Part I

I was born early in the morning on June 2nd in 1970, the son of a Cuban Refugee and a strict Mexican father. My mother was involved in an Anti-Castro group in Havana and escaped from prison to seek refuge in the United States. My father was into alot of gangster shit that seemed to pave the way for the things I would fall into in the years to come. My parents were both hustlers, though, and did what they had to do to provide for us.My father and I didn't get along as I was growing up, as he was trying to prevent me from taking the same path that my brothers did. It was all around me, though, and nothing he could have done would have prevented the choices that I made growing up

My first memory of getting into trouble was when I was about 12 or 13. I stopped at a deli on the way to school with a friend of mine, who began stuffing shit down my shirt. I just went along with it. Hell, everyone else in my family hustled, I might as well too. We ended up getting caught and I tried my best to hold in my laughter as my friend cried like a little girl in front of the cops. My gangsta days came soon after. I was introduced to Sen, who was the G in our city of South Gate, California which borders Compton and all those areas. He was feared because he hung out with alot of the cats from South Central and Watts. Everything kind of fell into place for me. I was never recruited in a gang or forced into it. I chose it. I started bangin' with Sen's homies, which was different from what my brothers were doing. I was with the Bloods, a black gang, when most Mexicans and Latins rolled with their own gangs. But those guys had my back so I never saw a problem with it. Once I started to bang with the bloods, things really started to get crazy. I remember many close calls and many shoot outs where my homies and I were dodging bullets. Most of this went down in the summers of 1986 to 1989. At that time, it was basically a war in the street. Alot of my material comes from that time in my life- friends getting shot, some getting lucky and living. Some not. I had alot of close calls myself.

I remember one occasion where I was on the block with 5 or 6 of my homies, bouncin a basketball. The ball hit the curb and bounced away. As I bent down to pick it up, a car rolled by with a guy sitting on the window ledge, aiming his gun over the roof of the car. When I ducked is when he started shooting. He missed me and caught one of my homies in the ankle. This lifestyle does catch up with you though, and one time I was not so lucky. I was at a party in another Blood neighborhood that bordered a Crip neighborhood and a couple of my homies wanted to make a weed run. Two or three guys decided to come with us to watch our backs, but unfortunately the one that was supposed to bring his gun left it behind. We got to a corner and car full of crips pulled up. I expected my homie to let some shots off, but since he left his gun at the party I was out of luck. One of the Crips had a rifle and let off 5 shots. The first one hit my homie in the forearm. The last one hit me. It felt like a charlie horse. I didn't even realize what had happened or how bad it was until I turned the corner and stopped to look to see if they were still after us. The bullet had punctured my lung.My homies took me to the hospital where I would lay on a gurney for 2 hours before anyone helped me. The cops came in to question me, asking me who shot me. Eventually they told me that I probably deserved it and left. That was one of my main motivations for writing "Pigs". I also wrote "Lick a Shot" based on that night

.I started to get into hip hop some time around 1984. Mellow Man was one of my first influences. He was the first guy I heard rap to my face and it really made a mark on me. I had been writing poetry in school for fun but didn't think about going into hip hop until I heard Mellow. I met Muggs in 1985 through Julio G who is now a legendary DJ. Muggs was my DJ for a while and Sen was with Mellow Man. Eventually, Sen came to rock with me and Muggs. We did demos for a few years, but I got tired of it and went back to bangin'. Sen and Muggs came to me and talked me back into making music again. I didn't think I would make any money from it, so I was hesistant. Good thing I listened to them. At the time I was good with the lyrics but didn't have the best delivery and I was using my normal voice to rhyme with. The guys told me that if I didn't improve the delivery and come up with a better rhyming voice I would just be a writer for Sen, so I knew I had to come up with something since I wanted to be an MC in the group .

One day, I was fuckin' around to the Real Estate beat which Mellow Man originally wrote to but I rewrote. I was just messin' around to it, trying different voices and deliveries and I did an early version of the voice I use now. The guys were like "Do that again." I thought they were crazy. I said it was wack and I wasn't going to rap like that, and they told me to either rap like that or not rap at all. So, I gave it a chance so I could be a rapper in the group. It took me a while to develop it and to be able to carry it for complete songs and albums, and especially while performing, but I got the hang of it after a while and I started to like how it sounded over the stuff Muggs was producing.

We recorded a demo, which included 3 songs that eventually all came together to become "Kill a Man"- the bulk of which was taken from a track called Trigga Happy Nigga. We had a spanish track that Sen did called "Cosa Caliente", a track called "LA's Strongest and Cypress Hills Gettin Funky. Joe the Butcher from Ruffhouse Records in Philly heard of the demo because of Muggs' previous work with 7A3. He loved it and on the strength of that demo we got signed to Sony/Ruffhouse. We got rid of all of those old songs and recorded new shit- Real Estate, Hand on the Pump, Pigs... I wrote Stoned is the Way of the Walk on an hour and half bus ride to Muggs' spot in Hollywood from my crib in Gardena. We recorded most of the first album in Cali, but towards the end we went East to have Joe the Butcher do the mixing and engineering. We also made some new songs out there, and that became a tradition for the first 3 albums.

