B-Real, Xzibit and Demrick have spent decades around rap and weed. On “This Thing of Ours,” the Serial Killers trio sound loose, sharp and fully in command. In this conversation with High Times, B-Real and Xzibit look back on first smokes, touring in the pre-legal era, building cannabis businesses and why age still means nothing if the hunger is there.
“We still can rap circles around half the motherfuckers that are doing this shit right now who are younger than us.” B-Real is filled with aplomb. The Cypress Hill frontman, now 55, has been pumping out albums and rocking stages for nearly 40 years, giving him the hard-won wisdom to school even the cockiest younger rappers. The same can be said about Xzibit, whose résumé includes multiple collaborations with Dr. Dre, most notably on 2001, an era-defining run on MTV with Pimp My Ride, and a spot on the legendary Up In Smoke Tour alongside Eminem, Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, Westside Connection, Ice Cube, Warren G, Kurupt, MC Ren and Nate Dogg.
Together with Demrick, B-Real and Xzibit are also part of Serial Killers, a side project they’ve been building since 2013 with albums like Day of the Dead and Summer of Sam. Their latest set, This Thing of Ours, is a master class in lyricism and, in many ways, a flex. As the title suggests, it’s fully theirs. They rap about what they want, pick the beats they want, this time courtesy of Scoop Deville, and make the music they want to make. There’s no pressure to chart, no label breathing down their necks and certainly no urgency to sell a million copies.
Both B-Real and Xzibit also have other ventures bringing in revenue, and some of them involve weed. B-Real has championed cannabis his entire career. In 1993, Cypress Hill made a stop at Omaha Music Hall, where a hilariously large fake joint dominated the stage and burned throughout the show. The group repeatedly pushed for legalization through activism and, today, B-Real owns Dr. Greenthumb’s dispensaries in California. Xzibit, meanwhile, has launched his own cannabis business, West Coast Cannabis, with locations in Bel-Air, Marina Del Rey and Chatsworth.
During the interview, Xzibit makes a stop at one of his facilities and walks through rows of marijuana plants waiting to be harvested. It’s a surreal sight. In the 1990s, when Cypress Hill and Xzibit were omnipresent, recreational and medicinal marijuana were still illegal. It wasn’t as easy as stopping by the nearest dispensary to stock up on your favorite strains. You had to rely on random fans in whatever city you were in, or have a plug. Here, B-Real and Xzibit look back on those early days, the current state of the cannabis business and ageism in hip-hop.
High Times: Cypress Hill’s relationship with weed goes way back. I want to ask you about a story that Sen Dog told me. He said one of the first times you smoked weed as a kid, you smoked a joint with him on his porch, then he had to go to work. When he came back eight hours later, you were still in the same spot and hadn’t moved. Can you corroborate that?
B-Real: That’s his exaggerated story. Of course he doesn’t tell people that he bullied me into smoking my first joint. But yeah, no, that happened. But it didn’t happen the way he said it. We smoked before he went to work, and we had a whole bunch of homies in the neighborhood, so I went and hung out with them. Then I came back to his crib when he was getting off work. That was the normal get-down. We’d link up with Sen before he went to work security at JC Penney, then we’d meet up with him to smoke him out after. So the story wasn’t exactly true. I’ll tell you that. I’ll smoke his ass under the table, hands down, today.
So it wasn’t like you were frozen there for eight hours and couldn’t move?
B-Real: [Laughs] No. Nothing has ever done that to me except maybe some mushrooms, but not no weed.
He said that his dad came home and was like, “I think there’s something wrong with your friend.”
B-Real: What was wrong with me was that I was friends with him [laughs].
What’s up, X? Welcome to the conversation.
Xzibit: What up! What’s going down?
Thanks for joining. We’re talking about weed origin stories. Do you remember the first time you smoked?
Xzibit: I was in high school. My friend Richard Harvey and I had a mutual friend called Wally, this short, white, redhead kid. We had some weed and I had never smoked weed. He had a green Buick Skylark that we went out and smoked in in the parking lot at lunch and, from what I know now about weed, it was some compressed, super-seedy, nasty motherfuckin’ brick weed, right? He broke it down and put it in the joint. He couldn’t roll very well and there were sticks coming out of the sides. I didn’t know what I was looking at, right? I smoked it and it was trash, but that was my first time.
High Times: Did you get high?
Xzibit: I don’t know. I was just like, “Damn, this is not a good experience.” But I didn’t know. I was just smoking weed. I was just happy to have the experience. But from what I know now, it was super trash. I didn’t really get high until I started smoking out of Philly blunts. Then we would just keep the whole thing. Instead of breaking it down, we would kind of squeeze the tobacco out, then pack it back and make it a full cigar again. I think that’s the first time I really got high. That’s how I started in the beginning. I didn’t know how to roll, so we would just dump out the tobacco.
But that first time, something about it made you want to try it again. Was it like, “Let’s see if this really works”?
