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CHEECH MARIN
By Wendy WorthPhotos By Aaron Farley
What would the hippie generation be without Cheech and Chong? In the midst of fighting against an unjust war, rocking out to psychedelic music, and loving just about everybody in sight, hippies needed some time to laugh-and get stoned. Really, really stoned.
With their self-titled first record in 1971, Richard “Cheech” Marin and Tommy Chong introduced their one-of-a-kind brand of humor to the world, with Cheech playing the role of a Mexican-American “cholo” and Chong portraying a drug-crazed hippie, each character confusing the other as they played up their cultural vocabularies through a fog of smoke. Though they never seemed to understand each other’s lingo, they bonded through their love of drugs and raunch. Their first movie, Up in Smoke, hit theaters in 1978, and instantly set a new standard by which all stoner flicks are measured. Their message wasn’t just about getting high and getting laid, though – it was about being free and having fun, even when The Man was out to get you.
Cheech may forever be associated with his partner, just like Abbott could never be the same without Costello or Laurel without Hardy, but he has spent the past 20 years building a strong solo career, from his first movie without Chong, Born in East L.A., to his roles in several of director Robert Rodriguez’s films, to his voiceover work on numerous Disney films, and most notably as Don Johnson’s co-star on Nash Bridges. Though his more recent work doesn’t carry the same drug-culture vibe (another sign that hippies have certainly grown up), Cheech is still Cheech, the cholo with a heart of gold and a big bag of jokes.
[SWINDLE/S]: You were originally a musician, right?
[CHEECH MARIN/CM]: I was always a singer. I didn’t play guitar ‘til later. But as a five-year-old, I was always a singer. I had a record. It wasn’t a big record; it was more like a homemade thing in the neighborhood.
[S]: So where did you grow up?
[CM]: In South Central L.A. I was turning 10 and we moved out to Granada Hills. From 36th and San Pedro in South Central to Granada Hills was a big change. When we moved out to Granada Hills, everybody was white! But I was still brown!
[S]: Did you have the wisecracks in class, like you do now?
[CM]: Oh yeah, I was mischievous. I was the class clown.
[S]: Did the teachers laugh or did they want to kill you?
[CM]: They laughed sometimes, and they wanted to kill me at the same time. I went to high school up in the valley and then I went to Cal State Northridge for four years, and at the end I got really involved in the draft resistance. I went to Canada for three years. I met Tommy [Chong] up in Vancouver, and he had just started an improv company at a topless bar that his family owned. He had seen improv comedy when he was on the road with Motown.
[S]: Tommy was on Motown?
[CM]: Yeah, with this band called Bobby Taylor and the Vancouvers. He was the guitar player in the band, and it was his band. He always put the bands together, and it was his clubs and stuff, and he wrote this big hit song. I was staying at this girl’s house when I first heard it, and I thought, “What brother wrote this?” And it said on the record “T. Chong.” So then I went to Vancouver to meet T. Chong. And when the band broke up he came back to do improv theater. He kept the topless girls in there because that’s what brought the guys in, and he said to them, “You’re not topless dancers anymore, you’re actresses, but you take off your clothes. And you get paid less,” because actresses get paid less. So he had this going, and it was like hippie burlesque, because you had these longhaired guys talking about sex and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, and somehow they would make these scenarios and skits where the girls had to take off their clothes. I saw it and I thought it was the weirdest fucking thing I’ve ever seen, but it was funny, and I thought, “I get this. I could do this.” So I told Tommy I was this great actor from L.A., and he said okay and I started writing for the group. I would be there every night and I would fill in whenever someone couldn’t make it. I was delivering carpets at the time, but the troupe offered me five dollars more a week to hang out with naked chicks and do improv. When the troupe broke up, Tommy and I stayed together and decided to put a band together, like a lounge act with music and comedy bits. We did our first gig in Vancouver, and we came out and started doing bits. We never got around to doing the music; people went nuts, and it was like, “Okay band, see ya later!”
[S]: How did you guys end up doing Up in Smoke?
[CM]: Well, we did a lot of albums and we were a big concert act. We wrote the movie and they looked at it. We went through the usual Hollywood bullshit and then we finally made it, and became famous international cultural icons!
[S]: You did a bunch of movies after that?
[CM]: We did eight albums and six movies. It was amazing; we just kept going and going.
[S]: So then what happened?
[CM]: We just got tired of each other; it was like a long marriage.
[S]: Did you decide to break it up?
[CM]: Yeah, I kinda decided that. I was going through a divorce back here [in L.A.], and Tommy was still in Paris. The video thing was just starting to happen, and I thought it was perfect for us, but Tommy didn’t want to do it. So I started writing these things and I got the inspiration from “Born in the USA” about the idea of being born in East L.A., and I started singing it like that. Tommy wouldn’t show up to record the song. He said, “Hey, it’s your song – you record it.” When it was time to do the videos, Tommy said, “Well, I’ll be in one of them, maybe.” So he came back and we did this video package, and when it came time to do the video for “Born in East L.A.” he wasn’t in the song, so the video was taken to Universal Pictures and they liked it and gave me a deal for a movie.
[S]: Tell me about collecting Chicano art.
[CM]: Chicanos are Mexican-Americans that have been politicized and have an attitude. Chicano was originally an offensive word by Mexicans to other Mexicans. Being that the Mexicans living in Mexico thought that Mexicans living here had left their country and were no longer Mexicanos, they were something less, something little – they were “Chicos”; they were Chicanos. They don’t even sound like Mexicans, living in this neighborhood. And to the Mexican populace they were still Mexicans and they were caught in between, like me. So these Chicanos, when they started getting politicized in the late ‘60s, they started this whole artistic movement.
I discovered them in the mid ‘80s after I had been gone for a while. And I started collecting their art.
[S]: How did you end up being called Cheech?
[CM]: It was a family name, as in chicharr—n, pork rind. When I was a little baby, all wrapped up and shriveled, they said I looked like a little chicharr—n, like a little pork rind wrapped up. So when we were thinking of names, we were like, “Marin and Chong . . . Richard and Tommy . . . Cheech and Chong!”