Dave's Still Not Here, Man

I've had the pleasure and good fortune to interview a number of my heroes over the years, but yesterday was special: I got to interview Cheech & Chong.

That's right, folks — the Abbott & Costello of dope humor are back, reunited and getting ready to embark on a stand-up tour after an acrimonious split of two decades. They gave a press conference at the Troubadour yesterday (arriving in a totally sweet lowrider) to announce the tour; both looked damn good for their ages (Cheech Marin is 62; Tommy Chong is 70), and seemed to have lost none of their loopy chemistry.

Seeing them in person totally brought me back to being 12 years old, sitting on the floor of my friend Devin's living room, both of us laughing our asses off at The Wedding Album; at one point, we actually wrote up and passed a petition around our junior high to get Dr. Demento to play "Earache My Eye" on his Funny Five. One of my co-workers, who's a decade or so younger than me, got into them in '85 via the Get Out of My Room LP; for both of us, hearing Cheech do his speeded-up cholo chatter again was as thrilling as seeing a Pete Townshend windmill. (Props to Carole for helping me put that into words!)

Wasn't able to get a ton of one-on-one time with them, sandwiched as I was between the folks from Fox News and High Times (when was the last time you read both of those names in the same sentence?), but they were amazingly cool and friendly. Here, in a brief nutshell, is what I learned yesterday from Cheech & Chong:

1) They do indeed still "enjoy" pot. Chong openly attributes his youthful vitality (and, by extension, the fact that he has a fairly young and hot blonde bombshell wife) to his regular intake of the stuff. And thanks in part to Chong's recent bogus jail stint — and our government's idiotic and wasteful "War on Drugs" that began after C&C's split — their act is more political than ever before. Though they promise they won't be doing any Nixon jokes this time out.

2) The rumors about George Harrison playing lead guitar on "Basketball Jones" are quite true. According
to C&C, George was working on Dark Horse in the same studio where they were working on Los Cochinos, and Lou Adler asked George to play on it. George's comment on the song at the time was something to the effect of, "That's rather funny, I suppose."

3) The music for "Earache My Eye" was written by their friend Gaye Delorme, in an unbelievably ill-conceived attempt to impress David Geffen and Joni Mitchell, who were hanging out with the guys at Lou Adler's house at the time. C&C wrote the lyrics, and are both amazed and thankful that the song has been covered so many times over the years. Cheech recently sang it onstage with Korn.

4) They still can't believe that "Bloat On," their spoof of the Floaters' "Float On," actually made the pop charts. They are equally amazed that "Basketball Jones" is now far better known than "Love Jones," the Brighter Side of Darkness song that inspired it.

5) Their all-time favorite album to spark up to is Marvin Gaye's What's Goin' On, which Cheech believes is the greatest record ever made.

6) They think anything by Barry White is the best music to make sweet, sweet love to, though Chong laughingly relayed a story about how a couple recently told him that they like to make out to "Championship Wrestling" off of The Wedding Album.

Really wanted to ask them about the "battle of the bands" sequence in Up In Smoke — which involved a large chunk of the late 70s LA punk scene — as well as a bunch of other things, but we ran out of time. As we were wrapping things up, Chong said to me (in classic Chong voice), "Hey, thanks for all the music questions, Man." I just about plotzed.

Comments

[Stuart Shea]

What a thrill! Man. You have the best job.

[Suggadelic]

Oh, man... What an awesome read. Thanks!! I've got a lifetime of love for Cheech & Chong, (thanks to my pothead dad, who loves them too).

Every now and then I'll be spacing out at work and the stand-up comedy scene from Still Smokin' comes to mind, (the one where Cheech tells the donkey balls joke), and I just crack up... I'm sure every one of my co-workers has witnessed me laughing to myself as a result of that occurrence...