Editor’s Note: The views expressed in the following interview are not necessarily a reflection of those held by the Playboy Group. This interview is presented as it was originally published only for the historical record. While we are pleased to share our Heritage Playboy Interviews with you, we are equally pleased at the progress that our company and society have made to ensure that exclusive and potentially triggering language and themes are no longer tolerated or encouraged. This interview originally appeared in the September 1982 issue of Playboy, on the heels of the release of the fourth Cheech and Chong movie, Things Are Tough All Over.
Three hundred million.
That’s the supposed gross of just three movies starring a couple of the unlikeliest, scruffiest-looking, most dangerous-smelling characters in the history of show business. And that’s just their movies. A decade of exhausting and lucrative touring has made them popular and wealthy, and six of their eight albums have gone gold. Their hit singles, incidentally, have competed not with other comedy records but with records by the likes of The Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin. In terms of financial success, no other comedy team—not Abbott and Costello, not Martin and Lewis, not even Hope and Crosby—has come close to doing what Cheech and Chong have done in a few short years. Their just-released movie, Things Are Tough All Over, should do it again for them, making them that rarest of Hollywood commodities: guaranteed box office. Not bad for two guys who tell a lot of grass jokes.
Had Horatio Alger been born Canadian, he would have invented Tommy Chong. The son of a Chinese-immigrant father and a Scotch-Irish mother, Chong spent his formative years traveling with his family from job to job and town to town in the Canadian hinterlands. By the time he dropped out of school in the tenth grade, he was already—in his words—”a Jack-off-of-all-trades.” From tarring roofs to driving semi trucks, he knew how to pay his way.
By the time he was 30, he’d sired two children by two women, toured Canada and the United States with a band he’d formed for Motown, co-written the band’s hit single and transformed a Vancouver strip joint into a successful improvisational-theater club in which he starred and for which he created most of the material.
Richard “Cheech” Marin was dodging the draft when he met Chong at that club in 1969. The son of middle-class Mexican-Americans, Cheech grew up in a system of conflicting values. His father was a cop; his buddies were thieves. Schooled by nuns, he soaked up the homework and rejected the stern Catholic regimen in the class-clown tradition. After majoring in English in college, he discovered pottery and felt a new urge in life. When his student deferment ran out and Uncle Sam sent his greetings, he took off for Canada on a wing and a prayer.
Cheech was the answer to Chong’s prayer; finally, he had a comedy partner who was willing to do anything to make the skit work. Pure chemistry: They left Canada for Los Angeles to find fame and fortune; they found both.
Finding them and getting them to sit still for a major interview were considerably harder. Playboy sent freelance writer Ken Kelley in pursuit of the pair, from Bel-Air to Vancouver to Las Vegas to Malibu and back to Bel-Air. Kelley is no stranger to arduous journalism; his past interviews for Playboy were with Abbie Hoffman on the lam (May 1976) and with Anita Bryant on the road (May 1978). He witnessed some interesting scenes, and here’s his report.
It’s the crack of noon, and I’ve just returned to my room after sunning myself around the patio at the ultrachic Hotel Bel-Air, a gem stone’s throw away from Chong’s front door in this sleekest of all L.A. neighborhoods. A rat-tat-tat sounds at the door and in steps a scruffy character looking every bit like Charles Man son after a prison break.
“Hi, Tommy Chong here. Hmmm—nice digs. Let’s go back to the patio and catch some rays. I’ll be more exposed that way.”
Several minutes into Chong’s ruminations about the dubious parentage of various Hollywood executives, another body materializes. He looks as though he’s just spent all his chump change on coffee refills at an all-night greasy spoon. It’s Cheech, and he’s agitated.
“Tommy, I just ran into Geraldo in the lobby.”
“Yeah, well, everybody runs into Geraldo sooner or later,” says Chong, deadpan. Cheech, Chong and Geraldo Rivera have been friends for many years.
“Yeah, but he’s shooting a ’20/20′ segment at the pool, with Brooke Shields. She wants to meet us! She says we’re her heroes!”
“Yum. Well, he knows where to find us. Pull up a chair. This is Mr. Playboy.”
“Glad to meetcha.”
Cheech paces around the yellow umbrella spiking the patio tabletop. “Hey, man, can we order something up?”
“What’s your pleasure?”
“Mmmmmm—some nice juicy watermelon, and a bottle of Conmemorativo, and…anybody got a joint?”
Presto, a joint. “Hey, I’ll wait for room service inside. You guys keep talking.”
Five minutes later: “Hey, there, you faggot asshole . . . oops! Sorry.” Rivera freezes at the sight of an alien microphone and backpedals rapidly.
Cheech re-emerges shortly, drooling over both his watermelon slice and the impending adventure with America’s premiere nymphet.
“Tommy—is she still jailbait?”
Chong arches his mustache eyebrows. “Well, statutory rape in California is 18, and she’s still 16. And her momma’s watching.”
“Jeez, this sure ain’t like the good old days—’Hey, honey, forget about your momma; c’mon over here to the garage and lemme show you my machine.’ Christ, I’m in love again. I know what: ‘Hey, Brooke, my name is Calvin Klein and I gotta measure you for my jeans.’ That should do it.”
“Hokay, pal, just don’t end up like Don.”
Don is Don Henley, the Eagles’ drummer, a close buddy who had recently been arrested, allegedly for giving drugs to one of two underage girls at his Malibu pleasure dome.
“Shit!” snorts Cheech. “That dummy—one girl was still in his pool the next day; that’s how the cops caught him. Like, a knock on the door: ‘Hi, I’m the pool man; I’m here to change the chicks.'”
The two burst out laughing, Cheech with his full-throttled high-pitched squeals, Chong with his infectious guffaws; and the noise and the leg thumping crescendo.
A blue-blazered boy with an ABC logo stamped on his lapel knocks politely on the louvered doors.
“What’s up, man?” asks Cheech, still chuckling.
“Geraldo says he’s ready for you now.”
“OK, his master’s voice. Let’s go.”
We proceed to the pool—and a beautiful pool it is, an upscale blue lagoon of shimmering water surrounded by every variety of bush and tree in spring heat. But, wait! There’s a problem. Geraldo can’t find his swim trunks. Major problem. Having already filmed a week’s worth of breathy Brooke-isms, he’s reached his grand finale, and the cameras simply cannot roll without the symbolic signature—Geraldo’s pool plunge with Brooke. Geraldo jitterbugs about; damn it, where are those trunks? He dispatches another squadron of ABC flunkies to really look around.
We wait. And wait. Victory. A black loincloth is found that fits the anxious thighs.
“Roll it.”
Brooke, her blue bathing suit buttered onto her slender body, dives in. Geraldo springs in after her with a mighty splash and tail-gates her the length of the pool.
“Honey, don’t let him get too close,” remonstrates Teri Shields from the side lines. “I’m still her mother; I have some say-so,” she says to no one in particular. She laughs, sort of.
I tiptoe with Cheech and Chong to the water’s edge, in the process nearly electrocuting a significant percentage of Fortune 500 progeny as I trip over a power cable. But the cameras keep running, as does my trusty tape recorder.
Brooke hoists herself out of the pool and wrings the chlorine out of her long brown hair. She’s a stunning sight, even without the hairdo and the make-up of countless commercials.
Geraldo follows her out, wiping off his teeth.
GERALDO: Brooke, I’d like you to meet my friends Cheech and Chong.
CHEECH: Oh, hi, I got all your records.
BROOKE: Hi-i-i-i! I just love you guys. You’re so funny!
CHONG: So this is little Brooke, eh? Say, I’d really like to take some drugs with you.
BROOKE: Well, you’ll have to check with—
TERI: Watch it! I’m her mom.
CHEECH: Don’t worry, Mom; we’re only teaching her Spanish.
CHONG: Are they still filming this? Because if they are, my little daughter’s gonna be really excited.
CHEECH: Yeah, and my wife’s gonna call her lawyer.
BROOKE: C’mon, you guys. I mean, what’s my image to you? Is it that racy?
CHEECH: No, you’re just a jean-clad endless love. Say, Brooke, lemme pull you over into the bushes here and tell you about your part in our next movie.
[Cheech mock-grabs Brooke’s waist and stage-whispers into her ear.]
CHEECH: Perfect! Fabulous! Wonderful! Sign here!
CHONG: She’s more than a woman.
CHEECH: Tommy, I know we can work her in somewhere.
BROOKE: [Laughing uncontrollably] Stop it, now, you guys. You’re too funny.
CHEECH: We gotta stop now, because we’re doing an interview with Playboy, and it’s a serious interview. We’re telling Playboy that we smoke dope but Geraldo Rivera does not smoke dope—never has, never will.
BROOKE: Yeah, I thought so. He seems like that.
Geraldo winces.
“Cut!” The unit director shuts off the cameras.
After the goodbyes, Cheech and Chong and I stroll back to my suite. We pass a tall, strange tree with a plaque beneath it. Cheech looks the tree up and down and reads aloud the words: “CALIFORNIA’S LARGEST FLOSS-SILK TREE. Hmmm—this must be where Nancy Reagan gets her teeth done.”
PLAYBOY: You guys are different from most comedy teams of the past. With Abbott and Costello or Laurel and Hardy, one was the straight man and the other the funnyman. Foil and foiled. You switch roles all the time.
CHONG: And we make more money than all of ’em put together. Gross $100,000,000 a picture and you can do whatever the fuck you want. Our success is so peculiar because our box office is so spectacular. Woody Allen is the greatest comedian America has, and he’s lucky if his movies break even. He plays soulful chords, and we play rock ‘n’ roll. Our demographics are the baby boom and a big fringe on either side.
CHEECH: What we do onscreen is everybody’s secret joke—they don’t talk about it to their stockbrokers or bankers, but it’s a shared reality. Tom Snyder once asked us, “Are you a one-joke act?” I said, “Yeah.” He said, “What’s the joke?” I said, “If you wanna find out, go plunk down five bucks and see the movie.”
PLAYBOY: There’s a curious theme in all of your movies. You plot and scheme to get the girl, but in the end—when she’s ready and willing—you’re unable. You guys just can’t score.
CHEECH: We represent the frustrations of modern man. Guys who fantasize themselves in great situations they’ll never have. To us—I dunno—it’s funnier if you don’t get laid. It’s existentially perfect, somehow. Like Zen—
CHONG: Like high school, you mean. And our plots are basically nonexistent. We make the movies; let the audience fill in the blanks. I think the reason our fans identify with us is that we don’t win every encounter; it’s break even at best.
PLAYBOY: And the theme is?
CHONG: It’s best summed up by a sage piece of advice we were given when Cheech and I first hit L.A. This old Chicago-Mobster type ran this club we’d play at once in a while. He’d stand with us outside the club and say, “Boys, see that? That’s pussy passing by. And there’s more power in one of those than in all the cables on the Golden Gate Bridge. Never underestimate the power of the pussy, boys, never.” We’ve sort of modeled our movies on that.
PLAYBOY: Although, as you say, you don’t get much of it yourselves.
CHONG: Maybe we don’t get the pussy, but we get our freedom, which is sometimes the end result of having dealt with the pussy: “OK, take the dogs, the dog food, the house—just get me out of here.” I’m sure every Playboy stud has experienced that. Our horns are so far out there, we have to fail. And we’re sloppy failures, at that. You wanna see arty failures, go see Bergman. You wanna see funny, go see Cheech and Chong.
