Miswanderlust
Ann 1Albums that Changed my Life: Cheech and Chong: Los Chocinos 1973
January 21st 2010 04:54
Back in March (yep folks almost a year ago), many of my friends put together the List of 10 or 15 of the most influential albums of their lives. I was jealous with envy when my friends could spew them out. Well it was really tough for me to drill down to 20 but I made myself a promise that I would do this.
So here goes...a year late and a dollar short (as my dad would say)
Cheech and Chong was my foray into counter culture (not that I didn’t have an aunt and uncle who lived in a hippie commune with a big bong in middle of the living room). I didn’t connect the dots until I was 13 when spending the night with my friend Bek. We would sneak into her older brother’s Jimi Hendrix bedecked basement bedroom. We would sprawl across the bed with the overhead light off and the black lights on and listen and laugh hysterically as we “got it”. We even believed that we shared an inside joke with the school miscreants and the “smoking lounge” folks.
This one still makes me laugh out loud. I love how burnouts Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong used America's post-hippie dissatisfaction as a jumping-off point. Coming from a family of law abiding citizens, I would howl at how the pair both mocked and reveled in pot culture, by creating a style of stoner humor that required little effort to appreciate, but was nonetheless quite hilarious.
The album art is one of a kind. The packaging of the first release included a die cut cover showing a car door and another die cut cardboard inner cover showing the usually sealed parts of a car door (which contained baggies of pot); the cardboard edge of the opening of the cover was cut decoratively around the windshield in the upper right corner. The credits and track listing were hand written in graffiti. In addition there is a car door (four pairs of feet suggestively situated in the drivers side window) enclosed on a single sheet in the album.
When I am having a bad day, I will pull the album out of my collection and listen to my favorite tracks.
Yes, I am the victim of a Basketball Jones....I was kicked off the basketball team for wearing high heeled sneakers
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