Archive for the ‘MUSIC’ Category

Cypress Hill
Troubadour
8-6-11

Better than . . . smoking at home.

“This is our first time rockin’ the Troubadour,” said B-Real of Cypress Hill, speaking from the fabled club on the twentieth anniversary of the legendary rap group’s multi-platinum self-titled debut. “It took us 20 years to get here.”

​Undeniably one of the most influential groups in the history of hip-hop, the South Gate stoners were the first Latino group to sell a millions copies, with four of their first five records earning platinum status — and ’93′s Black Sunday going triple-plat. They’ve ignited a revolution, becoming cultural icons for their groundbreaking early records and their medical marijuana advocacy. They also host their own SmokeOut, a single-day rap and rock music festival where medical marijuana patients can smoke freely on site. On Saturday night, they celebrated their storied career with an intimate sold out show at the Troubadour.

In the late 1980s, D.O.C. was recruited by Dr. Dre to Southern California from his childhood home of Dallas. Shortly thereafter, the Texas-bred wunderkind helped bring gangsta rap to the mainstream, ghostwriting large portions of the biggest West Coast classics, starting with Straight Outta Compton. He gave voice to the volatile yet comedic character of Eazy-E and helped define the personas of Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg. The MCs who used his words admired not just his rhymes but his ability to mold ideas and fragments into memorable songs. “He showed me how to take the greatness out of the words and combine that into a verse, a hook, a bridge,” Snoop recently told English radio personalityTim Westwood.

D.O.C.’s 1989 solo debut, No One Can Do It Better, was expected to make him a star like his collaborators. Featuring his nimble, aggressive yet warm chops, it’s considered one of the best rap debuts of all time, andJay-Z cites it as a profound influence. But while driving home drunk and high from a video shoot for a song from the album, D.O.C. fell asleep and spun out; he was thrown out of the back window before the car slammed into a tree. “I had so much in my system that they couldn’t sedate me,” he recalls over a late dinner at Sherman Oaks restaurant Senor Fred. He fought the medics when they tried to insert a breathing tube, causing it to scar his larynx. As a result, he speaks in what sounds like a stage whisper, almost like he’s talking through a smoker’s voice box.

He became utterly demoralized, so much so that when his music came on at a club, he would leave. “I didn’t want to hear that voice,” he says.

Though his subsequent rap albums wouldn’t prove successful — after all, he’d lost his trademark booming baritone — he nonetheless remained tight with his famous friends. He helped Dre and Snoop write The Chronic and Doggystyle, as well as Dre’s best-selling 1999 work 2001.

D.O.C., who is 43 and was born Tracy Curry, became relatively content in his position as ghostwriter to the stars, a post he held for two decades. But though he was one of the original owners of Death Row Records and estimates he wrote more than half of each of the first Ruthless Records albums — including Straight Outta Compton and Eazy-Duz-It, which have sold about 5 million albums combined — he never got his business affairs straight, and so never received his proper royalties. Content to stay in Dre’s posh houses, eat fancy meals with the crew and get blitzed, D.O.C. didn’t grow rich the way those around him did. “I was totally in the grips of the drug lifestyle,” he says. “The only thing I was really concerned with was having enough money in my pocket so that I knew I could get high when I wanted to.”

Making matters worse, in late 2009 he split with Dre, who’d put him up in a rented house and paid him a $20,000 annual retainer while they worked on Dre’s long-awaited albumDetox. The situation came to a head that October, when, eating dinner at an Arnie Morton‘s steak house, the pair had a huge blowup and parted ways. This wasn’t the first time they’d taken a break from working together, but the nasty argument — which D.O.C. refuses to discuss — convinced him that their partnership was over.

Since then, he has sought to get his life back together, preparing for highly experimental surgery to restore his voice, mentoring young rappers, going to Alcoholics Anonymousand settling down in his home life.

Still, the split from Dre, combined with the fact that he might never be able to rap like he once did, threatened to embitter him permanently. “I’m probably one of the best motherfuckers to ever pick up a microphone and spit in it,” he says, “but you’d never really know that, because I never really got a chance to show you.”

Things haven’t been all that bad for D.O.C. After falling out with Dre he moved back to Dallas and began living part-time with the stunning and iconic R&B singer Erykah Badu and their 7-year-old daughter, Puma. Also in the house are Puma’s well-pedigreed half-siblings: 13-year-old brother Seven, whose father is Outkast‘s Andre 3000, and 2-year-old sister Mars, whose pops is venerated New Orleans rapper Jay Electronica.

