“We Got Together And Smoked A Tonne Of Weed Just To Celebrate."

So how does Sen Dog hold his shit together when performing after a compression session? “Well, the lyrics that you write, and you put down – that’s an extension of your person, you know what I mean? You should know those. I mean, don’t get me wrong, there’s been times where I’ve forgotten lyrics onstage or whatever. That happens.” Sen Dog blames the booze for these lapses, however (“I used to drink a lot back in the day”). He chuckles, “I felt that I was better back then. I missed a lot of stuff, but now the most important thing of all is the performance.

“I used to drink a lot back in the day.”

“Being onstage with Cypress Hill is a high that I can pretty much say is unmatched by any other thing and just watching the respect that people give us onstage is very special. I take it very seriously and so does the band. And when you come out to see Cypress Hill, we want you to remember that performance for the rest of your life.”    

Casting his mind back about quarter of a century, Sen Dog credits music with taking him and his cohorts “away from stuff that could get [them] arrested or, you know, worse”. “When I first got into hip hop I started writing raps and rhyming, and my friends started doing it too, you know what I mean? It definitely started taking us away from doing dangerous things, because all of a sudden we knew we had a skill and that was more important than anything: getting better at what we do and being better rappers and stuff like that.”

Have you seen the Dennis Hopper-directed film Colors? Well Sen Dog and B-Real were in a gang called Neighborhood Family, which was affiliated with the Bloods who feature in the film alongside their rival gang, the Crips. The pair’s gangbanging past resulted in B-Real getting shot in the lung back in 1988, so it’s certainly a blessing they discovered music. Sen Dog figures if he hadn’t found this creative outlet, he “probably would be an angry soul”. “A good friend of mine Everlast told me one time, while I was going through a really rough patch in life, he said, ‘Hey, man, just take it out on the music,’ and at first I thought he was talking about, you know, it’s like a form of therapy or whatever, but it’s not. It is that but it’s also putting truth into something that is gonna affect someone that hears it and maybe help them with their lives, and I think that’s the best part about it.”