Image via Complex Original
Over the weekend, Cypress Hill celebrated the 20 year anniversary of their legendary debut album, the self-titled Cypress Hill. The album helped establish Cypress Hill as the first hugely popular Latino rap group while DJ Mugg’s stoned soundscapes were an influential guidepost for the future of hip-hop production.
In honor of the album, we decided to pull one of the achieves and post our previous interview where we had B-Real and Sen Dog talking about making songs like “How I Could Just Kill A Man,” “The Phuncky Feel One,” and “Pigs.” So get your left hand on a fourty and start puffing on a blunt while you zone out to the sounds of Cypress Hill. Lala la la lala la laaaaa...
As Told To Toshitaka Kondo (@ToshitakaKondo)
"Pigs"
B-Real: "We were in South Gate coming back from a house party and we went to Jack-In-The Box. I had a dark blue 520 Cadillac Seville sittin' on McLeans. It was gangsta. Straight up. I was using the phone booth and they decided to come harass me.
"Some of them were high school football guys and they didn't go anywhere else but to become a local cop. We knew them, so we weren't intimated by them. We'd be like, 'Fuck you, you third stringer. You couldn't even make LAPD.' And they were trying to gang up on me.
"It was about five or six cops. We looked like thugs so they basically treated us like thugs. But I wasn't doing nothing. I didn't have no weapons, no weed. [They said,] 'What are you doing here? Put your hands on the car!' I'm like, 'What the fuck you mean? What did I do that I got to put my hands on your car?' They're like, 'Don't create a problem.' I'm like, 'You're gonna arrest me for fuckin talking on the phone?'
"Then they were grouping around me and I was like, 'What? You gonna jump me in front of all these all these people in Jack-In-The-Box? Go ahead! The first one that jumps out at me, I'm knocking him out! I don't care if I get beat up the rest of the way. You guys better call your on-duty sergeant or something because we got a problem.' The sergeant comes on the scene and asks me what happened. And I told them exactly what happened. And he told those guys to let me go and to apologize."
Sen Dog: "B-Real was pretty pissed. When I rolled up to my house, he was sitting in front of my mom's house in his car. I rolled up in my driveway and I walked up to him and I was like, 'Hey what are you doing?' And he goes, 'I'm writing a song about the pigs!' He had this look on his face. When I came back outside the house, he was like, 'Listen to this!'
"That was actually one of the later songs that we recorded during the first album because either Muggs or I reminded him about the poem he wrote about the pigs. It was right around the time we did "Latin Lingo" because that was one of the last songs we recorded for that album.
"I remember having the first rough of the album, "Pigs" and "Latin Lingo" wasn't on it. It wasn't until we went back in with Joe The Butcher—the owner of Ruff House Records—came out to L.A. to hear the final. We recorded "Pigs". Then we flew out to Philly to mix and master the album and that's when we came up with "Hole In The Head" and "Latin Lingo".
"He laid it down to this funky track Muggs had come up with. And then we started to build the concept for the song more deeply around that. Names were changed, but where we grew up, a lot of people knew each other and what not. A lot of these cops would try to chase the same chicks that we chased. And chicks knew everything because what do men do? They talk to women. So we were connected back in the days.
"We knew exactly what those guys were up to, they were no different than us. They just wore a gun and a badge to work and we didn't. But you know, B was swift with the pen. And they gave him a creative spark and they paid the price. And those guys know that song is about them. They have to know. [Laughs.]"
"How I Could Just Kill a Man"
B-Real: "That was one of the first five songs that came out the box. It was actually comprised from three different songs that had lines that Muggs liked in each song. Muggs came up with the beat and he said, 'Man, say that one line from this song on this song.' So I started saying it. Then he said, "Okay, now put the verse from this other song after that." So we pretty much pieced it together like a puzzle.
"[The little 'All I wanted was a Pepsi!' vocal sample at the end] was off a Suicidal Tendencies record. We didn't end up sampling the record. What we did was we had one of our boy, Dante Areola, who actually created the logo for Cypress Hill, say it at the end so we didn't have to deal with sample clearance.