With all of these musical legends coming in and out, it’s quite a scene. Badu’s Dallas home is a “beautiful house right off of a really nice body of water,” D.O.C. says, adding that he remains enchanted with her. In fact, he hopes to film a reality show before long about the goings-on in her house, ending with their wedding.

D.O.C. is well-built and light-skinned, and has a radiant physical presence; upon meeting him it’s immediately clear why he was groomed for stardom. He’s tremendously charismatic, striding into the Ventura Boulevard Mexican eatery today and chatting up the staff members, many of whom he knows from his days living just across the street. For much of the latter half of the aughts he was ensconced there, just down the street from the Record One studio that Dre liked to use. (That is, when he wasn’t randomly flying his collaborators out to places like Hawaii and Reno, where 2001 was largely created.)

Joined by his new business partner, D.O.C. sits down in a secluded booth and orders an iced tea rather than a beer. He’s “detoxing,” he notes. There’s truth to this, as he’s been sober for more than six months. But it’s also a pun, referencing Dr. Dre’s supposedly forthcoming album, which has become the Chinese Democracy of hip-hop, so long delayed that many doubt it will be any good — if it ever emerges.

D.O.C. began working on Detox in 2005, after Dre already had been struggling on it in vain for years. It has sprung a series of uninspiring singles, and D.O.C. began to clash with Dre over matters both creative and financial, believing Dre wasn’t paying him what he was worth. Meanwhile, in his stunning May conversation with Tim Westwood, Snoop asserted that Dre had surrounded himself with the wrong people, a cast of lesser-known producers, engineers and MCs. It was he and D.O.C. who represented the historical “backbone” of Dre’s operation, Snoop went on, through his own gangsta bravado and D.O.C.’s song structures. “It has to be … holy matrimony,” Snoop said, “and right now it’s holy macaroni.” (Dre could not be reached for comment for this story.)

The fallout with Dre hurt D.O.C. deeply, and he returned to Dallas at the beginning of 2010, unsure what lay ahead. Then, in an interview with HipHopDX.com earlier this year, he announced the crystallization of plans for a medical procedure that could restore his vocal capabilities. The science fiction–sounding surgery would use stem cell tissue and be spearheaded by reveredBarcelona-based physician Paolo Macchiarini— famous for performing a windpipe transplant, using a woman’s own stem cells. In June, D.O.C. traveled to a Sacramento hospital for a series of tests to see if his body could handle the surgery. He’s still awaiting the results but says he feels optimistic.

He even brought a camera crew to the hospital for another reality TV show he’s planning, to be bundled with footage from a musical talent search. He’s in the process of training a handful of potential rap stars, including a genteel white 19-year-old namedMike Bond from a tiny town in central Texas. These unknowns will perform lyrics D.O.C. has written, and their verses will be paired on tracks with urban superstars in his Rolodex — including Snoop, Andre 3000 and Badu. D.O.C. says he’s in talks with production companies for the program, which he plans to titleI Got My Voice Back.

He hasn’t been totally stiffed. D.O.C. says he receives about $20,000 per year in writer’s royalties. This is, of course, only a fraction of what he’s owed, considering that the works he contributed to continue to sell well. Until recently, the majority of even this modest sum went to the IRS, owing to unpaid back taxes. He says a combination of loyalty and substance-abuse issues kept him from legally pursuing his publishing credits over the years.

But now he’s ready for a new day. He has paired up with a crackerjack PR rep named Chad Kiser, as well as a new full-time business partner, John Huffman, who has worked hard to get him the royalties he deserves. “We’re happy now about the situation with 2001,” Huffman says, adding that D.O.C. still hasn’t received his due from his Ruthless contributions.

While I was writing this story, something else fortuitous happened to the ghostwriter — he received a call from Dr. Dre, who invited him to come back to California. Snoop was brought back into the fold as well, and the trio resumed work on Detox at Dre’s Burbankstudios in late July. D.O.C. says he feels reinvigorated creatively, and that he brought Dre ideas to help “get that core audience back, with those types of songs and that California vibe from the Chronic album.”

Don’t scoff: D.O.C. insists the album really is coming soon. “Dre’s pretty fucking close,” he says, adding that he plans to move back to L.A. for six months, time enough, he contends, to complete the work.