Xzibit: You do things when you’re that young. Of course, I smoked it one time. Why not do it a second time? The second time was better. It was better weed.
Remember when bowls would pop because of the seeds?
Xzibit: Shit was popping everywhere. It was like, “What the hell?”
What about you, B? Do you remember your very first time?
B-Real: Absolutely. I was probably in the fifth grade.
Xzibit: Damn, you got me beat right there.
B-Real: I was a fast kid. I hung out with these four other kids and we all listened to metal, oldies and shit like that. We had one older homeboy who was a gangster to us. He was a young gangbanger at that point, but he was older than us. We looked up to him and, after school, we’d go to his crib and listen to either oldies or some metal. He’d break out this little acrylic bong, about eight inches tall, with big graphics. We’d smoke out of his fucking bong. I didn’t know what we were doing. I was just like, “Well, fuck, they’re doing it. Let’s go.” We’d all leave and go our individual ways. But when I got home, I didn’t realize I had the munchies. Every time I got home, I was asking my mother for food and she’s like, “Why are you so hungry when you come home from school all the time?” Because I had the fucking munchies and I didn’t realize that’s what it was. That was my first experience. I was hitting bongs before joints.
In the ’90s, we had to try really hard to get weed. I remember having to go to North Omaha to meet up with some shady individuals to get it, and now you can just go to a dispensary and get it yourself. When you were on tour back then, how did you get weed?
B-Real: It was a gamble because not everywhere had good weed. You had to know someone in that town or meet someone who knew somebody. It was hit and miss for the first six or seven years until we started cultivating our own shit and taking it on the road. It was stuff our friends grew because we didn’t trust what we’d be able to find. Once we ran out of whatever we brought with us, it got sketchy and you had to try to find people. Back then, there were none of these social media platforms to communicate with anyone. It’s so much easier now because there are so many cultivators out there in each state who are very talented, so even if it’s black market, it’s probably pretty good, whereas back in the day, black market was absolute shit.
[Editor’s Note: At this point, Xzibit pulls up to his dispensary and walks through rows of hanging marijuana plants.]
B-Real: Oh, wow. Damn, you got there fast. You were just in the car.
I take it you’re at West Coast Cannabis?
Xzibit: Yeah, I’m at my store in the Valley.
How many locations are there?
Xzibit: We have Bel-Air, Chatsworth and we just opened our store in Marina Del Rey.
I heard you just celebrated two years at Bel-Air, right?
Xzibit: Absolutely.
How did you go about getting weed on tour? Was it similar?
Xzibit: We always had it. We just illegally trafficked it.
When recreational and medicinal weed started becoming legal, were you surprised, or did you always think it would happen?
Xzibit: For me, it really didn’t change anything except now we’re just not getting in trouble for it.
B-Real: When we started going to places like Amsterdam in the early ’90s and seeing what they were doing, the structure of their cannabis culture and business, I knew it was possible for us. No one could call when, but as soon as people started getting into their activist and advocate bag and really wanted to make change, that’s when you saw the change happen. Like Xzibit said, it didn’t change much because we always had our own shit and we weren’t depending on anyone else, but it definitely made it easier to not have to sneak around or any of that shit. We could smoke freely and not have to fucking worry about it anymore, so it wasn’t necessarily a shock. It was more relief, like, finally these motherfuckers got it.
Is there any less allure because it is legal?
B-Real: Yeah, there is that, and for the thrill-seekers, the black market still exists. It’s out there for you if you want it. It ain’t going nowhere. And the work’s not done yet. There’s still a ways to go in terms of legalization. Until we’re federally legal across the board, there’s plenty of work to do. Because trying to be a multi-state operator with a licensing format is almost impossible to ensure that the licensees that, let’s just say, come under Dr. Greenthumb’s. Let’s just say I do licensing deals with Greenthumb’s, much like how Xzibit and the rest of us operate. We partner up with people through licensing unless we own a piece of that license. But in multi-state operations, you can’t necessarily supervise the shops everywhere and you can’t tell them what to do. You can only give them suggestions on how to operate. If they wanted to say, “Hey, fuck you, we got your name up here. We’re going to operate it the way we want. As long as we’re doing it according to the law, you can’t tell us how to operate.” When it’s federally legal and we’re allowed to franchise, then we could give them a playbook they absolutely have to follow. We can look through the books, we can do all the fucking things and make sure they’re operating the way all the others operate within the franchise. Right now, it’s too complicated.
The taxes in every state make it practically impossible for the margins to make sense, so there’s a lot of work to do. We need to get it federally legal so all of us who want to be in this business, whether it’s just in our home states or we want to operate as multi-state operators because we feel our brand has that sort of strength in the market, can do it with fewer complications and get a fair shake. A lot of these states turned over a lot of fucking money in tax revenue through the cannabis industry. We bailed out a lot of state economies through cannabis culture, legalization, decriminalization and all that we have in place. The fucking nation needs to say thank you to this business that brought money out of nowhere.
