Tommy Chong, left, and Richard ‘Cheech’ Marin, on the inside cover of their second album, The Big Bambu.
by Dave Dormer
It was a simple act of generosity at a downtown Calgary jazz club that would have a profound impact on the course of Cannabis History.
The year was 1957 and the place, the Foggy Manor Jazz Society’s private club in the basement at 210A 8th Avenue S.E. (now Olympic Plaza).
The southwest corner of Olympic Plaza in downtown Calgary, where the Foggy Manor Jazz Society Club was originally located in a basement. It would have been about where the picnic table is today. Dave Dormer/Cannanaskis
Ray Mah — a fixture in the Calgary jazz community who served as president of the Foggy Manor Jazz Society — gave an 18-year-old Tommy Chong his first-ever joint, along with a Lenny Bruce album.
“He showed up one night, I’m there listening to the jazz and he says ‘Hey, I’ve got a present for you,’” Tommy said in an interview.
“First he handed me the Lenny Bruce record then he handed me a joint, it was the first joint I’d ever seen in my life, and I put it in my pocket.”
Tommy kept that joint and the two smoked another one Ray had in the alley outside, the first time Tommy got stoned.
The experience left such and impression, Tommy told me he still remembers the record that was playing when they went back inside: Lonely Woman by Ornette Coleman. [UPDATE: Memories can be fuzzy, and it has since been pointed out that song was released in 1959.]
Today, of course, Tommy is arguably the world’s most famous stoner, as one half of the legendary comedic duo, Cheech and Chong.
The Foggy Manor Jazz Society is long gone. It operated the club there for a couple of years then moved it to another basement, at 1207A 1st Street S.W. — where Home and Away is today — before the society declared bankruptcy and folded in 1962.
The original building was torn down in the early 1980s to make room for Olympic Plaza, but the section of alley where the entrance to the Foggy Manor would have been is still there, it’s now a small parking lot behind Teatro Ristorante. (Update, the City has plans to redevelop that area and the alley is slated for removal).
The alley where Tommy smoked Cannabis for the first time. The entrance to the Foggy Manor would have been about where the car is on the left.
Interestingly, the park above where the Foggy Manor was located is now home to statues of the Famous Five, one of them being Emily Murphy, whose 1922 book The Black Candle is part of the story of how and why Cannabis was made illegal in Canada in 1923.
(A word of caution for anyone planning a pilgrimidge there, Cannabis consumption is not legal in public in Calgary and there is specific langauge in the bylaw against consuming at Olympic Plaza).
Tommy was born Thomas B. Kin Chong on May 24, 1938 in Edmonton. Alberta, and moved to Calgary — about three hours south — with his family at age three.
His dad, who was Chinese, suffered injuries in the Second World War and was in hospital, and his mom, who was Irish-Scottish, suffered from tuberculosis and was also in hospital. As a result, he and his older brother and younger sister were put into the Moore Home, an orphanage of sorts run by the Salvation Army at the corner of 17th Avenue and 29th Street S.W..
The Barbara Mitchell Family Resource Centre today (built in 1985 by the Salvation Army after the Moore Home was demolished).
That lasted until Tommy was about six, then the family lived on 42nd Street S.W., before moving to 1419 19th Avenue N.W., just north of SAIT, where he grew up. That house is gone now, it was torn down in 2013 and replaced with a larger infill.
Tommy dropped out of high school at the age of 16 and started focusing on blues and R&B music. He was also influenced by soul, and the early days of rock and roll.
He may have fallen in love with Cannabis the first time he went Up In Smoke, but Tommy didn’t become a stoner right away. It just wasn’t all that accessible in Calgary back in the 1950s and 60s.
In fact, he says that first joint lasted him “about a month,” and he didn’t share it with anyone.
As a teenager he played in a band called The Shades (named as a nod to the members’ ethic backgrounds) with four friends who were Black, and they put on Saturday night shows at the Royal Canadian Legion #1, downtown on 7th Avenue S.E.
