THIRTY YEARS A RECORDING CONCERN, CYPRESS HILL’S STONER SAMPLEDELIA HAS SURVIVED MORE THAN CHANGING TRENDS IN RAP – TRY A BULLET IN THE BACK. SO WHAT’S KEPT THIS BROTHERHOOD TOGETHER – ALTHOUGH SOMETIMES ONLY BARELY – AND IN THE GAME? “WE’RE MORE THAN JUST A HIP-HOP BAND,” THEY TELL ANDY COWAN.

Kings of the Cypress Hill: (from left) B-Real, DJ Muggs, Sen Dog and Eric Bobo, Brixton Academy, London, 1998.

© Alpha Press

THE STREET LOOKED LIKE COUNTLESS OTHER STREETS IN South Central Los Angeles – towering palm trees, picket fences, grids of wooden bungalows – but Louis Freese knew different. It was a dividing line: the border between safety and the opposite. The 17-year-old knew this because he’d crossed it before: as an apprentice with the Family Swan chapter of the Bloods, his initiation had been to spray-paint his crew’s names on a wall in Crips territor y. And he knew the risks: “If you get caught, you’re fucked.”

Today his set were headed to a friend’s house to score weed, but their friend lived in the danger zone. “Normally we would take a gun on a walk like this because of the close borderline,” says Freese – now best known as Cypress Hill rapper B-Real. “But we didn’t. We went out, as they call it, ‘slippin’’ and walked up on this corner. A car pulled up. There’s three guys in it, they all got blue hats, we all have red…”

The car window rolled down and a rifle barrel appeared. As Freese and his fellow Bloods scattered, a shot popped off, catching one of them in the arm. Then the gun swivelled in the direction of Freese.

“I’m running alongside this wall and this guy takes four shots. Three bounce behind me but the fourth ricochets a little bit ahead, bounces off the wall, penetrates my back…”

Freese staggered from the scene. Later, he would learn the bullet had punctured his left lung.

“I got as far as I could on that one lung,” he recalls. “Dipped into this hallway by these apartments on the corner. Looked up, the car was gone. I lost my breath and fell to the ground.”

At nearby Lynwood’s Martin Luther King Jr Hospital (nicknamed ‘Killer King’ for the deadly mishaps of its rookie doctors), it was found the .22 hollow point bullet had fractured into three pieces, two near Freese’s heart and spine. Doctors successfully removed the other fragment and blood from his lung.

Hooked up to breathing apparatus, Freese sur vived. Was it a wake-up call?

PHOTOGRAPH: PIERS ALLARDYCE

Hill communication: DJ Muggs with brothers Brett and Sean Bouldin in The 7A3, 1988; Cypress Hill’s first three LPs, 1993 single Insane In The Brain and 2004 album Till Death Do Us Part; Sen Dog’s brother Mellow Man Ace, New York, 1992; “Need a light?” Sen Dog, Muggs and B-Real go for a ride; Sen performing How I Could Just Kill A Man with Rage Against The Machine, Carson, LA, 1994; if the cap fits… B-Real, Sen Dog and DJ Muggs in 1992.

Getty (3), Michael Miller/Sony Music