I’m pretty sure Colorado taxpayers got money back from the cannabis industry.
Xzibit: There’s definitely a lot of work to be done in that aspect. There needs to be a tax when it becomes federally legal. It should be 3%, the same as alcohol and tobacco.
What’s the tax now?
Xzibit: Right now, it’s at 38%.
Is federal legalization any closer?
B-Real: No, not yet. I think there’s too many other things going on for any one of those politicians to be focused on cannabis right now. It’s actually up to the cannabis advocates to keep pressing, instead of sitting on their hands and just being thankful for what we got. We got to keep pressing because politicians ain’t going to do it. This dickhead president ain’t going to do it. The people got to keep pressing.
What are your daily rituals when it comes to smoking these days? What do you prefer: blunts, joints, bongs?
B-Real: Xzibit smokes tree bark [laughs]. He wraps his shit with Backwoods, and I call it tree bark.
Xzibit: [Laughs] Look, man, you get samples of everything. So I just kind of like to roll joints and concentrates together, sometimes in the joint if I have to, but most of the time I roll it in the wood.
Are we smoking all day?
Xzibit: Yeah, it doesn’t really slow me down. It’s good. A cup of coffee and I’m good.
B-Real: For me, it’s joints on papers with a glass tip, and sometimes we’re smoking hash holes. And for those that don’t know what that is, some other folks call them donuts, but it’s a joint with hash lined right in the middle. High Times folks know what the fuck that is. We smoke through the day. It’s part of who we are, and it’s not because we have to, it’s because we want to.
Cypress Hill has always advocated for cannabis. It’s cool to see that you turned it into a business. You too, Xzibit.
Xzibit: But it takes the team. It takes a lot of good people around you, and good people are hard to find. So once you’ve got a good team, you take care of them, and it becomes like a family.
April 20 is coming up. I grew up on 420 North 41st Street. My dad didn’t understand why somebody stole our sign every single year. Now he knows [laughs]. How do you guys celebrate 4/20?
B-Real: Every day is 4/20. It’s still the same.
Xzibit: Yeah, what do you mean? What’s the difference?
B-Real: Everybody else parties on 4/20 because it’s like every stoner’s birthday and shit.
Are you doing anything special at your stores?
Xzibit: Yeah, our grand opening is on 4/20 at the West Coast Cannabis Marina Del Rey store, but I’ll be going to the other locations as well.
Anything happening at your store, B?
B-Real: There’s specials, there’s flavor drops, there’s meet-and-greets and stuff like that. Usually we’re out of town. This is probably the one 4/20 in the last couple years where we’re actually at home, not doing anything. But I might stop into one of the dispensaries, maybe San Diego or something like that. We’re dropping music that day as well.
One of my favorite songs you did was actually “Dr. Greenthumb’s.”
B-Real: Yeah, that’s the calling card. It gets lit.
Cypress Hill just released a new single, too. You’re busy.
B-Real: I’ve been blessed to be locked in with two amazing albums: the Serial Killers album, This Thing of Ours, and this Cypress Hill Spanish album. Two completely different things. I’m blessed to be working like this.
Who would have thought all these years later that you’d still be doing it at such a high level? No pun intended [laughs].
B-Real: We try to stay busy. I think our school, the gold school, we were very young at heart when we started this but advanced in our years because of the street life we led before this. It sort of gave us an advantage in the mentality, like only the strong survive shit, right? We were very young at it, and we’ve kept this young, competitive mentality throughout the years, even as we’re now in our 50s. We don’t look at ourselves like we’re in our 50s. We feel like we’re in our fucking 30s and 40s and still doing it at the highest level. It’s about the state of mind you’re in. If you feel you’re fucking too old for this shit, you will sound and feel like you’re too old for this shit, and it’ll be done for you. But those of us in this modern age of it, we don’t feel that way. We feel like we’re still competitive. We still can rap circles around half the motherfuckers that are doing this shit right now who are younger than us. Although we do recognize the youngsters that are right there with us, too, because there are plenty of youngsters that get down. But, you know, it’s the competitive spirit. And as long as we’re taking care of ourselves, we’re right in state of mind, we could do this as long as we fucking want.
Absolutely.
B-Real: Look at The Rolling Stones. They’re close to fucking 90 and still doing shows. All of you guys, we all have such a spirit of youth. Like, it’s still there. And I think that helps us age very well. If Madonna could be a pop star at 60-fucking-something or 70-something, whatever she is, why can’t we still be cutting it up? And it’s about how much you put into yourself and how much you put into the art. So fortunately, Xzibit still has that passion. He’s not as old as us yet, but he will be one day. He’ll still have it. He’s got it in him.
The work ethic is insane, too.
B-Real: You got to want to do this, and we still love to do it. I think it shows when you hear or see us do the music that we still love it. If we were just going through the motions, you would hear that and be like, “Ah, this shit is kind of OK,” and you’d flip forward to whatever the next shit is. But when someone still has passion about it, I think you can hear it, and we still definitely do.