Because of the laws of the day, the Legion hall couldn’t be open on Sundays, so that meant the Saturday night shows had to end at 11:59 p.m. That also meant dozens, and sometimes hundreds of teenagers, many of them drunk on bootleg alcohol, would go marauding into the streets — something that was a new menace in a conservative city like Calgary in the 1950s.
As much as the authorities wanted to shut the shows down, they were being put on legally, through the Calgary Shades Teen Club, which Tommy created and used to rent the Legion. Because the Legion didn’t have a liquor licence, there wasn’t much that could be done to stop the shows.
As result, he was summoned to a meeting with Calgary mayor Don Mackay, along with the police chief and city lawyers, where Tommy was told in no uncertain terms, it would be best if he and his band left town.
So they ended up moving to Vancouver in December 1958, where the band had to change its name to the Calgary Shades, as there was already a group on the west coast called The Shades.
Tommy ended up back in Calgary a few months later, where he stayed for about a year, then he got called back to Vancouver by Shades lead singer Tommie Milton, who’d found a place for them to play as the house band.
That led to them changing the name a few more times (including calling themselves Four Ns and a C, (and a version with the N and C spelled out) and they eventually settled on Bobby Taylor & the Vancouvers in 1966.
By then Tommy had also started running a successful club downtown, the Blues Palace, which eventually became the Elegant Parlour.
It was at the Elegant Parlour that two members of the Supremes saw them play and invited the band to Motown to meet Barry Gordy, who signed them to a record contract.
Another interesting historical tidbit: while playing in Motown, Bobby Taylor & the Vancouvers needed an opening act, which ended up being a family with kids who could all sing and dance. They were really talented, especially the little one named Michael, so the band encouraged them to stick with the music business. That opening act would go on to become The Jackson 5.
Bobby Taylor & the Vancouvers had a minor hit song, Does Your Mamma Know About Me? which Tommy co-wrote. It reached #29 on the Billboard Top 100 chart and #4 in the R&B chart in 1968 and is billed as being about interracial dating, but Tommy says he also wrote it from the perspective of the first time he tried cocaine.
Things were going pretty well, but a little over a year after signing to Motown, Tommy and another member of the band went to get Green Cards so they could work legally in the U.S. and ended up being late for a gig.
The manager freaked out and fired them.
Barry Gordy tried to smooth things over the next day, calling it a misunderstanding, but Tommy decided he wanted to head back to Vancouver, which he did with a severance cheque for $5,000. That was a fair bit of money back then,about $35,000 in 2021 dollars.
Having seen improv comedy for the first time while on tour, Tommy fell in love and started City Works when he returned to Vancouver, after moving the Elegant Parlour to the back of a place called the Shanghai Junk, which was Vancouver’s first topless bar and was run by Tommy’s older brother, Stan.
It was there in the late-1960s that Thomas Chong and Richard Marin met for the first time.
Cheech — which was a nickname from his childhood — had come to Canada to avoid the Vietnam draft, even spending a few months in Alberta, working at a pottery studio in Bragg Creek, before ending up in Vancouver.
The two met while Cheech was delivering carpets to a business next to the club. They got to talking and Tommy offered him $5 a week more than he was making to be part of City Works. Eventually they started doing comedy routines, interspersed with music, and put their first self-titled album out, Cheech and Chong, in 1971 followed by the Big Bambu in 1972.
At first their jokes and humour was mostly based on sex, as they were performing in a topless bar, then the pair moved to California when Cheech was able to return and they capitalized on the burgeoning Cannabis scene. They released a number of hit films, beginning with the stoner classic, Up In Smoke, in 1978.
Tommy’s stoner persona (heeeeey maaaaan) came from doing impressions of a burned out homeless hippie named Strawberry that he let sleep in the lighting booth at Shanghai Junk/City Works.
Creative differences came between Cheech and Chong and they broke up in 1985. Tommy’s career continued and he came into modern popular culture through his appearance as Leo on the popular That’s 70s Show, and when he was jailed for a year in 2003 for selling bongs.
Cheech and Chong reunited in 2008. Today Tommy lives in California where he runs his Cannabis empire.