CHEECH: It’s all artistic license, anyway. Our timing, really, is vaudevillian. Trick ’em enough to keep ’em in doubt, keep ’em on their toes, then fulfill their expectations of failure.
PLAYBOY: Suppose someone who has never seen your movies is reading this, and all he sees are your pictures at the bottom of the opening page. Expand on them for him: Describe each other.
CHONG: What! You mean we don’t get to pose nude? What kind of magazine is this, anyhow?
CHEECH: I’ll start: Tommy looks like Erik Estrada’s agent. Erik’s got Steinway tattooed on his lips, you know.
PLAYBOY: What does Cheech look like?
CHONG: A centerfold for nearsighted gays. Every gay guy that’s liked Cheech has had eye trouble, you know. You know, when you think of it, we’re probably the ultimate gay guy’s fantasy: two guys on the town, half naked most of the time, making millions of dollars. Shit, there’s probably a paraplegic gay gnome right now saying, “I’d really like to do it to those guys.” Or at least do it to the Chinese guitar player. You know the legend: Guitar players are the best endowed, especially if they play bass.
CHEECH: Lies! Mexicans are always the best, no matter what they play. [Goes into a song] “Mexican-Americans have the longer dicks / Maybe they’re not so long, but they’re fatter / Anyway, you’ll like it bet-ter.”
PLAYBOY: Even though a lot of your fans are obviously in the teeny-bopper range, none of your films has had a G or a PG rating, which means—
CHONG: Which means we’ve made a conscious decision to make all our films R-rated. Which means the whole family has to go. Is the whole family gonna go see Bambi Meets the Wise Old Owl? Nah. Now, if it’s Bambi Fucks the Wise Old Owl, the kids will drag the parents along to see it. It’s the only way to unite the family.
CHEECH: We’re basically humanitarians. If you have cancer and you see each of our movies 17 times, you’ll be cured instantly. Columbia Pictures will back me up on this. Glaucoma, 16 times. Leukemia, only 13 times.
CHONG: Hangnail, you can walk out in the first 15 minutes.
CHEECH: See, you go to the movies for four reasons: to laugh, to cry, to get scared and to get a hard-on. If you can combine all four, hey; it’s the ultimate pizza combo, man. That’s what we do—tickle ’em on all fronts. Pick your gland. A Cheech and Chong fan is one of the most fortunate beings you’ll ever find in this world: He’s got five bucks and a sense of humor. Wonderful coordinates.
CHONG: We don’t need to go the way of other comedy teams. We’re unique in history, because we know who we are. Thank God for acid, grass and all the other mind-expanding drugs we’ve done over the years. Really.
PLAYBOY: We’ve just hit the subject your critics are most vehement about: your promoting drugs in your movies, turning kids into drug addicts.
CHEECH: They’re idiots. They have to say that; if they liked us, we’d be in real trouble.
CHONG: We’re not afraid of turning kids into dope addicts or anything else. Kids will pick up what they like, what they understand, and the rest is bullshit to them until they’re ready to accept it. That’s why kissy bits in Westerns used to turn kids off: “Aah, forget this shit; just shoot ’em.” Until they get older; then they look at the kissy bits and look at their girlfriends, and they can relate to it. Right now, my eight-year-old son, Paris—you say “Pee-pee” and he just falls on the floor. It’s the funniest thing he’s ever heard.
PLAYBOY: You named your son after the Homeric figure, did you?
CHONG: No. He was conceived in the Eiffel Tower.
CHEECH: Yeah, what are you gonna call him—Akron?
PLAYBOY: Cheech, you have a young daughter. What happens when she’s ten years old and says, ”Daddy, I’d like to try this marijuana stuff I see in your movies”?
CHEECH: I’d have to think about it. Maybe, if she’s mature enough to try it—who knows? If she’s a real dummy, ”Hey, no thanks, kid; you’re out of my hands.” You never know how they’re gonna turn out. Every kid is different; every kid has a separate deal going. Take Tommy’s kids. He’s a fucking Xerox machine, reproducing all over the place. And all five of ’em physically gorgeous. He’s got a black set and a white set. His three white kids look like Hitler Youth, and the other two look like Josephine Baker.
CHONG: Hey, I’m just a humble servant of the cosmic gene pool. But I have to admit that I was forced to re-examine certain Western taboos when I saw my daughter Rae Dawn in Quest for Fire.
PLAYBOY: Meaning?
CHONG: Meaning let’s get back to your original thrust, as it were: critics. They’re like bouncers at a bar; in order to break up a fight, they have to start one first. I remember a column last year by Shirley Eder, the gossip girl for Knight-Ridder. Her whole attitude was, ”Gee, they’re glorifying drugs all over the place.” She represents the fearful moms of the world. They don’t want their kids to climb up the ladder: ”Don’t, no, you might fall down.” And the kid is all of 25. Fearful people.
CHEECH: And lots of fearful people write columns. That’s the whole newspaper attitude: ”Oh, oh, here’s one more thing to scare our readers with.” Nervous, frightened people.
CHONG: From their peripheral glance, they read us as a type: “Oh, yeah, they’re glorifying drugs.” They never bother to look at what we’re really doing.
PLAYBOY: And what are you really doing?
CHEECH: Glorifying drugs.
CHONG: As a means of evolution.
CHEECH: As a means of livelihood.
CHONG: We wouldn’t do it if it didn’t work.
CHEECH: Look, how many times has Shirley Eder paid my rent?
CHONG: Seriously, we’re so harmless we’re dangerous. We expose how simple things are. Some reviewers will go on, “Yeah, I heard that joke 50 years ago”—and they have the seniority to say that, so to speak. Old fuckers. Our audience, on the other hand, ain’t seen shit. Nothin’. Brand-new.
CHEECH: And they come at you with, “But do your movies contribute to the greater good?” The answer is, “Who cares?” There are only seven jokes in the world, and we’re just bringing them up to date.
CHONG: We represent a Third World attitude. All the brown and black countries: Jamaica, Harlem—
CHEECH: Malibu—
CHONG: It really is a Third World attitude—a hipness, a total relaxedness. If you’re white, you can be afraid of lots of things—people of different color, religious fanatics—but if you’re black or brown and poor, you can be afraid of other things, like starvation or not having a place to live. We know the humor of these rough-and-ready so-called deprived people. They get the strength from working their backs off. Cheech and I did that, too, so we know what it’s like.
PLAYBOY: What’s the hardest job you’ve ever had?
CHONG: Speaking for myself, being interviewed by Playboy, by a guy who asks incessant questions and follows you around the continent trying to pry into your life.
PLAYBOY: Second-worst job, then.
CHEECH: Me, working for my father, pouring cement patios. Fuck—oh, God—I wasn’t even a donkey; I was still a burro. I didn’t last but a few days; my dad fired me. Nothing’s heavier than cement, man, and it don’t get no lighter. It was different when I apprenticed for a pottery teacher later on. I was doing the same thing—carrying cement sacks—but I wanted to do it. It was art. It was in the wilderness of Canada, and if you carry cement around pine trees, hey, it’s art.
CHONG: If you do it because somebody pays you a buck an hour, it’s work. If you do it for free—when you’re poor—it’s art. And we’ve managed to incorporate the basic humor of poverty into our appeal, which makes it universal—the underdogs against the world. We give people hope.
PLAYBOY: Again, your detractors in the press accuse you of pandering to the worst instincts in people—caricaturing swishy gays, dumb blondes, illiterate Mexicans, greedy Jews…
CHONG: It’s all true. We did it; we’ll continue to do it.
CHEECH: And we’re glad.
CHONG: Yeah. What’re they gonna do—fine us $100? Big deal.
CHEECH: Yeah, here’s another $100. [Laughs] And here’s $200 for your Anti-Defamation League.
CHONG: And the faggots who write that stuff probably write it with one hand while the other is chained to a sex slave. We’re shameless panderers: Whatever you want to accuse us of, we cop to it. We believe in what we do, and we can call the shots, because we’re not acting in somebody else’s movie. Nobody ever puts a gun to a guy’s head and says, “You gotta go down and see a Cheech and Chong movie, or else.” We show the best of the capitalistic system, the furthest you can go in America. Of course, I’d get really worried if we got all good reviews. I’d sit back darkly and think, Shit, there’s not one intelligent person in the whole world! You mean, we fooled ’em all?
CHEECH: Seriously, though, our attitude transcends all the barriers—racial, sexual, religious, age. It just boils down to this: Some cats are loose; some cats aren’t. Those that aren’t should get loose, and those that are can get looser. You know, the A critics love us. We get rave reviews from the likes of Pauline Kael and Vincent Canby. Because they have nothing to prove by knocking us; they just realize what we’re up to and appreciate it. They’re secure enough that they don’t have to be “clever” by knocking us.
Lemme tell you about critics. I saw this critic at a Robert Redford conference last summer. He comes up to me and says, “Hey, my paper just folded; here’s a perfect script for you guys. I teach a film class now, and you guys are a big part of it.” This is the guy who’s panned all of our stuff, from the git. “And, hey, when I come out to Hollywood, see if you can get me a job, OK?” Real class. Couldn’t get rid of him.
PLAYBOY: What was the conference?
CHONG: Cheech went to see Redford at his annual conference for independent film makers in Utah. Cheech calls him Ordinary Bob.
CHEECH: Yeah, you know—Ordinary Bob. You go up to Ordinary Bob land, check the Bob watch, see what Bob time it is. Everywhere you go, man, it’s fuckin’ Bob. Pictures of Bob on the walls, the shit stalls, everywhere. He’s holding forth at his seminar: “Hey, you guys, I made all these independent films—Downhill Racer, Jeremiah Johnson, The Candidate, All the President’s Men, Ordinary People…” Of course, they weren’t independent films; he made ’em and sold ’em to a studio. It wasn’t like he had to go out and hustle distributors. So he’s addressing this assemblage of real independent-film makers, and he’s telling ’em how to cut costs: Hey, lemme give you an example. We had a scene in The Candidate where I was a politician in a ticker-tape parade. We found out that this one street in San Francisco throws out ticker tape every Friday. So we told ’em, Robert Redford is coming down in the car on Wednesday: could they hold the stuff until Wednesday and then throw it out the windows? They said sure. That way, we didn’t have to pay anybody and they did it anyway.” This guy stands up in the back of the room: “My name is Joe Smith. How many secretaries do you think will hold off if I call up and say, ‘Joe Smith will be coming down the street on Wednesday’?'” Everybody cracks up.
Later on, I’m with some of the guys from the Association of Independent Video and Filmmakers, the A.I.V.F. They mostly sit around drinking beer and cry a lot. We’re talking about a problem with some of Ordinary Bob’s regents who are on the A.I.V.F. board, when Bob descends on us from Olympus: “Hey, what’s up, Ordinary Fellows?” This guy says, “We’re talking about troubles with the A.I.V.F.” Bob says, “Hey, is that something new?” The A.I.V.F. is ten years old; he contributes to it; his guys are on the board. Everybody looks quite bewildered. The Bob aide pipes up, “You know, Bob isn’t real good with initials.” Bob sits down for a few sentences. Another guy is saying, “When you deal with independent film makers, you have to treat them with T.L.C.” Bob says, “Hey, what’s that?” “Tender, loving care,” says the Bob aide. Bob gives his best Bob laugh: “Well, I’ve heard of T. S. Eliot.” Bob’s a regular riot.
CHONG: Sounds like Bob needs a hearing-eye dog, eh? [Laughs]
CHEECH: You just waste so much time dealing with ego. It’s such bullshit, and it exists on every level of this business, from gofers to studio heads.