This go-around, however, D.O.C. plans a different type of working relationship with the famed producer. Instead of having Dre put him up and pay him a salary, he’s going to rent a house for himself — “in Marina del Rey, with the artists” — and make sure he receives his proper back-end publishing. He says Snoop has called their recent reunion “magical.”

D.O.C. isn’t entirely certain what caused Dre’s change of heart, because Dre told him he didn’t want to focus on the past. He speculates that one factor may have been Snoop’s impassioned plea to Westwood, while another is simply that their loyalty runs deep. “We all got love for each other,” he says. “I love Dre like my fucking family.”

Dre appears to feel the same way. One night in the studio a couple weeks ago, he took a break from playing his new beats to put on a Beethoven symphony. As it played, Dre noted that the composer had created the work after he had gone deaf.

“And he drilled the point into my head, that most of Beethoven’s greatest compositions were created after he lost his hearing,” D.O.C. says. “I got the message.”

Written by:

Ben Westhoff

Photo by:

Brandon Showers

If you meet David Cohn, he won’t tell you he’s a rapper. Should you ask him what he does for a living, he’ll answer that he’s unemployed. He used to drive a Budweiser truck around Chicago, delivering beer to every liquor store south of the Loop. Then he got a job working in a shaman shop owned by a former producer for the Flaming Lips and Mercury Rev. He sold DMT, ayahuasca, salvia and enough esoteric psychedelics to make William Burroughs bug out. But only until 11 a.m. Then he’d go play pingpong.

The downside of working in a hallucinogenic Wonkaland is that there’s always someone with Day-Glo hair and a Kombucha tea addiction willing to work for soy milk and scrip. So two years ago, Cohn was axed and his personal life pinwheeled into tragedy: withering substance-abuse addictions among family members, crippling debt, a severe case of pneumonia that left him temporarily incapacitated and scarred by a pair of minor strokes.

Several months ago, Cohn fled the trauma — and the backbreaking Second City wind — to relocate to L.A., the home of his new label, the appropriately eccentric Anticon. Last week, he released Family & Friends, a bleak, melancholic and wry art-rap record that ranks as the most searing and powerful of his dozen-plus disc catalog. But unless you knew better, you would never know that Cohn was really Serengeti, his primary musical alter ego.

Serengeti emerged more than a dozen years ago, during a year Cohn spent studying abroad in Sweden, watching nature videos and teaching himself how to make music — a predilection that, like depression, runs in his blood. His great-uncle Sonny Cohn was a world-famous trumpeter in Count Basie‘s band, but the younger Cohn was raised during the Golden Age and grew transfixed by KMD and MF Doom. So he started rapping, got weirder, turned semipro.

“I’d get offers to headline in Chicago, but as the 10th rapper on a bill of 10. By the time I performed, the only people left were the rappers,” Cohn says, speaking from his small and sparsely furnished apartment in Glassell Park — his furniture having been hocked onCraigslist to help finance the move.

After all, the contemporary indie hip-hop world is a war of attrition, especially for those with obtuse sensibilities. Rap fans prefer their cult artists as cartoons, while Serengeti eschews self-promotion and contrived mythology. The latest trend is to name rap songs after SEO-friendly icons like Donald Trump, Miley Cyrus and Michael Jordan. By contrast, Serengeti’s most popular song is “Dennehy” (from the 2006 album of the same name), a paean to the gruff actor best known to the sub-30 set as Big Tom Callahan in Tommy Boy.

But Serengeti isn’t rapping as himself on “Dennehy.” Instead, the song is performed by one of his alter egos, Kenny Dennis, a 48-year-old white guy besotted with bratwurst, Buicks, onions, softball, Richard Daley, actors Dennehy and Tom Berenger, and his wife, Jueles — not to mention the Bulls, White Sox, Blackhawks and da Bears. Kenny has a mustache the size of Mike Ditka‘s forehead and an affinity for O’Doul’s — not because he’s a recovering alcoholic but because he finds it delicious.

Why would a black/Jewish rapper adopt the pug-nosed Polish slang of a Bill Swerski Super Fan? It all started when Cohn was watching the Little League World Series on TV one year, and the announcers were asking the kids about their favorite actors and athletes. “I wondered what it would be like if someone’s favorite actor was Brian Dennehy,” Cohn says, sipping coffee and wearing pajama pants at 5 p.m.

