June 16-22 SNL Week: Saturday Night Live is celebrating 50 years on the air, can NBC last for another 50 years??

The magazine National Lampoon did a stage show that came out of the radio show. Directed by Tony Hendra, Michael Keady and Sean Kelly and written by Hendra, Kelly, David Axelrod, John Belushi, Chevy Chase, John Belushi, Rhonda Coullet, Christopher Guest, Paul Jacobs, Harold Ramis, Anne Beatts, John Boni, Garry Goodrow, Douglas Kenney, P.J. O’Rourke, Alice Playten and Henry Beard, just from that sentence you’ve already figured out that a lot of SNL people started here.

Starting at The Village Gate on January 25, 1973, this ran for 350 shows. It begins with Belushi coming out to welcome the audience to the Woodshuck Festival: Three Days of Peace, Love and Death. Then, Paul Jacobs from Neverland Express does “Lemmings Lament,” sounding just like David Crosby. Christopher Guest is Dylan singing “Positively Wall Street,” Chevy Chase does John Danver on “Colorado,” Rhonda Coullet is Joan Baez singing “Pull the Tregroes, Negroes” (which has a much worse title); Belushi does Joe Cocker, Guest is James Taylor and there’s even a band named Megadeath years before Megadeth.

Supposedly, this was filmed for HBO — which started in November 1972 — but the tapes were lost.

Most of the acts in this are dead or your parents’ music now. Yet in 1973, this was really going after them and started careers. It’s too bad that Chevy Chase ended up being Chevy Chase.