Marin’s book opens doors to life lessons for all
How many times have you answered a knock on the door by saying, “Dave’s not here, man?”
That four-word phrase was part of my teenage vocabulary along with millions of other fans of Cheech and Chong. To this day, I smile just thinking about it.
“Who is it?” asks Tommy Chong, forever answering that frantic knock on his comedic door.
“It’s me, Dave. Open up. I got the stuff,” replies Richard “Cheech” Marin, audibly annoyed by Chong’s feigned cluelessness.
“Who?” Chong asks again and again in his iconic stoner voice.
I had no idea this quintessential Cheech and Chong skit actually happened in real life when the now legendary comedy duo recorded their first album in 1971. After signing a contract with famed producer Lou Adler, they struggled to create their first bit for the album inside Charlie Chaplin Studios in Los Angeles.
Chong suggested that Cheech go outside the studio and return in character with a costume prop. It always helped Cheech get into character, from the external to the
internal, like method acting. Meanwhile, Chong cued up a small tape recorder near the door. Cheech wasn’t in on the gag, which is why it worked so well.
“It’s Dave, D-A-V-E!” Cheech yells in a whisper through the door.
“Dave’s not here, man,” Chong finally replies.
It’s still brilliant, just like its creators in their heyday.
“Chong and I always had a love-hate relationship right from the start,” Marin writes in his autobiographical book, “Cheech is Not My Real Name: But Don’t Call Me Chong.”
“We did both of those things with equal intensity. But the one undeniable thing we always had was comic chemistry,” writes Marin, who has often been confused with his alter-ego stage persona, Pedro.
What I learned in his book is that Marin entered every door of opportunity in his life. He hustled, taking advantage of every chance encounter, and never stopped learning about life. “In other words, sometimes you have to be smart to understand why something so dumb can be so funny,” Marin writes.
I also learned that Marin is no Pedro, and Chong was never really his best friend. In the book Marin consistently takes jabs at Chong, who he described as a brother, with all the love, hate, laughs and animosity that can come with such a close relationship.
When Chong was a guest on my former radio show, Casual Fridays, he didn’t take similar jabs at Marin. Chong was not only funny, candid and lovable, he was humble, giving a lot of credit for the dynamic duo’s success to Marin. “You can’t be too shy or too high,” Chong joked with me on the air.
Marin’s long-awaited memoir chronicles their counterculture legend. It delves into how Marin dodged the draft in the late 1960s, fled for Canada, and later met Chong, who was running an improv theater in a former strip club. One toke led to another and the rest is, well, up in smoke.
“We couldn’t really explain it, but we had stumbled on the technique that we would employ our whole careers: improvisation in the recording studio and later in front of the cameras,” writes Marin, who’s now 74.
Marin repeatedly reminds readers that life’s most remarkable accomplishments often intersect at the corner of hustle and happenstance. In his early days in the Vancouver area, he wrote for a Canadian publication that opened doors for him to meet visiting celebrities like Richard Pryor, who greeted him naked in his hotel room bed.
Marin asked him, “Who is Richard Pryor?”
Pryor replied, “It’s not important who Richard Pryor is; it’s what Richard Pryor sees.”
In that brief moment, Marin learned from one of the best comedians ever that it’s all about the material, not the performer. For Cheech and Chong, broad comedy with insightful situational characterizations would be the hallmark of their careers. But first, they needed a stage name.
Marin and Chong? Nope. Richard and Tommy? Or Tommy and Richard? “No. Sounded like two white guys,” Marin writes.
One day after a successful gig, they drove home in a rainstorm in a beat-up car with wipers that worked manually with a hanger. Chong asked Marin if he had a nickname. “Well, my family calls me Cheech, short for Chicharron,” Marin replied.
It’s a deep-fried pork rind, curled up and small, just like what Marin looked like as a baby in the crib, according to his uncle. The nickname got shortened to Cheech. Chong said it out loud while driving — Cheech and Chong.
“We didn’t even try Chong and Cheech,” writes Marin, who would go on to enjoy a wildly successful career with stage, movies, TV, and voiceover work.
He also became a “Celebrity Jeopardy!” champion, and owner of the most renowned collection of Chicano art in the world, an inspiring feat for a boy who was “Born in East L.A.” (his award-winning 1987 film) and raised in not only a “sketchy neighborhood, but straight up ghetto.” At one point in his Catholic-educated childhood, Marin actually considered the priesthood. Then he kissed a girl. His mother was crushed.
The world would have been crushed if he didn’t dodge the priesthood, the Vietnam War, and all those cops who seemed to be forever chasing Cheech and Chong. “The opposite was true. The cops always loved us,” Marin writes.
I never smoked pot, but I always loved them, too. Even more so after reading Marin’s memoirs and how everything came together for him.
In 1971, after Chong finally opened that studio door for “Dave,” he told a visibly agitated Marin, “Listen, listen, listen … play back the tape.” They knew right there they stumbled onto comedic Maui-Waui, but not something that would be played back for every new generation. Somewhere today a teenager is answering his door with “Dave’s not here, man.”