But Kenny Dennis is neither SNL sketch nor satire. Cohn’s genius lies in his three-dimensional commitment to his creations — a worldview bounded by regional chains, Windy City intonation and tribal loyalty. Nagged by the willful suspension of belief required to accept a middle-aged, blue-collar man rapping, Cohn cultivated the elaborate backstory.

“Serengeti explores the medium’s potential as art. Not in the self-indulgent or abstract-for-the-sake-of sense, but in the sense of a real person exploring the range of their experiences, emotional and otherwise,” says Mike Eagle, a friend of Cohn’s since their days at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, and a gifted art rapper in his own right. “Serengeti is vulnerable, and makes his work valuable in a way that economics or popularity can’t define.”

Serengeti is the rap Sam Beckett, quantum leaping into different spirits, including a different, 1993 iteration of Kenny — who was, in this telling, then known as KD, Tha Killa Deacon.

“It’s fun for me to be Kenny because he’s just a simple guy who’s happy all the time. All he wants is his wife, Jueles, sports, and some brats and chops,” Cohn says. “I’m usually depressed. When I’m not Kenny, everything I write draws back to my real life, which has often been really fucked up.” To wit: His first girlfriend, of a decade, died in a car accident, folks close to him have had drug problems, and he still has to deal with the spatial problems caused by his strokes.

Family & Friends navigates similarly complex terrain: the reinvention of self (“California”), deadbeat dads (“Long Ears”) and the ravages of heroin (“Tracks”).

Its offbeat pop production was handled by Advanced Base (formerly known for the lo-fi electronic project Casiotone for the Painfully Alone) and Yoni Wolf of Why?

“He originally came in with more silly, funny lyrics, but I told him to write something from the heart,” Wolf says, discussing the recording process last summer in Oakland, when he and Cohn cut six tracks in as many days. “On the spot, he wrote lines about sleeping on a pool table with his keys and wallet in his jeans to avoid getting them stolen. He’s raw and honest and has a quirky dark sense of humor.”

Kenny Dennis could never leave the Second City, but Serengeti’s keeping his spot in L.A., at least for the time being. In a simultaneous attempt to shed the burdens of the past and avoid paying airline baggage fees, he dumped eight notebooks full of lyrics prior to boarding his one-way flight to LAX.

“I wish I hadn’t thrown away all those notebooks. I had a lot of songs in there, but they felt like they were weighing me down,” Cohn says. “It seemed like I needed to toss them before coming here.”

Since landing in California, Cohn has cut an EP with ambient-experimentalist beat producer Matthewdavid. There also are upcoming albums from his side project Tha Grimm Teachaz and a full-length collaboration with Advance Base, plus a yet-to-be-announced work coming next year with one of the most famous and acclaimed songwriters in indie rock. (Unfortunately his identity can’t be revealed, due to a press embargo from one of the labels involved.)

Despite his misfortunes, and his habit of being perennially overlooked, Cohn has carved out a modest but fiercely devoted following, made up of those who like their reality rap based on immutable realities: transformations, temptations and all points of psychic unrest. He’s a writer who happens to rap and not the inverse.

“I could never stop. I hear words in my head or overhear something on the street and I have to write it down or else it will be lost forever,” Cohn says. “It’s a curse. Write, write, write, edit, edit, and then go back over it. It’s not about sitting down to write, it’s about being open to the ideas.”

Written by:

Jeff Weiss

Photo by:

Jenne Warren

The annual International Pop Overthrow festival continues here and at other venues around the Southland, and tonight’s lineup is loaded with a diverse variety of musicians working within the loose confines of the power-pop genre. Local trio the Wallburds alternate between smart, not-necessarily-retro pop-rock anthems like “Moments Before Midnight” and such intimate ballads as “Kindergarten Crush.” The L.A. duo Loch & Key aren’t strictly poppy, although Sean Hoffman used to play bass with the respected Bay Area alt-rockers American Music Club. Leyla Akdogan is an engaging chanteuse on the pair’s generally mellow songs, which glide from bossa nova idylls to dreamy balladry. Openers Black Kettle purvey sunny pop songs that are distinguished by cheery, ultra-femme harmonies. With Cannoneers and Ansel.

