National Lampoon’s Stereo Test Record: One Dollar’s Worth of Dangerous Genius
When Lou was a wee lad, the brothers next door dropped off about 100 MAD magazines as they went off to college and had no more time for childish things. Over the years, Lou read those magazines to pieces. He started with the cartoons, like those of Don Martin and Spy vs. Spy, then moved up to read the entire magazine cover to cover. This was formative reading. The foundations for the great blog you have today.
If Lou wasn’t so dumb he would have bequeathed his MAD’s to another neighborhood kid and moved on to old issues of National Lampoon. Lampoon was a considerable step up in intellectual heft from MAD. Every single account of National Lampoon falls all over itself hammering home the point that everyone associated with it was incredibly, subversively smart. There are documentaries and books on the topic. A Futile and Stupid Gesture: How Doug Kenney and National Lampoon Changed Comedy Forever by Josh Karp is one book. Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Story of National Lampoon is a documentary. There are YouTubes and Internet accounts out the ass. And Netflix.
Lou was not smart. Never was. Still isn’t. In any case, by Lou’s later teenage years, National Lampoon was a parody of its heyday. Lou went to college with a subscription to National Review. He needed National Lampoon. Somewhere in this is the story of Lou’s life.
National Lampoon grew out of the Harvard Lampoon at the tail-end of the 1960s. Doug Kenney, Henry Beard, and Robert Grossman tasted fame and fortune at Harvard with their parodies of magazines, such as Playboy (Play Dead), and really hit it big with a parody of J.R.R. Tolkien called Bored of the Rings, which sold substantial numbers. It was time to graduate. By 1970, National Lampoon was ready for newsstands. After a rocky first few issues, the magazine hit its stride and zenith, which lasted until Doug Kenney left the magazine in 1975. At its height, there were over one million readers. The magazine carried on from that point and had its ups and downs but never returned to glory. It folded in the 1990s.
When most people think of National Lampoon, they think of the movies. Animal House, Caddyshack, the Vacation series. And a host of lesser efforts. Doug Kenney was once again instrumental in this, as he was co-creator of Animal House and Caddyshack, the best of the Lampoon movies. Michael O’Donoghue and Anne Beatts, Lampoon alumni, were driving creative forces in kickstarting Saturday Night Live. Ironically, Hollywood and TV were the end of Lampoon. As good as the movies and shows were, the real genius of National Lampoon was before then with the magazines, books, radio hour, live shows, and records in the early to mid-1970s.
The Vogue had a copy of Official National Lampoon Stereo Test and Demonstration Record in the one-dollar bin. This is a steal. The record, which features both John Belushi and Chevy Chase (who were associated with Lampoon before SNL), parodies the fad for hi-fidelity stereo equipment that was a mainstay of any swinging pad inhabited by a wild and crazy guy. Men’s magazines, like Playboy, featured reviews, tutorials, and advertisements about stereo equipment all the time as did rock magazines and drug magazines, like High Times and Rush. Rush was the Pepsi to High Times’ coke. The hi-fi was the paraphernalia of being a hip bachelor, like a coke spoon. Or as National Lampoon would have it a coke fork. In fact, magazines, like High Times and Rush, would have ads for freebasing kits in its back pages. Believe it or not, there was a time when freebasing was considered the healthy way to do cocaine, until Richard Pryor set fire to that misconception. In the 1970s before crack made cocaine affordable to the unwashed, the Colombian marching powder was treated as beneficial to hard-working, hard-playing white-collar professionals looking to get an edge in the rat race. In 1975, Time magazine ran a story on cocaine that said as much. More innocent times, until Stevie Nicks was taking coke up the butt.
Intrigued by the Lampoon LP, Lou got a hold of Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Writers and Artists Who Made the National Lampoon Insanely Great from the local library. Not the documentary, this is an anthology as coffee table book. The format is apt because just as important as the writing in National Lampoon (see, e.g., Henry Beard’s masterpiece “Law of the Jungle”, which is featured in all its 12,000-word glory, as are lots of other classics that demonstrated the high intelligence of the staff) was the design. The book features cartoons, fake ads, covers, artwork and photographs that made Lampoon justly famous. The cover “If You Don’t Buy This Magazine, We’ll Kill This Dog” is one of the most notorious and celebrated of all-time. Their parody Volkswagen ad that suggested Ted Kennedy would be president if he drove a Volkswagen is another classic. A classic which resulted in an $11 million lawsuit.
The book features a wide selection of Lampoon writing with a focus on political content, but missing were the stellar music parodies that were a distinctive feature of Lampoon. The LP at The Vogue is but one example in this regard. The Lampoon stage show, Lemmings, a parody of the contemporary music scene, has everything that would later be in The Rutles and This Is Spinal Tap. The takedowns of Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, James Taylor, The Grateful Dead, and others in Lemmings and in the Radio Hour are not only devastating they are great pieces of music in their own right.
By all accounts, Doug Kenney was the smartest of an exceedingly smart bunch. A true genius. But just as smart as the Lampoon group were, they were also self-destructive. Again, Kenney led the way. Kenney’s rampant drug issues eventually ended with him jumping from a cliff to his death in Hawaii, while on vacation trying desperately to get his drug use under control. Chevy Chase was on that trip as well. Now, Chevy is a world-class asshole, who does not suffer fools gladly. He is condescending and thinks highly of his intelligence. Kenney outdid him in all this. Chevy looked up to Kenney and considered him an equal if not a superior, which is probably the best testament to Kenney’s supreme genius on record.
For years, Lou was under the impression that Kenney jumped off a volcano. Lou now thinks it was just a cliff on a mountain, but the image of Kenney hurling himself into a volcano is something that Kenney himself would appreciate. For the most part volcano fatalities happen to volcanologists and journalists. Or depressed Japanese looking to commit suicide. But Kenney was a student of history who no doubt knew of the deaths of Pliny the Elder during the eruption of Vesuvius. Maybe Kenney was thinking of Empedocles, who tossed himself into Mount Etna to prove to his followers that he was immortal and would be transformed into a god. He wasn’t. And neither was Kenney. But, of course, they both live on in the myths surrounding their deaths. Kenney deserves to live on through his work and he does. The influence of National Lampoon is everywhere there is humor, satire, and parody in popular culture and political commentary. And the major driving creative force of National Lampoon was Doug Kenney. Aloha is goodbye.
Suggested Sites and Sounds:
Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead Trailer: Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Story of the National Lampoon - Official Trailer
A Futile and Stupid Gesture Trailer: A Futile and Stupid Gesture | Official Trailer [HD] | Netflix
Freebase Ads: Vintage 1979 Chemist's FREEBASE SYSTEM Magazine AD~AUTOMATIC PIPE/Corazzi-Humes | eBay
Lemmings: National Lampoon: Lemmings: Dead in Concert 1973 (Better Quality)
Grateful Dead Parody in a HST Parody: Grateful Dead Parody - Hunter S Thompson
Doug Kenney Speaking at UCLA: Doug Kenney speaking at UCLA 3/6/1972
The Death of Doug Kenney: The Death of National Lampoon’s Doug Kenney | FULL PODCAST EPISODE
— Lou Waxman