PLAYBOY: Has ego interfered with the chemistry of Cheech and Chong? Chong directed the second and the third movies, for instance, which automatically put Chong above Cheech in the Hollywood scheme of things.
CHONG: Good point, and I’m glad you brought it up. It interfered a whole lot—to the point where we almost broke up. We haven’t really talked about this together before. My ego almost broke us up in the making of Nice Dreams. We started fighting real bad, and we never fight: oh, sure, we’d fight when we were doing our night-club act if we were doing a lot of coke, so we stopped doing a lot of coke. Or we’d fight if we were tired, but that’s the weariness of the road. But we had a real falling out making Nice Dreams, basically because I got seduced by the power of playing God—being the director. You get confused: On the one hand, you have this ultimate power, and on the other hand, you realize that once the movie’s released, you’re in the hands of 15-year-old kids who’ve got to think you’re funny—or you’re washed up. The juxtaposition of power and powerlessness makes you crazy if you dwell on that.
CHEECH: It got to the point where I said, “This ain’t Cheech and Chong; let’s forget it.”
CHONG: The director power was so seductive, so hard to resist. I’d find myself “taking meetings” without Cheech, saying, “Yeah, Cheech can do this, he can do that” without consulting him. Our power had always been that together we could gang up on anybody, and suddenly we’d been divided. It was a miserable period. I’d see him during the dailies, and we couldn’t talk. Strangely enough, it didn’t interfere with our work on the movie, because we’re such pros.
CHEECH: But then he had to start editing without me, to go to screenings without me. He couldn’t turn to me and say, “Hey, Cheech, what about this?” Nothin’ but an empty seat. We met a couple of times, but Tommy clung to his position, and I just figured, Well, it’s over with.
CHONG: I was so pathetic, so lonely, I really hated it. It was just unbearable—like having a fight with your parents to see if they really love you. We had to invent problems so we could solve ’em and realize how tight we actually were. I just realized one day how insensitive I was, what an ego trip I was on, and I walked over to Cheech and said, “Sorry I’ve been such an asshole; let’s not do it again.” It was impossible for me not to do that, because when I saw him in the editing room, I fell in love with him all over again, every day.
CHEECH: You have no idea what a big thing that was for me. Whew! It was the first time I’d ever heard Tommy Chong apologize for anything in my life. I was shell-shocked by it—it was a major emotional breakthrough for him, and people don’t usually change like that when they’re 42 years old, especially when they’re successful. I was real proud of him. Tommy has a dual personality, a true Gemini—real foolish in lots of ways but real wise in lots of ways. I always try to ignore the stupid stuff and listen to the wise stuff.
CHONG: Well, to get along with Cheech, you have to realize that he’s unchanging. He can be maddeningly lazy about some things and incredibly intelligent about others.
CHEECH: That means I’m intelligent enough to know when Tommy’s full of shit. Let me put it another way: Cheech is educated and Chong is smart.
PLAYBOY: What’s the difference?
CHEECH: Tommy has the horse sense; I have the book learning. So we can cover each other’s ass. He has to convince me on a gut level that I can do things my mind resists. One of the things our falling out showed me was there was, unbeknownst to me, a real resentment that had built up over the years between us. I was thrust into the spotlight for the things he was directing. Our standing joke is that Tommy says, “I’m half Chinese,” and the guy asks, “Which half?” and Tommy says, “The half that doesn’t show.” He’s such a protean figure, he can blend in and you don’t really realize what he’s up to. He never gets recognized in public. Me, I can shave my head and put on a dress and guys will come up to me and say, “Hey, Cheech, good disguise, man. I need some coke.” For Tommy to recognize his God trip over directing, to deal with his resentment and ego—well, it meant, simply, that we could continue as a team.
CHONG: I decided I’d never direct Cheech and Chong again. We hired our former film editor, Tom Avildsen, to direct our current movie, Things Are Tough All Over. What a joy that was. When you’re a director, you gotta talk to all the other assholes in the business. When you’re just the star, you’ve got only one asshole to talk to—the director.
What really brought me around was my realization that without Cheech, I’d just be another Chinese grocery store. No fun. And, besides, Mexicans are real loyal: Treat ’em nice and you’ve got a friend for life. You know what a Mexican bride wears to her wedding?
PLAYBOY and CHEECH: [Simultaneously] What?
CHONG: Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue, something purple, something orange, something green, something. . . . [Laughs]
PLAYBOY: What, then, does a Canadian bride wear to her wedding, Tommy?
CHONG: You can’t talk about Canadians in conventional terms. Americans can’t figure us out. A Canadian is the monobrained, laid-back guy in the lounge chair who wants to fuck, get high, go to concerts—
CHEECH: Fix his motorcycle at four A.M.—
CHONG: And he never tips. If he does, he’s called “continental.” Canadians love to vacation in Florida, love to skin-dive—
CHEECH: A variation on muff-dive.
CHONG: They’ll smoke anything, eat anything. The archetypal Hell’s Angel: “I know drugs won’t kill me; hey, I’ve tried everything and I’m not dead yet.” You know the Canadian definition of the perfect woman?
PLAYBOY: We’re almost afraid to ask.
CHONG: She’s about four feet high, she’s got no teeth and she has a flat head so you can rest your drink. [Laughs] And then, when you’re done with her, she turns into a six-pack and a gram of coke.
PLAYBOY: You really capture the Canadian sensibility, loosely speaking, in your routines.
CHONG: Cheech, tell us about the first nun you ever fucked in your model Catholic upbringing.
CHEECH: Let’s see. She was about four feet high, no teeth…Mmmm. You almost caught me there. Seriously, though, I grew up half in Watts and half in Granada Hills. It was a real interesting transposition, like going from Kenya to Knott’s Berry Farm. My dad was a cop; my mother was a housewife. I was raised under very heavy discipline. My father’s biggest fear in the world was that I would turn out to be a juvenile delinquent. And I would have had he not regularly beaten the shit out of me. I was always a wiseass in school but very smart scholastically, so I could get away with a lot of stuff. I was either the teacher’s pet or the teacher’s whipping boy. The nuns basically liked me, but they couldn’t keep me quiet.
PLAYBOY: What order of nuns did you have?
CHEECH: Sisters of Saint Joseph—black, with white side walls.
PLAYBOY: You’ve certainly put your nun training to good use in your comedy.
CHEECH: Our movies are Mexican shrines, actually. Mexicans make their churches very scary most of the time. It’s heavy duty: The Mexican Jesus has got thorns all over his head and barbed wire all over his body. No pretty-boy Protestant with a blow-dry haircut. He bleeds. Catholics believe in redemption through torture, and the nuns are the enforcers. I got hit a lot by the kind sisters. It was color coordination: They were black and white; I was black and blue. In some ways, I was a very traditional, classically trained Catholic school kid. I was even an altar boy. I’d read the Latin and I’d go along with the game plan for a while, and then something would snap and I’d say “Fuck it” and get real bohemian and rebellious. My dad was so worried about me that he sent me to a sort of prejuvenile delinquent camp the L.A.P.D. ran up in the mountains. It was heavy Gang City—the black and the chicano gangs. We got along great, because we had a common enemy—the mountains. Niggers do not like cold weather. You see no black Olympic skiers. Spicks can take it only slightly better. It was “Shit, what that smell?” “Pine trees, motherfucker, pine trees.” “What’s a pine trees?” When the summer was over, everybody would go back to town and get in trouble again.
PLAYBOY: What kind of trouble did you try?
CHEECH: Well, I never stole a car, if that’s what you mean.
PLAYBOY: Never?
CHEECH: Well, just maybe a little bit. I really don’t like to talk about it, but if you insist—
PLAYBOY: We insist.
CHEECH: It was really a matter of “C’mon, man, you some kinda chicken? You gonna be a cop, like your old man?” “Hell, no, I ain’t chicken. Fuck my old man.” I was becoming everything my dad feared I would. I’d always fuck up, given half a chance. So these guys I knew were stealing cars for money. They’d bring ’em into the hills and strip ’em.
PLAYBOY: What was your job?
CHEECH: The first time I went with the guys, I was the lookout. Jeez, you know, I’ve never officially admitted this before—
PLAYBOY: It’ll go easier on you if you fess up.
CHEECH: OK, Your Honor, I was, like, 15. The deal was very attractive. The class president was the mastermind of the whole deal, I swear. He had the connections to sell the parts. It meant I had money, and I’d never had any money before. I did this stuff only three or four times. The last time, I had to hot-wire the sucker—I’d moved up in the crime world.
One day, this guy came at us with a big shotgun, saying he was gonna blow our brains out. That registered. Plus, I knew that if I ever got caught in any kind of crime, my father would kill me. With his hands. And he would take great relish in doing it. He’d always tell me, “If you ever get caught by the police, don’t call me, because I’ll make you wish you were dead. I brought you into this world and, goddamn it, I’ll take you out of it.”
PLAYBOY: Did you get along with him?
CHEECH: It’s funny; now he’s a criminology instructor at an L.A. college, and he loves the parts of Cheech and Chong movies where we demolish the cops. Loves them. He’s always thinking up better ways for us to make fools out of the movie cops. He was always an honest cop but real regimental about me—”My way or the highway.” So I had to leave home right after high school, because our fights were starting to get real physical and one of us was gonna get seriously injured. It was a bad time all over. My parents were divorcing, Vietnam was in full swing and, of course, we were on different sides on that…I worked briefly for him, as I told you, then he fired me. Then I signed up for college. Went almost for four years. I majored in English literature. I was gonna be a lawyer, then a teacher. The only reason I didn’t become a lawyer is that my dad wanted me to be one, and I was smart enough not to be one. So I was floating around in my last semester, and I took an elective course on pottery. I flipped out on it because I always knew I was an artist, but in school, you’re taught that if you can’t draw, well, you’re not an artist. It opened something up for me that I’d never enjoyed so much. And just then, my student deferment ran out. I had to get drafted or beat it out of the country.
PLAYBOY: And that was an easy decision for you?
CHEECH: No shit, Sherlock. I had to get my ass into Canada, like a lot of other guys who opposed the war and didn’t want to get their gonads shot off.
PLAYBOY: Wasn’t there an easier solution? Couldn’t you have proved to the draft board that you were, say, a homosexual?
CHEECH: Hey, there’s no such thing as a homosexual Mexican. [Mincingly] “OK, Chico, you’re an orderly.” Be serious.
PLAYBOY: Prove that you were crazy, then?
CHONG: Let me interject for a moment, if I may. White-skinned people can get away with all sorts of shit like that. See, they can’t trust a crazy white guy, ’cause he’ll shoot his commanding officer in the back. But if you’re Mexican or black, it’s hard to bullshit ’em. “Yeah, OK, so you’re crazy. Here’s your crazy gun. Go get ’em, boy.”
CHEECH: [Laughs] I considered everything. I considered prison for a minute, until I read the personals in the underground press, with the jailbirds writing, “Help support your brothers; it’s fucked in here.” Besides, I wanted to be a potter. I’m convinced something in the clay got into my system, fucked up my nerves and booked me a flight to Calgary. And through a roundabout series of events, I met up with Tommy. He was a real hood, you know. A monster. Just ask him.
PLAYBOY: How vicious were you, Tommy?
CHONG: I’m an ex-hood, it’s true. You gotta realize that the Canadian national sport is fistfighting. Occasionally, that translates into hockey, the “official” sport. But the afterschool fight is the main event, the killer attraction. In my case, I got killed a lot. I grew up fighting. That’s how you keep warm in Canada; it gives you a chance to hug another guy without getting called a queer.