Catch them here

Written by:

Falling James

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For a band that practically bleed frequent-flyer miles, jam-lifers Phish surprisingly haven’t touched down in Tinseltown since 2003. (That is, if you don’t count their three-day Halloween blowout two years ago in Indio.) Stranger yet, Monday also marks the foursome’s first gig at the Bowl. For their grand return, expect the classics. There’s no album to promote (Phish makes studio albums?!), but then again, the Vermont noodlers are aiming for new material by year’s end. New cuts, for better or worse, are probable. Some things are certain: The always “just off hiatus” hippie heroes will revel in short film–length jamming, frontman Trey Anastasio’s mouth agape in whammy-bar ecstasy. Refilling the “migraine” medicine early this week is advised; local dispensaries are facing an (un)expected shortage on supply.

Catch them here

Written by:

Dan Hyman

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Jen Whittenburg is a down-to-earth singer with an appealing voice and intelligent pop-country tunes on Drunk on Crutches’ recent al-bum, People Places Things. “I’ve been busy striking matches,” she declares. “Lord, I wish that I was stoned.” She strikes sparks with seemingly simple songs that neatly sum up the complexities of relationships. The Georgia native also is ambivalent about her new hometown in tracks like “California, You’ll Have to Wait” and “Using Me Up,” where Hollywood’s bright lights and sirens keep her up all night. A cover of Neil Young’s lost classic “L.A.” fits in seamlessly with the album’s themes of dislocation and restlessness. Drunk on Crutches plays a free, early-evening set at the Grand Ole Echo’s weekly country-roots roundup.

Catch them here

Written by:

Falling James

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L.A.-via-Brooklyn electronic duo High Places is multi-instrumentalist Rob Barber and vocalist Mary Pearson, two city dwellers who love nature and weave the sounds of the natural world into bass-heavy beats, syncopated rhythms and fragile vocals. Before forming High Places, Pearson was a bassoonist with a deep classical repertoire and Barber was an art instructor at the Pratt Institute, where he taught lithography and etching — highly technical and process-based art forms that have heavily impacted how the band makes music. Together, they make lo-fi, minimal tracks that provide brief escapes from urban claustrophobia. High Places will release their highly anticipated third full-length, Original Colors, in October on Thrill Jockey.

Catch them here

Written by:

Lainna Fader

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These days, Cypress Hill are most often associated with a cloud of marijuana smoke — not that there’s anything wrong with that — but the influential Latino collective are far more than just hip-hop’s equivalent to Cheech & Chong. The South Gate group might be looking back with tonight’s show, where they’ll celebrate their 20th anniversary with a full-length performance of their 1991 self-titled debut al-bum, but they still remain vital. On last year’s Rise Up, B-Real cleverly insinuated his distinctively pinched vocals alongside con-tributions from guest stars Mike Shinoda, Pitbull, Tom Morello and Evidence & the Alchemist, and word on the street is that DJ Muggs is back on board after sitting out last year’s tour. Given the hometown nature of tonight’s show, expect more guest stars and the pun-gent aroma of sacramental, herbal celebration.

Catch them here

Written by:

Falling James

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Ain’t no party like an old-skool party cuz an old-skool party don’t stop — really. With baby-faced rappers doubling back to dip into the canon of ’80s rap songs that sampled funky-soled classics, the hits of tonight’s groups keep finding new fans. The bill is heavily weighted toward the Midwest, with two of Ohio’s finest funk bands, Ohio Players and Dazz Band, and Prince associates The Time, led by wacky wild card Morris Day. As if the night weren’t sexy enough (we’ll take funk’s simmering innuendo over “S&M” any day), L.A.’s own Mary Jane Girls are in the house. Barely-legals, go watch your mom and dad show you how to dance all night long.

Click here to catch them

Written by:

Rebecca Haithcoat

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Hardcore punk rock has a reputation for inspiring mayhem and wanton destruction, but the bands on tonight’s bill are motivated by loftier concerns, such as saving the world. Of course, the social activism and politically charged lyrics espoused by these groups are delivered with relentless brutality and superfast tempos, but the overall message is one of unity, not violence. On the Rag editrix and All or Nothing H.C. frontwoman Renae Bryant comes at punk rock from a fiercely feminist, vegan and pacifist perspective, and she passionately decries anti-immigrant tea partiers (“Line in the Sand”), gives a shout-out to her hero Jack Kevorkian (“Death With Dignity”) and offers hope for suicidal cutters (“Control the Inside Out”) on Bring Me the Head of …, the Norco band’s new split CD with Naked Aggression. Led by singer Kirsten Ellis, the similarly intense Naked Aggression rail about corporate oppression and the widening class divide, while Boyle Heights’ Union 13 confront racism and youthful alienation with astonishing speed and power.

Catch them here

Written by:

Falling James

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