Tommy Chong has got the munchies. It’s early afternoon in locked-down LA, and last night he was on the pot cookies. “My wife, Shelby, just made a whole batch of them – oatmeal and maple syrup.” He stops to correct himself. “I put the pot in there, and of course I put too much in. Last night it got me almost comatose. Shelby got kinda mad at me. You know like when a kid gets so stoned all you do is sit there and grin.” Chong is 82 next month.
He sounds about four decades younger – his voice is deep, sexy, pulsing with life. Chong is one half of the most famous
stoner comic partnership in history, Cheech and Chong. In the 1970s, they not only sold out their live shows, they topped the album charts and had huge box-office hits with movies such as Up in Smoke and Cheech and Chong’s Next Movie. The double-act were as radical as they were bonkers. And while the films were ostensibly about two aspiring rock stars in search of the next spliff, they introduced audiences to a downtown, multiracial Los Angeles rarely seen in movies.
Their characters, Pedro de Pacas (Richard “Cheech” Marin ) and Anthony “Man” Stoner (Chong), were hopeless wasters, but heroically so. In their frequent spats with the police, they invariably won – even if they didn’t have a clue how or indeed even notice that they had.
But there is more to Chong than Cheech, as he is quick to point out today. After they split up he enjoyed success as a solo comic and businessman (though that ended up in a
jail sentence). Before Cheech and Chong, he was a guitarist with Bobby Taylor and the Vancouvers, co-writing their hit single
Does Your Mama Know About Me – a gorgeous song about a mixed-race relationship. Although they only had the one hit, the band were influential – something Chong is again quick to point out. A young Jimi Hendrix played with them, and they were partly responsible for the Jackson Five (who opened for them in 1968 ) signing to Motown. Or rather Chong was.
“I was the lawyer who signed the contract for them,” he says. Hold on, I say, you’re not a lawyer. Chong laughs. “Well, I was the whitest guy they knew. I looked like a Jewish guy, a lawyer. So literally Bobby Taylor took the contract and gave it to me and said what d’you think?” Chong gave it the OK and the rest is history.
