HEADY TIMES WITH TOMMY CHONG

They hung out as young teens. More than half a century later, Saanich
poet Patrick Lane and Tommy Chong (a.k.a. the Prince of Pot) finally
had a chance to reconnect.

Tommy, who found fame in the comedy duo Cheech and Chong and as the
old hippie in That '70s Show, was in Victoria last weekend to promote
his new book. The I Chong: Meditations from the Joint is a
non-fiction recap of his nine months in the slammer after getting
busted for shipping bongs to a Pennsylvania head shop.

Lane was just 13 when he first met Chong in Vernon, where the poet
lived. He bummed a cigarette off Tommy, a 14-year-old Calgary cadet
attending summer camp. The pair hit it off.

"He was such a clown then, and I've always been attracted to that
kind of guy," said Chong, 68, sipping carrot and saffron soup in a
Victoria restaurant.

Fast-forward to 2006. Lane dropped by Chong's reading at Bolen Books,
where a mall-long lineup assembled to get tummies and bongs signed.
Tommy recognized the poet immediately. The two, both wild guys in
their youth, mused at how they had turned into relatively respectable
writers (The I Chong is the comedian's first book).

"He said, 'Look at us, we're really successful,' " said Lane. "I
said, 'I'm a starving poet.' "

Chong also found time to link with another local. In the '60s, Jerry
Kruz managed The Afterthought, a psychedelic nightclub in Vancouver.
He recalls meeting back then a clean-cut, short-haired Chong, who was
in a band for hire. Its notoriously non-P.C. name was Four Niggers
and a Chink. Kruz couldn't imagine advertising such an ensemble, so
Chong agreed to go by a more conservative moniker: Bobby Taylor and
the Vancouvers. That group, featuring Tommy on guitar, went on to
score a hit in 1968 with Does Your Momma Know About Me.

Ever the promoter, Kruz asked Chong during his visit here if he would
perform at next year's Summer of Love celebration -- an old hippie
groovefest held annually on West Fourth Avenue in Vancouver. Tommy
agreed. Perhaps he was swayed by the vintage Bobby Taylor and the
Vancouvers poster that Kruz presented him with in Victoria. Anyway,
Chong told me he plans to gig at the Summer of Love with The Shades,
his old R&B band.

The grey-haired, balding yet still shaggy comedian -- who lives in
Los Angeles -- has a jumbo plastic baggie's worth of Vancouver Island
connections. He owns a house in Qualicum, where his parents used to
live. Chong said he might eventually hole up there to write a novel,
or perhaps create a stage version of the 1978 film, Cheech and
Chong's Up in Smoke. His brother Stan, a retired security guard,
lives in Parksville.

I confess I expected Chong to be exactly like his on-screen persona
- -- that is, drugged-out pothead. In person, he's anything but. Sure,
Tommy is laid back ... but he's also friendly and sharp. And he has a
memory any 21-year-old would die for.

He recalled, for instance, playing a gig in Victoria in 1958. Back
then, Chong had just quit a band and accepted a job here backing a
burlesque show for -- of all things -- a circus. It was just Tommy on
guitar and a military drummer, who must have found it mind-boggling
switching from paradiddles to bump-and-grinds. Chong said he played
Tequila in a jazzy Wes Montgomery style as well as Willow Weep for Me.

And where in Victoria was this, exactly? "It was, like, rocks and a
hill. In the centre of town somewhere. I don't know exactly where. I
have picture of it," he said.

OK, so it's not a photographic memory.

Chong also knows David Foster. He met him not during his musician
days in Vancouver, but in L.A. after Foster moved there following
Skylark's 1973 hit, Wildflower. Chong insists he gave Foster his
first record producing job, a Cheech and Chong parody of an R&B song.

There were fans both young and old in lineups for Tommy Chong's book
signings at Munro's and Bolen Books. Yet it seems Cheech and Chong's
glory days are fading into the history books. The duo was massive in
the '70s, but Tommy said none of the young stars of That '70s Show
had really heard of C & C before.

"They all respected me. But they weren't fans. They would eat at
their table, sit together. I usually sat with the crew, because I'd
done movies with them," said Chong.