IN CONCERT
B-Real of Cypress Hill with Pocket Kings, JM Drumbeats, SirReal, and DJ Speedyshoes
When: Tonight, 10 p.m. (doors at 9)
Where: Club 9ONE9
Tickets: $30 at the Strathcona Hotel, Lyle's Place, Status Hair Lounge, Ditch Records, Complex, ticketweb.ca or the B.C. Smoke Shop
Cypress Hill arrived at a turbulent time in the arc of modern-day music. And with the odds stacked against them, few gave the trio of "funky bilinguals" from Los Angeles even a 50-50 shot of succeeding.
It was the summer of 1991, a stretch that saw the debut of Lollapalooza, the crossover success of Metallica and the official arrival of both Pearl Jam and Nirvana.
Guns 'N Roses was the biggest band in the world, with Garth Brooks and Michael Jackson not far behind.
Despite the odds, the pioneering rap trio found an audience. Cypress Hill's self-titled debut from 1991 - a dizzying, gritty recording full of street Spanglish and songs about getting stoned - effectively changed the course of hip hop.
For the first time, Latinos had a prominent voice in hip hop - that of rapper Louis Freese, a skinny, nasally 21-year-old of Cuban and Mexican descent who went by the name B-Real. Years after the fact, 41-year-old Freese remembers how his group, which is still together today, felt about succeeding on its own terms.
"We managed to reach out to everybody," Freese said Tuesday. "We know where we're from, but we've always wanted to be a world band rather than a regional one. To do that, we had to be more openminded about our music."
Cypress Hill had killer instincts. They were among the first groups to successfully merge hard rock with hardcore rap in a way that didn't seem disingenuous. It had been done before, Freese recalled, but often ineffectively.
"It was pretty much taboo to do anything with a rock band. But we did not give a sh-t what people thought."
They added a live band for some concerts, and worked with both Pearl Jam and Sonic Youth on the soundtrack to 1993's Judgement Night. That same year, Black Sunday, the group's second album, debuted at No. 1 on the sales charts, setting a number of thenrecords in the process.
"We were rock fans, and a lot of our influences from a visual standpoint were based off rock and metal imagery. A lot of the skater kids, BMX kids, rock kids gravitated toward us because we had things in common. It was a punkrock attitude within the hiphop genre."
Black Sunday took Cypress Hill's love of something else - marijuana - to new heights. Black Sunday songs like I Wanna Get High, Insane in the Brain, Legalize It and Hits from the Bong celebrated the pot plant, with Freese emerging as something of a pot provocateur.
To this day, the rapper clearly loves his weed (Freese answers to a slew of pot-derived nicknames, including the Human Smoke Machine, the Buddha Master, Dr. Greenthumb and the Highest Man in the World.)
The biggest pothead in hip hop is no dummy, mind you, having fought legislation south of the border on behalf of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws.
"We've seen a lot of progress and we know that we've contributed to some of it," he said. "We support it fully."
Cypress Hill still tours and records, though less actively than in the past. Freese often operates as a solo act, as do his Cypress Hill mates. But in the end, the goateed rhymer with the unmistakable voice belongs to only one group.
