Cheech & Chong's Up In Smoke

Cheech & Chong’s Up in Smoke is the 1978 soundtrack to Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong’s first feature film, Up in Smoke. More than a typical score album, it works as a comic audio extension of the movie: a 16-track sequence that alternates songs, dialogue clips, and character sketches from the stoner-road-comedy plot. The record captures the duo’s irreverent, countercultural humor while placing it in a late-1970s Los Angeles musical setting shaped by rock, funk, Chicano culture, and novelty records.

The title song frames the album’s marijuana-centered satire, while War’s “Low Rider” provides its most famous outside track and an ideal cruising soundtrack for the film’s lowrider imagery. Cheech & Chong also perform comic versions of Leiber and Stoller’s “Framed” and “Searchin’,” along with “Rock Fight”; the fictional band Alice Bowie supplies their earlier cult favorite “Earache My Eye.” Instrumental and rock material by Yesca—including “Strawberry’s,” “Here Come the Mounties to the Rescue,” and “Lost Due to Incompetence (Theme for a Big Green Van)”—ties the music to the film’s chase-and-misadventure atmosphere. The result is playful, deliberately rough-edged, and inseparable from the duo’s comic world.