A singular Renaissance man
Cheech Marin talks comedy, pottery, pot, art and his new memoir
Pay a visit to the Pacific Palisades home of actor and comedian Cheech Marin and you may find yourself holed up in the bathroom, in the company of your affable host, having an impassioned conversation about painting.
Marin, an avid collector, has dozens of artworks dotting every corner of his hilltop home. There are canvases by Patssi Valdez in the hallway, an oversized painting of a Madonna by George Yepes in the foyer and, in the guest bathroom — where Marin has led a small clutch of guests — a series of surreal etchings by the late Los Angeles painter Carlos Almaraz.
“These are very rare,” says Marin, gesturing at a print in which a trio of feline heads float before a custard-colored sky. “The color, the way he captures these figures, the city, it’s the bomb.”
Marin is a singular type of Renaissance man.
Over the course of his 71 years, he has worked as a ceramist and a music critic. He has been half of the stoner comedy duo Cheech & Chong. He has played cops on TV, bandits on film and myriad priests (such as the gun-toting padre in Robert Rodriguez’s 2010 vengeance flick “Machete”). He has created music albums for children, worked as a voiceover artist and made a name for himself as a voracious collector of art.
Now Marin — born Richard Anthony Marin in South Los Angeles — can add another title to the list: memoirist.
“It was a chance to write and make it intimate and put you there,” he says of his new autobiography, “Cheech Is Not My Real Name … but Don’t Call Me Chong,” as he settles into a broad couch on an outdoor terrace with Pacific Ocean views. “There’s a rhythm that you get — the words start making a rhythm, they’re your tones.”
Needless to say, Marin isn’t the sort of celeb to rely on a ghost writer. (He did, after all, work as a music reporter for a publication called Poppin.)
“The writing took about nine months,” Marin says of the memoir. “It was get up early, get a cup of coffee and hit it. Not even read a newspaper. Just get up and hit it.”
That, he says, is when the words would spill onto the page. “It’s like an accumulation of what my mind has been going through in my sleep,” he adds with a grin. “That’s when all the demons come out to dance in your dreams!”
In addition to developing his voice as a writer, the project has been an opportunity for Marin to revisit important moments in his life — the moments that don’t always make it into the magazine profiles.
There were his early years in a tough patch of South Los Angeles, where his father, a police officer, once shot a violent robbery suspect — right outside the Marin family home.
“After a while it became just another shooting in the hood, and everything went back to normal,” writes Marin. “It never went back to normal for me. I had nightmares every night.”
In the wake of that incident, the family moved to Granada Hills in the San Fernando Valley, where Marin attended high school and college — and where he would cultivate cultural interests that would shape the rest of his life.
The first interest was music. He has played guitar since he was 12. And in high school, in the early 1960s, he was a devotee of folk music. “I don't know how authentic I was, being a Chicano singing about Gypsy Davy roaming the country-o,” he writes in the book. “I just liked singing and being in show business.”
His second interest was pottery, cultivated in the ceramics lab at Valley State College (now Cal State Northridge). “I just fell in love with it,” he recalls. “The first time you center a piece of clay, you feel this force in the universe. I describe it in the book like this tuning fork went off in my loins. It's where my recessive Mexican craft gene came out. It was like, ‘Vato!'”
In 1968, pottery and the Vietnam War led Marin to Canada. In protest of the war, Marin defaced his draft card (he had Muhammad Ali sign it at an event), then publicly turned it over to a group from the Students for a Democratic Society, who opposed military intervention in Asia. In retaliation for these sorts of actions, a U.S. general called for individuals who vandalized or turned in their cards in to be reclassified as fit for military service — whether or not they had student deferments.
All of a sudden, Marin was at the top of the draft list. He writes that he had no intention of going to Vietnam — so he went to Canada instead, where he found employment in the studio of potter Ed Drahanchuk in the mountains of Alberta.
After the work ran out with Drahanchuk, Marin eventually made it to Vancouver — and that's when his life truly changed. This was where the publisher of Poppin magazine, for which Marin had been dutifully churning out unpaid stories on the likes of Little Richard and Richard Pryor, introduced him to a local impresario by the name of Tommy Chong.
Chong hired Marin to help write material for a revue. What followed is a story that is by now familiar: Cheech & Chong honed their improvisational act on the hostile stage of the Shanghai Junk in Vancouver before relocating to L.A., where they ultimately landed a deal with Dunhill Records.
From there, success came fast and furious: A Grammy Award for their second comedy album, “Los Cochinos.” The release of “Up in Smoke,” the 1978 film — one of the year's top 20 box office grossers — which turned them into comedy and cultural icons. The dizzying array of club gigs and follow-up movies.
“Tommy and I were so attuned to each other that we could write for each other,” writes Marin of those days. “I could see his characters, and he could see mine.”
“It's like music,” says the actor of his and Chong's collaboration (one that continues despite some tense moments over the years). “We were both musicians. We knew when to highlight each other, when to play rhythm and when to play lead.”
In writing about that era, Marin says he wanted to show that Cheech & Chong were not some cosmic accident. “We are artists, we work hard,” he says. “We have a subtle and unexpected art that is hugely popular.”