“We were and are a hardworking band, and whatever accomplishments and whatever record sales we got were not a fluke,” Cypress Hill member Sen Dog explained when asked what he hopes viewers take away from the documentary film Cypress Hill: Insane in the Brain. The group got together with the film’s director and producer for a virtual press conference during TCA. “We actually worked hard to get everything that Cypress Hill has earned. And in the midst of people seeing us smoking on stage and making a party out of it, everything, there's a lot of work that goes into it and I want fans to recognize that. The documentary, I think, catches the hard work and all the traveling and everything that has gone on.”
(Courtesy of SHOWTIME)
“I've been wanting to do this documentary for many years,” director Estevan Oriol revealed, who acted as the group’s touring manager and directed several of their music videos. “I just wanted to show all the doors that these guys have kicked down and the game-changing that they did. I don't feel like they ever got their flowers for what they've done because of the content in the songs. Their first song was ‘Kill a Man’ and then there was ‘Pigs’ and the weed songs. And at that time, none of that was popular on the radio or MTV. So, there wasn't a lot of radio play and a lot of video play. But nobody got to see everything that we were doing behind the scenes. We were the kind of band had to tour no matter what.. and we weren't scared to tour. A lot of hip-hop guys were scared to fly. They didn't want to go outside their comfort zone. And we weren't like that. We went anywhere. We wanted to go more places. While I was with Cypress Hill, I went to 44 countries. And we went to every state multiple times. So that impacted the success, I think, of Cypress Hill — that we toured the world multiple times, that we really touched down in people's backyards and shook hands and kissed babies and everything. So, I think that's kind of what I wanted to show with this documentary, is it was kind of like showing what we didn't get to show through not having radio play or video play in those times. And we've been around for 30 years, so that was important for people to know and to see.”
Having dreamt of making this documentary for a long time, Estevan Oriol had been recording Cypress Hill footage for a long time. But some of the footage also comes from the band members themselves. “For me, it was documentation, just something to be able to look back for me, like, man, I could show my kids this, the fun that we were having,” explained Eric Bobo on the footage he contributed. “To have footage of us at Woodstock from our eyes is something that a person outside of the camp may not really be able to capture exactly like that. And we were just having fun with it. We were really just, I mean, showing different sides of us and documenting stuff and having fun and everything like that. We were just getting all of that footage that is now being used. And I think that it was just important. It was important documentation. And who knew that we would be still here. And it was just great to be able to do a tour, do all these tours, and then go back at the house and look back at what we did.”
“I think we all carried the cameras back then just to be able to get whatever we felt we wanted to get and look back at it,” B Real added. “It was basically for us. We had no idea whether it was going to make the documentary or not because that wasn't even in our minds that, oh, we're doing this so that later on we could put this in a documentary. No. We were in the moment. We were in the moment just capturing those moments and looking back at them for the sake of seeing what we had just done and having fun and laughing at it. I mean, there was times that Bobo and I would finish our set with ‘We Ain't Going Out Like That’ on a live show. And a lot of times during that song, Bobo and I would end the set by running up into the crowd where the mosh pits were. And Bobo would have his little camera and we would get stuff like that. Tat particular thing didn't make it into the documentary because that footage got stolen on a vacation that Bobo was on.. It wasn't a big plan. We just bought a bunch of cameras. Everybody had their own, and we got what we got.”
Cypress Hill: Insane in the Brain showcases how the group developed their signature sound, which didn’t happen overnight. “It was more of a lot of little pieces put together, like a musical collage,” DJ Muggs explained about how he would piece together 10-second samples and build songs around them. “We spent so much time hanging out as friends. We were just together all day every day, 16 hours a day. I knew B so well and I knew his voice so well that as we were making music and as we were honing our sound, once we honed our sound, I just knew what would make his voice jump off the music the best, it would just radiate the best. It was just coming from spending time and just experimenting. And we experimented together and came up with the Cypress Hill sound. It was a year, two years of demo tapes before we was making songs that sounded like records.”
With so much footage and so much story to tell, the biggest challenge in creating Cypress Hill: Insane in the Brain was choosing what to showcase and what to leave out. “Each guy is a legend in his own right, so each guy could have their own feature-length film,” producer Peter J. Scalettar shared. “This was an embarrassment of riches. I would say the hardest thing was there's a ton of stuff that never made the light of day in the film that that's a bummer. But at a certain point, you just have to make these hard choices to go, all right, what's the stuff that really helps to effectively illustrate this wild ride over the past 30 years?”
Experience 30 years of hip-hop in Cypress Hill: Insane in the Brain, airing tonight at 8/7c on Showtime, part of the network’s Hip Hop 50 celebration.