The early origins of Cypress Hill begin in the late 80s with a group called DVX, which stood for Devastating Vocal Xcellence. It’s revolving door membership would include Sen Dog and B-Real, as well as future Funkdoobiest rapper Tyrone “T-Bone/Tomahawk Funk” Pacheco, “Mentirosa” hit-maker Mellow Man Ace, and influential L.A. radio DJ Julio G. But its legacy was cut short for various reasons.

Sen Dog, 1992

“DVX was like some old school, hardcore b-boy rap. I started that band with my brother, Mellow Man Ace. I was out of high school that year and my brother was a senior. We had that going for a while and we had a DJ named Julio G who we knew from high school. He had aspirations to be a radio DJ on KDAY’s Mixmaster Show. He told us that if he ever got that chance, he was going to take it, and he got that chance and he took it,” Sen recalls. “Right around the same time, B-Real was in a break dancing crew with my brother called Street Dancers and he was starting to show us some promise as a rapper. So we were actually a four man crew at one point, with my brother, myself, B-Real and T-Bone.”

But Mellow Man Ace left DVX to be a solo artist in 1988, and struck RIAA gold in 1989 with a crossover Spanglish rap single called “Mentirosa,” with Julio G on the cut.

“Mellow got a chance with some label that wanted a Spanish rapper — we were not even rapping in Spanish at that point, but we spoke Spanish. Mellow was able to put something together that impressed them. They were like ‘We know you are with this group, but we really want you and don’t want the group.’ Mellow made that decision on his own and left what would eventually be Cypress Hill,” Sen says of his brother’s path.

Despite the fact that Ace’s song was a hit, its legacy would pale in comparison to that of Cypress Hill, which would begin two years later.

“He had success, so that left me and B like ‘Okay, what are we going to do?’ T-Bone from Funkdoobiest went to jail for some gang-banging shit at that point, so he was out of the picture. We were like ‘Well, let’s start our own group. What are we going to call it?’ Eventually we named it after our block on Cypress Avenue that we called Cypress Hill.”

Before DJ Julio G departed on his own journey into radio, he introduced Sen and B to DJ Muggs, who in 1988 was producing for a short-lived L.A. rap group called 7A3 that were signed to Geffen.

“[7A3] were more of a commercial sound, radio friendly if you will. That kind of fell apart. They had gotten dropped from Geffen in the midst of Muggs producing the Cypress Hill record. They had flown to Philadelphia to work with Joe ‘The Butcher’ Nicolo, who was eventually the guy who signed us to Ruffhouse. It’s all interconnected there,” Sen continues. “Muggs would keep sending me beats in the mail and he kept telling me ‘Make sure you have B write to this stuff. When I come back, we’re going to record.’ It took a few months, but when he came back, we had a song called ‘Trigger Happy’ that was about 14 or 15 pages long, because that’s how long we used to write our raps — we didn’t know any better. ‘Trigger Happy’ was eventually ‘Kill A Man,’ once Muggs heard it and dissected it… The more we went on with it, the more Muggs wanted to be a part of it, not just be seen as a producer.”

Muggs’ unique Soul Assassins sound is what pulled the whole thing together. He took things in a different direction, with a style that meshed hard hitting drums, groovy bass lines and distinctive high pitched shrieks that were pulled from various places, such as blues guitar riffs or Prince vocals. Utilizing sources like 50s doo-wop tune “Duke of Earl” (“Hand on the Pump”) or Jimi Hendrix’s “Are You Experienced?” (“How I Could Just Kill a Man”), Muggs’ beats were heavily-layered sample collages that paid homage to forty years of music history, pulling pieces from the most unlikely of origins.

“Muggs was our ace-in-the-hole, right there, as far as Cypress, Funkdoobiest. We had DJ Muggs. And he had a different production style and approach than anyone else in the game. And I mean the heavy hitters like Dr. Dre and everybody were blown away by his production,” says Sen. “To get Muggs to really deliver that signature sound, it opened the door for Cypress Hill and it opened the door for Muggs to be one of the great producers in hip-hop.”

The two rappers meshed well with that energy, playing opposite sides of the same coin; B-Real with his high-pitched, condescending nasal style and Sen with his more straightforward, grunting delivery. The unit had finally taken shape. Three mysterious, goateed individuals in EPMD-esque fisherman caps and red skull t-shirts, their features perhaps intentionally obscured. Roll it all up with the group’s pro-marijuana infused lyrics and you had something truly unique with Cypress Hill.

Cypress Hill, 1991

“That was just us, that was the way we dressed. Muggs was from the East Coast, we were from L.A. We would kind of mix and match looks, get a little bit of East Coast flavor with the West Coast and that’s what made us look a little bit different,” B reveals. “But we were very much influenced by East Coast artists like EPMD, Beastie Boys, Public Enemy, KRS. So we just tried to mix our flavor up. We wanted to be ambiguous — we didn’t want everyone to know exactly where we were from. We wanted to you guess if we were from L.A. or New York and keep guessing. Fortunately it worked for us.”