And if you were of Chinese extraction, you always learned to fight, to survive. My grandfather and grandmother were recruited in China to come to Canada as cheap labor. My grandmother had been a big stage star in China, and she was the first Chinese lady to fly an airplane: she was a friend of Amelia Earhart’s. When my pop came of age, he went back to China to find a bride; that’s the Chinese tradition. Well, he partied like hell, forgot the wife. He came back to Canada and met my mom and married her. He likes white women. Mom is half Scotch and half Irish.
CHEECH: That means half of her wants to get drunk and the other half doesn’t want to pay for it.
CHONG: [Laughs] She’s a real ballsy woman. She had to be to marry Pop—not only because of the race thing but because Pop is real short and she’s real tall. Her whole family shunned her for years. They homesteaded in Edmonton and, eventually, oil was discovered on Pop’s land. But he’d sold it by then—he never hung on to nothin’. Thank God, or else I’d have been too filthy rich to do what I’m doing. I’d have become a useless doctor or lawyer instead of a useless comedian. At least, this way, my uselessness is useful: I make useless doctors and lawyers laugh. I inherited Pop’s sense of humor and a bit of his coloring.
PLAYBOY: Things were tough all over, then, were they?
CHONG: Hmmm—catchy phrase. Yeah. Real tough, real rural. When I was about eight, we moved into the city, into an abandoned military complex. Look-alike homes, but it was heaven—bath tub, running water. Didn’t have to melt the snow anymore. The locals called it Dogpatch. It was a hippie community, actually. Free spirits; instead of dope, there was beer. Party every weekend. The kids would sleep in the beds and the adults would drop where they fell. Just about then, I got recruited for Bible camp. I was walking down a country road, and these guys pulled over and said, “You wanna go to camp?” I said, “Sure.”
PLAYBOY: So that was the start of church and Chong?
CHONG: Yup. It was something to do: lots of joy, ecstasy, hell and brimstone—and fishing, too. You swim and learn about Jesus. That Bible camp is the basis of everything I am now. They got to me when I was uncorrupted. My parents were Christians only in the vaguest sense; they believed in Santa Claus.
I dropped out of school in the tenth grade and became a roofer. Tough fuckin’ work: I’d be up there on the roof, watching the fine little girls walk home from school, and I figured I should get on the ground floor again. I went back and got real deep into music. I started a high school band. We had this lead singer, an acne-faced Indian who did Elvis Presley imitations. Looked nothin’ like him, of course, but swiveled his hips and screamed into the microphone and the girls just went apeshit for him. I said to myself, “Hmmm, what can I do in school that compares with this?” I decided to make music my profession, and I dropped out of school again.
PLAYBOY: So you took up music to impress girls?
CHONG: Well, not really to get laid, because sex was still part of the hood thing. Thank God for Chinatown—the only place open after hours. Historically, in every city, Chinatown is freedom. Gambling, prostitution, drugs; the Chinese just put up their tents wherever they want and run the show. Eat anything, smoke anything. It was a Chinese guy—a bass player, in fact—who first turned me on to weed. I was maybe 20, we were in the back of his car and he offered me some tea; that’s what we called it back in 1958.
Anyway, if a Chinaman thought there was a chance for trade, he’d stay open all night. He’d get the hopeless drunks, the horny hoods and the general scum of the earth. He’d serve ’em whiskey in teapots, a buck a pot. And there were more than a few aged hookers hanging out.
PLAYBOY: How old?
CHONG: Well, they were old to me; I was maybe 17 and they were mid-20s.
PLAYBOY: Did one of them deflower you?
CHONG: Lila—lovely Lila. I say her name because everybody in Calgary will know who I’m talking about. I’ll never forget her. If she were young today, she’d be a punk rocker with purple hair. Gorgeous little girl, with red hair back-combed into a beehive. I hung out with her for three months before we did it. She didn’t know I was a virgin; a hood doesn’t let that kind of information out. One night, it was magic. We hiked up this hill into the woods. Freezin’ cold. I was Mr. Tender: I threw her down on the ground and unzipped my pants. She kept saying, “Wait a minute,” but to me, the foreplay had been the past three months. Then she gave me the ultimate compliment. She said, “Oh, my God!”
PLAYBOY: Meaning?
CHONG: Meaning I hurt her. It was real spiritual to me, though. Anyway, by that time, I had this real hot band together, covered the whole spectrum—Chinese, Indian, mulatto, black, white—and we were drivin’ the people wild. I was brilliant, even in those days: I rented a local hall, formed a nonprofit organization that paid the band and no taxes. Finally, the mayor of Calgary met with us and suggested we move to Vancouver. We did. We lived in flea-bag hotels, booked our own gigs—and I met my first wife. We were auditioning a piano player, so I went over to his house to hear him. I took one look at his sister Maxine and fell instantly in love. She was a fantastic girl—all black girls in Canada are. She broke my heart a bunch of times—first girl ever to do that. After five years of on and off, I married Maxine. We broke up for a whole year at one point, and I went to Edmonton and met this other black girl. Gail Lewis. We had an affair and she got pregnant. That coincided with my leaving town. In those days, there was no abortion. She wanted to keep the baby, anyhow, so my mother took in the baby and raised her for the first six months. Gail couldn’t do it alone, and my mom wanted and loved the baby. Good thing Gail didn’t believe in abortion, or else the world would be deprived of Rae Dawn Chong.
I went back to Vancouver, because Maxine called and said, “Let’s tie the knot.” Gail and Rae Dawn came to our wedding: that’s where I first met my daughter. My baby by Maxine, Robbi, was born after that, and I adopted Rae Dawn and we moved to San Francisco. Gail got pissed off and tried to get Rae Dawn back. It was a big court battle, and I won. It was surprising and set a court precedent in Canada, but it was clearly in Rae Dawn’s best interests.
PLAYBOY: Was it a bitter fight?
CHONG: Gail and Maxine got along, so that part wasn’t a problem. I really don’t think women fight over guys; it’s more like a conspiracy when they get together: “Yeah, I know what you mean; does he still do that?” Drives me crazy. So I hooked up with this guy Bobby Taylor in San Francisco, who sang like an angel. We formed this band, Bobby Taylor and The Vancouvers, and moved back to Vancouver and opened a night club. But it was a dead scene. We played a bunch of other clubs to pay the bills, and at this one teen club, I walked in the door and my heart stopped. I saw this blonde, tanned 16-year-old angel, and I fell instantly in love again. I said, out loud, “I want one of those.” Her name was Shelby, and little did I know she’d become the next mother of my children. After the show, she “allowed” me to give her a ride home, puttin’ me down the whole time: ‘”I don’t like the way you dress; your hair’s too short; take off that stupid T-shirt…You can let me off right here.” I’m thinking, What a snotty bitch; then she leans over and gives me this beautiful, juicy kiss on the lips.
No other club would let her and her friends inside, because they were underage. Of course. I made sure that we waived the rules. Then the Servicemen heard about all these gorgeous young girls, and—boom!—we were an instant success. Packed ’em in for five years solid.
PLAYBOY: So you started two-timing your wife?
CHONG: Shelby wouldn’t make love with me for a good two years—actually, a bad two years. She wouldn’t because she related to me as a married man, she knew I loved Maxine and she didn’t want to break up my marriage. Even when I moved my family to a house right next door to hers—quite by accident—she and I remained Platonic. When we finally made love, it was the most cosmic event of my life. I was high on LSD; I’d just started doing acid—this was 1967—and she became pregnant that first time with our daughter Precious. She went away for a few months and came back quite obviously with child. I was so happy, I couldn’t help it; babies make me happy under any circumstance. Shelby told me she wanted to have the baby, and I told her, “There’s always room under my roof.”
PLAYBOY: Did you inform Maxine?
CHONG: No. Not then. A lot of things can happen right under your nose that you’re not aware of. But Maxine and I were feeling a strain in our marriage; she knew I was falling in love with another woman, and she knew I knew she knew it. She didn’t know who it was, but she’d look at me with her big, brown, soulful eyes that said, “Where did our love go?” I was on the road a lot with the band, and then, one day, Berry Gordy caught our act and asked us to sign with Motown. So we moved to Detroit to make records. Maxine and the kids came, and so did Shelby and our daughter Precious. Nobody knew that I was the father of Shelby’s baby.
PLAYBOY: You were treading on thin ice, obviously.
CHONG: I didn’t know how thin. The band was starting to make it big; we were in the Motown factory of hits. I’d written a song about Shelby and me when Precious was born—Does Your Mama Know About Me?—which became a hit. We were on the verge of making it. And then Motown fired me.
PLAYBOY: Why?
CHONG: It was a typical stupid corporate fuck-up. We were playing a gig in New Jersey and I had to fly back to Detroit for one night so I could get my green card. Simple operation. A Motown bureaucrat decided I was just fucking off and told me, “If you go back to Detroit, don’t bother with us anymore.” I needed the green card, so I went back: “OK, I’m gone, pal.” Gordy lived to regret it. We’re still good friends, though—he introduces me to his friends as “my protégé, Tommy.” I couldn’t have been so confident if Shelby hadn’t been behind me all the way. When I got fired, she said, “Fuck it; it was an asshole band, anyhow. Let’s beat it out of Detroit and move to L.A. and make some money.” What could I say? We did. Maxine stayed with the kids in Detroit until I sent for her. So we were all in L.A., I was out of a job and, suddenly, Shelby got deathly ill. I had to take her to our house, with the baby, and tell Maxine, “This is my baby, too.” Maxine had tears in her eyes and a smile on her face and love in her heart when she saw the baby. So it was official. She worked as a secretary to feed us all while Shelby recuperated.
After she recovered. Shelby and Precious and I went back to Vancouver. My old club was failing because I wasn’t there to run it. My brother and my pop were doin’ their best, but the momentum was gone. So then, this strip joint came up for sale, and they put up the money and I managed it. We named it The City Works, and that’s where I met up with Cheech.
PLAYBOY: When did you and Shelby get married?
CHONG: Never did. I keep asking her, but she says no—she says you can cheat on your wife, but you can’t cheat on your mistress. And after Maxine and I got divorced. I had to tell Rae Dawn that Maxine wasn’t her mother.
PLAYBOY: How did she take it?
CHONG: Real hard, at first. She was, like, 11 years old. I put a lot of pressure on her, and for a while, she interpreted it as a lack of love. Then she tried going to live with her mother for a year, and she found out they couldn’t get along, so she moved back with Maxine, and they remained real tight. The whole thing is just another Tommy Chong production—lots of plots, subplots and chaos, and it all ties together in the end.
PLAYBOY: Actually, it’s downright Dickensian. But let’s back up a bit here. What was Cheech up to in Canada?
CHEECH: Well, I was in hiding for almost three years—in the deep woods for a solid year. I became the Mexican Thoreau.
PLAYBOY: How much of a Thoreau were you?
CHEECH: I saw maybe 20 people the entire year, and one of them was Sasquatch—or a very big dog. It was so strange; one day I was standing on Hollywood and Vine and the next day. I was in Priddis. Alberta, and it was 75 below.
CHONG: That’s only 59 below Celsius. Canadians have this system to soften the blow.
CHEECH: Yeah, well, like most Americans, the only thing I knew about Canada was Sergeant Preston. I was a wide-eyed whippersnapper; everything was so new to me. I just wanted to be this potter in the woods, and I hooked up as an apprentice with this real master potter. I was just into being pure and living this natural life and learning something new. I missed girls a lot. but I became good friends with my hand.
