A Conversation with War’s Lonnie Jordan and Cheech & Chong’s Tommy Chong – HuffPost 5.5.14

Mike Ragogna: What brought you guys together for this recording?

Tommy Chong: Um, money. We’re trying to raise money for the KCET broadcasting.

Lonnie Jordan: I almost said “PMS,” I meant PBS.

TC: That’s something your wife told me to watch out for.

LJ: PBS Has been helping us out quite a bit down every road. We’ve been doing a thing with PBS where we’re helping them and they’re helping us, so we’re working together for the community and for all those that the station reaches.

MR: This fine new War album is the first new one in what, twenty years? What is that about?

LJ: Well, we stopped recording only because we got kind of bored of it. There was nothing new to talk about. We’d said everything already back in the day. We just took a break from recording and decided to keep playing live for our audience until they gave us something again to write about. It’s the fans that write our songs. We just pick up the pens and the checks.

TC: That’s it. Everybody has their creative period. Recording is like planting the garden, and then touring and appearances are like harvesting, so you guys have been harvesting lately.

MR: So War’s been harvesting, what seeds have Cheech & Chong been planting lately?

TC: Right now, we’re getting ready to do another movie, which will have War involved in it somehow, acting and doing the music. Cheech & Chong is on a Last Gasp Tour, and then we’ll follow it up by The Final Straw.

MR: [laughs] And then the absolutely final tour.

TC: No, no, then we go into Cher, the seventeenth annual farewell tour.

MR: So you guys are pals, where did this friendship begin?

TC: Well we were out of wine at our dressing room, so I went over to Lonnie, and of course Lonnie’s got nothing but wine in his dressing room.

LJ: Red.

TC: And that’s how we get along.

MR: Did anybody “Spill The Wine?”

TC: Let’s write a song about that! Oh wait, you already have.

MR: Lonnie, let’s go over the new album. You have some guests on it, Joe Walsh, Tower Of Power, The USC Marching Band…what?

LJ: Yes! USC Marching Band!

TC: Lonnie was drunk, he met them in a bar and he made some promises. Of course, when he woke up he couldn’t remember them.

LJ: [laughs] Which is convenient.

TC: Cheech & Chong’s on that album too, right?

LJ: Yep!

MR: Their greatest guest appearance since being on Joni Mitchell’s “Twisted” fromCourt & Spark. [laughs]

LJ: Cheech & Chong being on the album for me is exciting to me because they have so many fans. And the first time “Lowrider” played anywhere outside the radio it was in a movie, their movie, Up In Smoke. From then on everybody in the whole world who started doing movies started catching on to the bandwagon saying, “Oh, that’s War? That’s their stuff?” Because of Up In Smoke, everybody learned who we were. No one really ever connected our music to us.

MR: Also you’ve got “The World Is A Ghetto,” “Summer,” “The Cisco Kid,” “Why Can’t We Be Friends,” “Spill The Wine…” After all these years, what do you think of that legacy of hits?

LJ: You’ll have to ask all my exes. Exes on the back of my checks. I’m surprised with myself that I was even able to do all that. To this very day I don’t understand how I did it, and I guess that’s because I never really thought about it. Thinking can sometimes be a disease, so I just never thought. I just felt my way all the way through to this very day.

TC: Hey Lonnie, tell them about the cover song you’re going to do, the follow-up for “Why Can’t We Be Friends?” He’s going to do a new version called “Why I Wear Depends.”

LJ: Oh no you didn’t! [laughs]

MR: Wait, let’s go there. I imagine your fan base is pretty expanded demographically, but does it tend to be a bit older overall?

LJ: No, no. The older fans still are fans, but they’ve multiplied and now they have little mini-me’s running around with telephones in their hands, and they seem to learn about us much faster than their grandparents or dads and moms that were our older fans and still are our fans. Even with Cheech & Chong I see the young ones sitting up there, a lot of them, and a lot of them do have their phones in there, Googling the things they may not be able to get at the concert.

TC: The thing is, we get all kinds of people. We get the young ones that have to be with the old ones to make sure they get to the concert and home. And then the really young ones get to come in with their parents, because there’s an age restriction. We’re family entertainment, War and Cheech & Chong.

MR: You guys had a lot of hits in the period, but you have generations of people that are now raised on War and Cheech & Chong. It seems to me like you should have more fans than ever in the history of mankind.

TC: What happens in that everything moves in cycles. We start off with say rhythm & blues, and then it changes into rap and then it changes into heavy metal, but it always comes back to the original, to the roots. Cheech & Chong and War are original, so we will always be viable. We’re not only part of the culture, we are the culture. You can go to college, you can go to Europe, you can experience all the other cultures, but you will eventually come back to home. That’s what we are. We’re home.

