“Welcome to the Woodchuck Music Festival, three days of peace, love, and death.”

Your emcee is a bearded John Belushi and, in between warning the audience about spiked drugs and encouraging the people climbing the sound tower to jump off from the high spot possible, he introduces several musical acts.  Christopher Guest appears as Bob Dylan, repeatedly walking to and then retreating from the stage until Belushi produces enough money to convince him to perform a song called Positively Wall Street.  Introduced as the ultimate “bummer” by Belushi, Joan Baez (Rhonda Coullet) comes out on stage with a baby and rambles about her imprisoned husband David (whose hunger strike was so successful that he and the inmates of Cell Block 11 have all starved to death) before singing a protest song with a title that I can’t repeat.  Joe Cocker (Belushi) sings while shaking on stage.  James Taylor (Christopher Guest) attempts to perform but his band (including Belushi and Chevy Chase) are too zoned out on heroin to play their instruments.  The owner of Yasser’s Farm (played by Christopher Guest) comes out to praise everyone in the audience who has already died.  Finally, a heavy metal group called Megadeath (no, not that Megadeth!) come out on stage and turn up their amplifiers so loud that the entire audience dies at the end of their song.

An Off-Broadway production that premiered in 1973 and ran for over 300 performance, National Lampoon’s Lemmings has achieved legendary status amongst comedy nerds.  It’s rare that you read any history of Saturday Night Live, Second City, or This Is Spinal Tap without coming across a reference to Lemmings.  Along with satirizing Woodstock and the 60s counterculture in a way that probably few would have the guts to do today, the production features Belushi, Chase, and Guest before any of them became (however briefly) stars.  Fortunately, HBO — which started broadcasting a year before the premiere of Lemmings — filmed one of the stage shows.

Viewed today, Lemmings still carries a strong satiric bite.  Though Lemmings was clearly a 70s production, much of its humor still feels relevant today.  The vapid political posturing, the greed disguised as altruism, the audience blindly following their idols, there was little in Lemmings that one can’t see today just by spending a few minutes on social media.  Beyond the humor, though, Lemmings is a chance to see Belushi, Chase, and Guest as youngish men who had their entire lives ahead of them.  Chase is surprisingly likable, playing up his goofy physical comedy.  Guest disappears into each role that he plays, with his impersonation of Dylan being the clear highlight.  That said, Belushi is the clear star of the show, delivering the most absurd of lines with an engaging sincerity.  As I watched Lemmings, it was hard not to wonder what type of roles John Belushi would be playing today.  Would he still be doing comedy?  Would he have faded away?  Or, like Bill Murray (or, for that matter, Jim Belushi), would he now be appearing in a mix of comedic and serious roles?

We’ll never know.  But we’ll always have his performance as Joe Cocker.