PLAYBOY: Which hand?
CHEECH: Whichever one wasn’t frostbitten.
PLAYBOY: What got you out of the woods?
CHEECH: Showbiz. Things got kind of slow on the pottery scene, and I got lonely, and I decided to go to Banff, because this band wanted me to play with them. We did OK, and I really got bit by the performing bug, but they split to Hawaii, so I had to figure out something else. This one agent chick booked me a few gigs in the Northwest Territories, and I played a lot of tractor conventions. Sang, played some guitar, told some jokes. Then it was over, and I was stranded in the Canadian Rockies in the coldest winter of 80 years. After about six months, I decided to move on. I had this buddy who said there was some action in Vancouver. I got a gig working for this local rock magazine—no real money, but you got free records, you got into the concerts free. Right after I hit Vancouver, I met Tommy.
CHONG: Cheech and Chong was preordained.
PLAYBOY: By what force?
CHONG: Organized slime.
CHEECH: Enrique the dishwasher. See, after I went to Canada, the first place I ended up was this tiny village outside Calgary, where Tommy had grown up, and I met all his old friends. I kept hearing stories about this crazy Chinaman. One guy told me Tommy had a band called Four Niggers and a Chink, and that intrigued me. I kept hearing tidbits about this maniac Chong. So the second day I land in Vancouver, I go to dinner in the sleaziest Chinese-junkie section of town. I round the corner and there’s this night club with these big, glossy pictures of these two bearded maniacs with tattoos and Army helmets, wrestling these naked girls with pasties on their nipples. Oddest thing I’d ever seen. I had to check this out.
CHONG: My first partner looked like a Hell’s Angel.
CHEECH: And you. you looked like a hip Genghis Khan. I couldn’t figure it out: I thought you were a Mongolian. I thought, Shit. I’m gonna meet a Mongolian. So I flashed my press pass and got into the club.
CHONG: See, when I came back to Vancouver to manage my brother and Pop’s strip joint, it was barely breaking even. So I decided we’d form an improvisation group—along with the girls. I’d seen The Committee in San Francisco by then, and some groups in L.A. So we worked out a whole new bit. Well, we ended up packin’ the club, but it worked against us. The intelligent people got turned on to us, but they sip on a glass of wine all night.
CHEECH: Or a glass of water.
CHONG: A night club is basically a watering hole for alcoholics; they wanna get drunk and don’t wanna hear nothin’ about entertainment. One alcoholic can keep a club rich, but we lost the alcoholics, because with all the good stuff onstage, they had no one to talk to. Competing against naked chicks is tough.
PLAYBOY: Why did you decide to hire Cheech?
CHONG: First of all, he showed up with this gorgeous chick who’d come all the way from L.A. to see him for one night. I always judge guys by their ladies. That way, you can’t go wrong. Some guys read palms; I read ladies.
CHEECH: When the ladies run out, he uses his palms.
CHONG: Really. I can always judge a guy by his lady. Cheech had immediate charisma.
He was kinda watching my show, but mostly, he was interested in kissin’ on this chick. I didn’t know he’d been in the boonies for three years: after I got ahold of him. I got him right back into drugs and sex and everything was OK again. But I was impressed right then. He’d passed the audition.
CHEECH: The girl was the love of my life: I hadn’t seen her in years. She comes to the show, she takes one look at Tommy and says, “If you work with him, make sure you get paid in advance.” I never saw her again, but to this day, I am grateful for that advice. Tommy offered me five dollars a week more than I was getting, and I always followed him around on payday to make sure I got my bread.
CHONG: That impressed me, too. Cheech wasn’t the funniest guy I’d ever worked with, but he was absolutely fearless. He’d do anything. On the spot. We were working four hours a night, six nights a week, for nine months solid. Total improvisation, no repeats. Thank God. I’d seen a lot of The Committee in San Francisco, and Cheech had seen a lot of the Instant Theatre in L.A. Thank God for Playboy’s Party Jokes, too, I might add. We’d run down to the newsstand and get the latest issue and act some of ’em out and use the rest as oneliners. We were desperate for material.
CHEECH: No pride. None. Still none.
CHONG: Anyway, we were real creative but goin’ broke, so Cheech and I decided, enough of this shit; let’s get back to what we know. Let’s form a band. We got a rhythm section together and set our premiere for a Battle of the Bands competition in Vancouver; this was 1969. Musically, we weren’t that hot, so we decided to warm up the crowd with a bit of humor. It got to be joke after joke after joke and the crowd kept roarin’, and when we finally left the stage, we won the contest without playin’ a note. My band said. “Gee, boss, that was a cinch; what’s our next gig?” I said. “You’re fired.” I’d replotted everything. I knew the system; I knew if we went back to L.A. and worked as hard as we could, we could make it as a comedy team.
CHEECH: So Tommy said to me, “Let’s split for L.A.” I knew he’d been through the grind before, that he knew what to do and that this was the next step. So we begged enough bread for gas to get to L.A.
CHONG: We were heading for the border and I said. “Well, what’re we gonna call ourselves? ‘Richard and Tommy’ sounds rather dumb. You got any kinda nickname?” He said. “Yeah, ‘Cheech.'” I said. “Hmmm, ‘Cheech and Chong’; sounds good.” Actually, he wanted to call it “Cheech and Cheech,” but I figured I should be in there somewhere.
PLAYBOY: What’s a Cheech, anyhow?
CHONG: It’s what you name a baby when you’ve already got 12 kids and you’ve run out of names.
CHEECH: It’s short for chicharrón, a Mexican delicacy consisting of fried pigskin.
PLAYBOY: So, Cheech, did you expect, when you crossed the Canadian border, that you’d be such a success if you hung out long enough with this Chinese madman?
CHEECH: Actually, I was just worried about making it across the border. I thought the FBI would be waiting for me there with rabid Dobermans. I crossed the border floating on about 40 beers, and the guards questioned me, and I said, “I’m a journalist.” And they smelled my breath: “Yep, he’s a journalist, all right.” Passed us right through.
PLAYBOY: So you finally got to L.A.
CHEECH: Yeah, we showed up on Maxine’s doorstep, penniless and homeless. She had a place right off the Strip. She and Tommy had already split up, so it was a strange situation.
CHONG: Yeah, I was a raw, exposed nerve. My wife was a free woman: my girlfriend was a free woman: Shelby was in Vancouver, hauling in tons of bucks as a cocktail waitress. I had a solid month of no love, until I begged her enough and she joined me. We found this little shack in Venice for $40 a month.
CHEECH: Maxine had this little Honda, a girl’s version, and so Tommy and I would get up every day and tool around town on that, checking out the black clubs. This one guy remembered Tommy from his Motown days, so he said he’d let us perform and if the audience liked us, we could come back and he’d pay us. This was in the days when there were almost no comedians performing in any clubs, especially in black clubs, especially nonblack guys. So we came out and blew the audience away. The niggers did not know what to think of us, but they loved us; it was, like, “Yeah, that’s them Cheech and Chang guys, shut up and listen.” So we had a weekend gig, and then we started playing all the black clubs after that. Most of them were really tough clubs, where you didn’t take your hands out of your pockets after you were paid-—armed guard in the parking lot, all that.
Then this black guy who was about to reopen a club caught our act and offered us $400 a week, and that was real, real big money, believe me. It was at the Climax II; the first Climax shut down because the owner skipped town owing everybody money. So it was us. Johnny Mathis’ brother and Earth, Wind & Fire. Man, we loved the guys in that band—partied like crazy with em. But the club itself was the main attraction; it was one of the first after hours clubs, and it was the hip place to be seen. Every celebrity in Hollywood showed up. Four and five in the morning, and people are still in line to get in. Just packed. I remember, the first night, I was so excited: “Hey, Tommy, this is great, huh?”
CHONG: I took one look around and said, “We are getting our money up front, because the nigger who owns this is crazy. Too many people, and he don’t know how to handle it.” It closed after five weeks. But we got paid. And it was fun.
CHEECH: Yeah, the wildest chicks. So, when that fell through, we got a gig as the house comedians at this other club, P.J.’s. We opened for all the great black acts—Ray Charles, The Isley Brothers, Martha and the Vandellas, Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye—playing to a total black audience, 500 people in the room. We got all the hip uptown niggers. And we got a lot of material from working that crowd. But it closed down right away, too; the owner got ripped off all the time. So when that closed, we were back to little $25-a-night gigs again. We ate a lot of Pioneer chicken and shoplifted a lot.
PLAYBOY: Together?
CHEECH: No, I had my shoplifting down OK as a one-man act. I wore baggy pants and a big coat with plenty of pockets. I’d go into Ralph’s Market and stick three or four steaks down my pants and walk out. I’d moved out of Maxine’s, and I was living in this other house on the Strip. Big old house full of people, most of ’em junkies and dealers. And I really fell in love with Karen Dalton, this folksy-blues singer who had a couple of albums out. Tommy and I would rehearse at the house, so he was there a lot, too. It was just real hand-to-mouth; we had this big pot of stew going all the time, and whatever you stole that day, you put into the pot. We’d all get rousted by the cops every week. They’d come in and line us up naked in the living room.
PLAYBOY: With all the heroin around, how come you never got tempted?
CHEECH: I’m real scared of needles. And I saw a lot of friends of mine die. Once you know the junkie trip, it’s the same story. Every junkie is like a setting sun; sometimes it really flashes pretty and brilliant, but when it goes down—sssssssssst. Lands in the ocean with a great big fizz.
One of the women would come to us and say, “I’m doing a big hit tonight; check on me every hour, OK?” A couple of times, we couldn’t wake her up and we sent for an ambulance. When you O.D., you don’t turn blue; you turn yellow-green. She went to the hospital once with absolutely no pulse. She broke out the next day and came back, drank some wine, smoked some joints and shot right back up. She’s dead now. I couldn’t get tempted by that scene, man. It was un-glamorous. I like downers, but not d-d-d-o-w-n-n-e-r-s. Robitussin is as far as I went. I used to do that in high school: two bottles of Romilar CF and you’re ready to meet your date’s parents. Anyway, I moved out of that house after a couple of months.
CHONG: Yeah, we went from the frying pan into the fire. Shelby went back to Vancouver again for a while, and I was staying with Cheech. I went to sleep smoking a joint one night…
CHEECH: And I woke up with him yelling, at the top of his lungs, “Cheech! Cheech! Help! Help!” The heat had melted this big plastic pillow with all this foam rubber in it, and it just exploded all over the living room. There were 456 little fires. The whole living room was on fire; the whole world was on fire. So we were trying to put out the fire with our appendages. I burned up my hands, he burned up his legs. We somehow got it out.
CHONG: We were out.
PLAYBOY: And down-and-out.
CHEECH: But the Bank of America came to our rescue. Tommy goes into the branch office right around the corner to check on his measly 59 cents. The teller says, “OK, you’ve got $2000, and don’t bother me.” Entrepreneur that he is, Tommy says, “OK, gimme $500.” The manager signs the transaction and Tommy beats it over to my place: “Cheech, hide this, quick.” So I did. He took out $500 a day until it was gone. Well, pretty soon, the branch manager comes over: “Umm, Mr. Chong, you owe us $2000; it was an error, but you must pay us back.” Tommy goes comatose. “I do? How can this be? I’ll have to check with my accountant!” The bank guy is sitting on the only piece of furniture in the damn place, a funky beanbag chair, and Tommy has to check with his accountant!