LJ: We’re also a movement.

MR: Given the cultural impact of songs like “Why Can’t We be Friends?” and “Lowrider,” like Bob Marley and others, to many, you became cultural heroes.

TC: And Bob Marley always had a message with his songs. And that was the thing about War, too, we always had the message, you know? “Why Can’t We Be Friends?” is universal, it’ll last forever. “Lowrider,” it’ll go forever. We can look a hundred years from now and there’ll still be someone in that lowrider culture and someone singing “Why Can’t We Be Friends?” Just like Marley. Marley is the master. When Jesus left he said, “He will lead.” His words will live forever, and that’s the same as us. We’ll get old, we’ll die, but our work will always be here.

MR: That’s so cool. With all these great people around, what was it like recording this thing? Was it zoo-like at all?

LJ: Well, actually the place that we recorded at was pretty much like old school. It had Hendrix and all the old guys up on the wall like an old flashback for us. It just kept our environment of recording the same as it was back in the day. It wasn’t a zoo, it was just a great flashback. I enjoyed every step of the way and when Cheech & Chong came in and recorded with us I really had flashbacks. I thought it was a hot flash, but it was a flashback.

MR: Tommy, what advice do you have for new artists?

TC: Just enjoy the moment, whatever the moment is. Sleeping in your car? Enjoy it. Accepting the Academy Award for your music? Enjoy it. Enjoy the moment, because that’s all we have. Life is just a series of moments strung together, make the best of them. Take care, guys, I’ve got to go.

MR: Thanks Tommy! Lonnie, what’s your advice for new artists?

LJ: I would say not only enjoying the moment, but as far as being an artist, they should definitely become multi-talented in the field of art. Listen to a lot of music, go see a bunch of different types of art, anything that’s an art form, spread your mind out to it all, because it’s all different forms of art. When I say different types of music I mean rap, classical, jazz, reggae… Young kids have Google, go back and find out about ska, calypso and how it became reggae and all that, all of the African music, country, classical music as well, jazz, where it all came from. Understand it. That’s a challenge right there. That should be their school. That’s a challenge right there. That should be their school. Then they’ll understand art.

MR: Is that how you came into it?

LJ: Well the thing is when I first came in we didn’t have Google, all we had was dictionaries. I didn’t learn nothing from that, I learned from traveling and meeting other people because I’ve always been open to meeting and talking to other people of different nationalities and other planets. I’ve been open to everything, all genres of music. You just play one note, as far as I’m concerned and one note emphasizes all countries. That’s all you need, one note.

MR: You must have had an idol or two, who were your idols?

LJ: A lot of people besides myself. I love Ray Charles, I love Patsy Kline, I love Claude Debussy, anybody from the year 1700 or whatever year it was that he was making music. Anyone that can create a song called “Clair de Lune” back in those times must’ve been doing some of the heaviest weed in the world. “Clair De Lune,” man? Oh my god. But other than that, you have your friends in the jazz world, Bill Evans, Oscar Peterson. On the rock side, I used to love The Everly Brothers, I loved Elvis Presley, I loved Richard Berry and Chuck Berry, all the Berries, the list goes on. I don’t have one person or one artist, I love all of them. Even Ray Price, I thought Willie Nelson was a great writer although I knew that he wrote a lot of music for a lot of the R&B artists back in the early sixties, I loved his music. The list goes on. I could write a book on all the people. It would take a while, but I love them all. James Brown.

MR: Most people don’t realize Willie Nelson is the poster child for genre bending and nobody says, “Hey, you’re not wearing your big hat today. You’re not country!” He mixes it with R&B, he mixes it with soul, all sorts of stuff.

LJ: Yeah, he’s another rebel in music. He’s another doctor of music, which is what I feel I am. I’m a doctor of music. I heal people through music, besides myself. Jimi Hendrix of course is another one. What I loved about Jimi Hendrix is that he came from the same school as me, the blues. That’s where we came from. The form of art coming out of the blues where people would play the blues, you’d play a lot of holes in the walls. A lot of holes in the walls meant you had to play in the hood back in the early days, watching people get stabbed and they sing about it, somebody beating their woman up, or a woman beating a man up and then they sing the blues about it. Suriving in the streets, that was the blues back then, which is the same form of art as rap is today. That’s an evolution right there. A lot of people don’t know that we used to jam with Jimi Hendrix a lot, especially as Eric Burdon & War because Eric and Jimi were great friends through Cas Chandler, the bass player of The Animals, who actually introduced Jimi Hendrix to the music industry. We were the last band that Jimi played with at Ronnie Scott’s in England before he died.

