Oh Delorme! | You may not know his face, but you'll remember his tunes from his comedy days with Cheech & Chong.
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Acclaimed guitarist Gaye Delorme is a much-loved artist in these parts — he lived in Edmonton in the ’80s, and produced hit albums for several Albertan songwriters like k.d. lang and Jann Arden. But outside Alberta, he’s famous as the writer and guitarist for much of the musical material performed by ’70s stoner-comedy duo Cheech and Chong (who, incidentally, just announced a reunion tour of Canada this fall).
When I asked Delorme for a Cheech and Chong story, he gave me this:
“I had written this piece of music in ’74, it was kinda like this rock parody thing. I played it for Cheech, and he loved it right away and started writing lyrics, and so we arranged to go record it at A&M Records in L.A. I got to the studio with Cheech and we sat in a little room by ourselves and wrote out the ‘People talkin’ to me tryin’ to tell me how to live, I don’t listen to it ’cause my head is like a sieve —’”
(Insert my giggling here.)
Delorme continues, uninhibited: “We wrote the song and arranged to record it that night. I tried to get a big rock drummer but I couldn’t, so we ended up getting this Brazilian guy that I was working with out of New York named Airto Moreira. I don’t know how to spell that, but he’s a famous percussionist.” Luckily, I have Google for spellchecking purposes.
“I’d arranged to get a bass player through a friend of mine. We set up with the engineer, put in all the plug-ins, and we were ready to go, and Tommy [Chong] brought in his guitar case, and he was going to play along.
“But,” giggles Delorme, “Tommy got everybody stoned. Not me! But he got the bass player stoned. In fact, I don’t think the bass player to this day knows what session that was. And finally, when Tommy went to open up his guitar case to play guitar, there was no guitar in it.”
“Oh!” I say. “I guess that relegates the sound to ‘air guitar.’”
“Yes, it does,” Delorme says. (The finished track features only Delorme’s guitar and none of Chong’s, which may have been an unintended stroke of genius.) “After the session, the boys were so stoned they didn’t say anything to each other at all; they just left. The tune was called ‘Earache My Eye,’ and what happened is Tommy and Cheech went back in and rewrote the lyrics, and I put a couple of lyric lines in it, and it got released right away to radio, and become the #4 record in North America.”
“Wow,” I say.
“But I never saw the bass player again,” Delorme says. ”He was an R&B player, and I don’t think he even knew his name when he left the studio because Tommy got him so stoned. I can imagine that guy’s walking around somewhere in L.A. and hearing this song and going, ‘Jeez, there’s something familiar about that tune ... What is it about that song?’”
“But of course you weren’t stoned,” I say.
“No, I don’t smoke dope,” Delorme says matter-of-factly. “Never did.”
“Not even once, not even like Bill Clinton?”
“I tried it but I didn’t inhale ... Well, maybe back in the ’60s. But smoking dope never worked for me.”
“You’re funny enough sober,” I say, and I mean it — I recently spent some time in Vancouver hanging out with Delorme, and he is definitely one helluva natural-born comedian. And, for the record, neither of us was stoned.
A mere $20 allows you to catch Delorme’s wit and killer guitar in action this Saturday, Aug. 30 at the Haven Social Club.