PLAYBOY: What did your accountant advise?
CHONG: The ’71 earthquake struck the next day, and I never heard from the guy again. Divine intervention.
CHEECH: Yep—deus ex machina. So Tommy gets this brilliant idea: All we want in life is a place to play, so let’s take the two grand, rent a club and buy ads in The Hollywood Reporter and Daily Variety saying we’re making a film and we need extras. The next day, the line’s around the fucking block. We told everybody, “We’re making this movie about up-and-coming comics, and you guys get to play the audience.” So then we sold ’em drinks and food. Made a bunch of money on that. And Tommy had conned this guy into filming the thing so it looked real. We came out and did our act, everybody loved it, the word spread again and it became a hip hangout for about a month. But we could spread the money only so thin, so it folded and we were back on the streets again.
PLAYBOY: Don’t keep us in suspense. When was the big break?
CHONG: Mondays were amateur nights at The Troubador, this white folk-rock club. You’d show up at nine in the morning, stand there all day and get your show-up time. The hip thing about the deal was, the first act that showed up went on last. The last guy who showed up went on first and just ate it. We were great. So we played a bunch of Mondays, but the owner would never hire us for a gig, even though we were packing the club and really starting to get an “industry audience”—a real following among the “important” guys. [Hollywood producer] Lou Adler “just happened” to be in the crowd; he told our friends he was there to check out another act, but he split right after we went off. Rather suspect, eh? The next day, I got this call from Missy Montgomery, Dinah Shore’s daughter; she worked for Lou. She said, “Lou loved your act; he wants to sign you; hurry down here.” We signed that day.
CHEECH: Lou gave us a two-grand advance. We’d go every night—after hours—to the A&M studios, into a little room with two tape recorders, and try to translate our stage act into an album. We didn’t know what we were doing; we just did it. Our first album cost $8000 total. It went gold.
PLAYBOY: Adler became your producer?
CHEECH: Yeah, he produced all our albums; he produced his name on the cover.
CHONG: Lou was never once in the studio with us, because he didn’t know shit about comedy. His thing was music—The Mamas and the Papas, etc. He was good on hunches, and his hunch about us paid off rather well for him.
CHEECH: So our first album, Cheech & Chong, was released in September of ’71. It didn’t set the world on fire at first, but then Lou said, “Why don’t you do a Christmas single?” So we worked real hard on it and came out with Santa Claus and His Old Lady. A&M released it in November—boom!—smash hit right away. Then our album sold like crazy. Not only gold but it stayed on the charts for 64 weeks. So then we started our second album, Big Bambu. We recorded most of it on the road in hotel rooms, with just a couple of little microphones. It made number one! We had another hit single off it—Sister Mary Elephant. Our next album, Los Cochinos—boom!—made number one, too, and another hit single, Basketball Jones.
CHONG: See, our competition was not other comedians. It was The Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin and Stevie Wonder—and we were outselling every one of ’em. We had three top-ranked albums in a row in two and a half years. Every album went gold. We just believed in ourselves so much that we conquered the American pop charts, going up against the Stones. We’d get letters from guys in Vietnam telling us our cassettes were the hottest ones around–two Stones tapes for one Cheech and Chong in trade. You know? That means something.
PLAYBOY: What was unique about you guys?
CHONG: We struck the right note. We did things in our skits that nobody else was doing—militant hippies, dope dealers, high school kids on dope, crazed Vietnam vets, nuns and a whole side of ethnic truths no one else had touched. And we came at a time when everybody needed to laugh. We cruised through that era, but we left our mark on it. Making people laugh is an act of love, and we showed the power of pure love coming out of all the hate.
CHEECH: We always keep a touch of the absurd. It comes out of our ability to absorb everything. Like when critics call us reckless, lewd, sexist, racist, they’re really not looking at what we’re doing. If you confront that kind of shit up front, you make it evaporate. We just prove art imitates life in the best sense. We make people think. We fit the classic comedy-of-manners mold, but we put a hip twist on it.
CHONG: We really are twisted.
CHEECH: We have a real practiced eye, and we can instantly recognize when something is funny and how it will work. Sometimes, our judgment is wrong, but we come close most of the time.
CHONG: Yeah, we must know what we’re doing—otherwise, we’d be interviewing you, eh?
CHEECH: See, the point is you learn from studying everybody, but then you have to put your own imprint on it. I’ll give you a recent example: My dad came to a dinner party at my house with his new wife. Dad’s been a cop all his life, his new wife is a cop and her exhusband is a cop. So in the middle of this great dinner my wife, Rikki, has made, Dad starts talking shop. He’s discussing this child-abuse case where these maniacs burned their kids with a cigarette every day. He goes into quite graphic detail, and I’m avidly listening just like I did when I was a kid; this was normal dinner conversation. I look up and see that Rikki’s turning green. Then she says, “Please stop!” My dad goes, “Jeez, what’d I do, stick my hands down her pants?”
CHONG: Black humor—that’s the saving grace of any poor society. That’s what makes us funny. We make people laugh according to what makes us laugh; give us a situation and we’ll mine it for all it’s worth. We’re not as intelligent as Richard Pryor—he’s more obsessed and talented—but I think we’re just as important as he is. We don’t leave people behind, like Richard does or like Lenny Bruce did; we keep the moms and dads laughing, too. It’s not just hip jokes for the band. I’m no genius; I learned some secrets early in life and had some good training, just like Cheech. Separately, neither of us is a genius, but together, there’s a wonderful genius.
CHEECH: I admire just about every professional comedian, but Pryor is definitely the best, the most outrageous. I learned a lot about spontaneity from Richard. I remember catching a show in his real wild days; this chick in the audience was giving him a real hard time. She wouldn’t let up, so he said. “Here, bitch,” and whipped out his dick and shoved it in her face. She sat there for about 30 seconds and split. All these celebrities were in the crowd, and they just went bananas. I mean, have you ever seen anybody pull his dick out onstage? I never had, and I’ve been in lots of places. Of course, he didn’t have the greatest dick in the world, but it sure worked right then. [Laughs]
PLAYBOY: How did your new-found celebrity affect you?
CHEECH: We were really lucky, because after our records hit, nobody, knew what we looked like. We got invited to parties because our names were famous, but our faces weren’t. We got to observe all levels of society up close, and we were fortunate enough to discover what bullshit is involved with most “celebrities.” Adler had this club. On the Rox, on top of the Roxy Theater on Sunset—a private club for his celebrity friends. And most of ’em looked like they’d come from under the rocks. Most of ’em chose to anesthetize their lives, because they couldn’t deal with anything. We learned a lot about excess: You can do a little of this, a little of that, but don’t pig out on any one thing.
CHONG: We’ve been able to handle our success because, for the most part, we’ve never believed the hype that surrounded us. With most stars, they start believing the hype and fall apart. They’ll read in Billboard that their album made two zillion dollars, and it’s, “Hey, I don’t have that money in my checking account; everybody’s a bunch of fucking thieves.” Then, when they do figure out that they have enough money, it’s, “Hey, I wanna quit and get my head together and do what I really want to do.” Money is dangerous for musicians. That’s why the greatest thing that ever happened to all the old black blues musicians was that they never got a penny, so they stayed old black blues musicians. It would have ruined their music if they’d got paid. You can’t show me any R&B guy, for that matter, where the money didn’t ruin him—Stevie Wonder, maybe, but that’s because he’s such a spiritual cat. But most of ’em—Marvin Gaye, for example—it’s see how many alligator shoes they can buy and how many chicks they can hang up. I know; I was in that world.
CHEECH: When you’re all of a sudden thrust into the whole celebrity world, everybody is somebody; there’s nowhere to gawk. You don’t have time to get awed. One of the amazing things you discover when you become a star is that everybody, from other stars to the corner mailman, opens himself up to you and tells you the most intimate details of his life—things he’d never tell his best friends. So you sit there and take it in. take note of what he’s saying, because it’s all good material.
CHONG: I like to catch stars off guard, ambush ’em. I can get away with it because I look like your average Joe. I went up to Henry Winkler at this one party: “Hi, Henry. I’m a real fan of yours; I really admire your work.” He nodded blankly and turned away. “By the way, I’m Tommy Chong, from Cheech and Chong”——and before he could whirl around and return the compliment, I was gone.
CHEECH: We don’t hang out with the Hollywood crowd very much, but as a writer, I find it interesting to watch. Most of it is just Flatter City, real phony. But a Hal Ashby or a Jack Nicholson or a Ryan O’Neal—lots of our fans are film makers—when they compliment us, it’s a real stroke. The guy who lives next door to me, he’s lived there since 1934 and he knows everybody, so he has these great old-drunk parties. So I got to meet Robert Mitchum, Steve McQueen, Jason Robards—who is truly a prince. So is Mitchum.
PLAYBOY: How did you adjust to life on the road when you started touring?
CHEECH: It was seeing how long you could hold your breath for 11 months at a time. It all happened so fast. We played showcase clubs, big clubs, Vegas—everything you could think of. We started playing outdoor rock festivals. I remember one in Bull Island, Indiana. They expected 100,000 and 250,000 showed up. So at three in the morning, we got 250,000 people off for an hour. We were the only ones to get paid, too. After that, I told Tommy, “If we can play here, we can play anywhere.” We played Vegas. We played every prison in California.
PLAYBOY: Quite a contrast.
CHONG: Not really. Equally tough.
CHEECH: We got sentenced to a year in Vegas—Aladdin Hotel, one weekend a month, Thursday through Saturday, playing the 2:30 show. Fifteen grand per night, one show.
PLAYBOY: Vegas seems a strange setting for a Cheech and Chong show.
CHEECH: There’s a big fallacy about Vegas—
CHONG: Fallacies are what follow the pussicies around—
CHEECH: [Laughs] It was great—a vacation every month. We’d draw all the hip people in Vegas, a whole huge roomful of ’em. All the staff from the hotels and the blackjack dealers and the cocktail waitresses would be there. Real tough crowd. You had to get the big vibrator out to get them off, with extra batteries the size of jackhammers. That late is usually death for comedy: there’s a general rule that you can’t get ’em off after 1:30, because they’ve been up all day drinking, gambling, doing drugs. And if you don’t time their drug reactions right, you hear the crescendo of heads hitting the table: thump, thump, thump. You really had to get it goin’ right off, stronger and stronger and more intense, to keep these guys’ attention. Really fine-tuning your act to your audience. Nothing intricate, just well executed. Tough hecklers, too. We’ve used a lot of Vegas in our new movie.
PLAYBOY: You must have encountered some tough hecklers over the years.
CHONG: The greatest we ever came up against was when we played San Quentin. These fuckers are killers, you know. Cheech was out there, and it was the Sister Mary Elephant nun bit, and the guys were shouting, “Lift up your skirt, let’s see some pussy,” getting real gnarly with it. Cheech waited for the perfect time and said, “Young man, would you like to stay after prison?” Broke the whole joint up. Another time, we were playing Terminal Island and the power went out—totally black. Cheech says, “It’s really good being here at the Apollo Theater.” Cracked ’em right up. Prisoners have the heaviest sense of humor.
PLAYBOY: Is that why you played prisons?
CHEECH: No, we played prisons because we figured the only difference between them and us was that we didn’t get caught.
PLAYBOY: Didn’t you get approached to do television around the time of your third album?
CHONG: Yeah, and we said, “No, it’s too much like work.”