"Muggs had a little pre-production lab in his apartment so we did all our demos there and we'd be smoking out as usual. He had an apartment out here in Hollywood. He lived with DJ Aladdin of Low Profile. WC, Coolio, Aladdin, and Crazy Tunes were in one bedroom doing the Low Profile album while Muggs, Sen Dog, and myself were in another room doing demos for Cypress Hill. So it was a pretty trippy time.
"We were real close with those guys. The Funkdoobiest guys were originally from our camp. So it was all of us and them together in one apartment partying out, going over songs, and watching Muggs and Aladdin practice their DJ battle moves. And then Prince Whipper Whip and Grandmaster Caz and those guys from the old school days lived in the same apartment structure. We would see them and blaze up with them. Ice-T every now and then would show up.
"Eventually when we got in the studio, it was the same thing. Only we were a little bit more selective because we didn't want to be wasting time and money on shit we didn't like. So whatever we liked from Muggs' bedroom, that's what we took to the studio and eventually laid.
"[The videos for] 'Kill A Man' and 'Hand On The Pump' were filmed back to back in New York because we were on tour with Naughty By Nature and we started to get a lot of momentum with 'Kill A Man,' so Sony pulled us off the tour for two days to go film that video. We broke in New York first. No one knew we were from L.A.
"We were called Cypress Hill and there's no place in L.A. called Cypress Hill. I mean, there's Cypress Ave, Cypress City, and shit like that. What was synonymous with our name was Cypress Hill, New York. So a lot of people thought we came from there. Plus Muggs was from Flushing, Queens. So, musically we had an East Coast flavor on the beat so people had it confused."
"Hand On The Pump"
B-Real: "All of our shit started in Muggs' bedroom man. There was probably one song that was created outside of that environment once we got our record deal. Maybe it was 'Hole In The Head' and 'Latin Lingo,' those were the two last songs that we recorded for that first album. And those were the only two that were created in a studio and not in Muggs' bedroom.
"We were pretty much all together all the time. He'd either be saying, 'Hey you should fuck with this.' Or we'd hear something where we'd be like, 'Hey let's fuck with that.' We always threw ideas at each other. Really, he was the one for the vision for the music and how he wanted those tracks to sound. We'd just pick the ones we liked.
"'Hand On The Pump' was a co-write. My man Brett Bouldin from 7A3 had the original concept. Him and I started writing the song together. The beat came first, then the chorus, and then we wrote the rhymes around the structure of the chorus. We wouldn't cut any vocals until we got to the actual studio.
"[Muggs] would finish it at home, get it to where he wanted it, and then if he felt like he needed to add anything after he would add it after we do the vocals. Every session we all did it together, we were always together. Hanging out and throwing ideas at each other. Smoking and drinking and trying to create a vibe. So pretty much every track went down like that."
"The Phuncky Feel One"
Sen Dog: "'Phunky Feel One' was created in Muggs apartment in Hollywood. Muggs would sit there in that apartment and make beats all day. And when B and I would get there, he would have cassettes of music waiting for us.
"We heard the track in the apartment and that's when we started working there. B-Real's opening lyric is, 'Well I'm the real one, yes the funky feel one.' So we were like, 'We gotta use that.' It wasn't hard to figure out the hook after that line.
"Our thing was we had a producer in Muggs that made everything funky and we wanted to capitalize on that. And during the break in the song, that was really funky, and along with the funky feel you got after you smoked a joint, it was that kind of vibe. To be, it was what the band would be about. I guess the whole funky vibe. The whole funky Cypress Hill shit that started taking form there.
"One recording place we went to a lot back in those days was Paramount Recording and I think it was on Santa Monica Blvd. They were little studios that weren't highly expensive. It was mostly heavy metal people and hip hop people there. I think that's when we first put that song down on 2-inch reel back then. I'm pretty sure that's where 'The Phuncky Feel One' went down."