We finished our album, did a video for "Phuncky Feel One" and went on the road shortly after. We did alot of shows with Naughty by Nature and also performed with Tim Dog, 3rd Bass, Scarface and Ice Cube. All of those shows helped and people started to take notice to Cypress Hill. They got word of how good our live show was and all the energy we put into it. I learned alot of that from Busta and I tried to be as hype as I could while performing. People started to get word of "Kill a Man", which was on the flip side of The Phuncky Feel One. We knew it was a good song but we never thought that MTV or radio would play it because of the content. Well, they did. All of a sudden, people started calling us to do more shows and our record was going up the charts after being out for 6 months. Shit was finally starting to pop off for us. We were pulled off the road to do a video for "Kill a Man", and "Hand on the Pump" was picked as another single. We did videos for both of those songs in 2 days. Kill a Man was shot in Harlem, Times Square, and The Bronx. A year later, our record was platinum. Our first record was 5 years in the making- 5 years of us trying to find ourselves. For it to be accepted like it was felt really great for all of us.

Part II

The hype for the first album really started to pick up once DJ's started to play "How I Could Just Kill A Man" and we found ourselves doing alot of shows with groups like Naughty by Nature, Scarface, 3rd Bass, and Ice Cube. Word started to spread about how hype our live show was and that helped promote the record since we really didn't have much radio or video play at the time. The record company finally realized that they had something with us and pulled us off the road after one year to start working on our second album, Black Sunday . We were told we had 6 to 8 months to finish it, which is not alot of time. I went to Queens to stay with Muggs who had an apartment there at the time and we did most of our recording at Baby Monster Studios in Manhattan. Sen came out to join us and we really started to put work in on this album. About 2 months into the recording process we linked up with T Ray who did "Ain't Goin' Out". We really vibed with him and were very satisfied with how that track turned out. After we were done recording in New York, we went to Philly to record with Joe "The Butcher" Nicolo at Studio 4.

This time around, I made a conscious effort to write some weed songs for the album. "I Wanna Get High" was inspired by "Searching For a Joint" by Leena Marley- Bob Marley's mother. I'm a big Bob Marley fan so I was happy to be able to pay tribute to his family's music. "Hits From the Bong" was alot more spontaneous. I was smoking out with some friends, hitting the bong and it occurred to me to do a track about- what else- bongs. No one had really done a track like that at that point so we were definitely happy with how the fans reacted to it.

Out of all the tracks on Black Sunday, "Insane in the Brain" is the one that really put us on the map. That came as a shock to all of us as it's actually a dis track to Chubb Rock (and a few other people).Chubb Rock did a song called "Yabba Dabba Doo" in which he flipped some of our lyrics and we took it as a dis so we used "Insane in the Brain" to throw some shots back at him. The record company picked it as a single and all of a sudden we were getting noticed by MTV and radio, something that hadn't happened to us on a large scale before.

When Black Sunday was released, our first album was still on the charts one and a half years later and when Black Sunday hit number 1 we had two albums in the Billboard Top 10 at the same time. I believe we were the first hip hop group to do that.
All of this happened very fast for us and we had to learn to deal with the sudden success that followed. It was very strange to go from a nobody- someone that couldn't give a CD away- to someone that people actually sought out. People were handing us CDs left and right, asking for pictures and autographs... everything we did was under a microscope and we lost alot of our privacy. You need to have alot of patience to deal with that and thankfully I did. I still remember advice that Chuck D gave to me when I was coming up. He told me that a moment I spend with a fan means a lifetime to them, and no matter what you have to stay humble. I followed his advice and spent as much time interacting with our fans as I could.

With Black Sunday, we finally got a chance to get over to Europe and do some major touring. We got a big welcome from the fans over there and every venue we played was sold out. It was like a rebirth for Cypress. The European fans were like a whole separate following and are some of our most dedicated and loyal fans. We actually did promo for Black Sunday in Europe before we did anything in the States. We were over there a week before the European release date and a day before the US release date.
Once we got back from Europe and started to tour in the States for Black Sunday, we met up with the Beastie Boys. That was when we met Eric Bobo. We asked Bobo to come play with us after his run with the Beasties and we immediately clicked. We knew he was a good match for Cypress. He eventually left the Beasties and became a fulltime Cypress Hill member. During that time we played Woodstock in 1994 for 500,000 people which was one of the best experiences of my career to this day.

After we toured for about 2 years off of Black Sunday it was time to start recording our next album, Cypress Hill III- Temples of Boom. The label wanted us to do some more "Insane in the Brain" type of stuff but we were in a dark place at the time and our music reflected that. We were having problems with our management at the time, Buzztone, there were new people at Sony that didn't know or necessarily like our music, Sen Dog took a break from the group, and Sony lost faith in us after Black Sunday and didn't think III would do as well and as a result of that it didn't get the push it deserved from the label as far as promotion goes. Muggs produced alot of dark beats and I wrote lyrics to complement that and to reflect where I was mentally at the time. We had no radio joints on the album so we weren't getting the same MTV and radio play that we received with Black Sunday. We decided we had to take matters into our own hands to promote this record so at every show we requested autograph booths be set up so we could meet our fans personally and we also integrated the songs from III into our show to let the fans know we had a new album coming out. Sony kept pushing the release date back and at that point we felt like we were an indie group since we had little help from Sony and did almost everything for that album on our own. The Smokin' Grooves tour helped a great deal in regards to letting fans know about the album. We kept touring and touring and the album ended up going platinum. But as you know, we never stop moving so the time soon came to record a new album.

Next up: Cypress Hill IV