CHEECH: You gotta be there every day. It’s material-chewing, eats you up. We got followed around in ’73 for a while by James Komack, who wanted us for a TV show; he wanted to use our bit Pedro and Man for a sitcom. He offered us a huge amount of money, and he just kept pitching us. We said no. So he just turned it into Chico and the Man. We were having too much fun with the records and the concerts.
CHONG: We did The Hollywood Squares. though.
CHEECH: Once. We were in the same square—the Cheech and Chong box. They prepped you in advance with a bunch of dope questions. You answered like addicts would. It was real, real hot, lots of lights, and you felt as if you were looking into a make-up mirror constantly. All the time I was sitting there, I kept saying to myself, “What the fuck am I doing here?”
PLAYBOY: Why did you do it?
CHONG: Exposure. A chance to expose yourself.
CHEECH: You never saw under the boxes, right? I can’t tell you what Paul Lynde was doing, but there was this little yelping under his box, like, “Arf, arf.” [Laughs] George Gobel was on the show, and he’s alwyas been one of my favorites. But he and Ed Asner and Lynde were all pretty drunk, so we didn’t get to talk to them.
PLAYBOY: Cheech, you married Rikki about then, didn’t you?
CHEECH: Yeah. I was dating her best friend, Jack LaLanne’s daughter. I fell in love with her instantly when I was here waiting tables. She wouldn’t give me her right number for weeks. Finally, I trapped her in a corner when she had a tray of dishes in her hand, and she had no choice. She finally gave it to me. We lived togther and lived together and lived together, and finally, I said, “I need someone to help me spend my money.” My fucked-up way of proposing. I’d never seen anything like her. I’d lived with a lot of ladies—don’t tell my wife—but I’d never wanted them to get beyond the girlfriend stage. We got married in ’76 at the dawn of the most beautiful sunrise Big Sur ever saw. It was like an acid flashback. The greatest moment of my life.
PLAYBOY: How did you deal with the sexual temptations of nonstop touring?
CHONG: It’s tough, lemme tell you, when you’re the Brown Sex God. [Laughs] There’d never been a low-rider Apollo or a Canadian sex symbol, so we became it by default.
CHEECH: We’ve both been physical-fitness freaks for a long time. So we’d hit a town, look in the Yellow Pages and find the nearest gym or go to the Y.M.C.A., play basketball, lift weights, get a massage, because you gotta rest up for the party at night. Working out has taken the place of many an orgasm.
CHONG: When I’d get frustrated, weight lifting would just work it right out of me. An orgasm is usually a release of frustration, so instead of pumping pussy, we’d pump iron. Gets the blood circulating. Of course, it can work both ways. I’ll never forget this great line from this guy in a Las Vegas gym. He said, “I was gonna work out, but I got a blow job instead.” He was serious.
CHEECH: Well, I think a lot of guys waste their time and their money going to shrinks. I think they’d be a lot better served by going to a massage parlor. I’m serious, too. The thing is to relax, live in the present, and if you’re in a massage parlor, a good blow job really makes you live in the present. All a shrink would make me do is feel guilty about feeling lazy—inertia is the basic law of nature, especially if you’re a Mexican.
PLAYBOY: Just how big is your casting couch?
CHEECH: Only big enough to lay my head on the laps of a few intimate friends. [Laughs]
PLAYBOY: How do your ladies, Rikki and Shelby, deal with the groupie scene?
CHEECH: They have these cattle prods, see, just to keep ’em away—except for the slower-witted ones, who don’t have much sensitivity to pain. Then it takes ’em a little bit longer. [Laughs] I worry about my wife more than she worries about me. Not that she’s promiscuous or anything, but all things considered equal—if nobody knew who I was and nobody knew who she was—she’s a hell of a lot better looking. I never got by on looks, I got by on personality. And ultimately, I think, women are attracted to charismatic men.
PLAYBOY: So you agree with Henry Kissinger that power is an aphrodisiac?
CHEECH: Absolutely; how else could he fuck Jill St. John? Anyway, Tommy and I are both happily married men now, happy as can be. Right, Tommy? Remember your old lady’s gonna read this.
CHONG: Right. We never even look at other women. Let’s move on to a safer subject, like drug abuse.
PLAYBOY: Well, we were just going to ask. How did drugs affect you guys?
CHEECH: Which ones? One at a time
PLAYBOY: Cocaine?
CHEECH: Yeah, we touched on that before. When you can first afford it, cocaine is the greatest drug in the world. We’d do coke and listen to lots of jazz. Hang out with a bunch of dealers, then go out on the road and get sick a lot. Big nasal problems. Timing problems. One time, we did a week in Chicago and all Tommy did was stay up all night with a vaporizer. He’d get up, do three shows a night, come back and gasp all night. We had a big argument one time in New York, when we first played The Bitter End. We took some coke before going on, and it was horrible. We overdid it, because we were confronting the problem of “New York.” So we decided to quit: “Hey, man, this just ain’t it.” I don’t like the high; it makes me paranoid, so fuck it. Now I do it maybe twice a year.
CHONG: We looked at each other and said, “What the hell is this doing to us?” I’d been sick every day for the whole tour. It makes you feel like you know what you’re doing, but you don’t. The first gram of coke I ever bought lasted me a month; I treated it like a lid of grass, and a lid could last me six months. I snorted up the second one a lot faster, and so on, and it just started fucking with me. It’s the powder form of a rich man’s gold chains—hey, look at me, flash, flash. Beautiful chicks love cocaine, so you can have every beautiful airline stewardess hanging around your neck if you’ve got a lot of coke. Now, once in a while, I’ll go for it. But I turn down lines constantly. I know that since I’m in touch with my body, I can pig out for one night and it won’t permanently affect me, like before.
PLAYBOY: Marijuana?
CHONG: I usually smoke dope at night to relax. I love to work out and then to toke up to make me relax more. It gives me balance.
CHEECH: Marijuana is about it for me these days. Makes me relax, reflect. I have a ligament condition, and if I smoke, my ligaments get sore, but I love to smoke it so much. I go through periodic detoxings.
PLAYBOY: What do you do with all that amazing-looking marijuana you use in your movies—send it back to wardrobe?
CHEECH: No, the crew always steals it. We went through three huge batches on our third movie.
CHONG: Too bad we don’t have Smell-a-vision.
CHEECH: Or the “Feelies,” like in Aldous Huxley.
CHONG: Yeah: just imagine the “Smokies.”
PLAYBOY: OK, what about LSD? What did it do for you?
CHEECH: It opened me right up. I never took a whole lot, but whenever I felt the need, I did. I take it now when I feel the need. It’s a cosmic colonic—clears all the shit right out. The great purifier.
CHONG: It taught me a whole lot. I really respect it. It’s a very holy substance, and if you treat it right, it treats you right. I seldom do it now. The only time we really still do drugs is when we party. Then we do a lot of drugs. Last year, Cheech and I went to a party in Alberta; we were up for three days, snortin’, drinkin’ and smokin’. It was a ball, but Cheech kept noddin’ out on me, fallin’ asleep. Just like the old days. But that’s real rare now.
PLAYBOY: You own a boat that you routinely take back and forth across the Canadian border. Now that your popular image is that of drug-crazed fiends, do you ever get hassled by Customs officials?
CHONG: Naah. They just want the autograph for the kids. They don’t want to be the guy who shot Jesse James. Besides, I never bring drugs across, ummm, intentionally. Accidentally, many times: “Oh, shit, I thought I got rid of this!”
PLAYBOY: You recorded your last album in ’76. Were you thinking then about getting into movies?
CHEECH: Yeah; it was always in the back of our minds. By 1977, I was really agitating with Tommy to make Up in Smoke. I always figured Cheech and Chong should be making movies; it was the natural extension of our act. I also thought that was where the real money was. We had all these big ideas from all the time we’d been trying to make it. But when Adler tried to cut a deal with us, it was like he was trying to sell these two pet rocks. “Well, what do they do? They can’t shoot heroin all over the screen; that’s hard to sell, you know.”
Lou would play ’em our records and say, “These are the most successful comics in the history of records.” “Yeah, but that’s records.” So he’d take ’em to the show. “Great, they can act, but that’s onstage.” Most of those guys couldn’t see the forest for the trees. So Lou got someone to put up some money and we completed principal photography for $800,000 and he sold a distribution deal to Paramount where the studio risked almost no money.
CHONG: Up in Smoke was the perfect statement of the counterculture of the early Seventies. Cheech and I wrote it, I basically directed it, though Lou listed himself as director and coproducer. We previewed it with a corny, dumb-fuck ending that Lou insisted on, and the audience said, “Great, except for the ending.” So we went back and reshot it along the lines we had wanted to begin with. To Lou’s credit, with little studio support, he four-walled it in the South, and it really started to snowball. The studio figured it had something, so it put some promotional money behind it, and—boom!—a smash hit. Lou’s a genius at that. He was the first agent of ours we didn’t have to instruct what to do in terms of PR. But he really fucked us when he sold the movie; we were getting ten percent of what he made in profits. Ten percent! To split between us! I begged Lou to just credit himself as producer and me as director, and I begged him before it was released nationally to renegotiate the profit split. I wanted to split the profits equally: Adler, Cheech, Chong.
CHEECH: I was worried; I figured, “We’re gonna have a smash hit and no money.”
CHONG: I realized then: Never tempt your friends. I mean, I still like the guy, but there’s no way to adjust for power and greed, and Lou had such a good deal with us that he had to go for it— to his discredit.
PLAYBOY: Why did you sign such a lousy deal to begin with?
CHONG: I wanted Lou to prove somehow that he was really worth 90 percent. You know: What do you do to get that kind of cut? If you deserve it, fine; and if you don’t, we’ll just renegotiate it the way it should be. Anyway, we went out on the road, Cheech and I, and we did this big promotional tour for the movie. Every talk show we did. every interview. we did. we knocked Lou. Real bad. Like, “Yeah”. Lou Adler—nice guy, just don’t turn your back on him.” So I got a call in the middle of the night from him. “That’s slanderous. Tom.” “Yeah, OK, then, give us a better deal—a third each.” He called back: “OK, I’ll go for-it.” I said. “Great—starting with Up in Smoke.” He said. “I can’t go for that.” I said. “Fine; there’s no deal.” And we went shopping for lawyers. Here the picture was one of the top grossers of the year, and we couldn’t get another movie deal, because nobody wants to touch you when you’re in litigation.
So Lou’s cousin turns us on to this curious fellow, Howard Brown, Cheech is scared of him at first, because he figures he’s a rounder, but I love rounders. He came to L.A. after doing God knows what in New York, because he wanted to get into show business. He courted us, and we put him through the mill, but he won us over. We said, “Go prove yourself.” He goes to Lou and gets a $500,000 check by threatening him with legal trouble. Then he goes to Paramount and says, “We just made a movie that made $100,000,000. Make us a great offer and we’ll make some more money for you guys.” They do the toughguy routine: “We’ll give you $500,000—not a penny more. Go make a better deal if you can.” Howard says, “I think I got $2,000,000 from Universal: would you put it in writing that we’re released from Paramount?” Guy at Paramount says “Sure.” Howard goes back to Paramount and says. “We just signed a deal for $2,000,000 at Universal,” and the Paramount guys shit a brick: “Howard, how could you; you know we didn’t mean no. We’ll give you $2.500.000; go tell Universal that.” Howard says. “I can’t do that, but don’t be sore, fellas. There’s always the next movie. Universal’s got us for one; why don’t you guys be smart and grab us for the third one? We’ll give you the same deal—$2,500,000 to sign us now.” Paramount says, “Forget it.” Howard runs right over to Columbia and asks for the same amount. Frank Price, Columbia’s president, snatches us up. So he’s sold two movies before we’ve shot one foot of film. And he’s still on a roll: He sold our latest one to Columbia for $5,000,000, plus 50 percent of the net profit, plus ten percent of the gross profit.
