Tommy Chong visited with Steve Jaxon on The Drive last week, on April 22, a mere two days after 4-20, to talk about being out on the road again with his partner Cheech Marin, ahead of their performance at The Warfield Theatre in San Francisco, which took place the next day.
Tommy Chong
Steve began by telling about the time he met Cheech and Chong when he was a student at Michigan State University in the early ’70s, saying, “…you guys mentioned that when you’re on the road, back then, at least, you would go to the YMCA and play basketball and work out.” Tommy confirmed the fact and told the story: “Yeah, I’ve been working out all my life. Before I met Cheech, when I was 16 years old, I discovered weight training. And then I was pretty heavy into it and it kept me healthy. You know I’m almost 80 and still got the body of a seventeen-year-old, you know.”
Then Steve asked what made him and Cheech decide to go and hit the road again and Tommy replied, “…there are so many people that heard about us and never seen us, you know? And we just have a lot of fun on the road. Well, you think about what we do, we just talk about dope, we smoke dope and we go home and watch dope movies… and make dope movies and just have a dope time. It’s really the way to live!”
Steve than asked if there are any more Cheech and Chong movies in the works, with them touring again. Tommy described the reasons why there probably aren’t any coming soon, this way: “You know, I just like to write them, I don’t want to do them anymore, you know? Once you write them and you read it and you think, that would make a great movie, and then I put it on the shelf. I’ve written about five or six good Cheech and Chong movies. We might. Right now it’s not a good time, because there’s really hardly any movie industry left unless you’re Ironman, you know? (…) We could be superheroes but we’re folk heroes, I’d rather be a folk hero.”
Steve wanted to know about Tommy Chong’s new line of cannabis products, which he described: “…we started off with getting strains, but the strains change every crop, you know, there’s a new crop and so rather than try to get different strains, I decided, well, we decided, my son and I, to start a distribution company… So I’m just putting my name on it. You know, I test the product first, and then I put my name on it. I call it Chong’s Choice and it’s available in a lot of the dispensaries now, all over the place. ”
The Chong’s Choice logo.
This gave Steve a chance to mention that he had discussed cannabis legalization on The Drive with many guests including California Lt. Governor Gavin Newsom. He mentioned the legalization initiative that is slated to be on the California ballot next November and Tommy gave his take on it: “…the thing is, the government and the straight people are trying to figure out how to get a handle on it, which is why it was made illegal in the beginning, because they couldn’t put a handle on it. You can’t patent a plant. The only way you could control it was to make it illegal. And you can do forfeitures and seizures. It was a real racist law. And now that that law is disappearing, and we’re legal, now it’s going to take a while for everybody to realize that we don’t need laws. We just need to be left alone. Don’t bother us and we’re not going to bother you. And you know, what they’re doing now is a good start. But a few years from now it’ll be a joke, you know? Like, right now, apparently you can grow three plants per household in… California… but who’s going to walk around and count the plants?”
The topic shifted back to the past as Steve asked Tommy Chong to tell how he first hooked up with his partner Cheech Marin. Tommy told the story this way: “We met in Canada. Cheech was up there, he was part of a secret army, made of mostly Mexicans, in case the Viet Cong attacked from Alaska. (laughs) I was running sort of a homeless shelter and topless nightclub, (more laughter) for guys that were up there fighting the war.” As for how the comedy performances started, he told the story this way: “Do you remember a group called The Committee in San Francisco? …well, I was one of them that used to sit in the audience and just marvel at how genius these guys were. And so I started up my own Committee-type group up in Canada with the topless nightclub. And then Cheech joined up as part of the troupe. And then when the troupe broke up, Cheech was the only one that wanted to keep going, and so we teamed up and the rest is history.”
In his characteristic way, Steve did not hold back his enthusiasm: “What you did for our generation, my generation, in comedy especially, back in the day, was just unbelievable, I mean, you guys were superstars!” Tommy Chong easily put it all into perspective for us, saying, “Yeah, well, you know what we did? We did comedy where no one got hurt, you know? There was no moral judgment, it was, guys getting stoned and having a good time and cops chasing them and getting stoned and then they’re having a good time. That was basically our movies. And people related to it, you know, and there was no moral judgment or high ground, you know, ‘if you smoke dope bad things will happen.’ It was the opposite. We showed that, we showed a slice of the lifestyle that was going on in America.” Steve agreed and added, “It was going on big time back then, you know, we couldn’t talk that much about it, it was like, hiding the joint and making sure your parents didn’t find out and we all enjoyed – we were all laughing our asses off! We were stoned and laughing our asses off and then Cheech and Chong came along and proved that we were right and it was all cool!”
For more about Cheech and Chong, visit their website http://cheechandchong.com/ To learn about Chong’s Choice, their website is http://chongschoice.com/