Buddy System

Twenty-seven years later, Cheech, now age 62, and Chong, 70, aren’t quite ready to check into the manor. They’re still smokin’ in the entertainment industry, even after a 20-year professional separation, with the duo regrouping this year for their “Light Up America” tour, a pot-pourri of improvisational, sketch, stand-up and musical comedy. On Saturday, Jan. 3, C&C will perform at 7 and 9:30 p.m. at the Turning Stone Resort and Casino Showroom, Thruway Exit 33, Verona. Shelby Chong, Tommy’s spouse of 33 years, will open both shows with her stand-up material. Tickets are $70 to $85. Call 361-SHOW for more information. 

Green grass and high tides: Cheech Marin (left) and Tommy Chong are Still Smokin’.

Chong, born to a Chinese father and a Scotch-Irish mother, got his start in the entertainment business while performing as a guitarist in the Vancouver, British Columbia-based band Bobby Taylor & the Vancouvers. The group was later responsible for the Motown hit, “Does Your Mama Know About Me,” co-written by Chong. He developed a love for improv comedy on tour, and began to collaborate with Los Angeles-bred Cheech (who relocated to British Columbia in 1968 to avoid the draft) after Chong hired him to perform in the improv group City Works at a Vancouver strip club known as Shanghai Junk in the late 1960s. The gig paid Cheech $60 per week, a $5 raise from his previous job as carpet layer. 

By 1971, the duo released their first of eight comedy albums on Warner Bros. Records, which have rolled many classics of pop culture into the American subconscious, such as “Santa Claus and His Old Lady,” “Earache My Eye,” “Sister Mary Elephant,” “Basketball Jones” and the infamous knock-knock “Dave” (i.e. “Dave’s not here”) from their 1972 eponymous record. Years honing their craft on stage made for an easy transition to the silver screen, as many of their well-received stage sketches became the measuring stick of subsequent efforts in the “stoner flick” genre. The boxing-out-the-car scene in the beginning of the first film, 1978’s Up In Smoke (which raked in $44 million, that year’s 12th-highest box-office figure) set the stage for follow-ups such as Cheech and Chong’s Next Movie (1980), Nice Dreams (1981), Things Are Tough All Over (1983) and Still Smokin’ (1983).

The duo split in 1985, after which they embarked upon solo ambitions. Chong landed a recurring role on That ’70s Show as the hippie Leo from 1999 to 2006. Meanwhile, Cheech continued to pursue a TV and film career, having performed alongside Don Johnson on CBS-TV’s Nash Bridges (Cheech reunited briefly with Chong for an episode in 1997), as well as big-screen roles in the Kevin Costner golfing comedy Tin Cup and nearly every movie directed by Robert Rodriguez, including the Spy Kids trilogy plus From Dusk Till Dawn, Desperado, Once Upon a Time In Mexico and parts of Grindhouse. 

But things started to go awry with both comedians’ lives while they were apart. Chong was prosecuted in 2003 for supposedly trafficking bongs across national borders, a felony that resulted in some jail time. (The 2005 documentary a/k/a Tommy Chong details the Justice Department’s $12 million Operation Pipe Dreams that led to the bust.) On the other hand, Cheech got a divorce from his wife Patti Heid at around the same time. To the dynamic duo it seemed the right time to come together again, and now the pair is planning for releases of an upcoming concert movie through the Weinstein Company and a cartoon feature that culls vintage material from their albums, to be titled Cheech and Chong’s Smokin’ Animated Movie.

The New Times provided a formidable challenge for Cheech and Chong during a Dec. 17 phone interview, as its own version of the duo, the mellow-as-a-hammock-on-fire Matt Mumau and the maniacal sleepwalker Tom Kahley, spoke with the pair from Los Angeles about the high times of the past and present and the inevitable end of the roach.  

Q: How has getting back together again been going?

A: Chong: Well, we’re still working on getting back together. We’re trying to give each other at least one compliment every day, you know?

Q: You have an animated film in the works. How did that come about?

A: Chong: Well, we had all these records sitting around doing nothing, and some animators decided to put faces to the voices, and here we are. 

Q: Did the film come about after you guys started performing again, or is it something that’s been brewing for a little while?

A: Chong: It’s been going on for a bit. Animation takes a long time, so it was about a year before Cheech and I actually hit the stage together.

