Jimi Hendrix Was Briefly in a Band With Tommy Chong of Cheech and Chong
In the early 1960s, Jimi Hendrix and Tommy Chong had something in common: they were both musicians playing in bands. Although Hendrix’s legacy lives on in his music, Chong went on to achieve global recognition alongside Cheech Marin as a part of the movie-starring comedy duo Cheech & Chong. While Chong was a musician, he was joined by Hendrix in his band.
Jimi Hendrix played in several small bands
Jimi Hendrix played backup guitar for a number of popular artists in the early 1960s, from Little Richard and Ray Charles to Ike and Tina Turner and The Isley Brothers. He soon began playing in bands of his own.
Hendrix played in various bands as a young adult. These groups included The Velvetones, The Kasuals, and the King Kasuals.
Jimi Hendrix was once in a band with Tommy Chong
While he was a member of The King Kasuals, Hendrix decided to visit his grandmother Zenora in Vancouver. It was here where Tommy Chong was playing lead guitar as a part of Bobby Taylor and the Vancouvers. The band was signed to Motown Records, headed by legendary record executive Barry Gordy.
Chong reflected on the early days of the band’s career in a 2006 interview with Tuscon’s KLPX. “We were in England,” he remembered. “Barry [Gordy] liked our band a lot, Bobby Taylor and the Vancouvers. And we were playing in this little club and there was no one in there.”
“Hendrix came in, and when he opened the door it was like God appeared,” Chong continued. “He had like 300 people behind him and packed the joint. And he’d just come in by himself, walked up to the stage, and he goes, ‘Hey, Tommy, how are you doing, man? Mind if I sit in?’ And I was in shock!”
“[In] my comedic mindset, I wanted to say, ‘Sorry, man, but maybe the last set,'” he said. “But I said, ‘Yeah, come on!’ And I handed him my guitar and he goes ‘No no, I want to play bass.’ So he played bass, and he played for the whole set.”
“Hendrix told me that he was stationed in Seattle, and we had a club in Vancouver, Canada, and he used to come up almost every weekend and sit in our club and listen to us play,” he added.
According to Philip Norman’s 2020 book Wild Thing: The Short, Spellbinding Life of Jimi Hendrix, Hendrix began playing with Chong’s band regularly at a club in Vancouver called Dante’s Inferno. Because Chong was the lead guitar player in the band, Hendrix took a backseat playing rhythm guitar.
Jimi Hendrix went on to become a rock star, while Tommy Chong was a movie star
Hendrix would go on to form his own band, The Jimi Hendrix Experience, in the mid-1960s. In a span of less than two years, they released three albums: Are You Experienced, Axis: Bold as Love, and Electric Ladyland. The group disbanded in 1969, but Hendrix continued to play with other musicians until his death in 1970.
Chong, meanwhile, began an entirely new career as a comedian alongside Cheech Marin. The duo released comedy albums and movies about cannabis-fueled adventures, with four of their comedy albums earning nominations for the Grammy Award for Best Comedy Album.