MR: Oh wow.

LJ: A lot of people don’t know that. And the weird part is we did the song “Mother Earth” and ironically after Jimi played with us and went back to his flat he went back to Mother Earth.

MR: Wow. Evolutionary is the name of this record but how evolutionary is it to you?

LJ: It’s still the same movement as it was back in the early days of our recordings. The thing is what’s more important to me is the fact that the young kids and our older fans finally connect our music to the band “War” without saying, “Oh, yeah, I know who War is! Huh! What is it good for?” We did not write that song. That was Edwin Starr. When we were on the charts back in the day you would see “Eric Burdon & War/Spill The Wine” and then you would see maybe one more bullet above us “Edwin Starr/War.” That was confusing, you would hear the DJs after Edwin Starr’s song say, “Edwin Starr and War!” and then you would hear “Spill The Wine” and they’d say, “Here’s Eric Burdon & War!” So it was confusing back then but that’s okay.

MR: What are some of the major differences between War then and now?

LJ: Well one of the major differences is Eric. I have to take my hat off to him for what he’s taught me over a period of time and back in the day. When a lot of people that came to our concerts were discovering Eric Burdon’s new band War, it was the first experience for me to feel this feeling in the clubs of people taking acid. But I watched Eric, the way he dealt with the crowd, the way he had control of the crowd and all that time that we were with Eric, I learned so much of that from him and the way that I controlled the crowd today. I just thought that was one of the greatest experiences I experienced with him, watching him control the crowd, have fun with them, just be loose but yet tell a story at the same time. Then the people dancing because they were expressing themselves through our message and through our control, they were expressing themselves. We were troubadours traveling and going to a building and turning that into a church and the people listening to our message and expressing ourselves through body movement or standing there and glaring or whatever they were doing. Those were the days, man, they were beautiful and every venue was the same way. So I learned a lot from that, although today is different. There are of course new drugs and there are more people who just want to groove and dance, there’s a little more activity today than there was back then as far as the fans out in the audience watching us, although I have even more energy than Eric and the band had back then but still the people today out in the audience seem to be a little bit more active and want to release more tension. I can imagine it’s because back then we had Vietnam that was pretty much driving people crazy, and the government driving people crazy is no different today. Like I said, we said everything the past as far as messages in our music, but now today that’s why our live shows have been contagious, because when people hear the message and get to dance and release themselves from all this craziness in the world today
we’re just soothing people or healing people through our music because I am a doctor of music.

MR: Beautiful. Where is all this heading?

LJ: Well, like Tommy said we’re in the process of getting ready to do a movie with him acting and doing the music, and we’re going to be doing a lot of TV shows, we’ll be doing a video for the single “That LA Sunshine,” we’ll be doing a lot more concerts, we’re going to bring back new radio formats. We’re going to do it whether you like it or not, and that new radio format is a flashback with a new attitude for everyone, but with a message. And it doesn’t have to be a sad message, it’ll be a happy message, like Pharrell, “Cause I’m happy…” He’s starting all this, so we’re just finishing it. We were the innovators of it back in the day.

MR: You’ve already established that with “Why Can’t We Be Friends?” I’m sure you’ve got other question songs in you that are just as relevant.

LJ: That’s right! We just say “The World Is A Ghetto” because we’re just trying to make people understand that the people that think they’re living in the ghetto, no, not here in the United States. Go across the water, you’ll see some people living in the ghetto. The world is a ghetto! You go to Beverley Hills and there are people in Rolls Royces. They get flat tires, why can’t they have roaches in their backyard or in their houses? There’s roaches in their houses. In a small house you can see more of the roaches but they’re there. That’s just a little scenario of what’s existing around you.

MR: And when it gets right down to it, everybody’s a lowrider.

LJ: There you go! Or everybody wants to be a lowrider. And not only that! I don’t know what you think about this, but it’s like Bob Marley said, “We’re one.” We are one, because if we weren’t, then why does our government go crazy trying to create a more successful DNA testing? Why would you need it if we weren’t one? That’s why we have all of these mistaken identities. Obviously, we all do look alike. Everything is really based on color, then. We have the same frame, so the only way people can identify each other is by color, but even the ones of the same color are mistaking each other. You know what I’m saying? DNA tests mean we are one whether we like it or not.

MR: And you knew that all along.

LJ: There you go, the world is a ghetto.

Transcribed By Galen Hawthorne