International

DJ Muggs, from Cypress Hill, closes ICBC and opens the doors to three days of Spannabis

Published

1 year ago

March 15, 2024

DJ Muggs, music producer, member of Cypress Hill and founder of the artistic collective Soul Assassins, closed the ICBC conference cycle (International Cannabis Business Conferences) in Barcelona. In a relaxed and humorous conversation with the comedian and editor of the magazine “West Coast Cannabis Magazine”, Ngaio Bealum, Muggs recalled his long relationship with cannabis, telling how at a time when artists and musicians still hid their public consumption, Cypress Hill decided to assert themselves as “the weed band”.

Wearing sunglasses, a cap and his usual baggy clothes, Lawrence Muggerud, better known as DJ Muggs, enters the stage at the Auditorí de Cornellá, where ICBC took place yesterday, with a swagger. “Yo, whassup?” launched to an audience of businesspeople, engineers, growers and longtime fans, who stayed until the end to see and hear it.

Born in the neighborhood of Queens, New York, in 1968, into an Italian-American family and later adopted by a family of Norwegian origin, Muggerud is one of the central figures of the North American hip hop scene. A pioneer on all fronts, he was one of the first white people to stand out in an environment that was predominantly black, when he joined the brothers Brett and Bouldin in The 7A3, in the early 80s. Later, with his brothers Senen and Sérgio Reyes (Sen Dog and Mellow Man Ace), friends and neighbors on Cypress Avenue in South Gate, California, founded the first Latin hip hop group, Cypress Hill. The band never hid their passion for cannabis, leaving behind hymns such as “Insane in the Brain”, “Hits from the Bong” or “I want to get High”.

“When you formed Cypress Hill, was being so 'cane-centric' a conscious decision?” Ngaio Bealum asked. “Well, actually I was already with Cypress before The 7A3, since 1980, because they were my family. hood, that's where I met them, in California. We sold weed together, we went around doing our scenes; Then I met these guys from Brooklyn [New York] who had a song called 'The 7A3 Will Rock You', which was a single with Ice-T. I was going to have a party and I invited them, but the DJ didn't show up, so I got ahead of myself and that's how I started doing it. DJ’ing”, said. “Then they invited me to play with them at the concerts with Ice-T and two weeks we were in the studio making the song 'Mad Mad World' for the film 'Colors', which was my first album in 1988. Two months then we were signing a contract with Geffen Records”, he explained.

“I went up on stage and said,'New York City, can I light my joint?' As I turned it on, the phones immediately started ringing…”

He told his friends on Cypress Av. that he was going with them and everything he learned he would bring back. The agent started to tell him “they need a logo”, “they need a concept”, but, he recalled, “the first time they told me about a 'logo' I didn't even know what the word meant (laughs). At that time there wasn’t even the Internet, there was nothing, we learned on the street”. So, if at the time “Run DMC were gangster's rap and Detroit's storyteller; LL Cool J was the beat boy from RAP. I thought about it and said: well we have to be the Cheech & Chong of this shit, because we smoked, but the weed at that time… Dr. Dre said 'I don't smoke weed' because it had caused his brother mental problems ; others said 'calm about it'; and we just thought: 'light it up!'”.

Later, Cypress Hill even took an eight-foot bong to the stage and then there was the famous episode of Saturday Night Live, which he himself recalled: “We were on national television and I was backstage rolling a joint and about eight people came to me and told me: don't light that on stage, don't light that live...' and I said 'no, not calmly' and I knew we had two songs and I couldn't do it in the first song because they would kick us out ; So I went up on stage and said, 'New York City, can I light my joint?' And I lit it up, the phones immediately started ringing and when we left the stage they completely devastated me! But I didn't want to know, we were punk rock, they couldn't fire us!”, he recalls with a laugh, finishing the story: “They told us we couldn't return to Saturday Night Live and I said 'screw Saturday Night Live, I'm the one who doesn't want to come back here anymore!' ”.

“Weed and music are two things that bring people together”

This subversive and honest attitude was a scandal, but it not only gave Cypress Hill a lot of visibility but also earned them a legion of fans who identified with this defiant stance and who were ready to once again challenge the hypocrisy that prevailed at that time, when the greatest Some of the famous people tried to keep their consumption a secret from the gods. “After the hippy culture, they [the Government, the system] tried to put an end to weed. They don't want thinking people, nor do they want happy people, getting along and sharing hugs,” he says, “but weed and music are two things that bring people together. Both gave me the opportunity to meet people I never thought of in my life…”.

DJ Muggs also recalled some episodes, now comical, that he experienced with both Cypress Hill and the Souls Assassins collective, such as the number of times they were arrested and had to confront the police. “When we went to Arizona, the police were on stage telling us: 'you can't smoke on stage'; We went to New Mexico, we had the police on stage; We went to Texas, the police were there waiting for us – and at that time Texas had a no-tolerance law, so if you had a joint, you could spend a year in prison,” he said. “But then New York, LA, they caught you with weed, took you to the police station for just one day, to put you in the system and spit you out the next day… We went through it all.” Other times what they actually did was jump off the stage and run to escape the police. “But I remember that before the European Union was EU, we had to go through the checkpoints. When entering France, they came to the bus with their dogs and everything; and one day Eric Bobo, at a passport control, opened the document and there was a piece of hash stuck to the shitty passport” (laughs).

Among many other memories, DJ Muggs, who at night took over the ICBC closing party at the controls of the mixing table, at the Barcelona Edition Hotel, summarized his life story and his relationship with cannabis in two sentences: “We liked to have fun, man! But when it's time to have fun, we have fun; When it comes to doing business, we do business.”

Spannabis, one of the biggest international cannabis events, opened its doors today at Fira de Cornellá, in Barcelona, for three intense days of sharing and lots of business for professionals in the cannabis industry and the thousands of people who just like the plant. Until Sunday, all roads lead to Spannabis!

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[Disclaimer: Please note that this text was originally written in Portuguese and is translated into English and other languages using an automatic translator. Some words may differ from the original and typos or errors may occur in other languages.]

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Margarita Cardoso de Meneses

Margarita has been a regular contributor to CannaReporter since its inception in 2017, having previously worked for other cannabis-focused media outlets such as Cáñamo magazine (Spain), CannaDouro Magazine (Portugal) and Cannapress. She was part of the original team for the Portuguese edition of Cânhamo in the early 2000s and was part of the organisation of the Global Marijuana March in Portugal between 2007 and 2009.

He recently published the book “Canábis | Cursed and Wonderful” (Ed. Oficina do Livro / LeYA, 2024), dedicated to spreading the history of the plant, its ancestral relationship with the Human Being as a raw material, entheogen and recreational drug, as well as the infinite potential it holds in medicinal, industrial and environmental terms.