Q: Are you guys thinking about doing an album after this tour, or maybe another feature film?

A: Chong: With all of that, we have to kind of hurry it up, because I’m getting so old that every day is an adventure for me. {Cheech chuckles at Chong}.

Q: On some of your videos posted on Youtube.com, you’ve mentioned there was some brotherly in-fighting that happened before getting back together. Is that still going on?

A: Cheech: Well, I’d say we’re not fighting like that because we’re really successful and we can afford to like outsource it to Korea. 

Bong and winding road: Chong poses with his collection to promote the documentary a/k/a/ Tommy Chong.

Chong: Actually we’ve got people hired to fight for us. We got our managers, and once a week they have to get in the ring with each other.

Q: Now that you guys have gotten back together do you think peace in the Middle East is far behind?

A: Cheech: The reason we got together is because Condoleezza Rice called us, and she said, “I’m not having no luck with these Arabs and these Israels. So how about you guys?” So, that can’t be far behind.

Chong: It’s the training wheels for the peace talks. They’ll try their tactics on Cheech and Chong, and if that works we’ll move onto the Middle East.

Q: Tommy, you mentioned that after your arrest you didn’t smoke marijuana for three years until you attended a National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) party at Hunter S. Thompson’s Owl Farm, and that the ghost of Thompson wouldn’t let you on his property unless you did. How did that reunion with marijuana compare with performing with Cheech again?

A: Chong: It’s funny. As soon as Cheech and I got back together again I stopped smoking, so I could remember what we used to do. I carried it over to this day. I haven’t smoked. I’m going to smoke at the end of the tour. I make these little signposts for myself. I’ll finish the tour, then I’m going to light up. I don’t need to smoke on the tour because everyone smokes for me. 

Q: Do you still see little clouds of smoke popping up in the audience these days?

A: Chong: Literally! You can’t see the audience through all the smoke.

Cheech: I took a suppository for not smoking anymore.

Q: Does your audience still carry the same counterculture vibe as it did in the late 1960s and the 1970s?

A: Chong: Definitely on stage. We definitely have the same vibe that we’ve always had, which is, you know, sort of like a twisted look at everything. And the audience, I don’t know. Cheech, what do you think?

Cheech: I think the counterculture has become the culture. Cheech and Chong can go into every category, age, financial, political persuasion, religion, color: It doesn’t matter or make any difference. So we’ve kind of infiltrated everybody.

Q: Do you think recent stoner films, like Pineapple Express or Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, are more vanilla than what you guys did?

A: Cheech: They’re right for their time and their age group. I think they’re perfect. It’s like watching your kids grow up and perform. 

Chong: I have a feeling that the producers looked at the grosses that our movies made. So, they have their eye on that, and then they have the other eye on the techniques that we used. You know, the way we used the pot in place of a plot.

Q: On your Web site, www.cheechandchong.com, there’s an advertisement for a company that sells a purportedly legal product called “Hawaiian gold bud.” Have you sampled this product?

A: Cheech: Yeah.

Chong: I haven’t ever sampled anything. I have nothing to do with marijuana.

Q: Many people thought there wouldn’t be a black president in their lifetime. Do you guys think the same thing will happen with the legalization of marijuana in the near future?

A: Cheech: Well, hopefully. We just got back from Boston and they decriminalized it there in that state, and that was kind of one of the founding states, you know? So, if it can happen there I guess we’re on the right road. Don’t you?

Chong: I think it will be decriminalized as opposed to {made legal}. I think it’s much better to, you know, don’t ask, don’t tell. I like the don’t ask, don’t tell situation as opposed to “Now it’s legal, and how can we screw that up?”

Q: Tommy, what was the music scene like in Vancouver when you got started?

A: Chong: I was part of a couple of guys who brought Ike and Tina Turner up into Vancouver, and we turned Western Canada into a blues-friendly state, to the point where the crowds actually rejected the rock’n’roll, the psychedelic movement. It didn’t really take a hold of things in Vancouver. {It was mainly} blues and jazz, and right now the state of the music influence in Western Canada where I’m from still leans heavily into the Motown kind of approach, although the rock’n’roll thing is all over the world as usual, and the punk rock and the rap, of course. I mean, there’s like intelligent music: That’s what I call intelligent music, where you have to know sort of music theory with the jazz and the blues and the classics. Then there’s performance music which is, to me, like punk rock, where you got a couple of guys in uniforms, and they got the outfit and they’re going to learn to play their instrument eventually, but not right away.