Cypress Hill’s 1991 self-titled debut album

With the success of their debut album, they would be the first Latin rap group to be certified platinum by the RIAA, and eventually the LP would go double platinum. Yet they never intentionally used their heritage as a marketing angle, aside from one album cut “Latin Lingo.”

“For us, we didn’t want Sony to label us as a ‘Latin hip-hop group,’ we just wanted to be labeled a hip-hop group. Because beforehand, if you got labeled as that, basically your fucking feet are held to the Latin market, which was not buying hip-hop music then. Like maybe 1%,” says B. “We are proud of who or what we are, but we didn’t want that to be the big gimmick. People could find that out after. We’d celebrate our ancestry and heritage after that, we just wanted people to focus on the music. Fortunately, Sony got that, put us out and didn’t focus on the Latin aspect until we made a Spanish record [1999’s Los Grandes Éxitos en Español]. I think that was a good play for us and it helped us reach people we wouldn’t normally reach if we marketed ourselves that way.”

Additionally, to the label’s credit, they allowed Cypress Hill to be themselves, boldly unfazed by the band’s pro-cannabis message in a post-Reagan America.

“When we first started, the label wasn’t sure about our material, so we went with the ‘safe’ first single ‘Phuncky Feel One,’ which was a great tune, but it wasn’t like a monster song,” says Sen. “In the beginning, we didn’t do a lot of videos on our weed stuff, because the label was not sure about that. We were, but the label was not.”

The band’s early singles were less about getting high and more about living street lifestyles. Ironically, the violently-tinged tracks “Hand on the Pump” and “How I Could Just Kill a Man” were viewed as suitable for radio and video shows, yet harmless songs about smoking weed were not.

“I think the labels were just used to the status quo of hip-hop at the time, which was that some rap was commercially viable for radio and some is not and made for the street… They were cool with songs like ‘How I Could Just Kill a Man’ [as a single] — and people don’t really understand that that song is more about offense,” says Sen. “For us to rap about violence and stuff like that was okay, because everybody on the West Coast was doing it at the point.”

“It’s very ironic that that was the case back then. You could not get a song about weed on the air. You could get all kinds of violent shit on the radio back then, but nothing that condoned any drug use,” says B-Real. “Now you hear weed songs all over the fuckin’ radio.”

“Prior to signing to Ruffhouse, we had a couple of other offers from some West Coast labels, but these are the labels that didn’t want us to rap about weed, didn’t want us to cuss in our songs, didn’t want us to use the word ‘nigga,’ didn’t want us to talk about violence. They thought we were good entertainers, good rappers, they just didn’t want us in our context,” says Sen. “That’s the reason that we didn’t go with those labels and went with a smaller one. Ruffhouse Records out of Philadelphia guaranteed us 100% freedom on the mic. Muggs knew that we had a lot to say, so it was a very important decision.”

“When we started shopping our demos, we had the marijuana influenced songs and they weren’t really with it. They were like ‘What are you guys talking about? Getting high and smoking weed?’ They weren’t giving us a shot. Sony for some reason got it, and said ‘This is you guys, do what you want to do. We’ll back it, if it fails, it fails. If it wins, great,’” says B-Real.

“But still, our label was still hesitant to put out our more weed infused music until things really started catching on, after seeing a commitment from fans to Cypress Hill,” adds Sen. “Then they began to say ‘Anything the band wants, just put it out, put it out.’ So then we started putting out ‘I Want To Get High’ or ‘Stoned Is the Way of the Walk’ and songs like that. It really made a difference in our careers.”

“To Sony’s credit, they let us do what we wanted to do artistically and that meant whatever our subject matter or content was. They were cool with it, they actually helped us market and promote to that area,” says B. “They came up with some creative ideas to help market the legalization movement as well as our music. I have to give a hats off to Sony for that because they were not afraid.”

One of those ideas was the inclusion of a fact sheet with the band’s second album Black Sunday, separating fact from fiction about cannabis. It was quite eye-opening for this writer at the time, whom was raised during Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” era, which found us repeating the slogan in unison, day-after-day in our elementary school classrooms.

Cypress Hill’s cannabis fact-sheet, included in 1993’s “Black Sunday” LP

“I don’t know who’s idea it was to put those liner notes in there, it might have been a collective decision, but we felt that we needed make an even broader statement than what we were saying lyrically in our music. So here were 19 facts in bold type that let you know something that you didn’t know,” says Sen. “I think that opened a lot of eyes that were highly against marijuana, cannabis or hemp, and for people that thought we were just a bunch of party boys. We were actually educated about what we were talking about, we just had to give it to you in the right context with those liner notes.”

“We wanted people to know that we weren’t just about smoking, we were about educating people about all aspects of the culture. We teamed up with NORML, High Times, and Jack Herer and put this information out there to people, so they would read it, share it, learn from it, be inspired by it and continue the fight, if they chose to be a part of it,” says B.