At 76, Tommy Chong Is Still Going Strong
Cheech & Chong, the legendary comedy duo with a resume that includes nine hit comedy albums that garnered massive record sales and eight feature films that scored heavily at the box office, will be bringing their show to the Emerald Queen Casino on Nov. 8.
The first movie made by Richard “Cheech” Marin and Tommy Chong was the iconic stoner flick “Up In Smoke‚” which was the highest grossing comedy of 1978, with more than $100 million at the ticket booth. The pair eventually parted ways and concentrated on their solo careers for a few decades, but much to the delight of their adoring fans, the duo got back together in 2009 and it’s been a whirlwind ever since. Lately, Chong has been in the spotlight more than ever before with a place on the smash TV hit, “Dancing with the Stars,” which finds him keeping step with professional dancer partner Petra Murgatoyd.
Chong tells us that he only has a few minutes because he is right in the middle of rehearsals for the show. At 76, he was chosen to strut his stuff on the hit show and he quickly became a fan favorite. About his popularity on the show, “Yeah, I think I’m giving the government the finger, and the young folks like me because of that, as well as the old folks like seeing me be able to do it. Just the fact that, the culture that I represent, it’s like this, I could never be elected President, but I can sure win a Mirror Ball.”
“I’m giving the government the finger … I could never be elected president, but I can sure win a Mirror Ball.”
He’s clearly having a blast doing the show and he says, “The most fun is performing the night of the show on Monday night; that’s the most fun part. Doing the show.”
Chong had his share of physical problems over the last few years including a bout with prostate cancer but he’s been able to keep up with his much younger dance partner and he reveals, “It’s incredibly physically demanding, but they’re pretty cool. They push us to our limit, and then they back off. It’s really demanding, but it’s so much fun. So, considering my age, I think I’m doing pretty well.”
Chong got his start in the entertainment business a long, long time ago, even before his breakout success with his comedic partner. While still in his teens, he ventured with his band to Vancouver, B.C. from his native Alberta and started playing music for a living. While there, he opened his own music venue and he explains how things were for him around that time. “Well, I had a real good blues band. We were the very first actual R&B band on the West Coast. We had quite a reputation, so the guy who owned the building asked me if I wanted to take over the steakhouse that he had that was empty. He said it would make a nice nightclub, but he didn’t want to run it and go through the hassle, so he handed it to me and my brother and I turned it into the Elegant Parlour. It was an after-hours blues club in Canada. It was like a bottle club, but we never had a liquor license. We also never had any hours, so we could open all night if we wanted to, which we did. We had another club called the Blues Palace; it was a converted movie theater, and we opened it with a band called Ike & Tina Turner Revue. We paid $750 for the whole band for one night.”
Chong’s career has not been without pitfalls though. After his successful run along side of Cheech, they decided to part ways, with Marin landing some big roles on television while Chong seemed to stay in the background. A government “investigation” led to a nine-month stint in prison that found him sharing a cell with Jordan Belfort, a.k.a. “The Wolf of Wall Street.”
When asked about that period in his life he tells us that it was actually an honor that the government thought that much of a stoner to spend $12 million to come after him for selling drug paraphernalia on the Internet. With a grin on his face, Chong spryly admits, “Well, you know, I felt kind of honored in a way, because it showed that my take on things affected the United States government. Because we know what the DEA was all about.” Chong states, “It’s a racist law, and it’s just an excuse for them to go after black and brown people, and being brown, I took a stance against it, both in the movies and the records.” He continues, “They also got the message, and they wanted to make a statement of their own and incarcerate me. That backfired on them though, because I came out a lot more popular and with a lot more voice. I mean, look at me now – I’m on ‘Dancing with the Stars.’ George Bush is still trying to atone for his sins that he committed while he was in office, so everything comes around.”
Chong gives a little hint of what fans can expect at the upcoming Tacoma Cheech & Chong show. “Well, we’ve been doing bits that we’ve never done live. There are record bits of ours where, people will know the bits from the records, but we’ve never done them live, so we’ve been doing those. And then we do our music that Cheech and I wrote.”
The show starts at 8 p.m. Find tickets at www.ticketmaster.com.
This article was previously published in Tacoma Weekly.