C+C music factory: Cheech and Chong feel the vibes in Up In Smoke.

Q: Where do you see yourselves in the lexicon of comedy duos?

A: Chong: I think we have our own niche. We’re more like an adjective in the culture, you know? They compare situations to a Cheech and Chong movie. Like, “This is like a Cheech and Chong movement.” I’ve never heard them say, “This is like an Abbott and Costello thing,” or a “Martin and Lewis thing,” I mean, even the drug czar {John Walters, head of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, in 2002} called medical marijuana a “Cheech and Chong” ploy. So, I think we’re going to be known more for really taking pot and making it mainstream.

Q: How did coming out of an improv comedy sketch group affect what you did throughout your careers?

A: Cheech: Well, the improv was where we came out of, and that really informs everything we do. We’re improvisational comedians. We’re like jazz musicians, if you relate it to music. We don’t come out and do four-four.

Chong: The strip club really helped us develop balls of steel when it comes to comedy. After you try it, and you make bikers and horny old single guys laugh at stupid things, it’s not hard to get in front of like a rock audience, or a typical comedy audience. Cheech and I never even really considered ourselves comedians for years. We were like a rock group that did more comedy than play music.

Q: Are you guys also planning on doing a concert film in the future, featuring your music?

A: Cheech: Yeah, we are at the end of January.

Chong: We’re going to record the show we’re doing now and make it into a movie. 

Q: What kind of material, new or classic, will be on it?

A: Cheech: New classic stuff.

Q: Everything is immediately classic with you guys, right?

A: Cheech: It’s funny. In the days when we were making records, everybody would say “These are instant classics.” We kept hearing that a lot, because they stood the test of time, you know? It’s amazing that with the stuff we’re doing right now I feel like we’re doing classics. It’s like doing Beethoven, sometimes.

Q: During a 2007 interview with you on Fox News, Neil Cavuto stated we’re in one of the strongest economies we’ve been in, and, Tommy, you replied “Yeah, right! Tell that to the people who are losing their houses now.” Why do you think they continue to say things like that on Fox?

A: Chong: Well, you see where the Republicans sold the American people myths and lies. They sold them a bill of goods, you know? They were like carny operators, telling the suckers, “Hey! Just try it one more time, and you’re bound to hit some numbers this time. Put your money down. You’re not going to give up now are you?” That’s what these guys are. They were carny operators. Bush was the head guy. They were all throwing the wool over everybody’s eyes so they could steal from them, and Cavuto is probably one of the biggest shills out there. He’s still talking that crap.

Q:  What did you think about the hockey strike?

A: Cheech: There was a hockey strike?

Q: Yes, there was. Maybe we should ask if you are hockey fans?

A: Chong: Yeah, I am. I’m going to the {Los Angeles} Kings game tonight, actually. 

Cheech: Oh yeah? Wow! Way to go!

Chong: I haven’t seen anybody get hit decently for a long time. The hockey strike was very funny, because Canadians had no clue what was going on. As far as the people that vote up there, I don’t even understand the voting system. You don’t vote for anybody. You vote for a party. The whole system: It isn’t the states, you know?

Q: Do you have any memories of traveling through upstate New York before?

A: Cheech: They’ve got a lot of deer there.

Chong: If they’re still living. But it’s the cows that have to worry up in that part of the country. Deer are cool! The fuckin’ cows are the ones that get shot all the time.

Q: Is there any kind of project you haven’t done that you’d like to do in the future?

A: Cheech: We’re going to start our own TV series. 

Chong: We’ve never done television, and I think it’s time. I’d like to do about maybe a season or two, where it’s so brilliant that we quit, and then they have to replay it over and over and over again like they do with Up In Smoke.

Q: Did you guys do all of your own stunts?

A: Cheech: Actually, we do!

Chong: We did in Things Are Tough All Over. We did one stunt in Nice Dreams where {Cheech} jumped off the elevator.

Q: But there were no doubles in the infamous car scene in Up In Smoke.

A: Chong: Well, let me think. 

Cheech: No, that was you.