Up In Smoke

When Cheech Marin picks up the phone, he’s already in character. “Hello, Jack in the Box! What the fuck’s up?” he bellows in his trademark gritty voice. It’s about 11 a.m. where he is in California, and despite his chipper demeanor, he says, “I’m just drowsing into consciousness here.” Similarly, his comic foil for four decades and counting, Tommy Chong, still seems like he’s emerging from a purple haze when he speaks with Rolling Stone around the same time of day, about a week later. “Hey, I’ve been waiting to talk to you, man,” he says in his signature sweetly stoned lilt – and that last word, “man,” sounds exactly the way he’s been saying it since Cheech and Chong became underground breakouts in the early 1970s thanks to their radical, sketch-based LPs… read more >