PLAYBOY: Why didn’t Paramount or Universal nab you right up?
CHEECH: We still hadn’t “proved” ourselves. They didn’t know if Lou was the Svengali behind us or what. They still don’t know. Ninety percent of the people in the so-called creative department are total flakes. That’s the bottom line. You’re dealing with real wackedout people. Most, of them will never notice what real assholes they are.
PLAYBOY: What has Up in Smoke grossed to date?
CHONG: I think about $110,000,000.
PLAYBOY: What did Cheech & Chong’s Next Movie gross?
CHONG: About $95,000,000.
PLAYBOY: How about Cheech & Chong’s Nice Dreams?
CHONG: About $85,000,000 so far.
PLAYBOY: With that almost unbelievable return, why isn’t the world breaking down your door?
CHONG: Image. When we worked for Universal, all we saw on the lot was signs saying, WELCOME BLUES BROTHERS. That film went from an $8,000,000 budget to a $40,000,000 budget, and the studio loved it. Barely broke even. We were on the same lot. and nobody even noticed us. We spent a nickel and made a fortune.
PLAYBOY: We’re still mystified. Given the crass amounts we’re talking about, isn’t that incentive enough?
CHONG: Maybe it would be if it were the old days, when the moguls put up their own money. But now it’s the banks’ and the big conglomerates’ money. The studio guy gets a salary no matter what, and there’s really no incentive to get excited over a low-budget film. because he doesn’t get any more money when it comes in—oh, maybe a bonus, or his star might rise a little bit. But look at it this way: A big-budget movie generates income immediately. In front. There’s millions for this and that, and a few hundred thou can easily disappear. So there’s all this cash floating around before any money is made. Whoever has the money in his hands is gonna take as much of it as he can.
It’s one big gargoyle: The artist grabs as much as he can out front and shoots the budget up right off. The studio head gets paid a wage, but if he guesses wrong, so what? Nobody’s gonna kill him. The money’s out there, everybody’s making a living and basically, everybody’s ripping everybody off. The unions are ripping you off because they’re feather-bedding. They make you hire more drivers than you need, more crane operators than you need, cameramen you don’t need. Overtime for meals. A good extra, if he knows what he’s doing, can pull in good money to not do fuck-all. A clever electrician can fuck the wiring up. A grip can fuck with the light; that can take an hour to change. An hour is $30,000 down the drain. A crane operator can say, “Crane don’t work in the cold,” and so, of course, it don’t.
So the movie is made, the director’s finished: “Fuck off, we don’t need you.” The film editors: “Hi. baby, love what you’ve done”: and when they’re done, it’s “Fuck off: we don’t need you, either.” The studio says take a fucking hike—unless it needs you for a reshoot; then you’re the greatest guy in the world. The executives sit there and make “critical” decisions, because their egos insist on it. If they like the movie. If they don’t, they won’t come near the fucking thing. So then it’s give it to a distributor: it’s his job now. So he flies out the exhibitors. Wines and dines Fat Al from Detroit because he owns a string of Midwest theaters. Al don’t like movies, but it’s a good way to make some bucks. So Fat Al agrees to take the picture, and he takes a few bucks in “expenses.” Then back to the distributor and “overhead.” Then back to the movie company and creative bookkeeping.”
PLAYBOY: How does that work?
CHONG: “We can’t mail the check: the computer’s broken down.” Or “The secretary’s sick till next week.” So now the $500,000 you’re supposed to have sits there collecting interest for them. If they’re smart, they’ll stretch it out long enough so that the interest pays for a lot of perks. So you’ve gotta borrow money to pay your bills, which you have to pay interest on, and hire an accounting firm and pay them money, and then the studio says. “Jeez, why didn’t you say so in the first place? Of course, you can have your money.”
CHEECH: There’s no way they can lose.
PLAYBOY: So how do you beat the system?
CHONG: Make all your money out front. Have total control—which we do. And make so much money that there ain’t a laundromat in the world that can clean it.
PLAYBOY: Mel Brooks once said there should be a sign emblazoned atop every studio president’s desk: WE MAKE THE MONEY; YOU FIND IT.
CHONG: Man, you can’t even worry about it. If you stop and think about money, it’s the scariest job in the world. You just think about how to make a better movie, party, have a good time. If you protect yourself, the bread always shows up. And never risk your own money. You put up your own money, you’re a fool.
PLAYBOY: Speaking of your own money, what was it like when you realized that you were millionaires? That you’d never have to work another day if you didn’t want to?
CHONG: I remember the day an accountant told us that—and we found out he was a crook. We never think about it. We do exactly what we want to do, and now the only difference is that instead of saying, ”Thank you for letting us stay here.” we own the joint.
PLAYBOY: What’s your net worth?
CHONG: We don’t know.
CHEECH: Never think of it. I just know my checks won’t bounce.
PLAYBOY: What’s the collaboration process when you make a movie?
CHONG: Cheech tells me his dreams, I tell him mine and we put them together. Cheech has a recurring dream—a nightmare that he has to go on a banana diet.
CHEECH: Yeah, that I’ve finally become a vegetarian. Scares the shit out of me. I’m in my garden, digging up carrots.
CHONG: Hey, those little carrots scream carrot screams when you pull ‘cm out of the ground.
CHEECH: Fuck ’em; they’re carrots.
CHONG: What we do is unconstructed. Just leave it at this: It works. If you have to explain it, don’t work.
CHEECH: Yeah, and if you want the secret, it’s gonna cost you. No more free jokes. We churn ’em out; we just do it. We can deliver 10,000 jokes on the dock in Pittsburgh by Wednesday, but it’s gonna cost you. Prices of jokes are going up—jokeflation, you know.
CHONG: Yeah, plus, the jokefly killed the last crop. Gonna cost you more.
PLAYBOY: Are you guys political at all?
CHEECH: Now, that’s a funny joke. I voted, once, a long time ago.
CHONG: I voted once, too, but I fucked up my ballot and it didn’t count.
CHEECH: Politicians are a bunch of nerds. I mean, really stupid. We’ve met lots of ’em, because they’re on planes getting drunk and they come over and introduce themselves to us. If they can see that far.
CHONG: People don’t realize one thing about politicians: You’re not supposed to love the guys. That was the trouble with Carter. He wanted everybody to love him. I hated him for that reason. And any time a politician tells you he’s not gonna lie to you, you know that’s exactly what he’s gonna do. Like you tell your old lady, “I never did nothin’ wrong while you were gone,” and she says, “Well, why would you even bring it up to begin with, then?” I believe in monarchy; kings and queens come in handy. Gives you stability, some class.
PLAYBOY: Teaches all the peasants to stay in line?
CHONG: Yeah, until you learn your manners.
PLAYBOY: You’d tell that to a welfare mother in Mississippi? “Stay in line and learn your manners”?
CHONG: Sure. I grew up with people like that.
PLAYBOY: So it’s anybody’s own fault if he’s poor, undernourished and illiterate?
CHONG: Absolutely, absolutely. You have the power within you to change any time. It can happen to anybody. When I started working at Motown, I was so problack, so gung ho, and you know what? I was the only one. The black guys didn’t give a fuck; I was the only one with a social conscience. I thought to myself, finally, Why are you so set on changing their whole trip? Then I asked myself, “Why are they so down?” And the answer was that when one made it big, he would make everybody else a slave. When these guys become king, they treat every other nigger as their plantation hand.
PLAYBOY: But you just said you’re a monarchist. Kings are supposed to do that, right? Keep ’em in line—
CHONG: I just know that the only way you can change the world is by changing yourself from within. It’s not who they are, it’s who you are. Just make your universe so attractive that it affects everybody else around you.
Me and Cheech, we’ve changed what could be done with records, Vegas, movies…We’ve looked forward to the Playboy Interview, because there are so many things that have not been said, that we can’t do from our pulpit. And let’s face it: The Playboy Interview is the ultimate showcase.
CHEECH: Yeah, you guys know how to make us illiterates make sense, or nonsense, or—anyway, we get a chance to talk with an audience in a way we haven’t before. The only other team whose interview I’ve read in Playboy is Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda.
CHONG: I hope we’re funnier than them, eh? See, I was a Playboy fan from the first issue—the very first issue. It was in ’53, and from that day on, I was a Playboy freak. I always thought that Playboy stood for the best—total freedom of the press.
CHEECH: I got hip to Playboy right away, too. Bought every issue when I was a kid.
PLAYBOY: For the literary content, no doubt?
CHEECH: Fuck, no—for the chicks, man. It was the first “open and unfold.” Even with the brushed-out pubes, it got you plenty horny. National Geographic was the only alternative—topless natives. But they were untouchable because they were in fucking Africa. I remember my first time out, I bought a Playboy and the centerfold was Janet Pilgrim, this real white girl with real blonde hair and real red lips and real big tits, and they said she was this secretary at Playboy who had just been, ummm, “discovered” in the othces. I remember so well…Ah, Janet. Moving right along?
PLAYBOY: What do you think about Ronald Reagan?
CHEECH: Fuck off and die, you ugly son of a bitch. [Laughs]
CHONG: Note, please, that Cheech said that. As a rich Canadian, I think Reagan is doing a swell job, by golly. I like him because he takes time off, like we do. I wouldn’t trust any guy who worked 20 hours a day. Not when his hand is right next to the little red button. I mean, a month of hassles, 20 hours a day; he comes home and his wife won’t fuck him—boom!—nuclear war.
PLAYBOY: Is there anything that could possibly shock you guys?
CHEECH: I really fucking doubt it. Maybe a true accounting from one of the studios.
PLAYBOY: So what are your future goals?
CHEECH: To keep this joint lit. [Laughs] Actually, to live happy forever or die happy tryin’.
PLAYBOY: How do you want to die?
CHEECH: I don’t think I’d like to be impaled on a fender; that might scare me.
PLAYBOY: How do you want your tombstone to read?
CHEECH: PLEASE DO NOT TAKE THE FLOWERS AWAY; THEY’RE MINE.
CHONG: HE’S NOT HERE RIGHT NOW. See, I want to come back.
PLAYBOY: As what?
CHONG: I’d like to come back as the maitre de at the Polo Lounge.
CHEECH: I’d like to come back as a ground hog between Brooke Shields’s legs. That’d be nice.
PLAYBOY: You guys got last year’s award from the National Association of Theater Owners for being the comedy team of the Eighties–
CHONG: Yeah, it’s the most prestigious award in the history of mankind. We’re right up there with Albert Schweitzer and Mother Teresa now.
CHEECH: In all humility, we think it should have gone to Jerry Lewis for inventing muscular dystrophy.
CHONG: I hear that in his new movie with Robert De Niro, Lewis gets kidnaped. That’s a great plot–kidnap him and send a ransom note to the French auteurists—
CHEECH: And they turn it over to the government, and the French government says, “Sorry, it’s not in our budget. We finance our own diseases.” [Laughs] Man, these Playboy Interviews are fucking exhausting.
CHONG: Amen.
CHEECH: Ain’t there a final question?
PLAYBOY: All right: What’s your place in history?
CHEECH: I want it to be remembered that we were the greatest Cheech and Chong ever.
CHONG: And the first.
CHEECH: And the only.