Cheech & Chong Collection

Cheech and Chong were already major recording stars for most of a decade before they made a single film together. They met in the late 1960s in Vancouver, where Tommy Chong owned a club and needed an MC — Cheech Marin, delivering carpets for a living at the time, filled the role, and the two built an act around playing up their own ethnic backgrounds for counterculture audiences (Marin Mexican-American, Chong Scottish-Irish-Chinese) alongside the drug-and-hippie material they became known for. Record producer Lou Adler — who'd already worked with the Mamas and the Papas and Carole King — spotted them and signed them to his label, and what followed was five platinum albums across the 1970s, most of them Grammy-nominated and one, Los Cochinos, an actual Grammy win for Best Comedy Recording. Adler had a specific term for what he was selling: "hard rock comedy."

By the time Up in Smoke arrived in 1978, Adler directing and producing it himself, Cheech and Chong weren't an unknown act taking a gamble on film — they were translating an already enormous audience onto a new format, and it worked past anyone's expectations: over $100 million at the box office. The Library of Congress has specifically credited the film with helping define stoner comedy as its own genre, with a direct line forward to things like Friday and Pineapple Express — Ice Cube has said outright that he wanted Friday to become a "hood classic" the way Up in Smoke had. A fair amount of the specific material was pulled straight from their own lives; Cheech has said the hamper scene in the film happened to him for real.

The run in this collection closes exactly where the real partnership did: Cheech and Chong split up after their ninth album, Get Out of My Room, in 1985 — the same title and year this collection ends on. That's not an arbitrary cutoff. It's the actual end of the active duo, not a gap in what's been collected.