Chase did not enter medical school, which meant he was subject to the military draft. Chase was not drafted; when he appeared in January 1989 as the first guest of the just-launched late-night "The Pat Sajak Show", he said he had convinced his draft board he deserved a 4-F classification by "falsely claiming, among other things, that he had homosexual tendencies". He played drums with the college band The Leather Canary, headed by school friends Walter Becker and Donald Fagen. Chase has called the group "a bad jazz band"; Becker and Fagen later founded the successful group Steely Dan. Chase has absolute pitch. He played drums and keyboards for a rock band called Chamaeleon Church, which recorded one album for MGM Records before disbanding in 1969. To give the album a more soft-rock sound, producer Alan Lorber made several alterations in the mixing, including the muting of Chase's bass drum, and Chase was reportedly incensed when he heard the final mix. Before fame, Chase worked as a cab driver, truck driver, motorcycle messenger, construction worker, waiter, busboy, fruit picker, produce manager in a supermarket, audio engineer, salesman in a wine store, and theater usher. Chase was a member of an early underground comedy ensemble called Channel One, which he co-founded in 1967. He also wrote a one-page spoof on "" for "Mad" magazine in 1970 and was a writer for the short-lived "Smothers Brothers" TV show comeback in the spring of 1975. Chase made the move to comedy as a full-time career by 1973, when he became a writer and cast member of "The National Lampoon Radio Hour", a syndicated satirical radio series. "The National Lampoon Radio Hour" also featured John Belushi, Gilda Radner, Bill Murray, and Brian Doyle-Murray, all of whom later became "Not-Ready-For-Prime Time Players" on "NBC Saturday Night" (later re-titled "NBC's Saturday Night" and finally "Saturday Night Live"). Chase and Belushi also appeared in National Lampoon's off-Broadway revue "Lemmings", a sketch and musical send-up of popular youth culture, in which Chase also played the drums and piano during the musical numbers. He appeared in the movie "The Groove Tube", which was directed by another co-founder of Channel One, Ken Shapiro, featuring several Channel One sketches. Chase was one of the original cast members of "Saturday Night Live" ("SNL"), NBC's late-night comedy television show, beginning in October 1975.