enjoy.
