I have one using a 723 voltage regulator chip. I fancied doing it when I realized its one of the oldest chips still in production. It's not high gain, but kind of crunchy. It probably needs some extra front end drive, but my aim was to use it alone.
You can get distortion from a voice memo chip, just leave the AGC capacitor off and fix it for pass-thru mode instead of recorder mode. You get a variable LP filter too set by the recording time resistor.