Bass Head

Muggs gets down and dirty as one of LA’s most notorious DJs

He may not be “hardest working man in show business” but after producing a steady stream of music—both for himself and an impressively long list of music industry A-listers—Muggs is certainly one of them.

And with a new dubstep inspired album, Bass For Your Face, the original DJ for Cypress Hill and leader of LA art collective Soul Assassins has fully embraced the latest in electronic dance music sounds and styles.

“I travel a lot and I DJ a lot, and I’m always looking for new music to play and different stuff to put in my sets,” Muggs explains. “I play a lot of instrumental music from all over the world. And I got to the point where I was like, f*@k, I’m playing a lot of electronic tracks and I want to be able to play my stuff instead of just remixes I made. That inspired me to start the process.”

“There are a lot of production techniques that I never even bothered learning because I don’t need it for what I do,” Muggs admits. “So in the process of making this album I picked up some new tricks—learned some new stuff, which was fun. It definitely stimulated the brain, man. When you’ve been making music as long as me it starts to get boring so I’m always looking for new challenges, new ideas to incorporate.

Dubstep is the sound of the moment so why not make an album with some of those sounds on them? But it’s hard for a guy like Muggs to stray too far from his hip-hop roots.

“This record has dubstep, there’s dub, there’s hip-hop. There’s glitch. Just different musical elements,” Muggs says. “I’m not putting any barriers on the music. But with this particular record instead of going real dance with it I kept it more hip-hop. It was more for the hip-hop heads to make them open their ears to electronic music where a lot of them still won’t give it a chance. So this record was really targeted for that audience, as opposed to a dance crowd.”

The hip-hop audience is a notoriously tough crowd to get into new sounds. But it didn’t used to be that way. For a while back in the early ’90s hip-hop was arguably the most innovative form of EDM.

“Back in the day, when I was coming up in the game, a lot of hip-hoppers had a house track on their album,” says Muggs. “It was kind of mandatory. In ’88 . . .’89.”

The ’90s have come to be remembered as the “golden age” of hip-hop. It was the sound you heard booming out of everyone’s cars. It was exciting and innovative and everybody was trying out new sounds.

“One hundred percent,” Muggs agrees. “Coming out of the late ’80s with guys like Mantronik—the stuff he was doing on the fucking drum machine, you know, was like, damn.”

When Muggs looks back on the early days of Cypress Hill he remembers a chaotic whirlwind of continuous live performances punctuated by short studio interludes.

“You know it went from being in the studio every day to being on tour for two years non-stop,” he says. “The first album took us three years—it was our whole lives on there. The second album we did in two months. And you know, looking back, we was just young f*@king angry kids, man. We was just doing it. We were on autopilot. I don’t think we came up for a breath from ’90 to ’96.”

Muggs points out that touring back in the pre-Internet, cellphone-less early 1990s wasn’t as cushy as it has become today. And there are always a swarm of opportunists ready to pounce on a hot new artist.

“We didn’t have the best managers,” Muggs says. “We didn’t have the best people around us. We didn’t have any good role models. We had managers and lawyers that looked at us like a money-making machine and they were saying, You can’t stop now.” We had managers making bad deals so they could get as much money up front as they could—not expecting us to have a long career.”

But Cypress Hill survived the fame, the industry jackals and the pressure of it all—whether it came from inside or out. Muggs took his own route, using his self-taught—and suddenly very much in demand—studio skills to launch his production career.

“Right after that first Cypress Hill album I guess we had the sound of the moment and everybody wanted some of that sound,” Muggs says. “So I started working with everybody and I really got more into production at that point. I was DJing parties making $100 a night. “But then I started producing and they started giving me $5,000 checks to be in the studio for fucking eight hours and I was like—are you f@*king kidding me?”

Muggs has an impressive list of production credits—by any measure. The Beastie Boys, George Michael, David Morales, Depeche Mode, Goodie Mob, U2, Dr. Dre, Wu-Tang Clan, but when you ask him to name a track he’s produced for someone else—something he’s really proud of creating—he comes back to the infamous track he did with House of Pain.

“I really liked ‘Jump Around,’” Muggs admits. “That shit won’t go away.”

Through all the tours, the radio shows, the promotional junkets and endless hours in the studio, Muggs keeps on spinnin‘.

“I do mostly performance stuff . . . festivals in Europe,” he says. “Mostly hard ticket shows. Not really playing Top 40 stuff in clubs. I don’t really DJ like that.”

But when it comes to putting the “DJ” in Muggs, he prefers to keep it simple on stage.

“Two turntables, a couple of effects boxes and a lot of skill,” he says. “I bring my turntablist background, my battle background. You know, if you see Jimi Hendrix you’re gonna want to see him do some tricks on his guitar.”

When it comes to the latest technology, Muggs likes the new toys as much as the next guy. But he’s been around long enough to know what’s really important to the people who pay to see him play.

“You want to see some showmanship,” he says. “Bring the energy, bring the music, read the crowd . . . take chances.”

www.djmuggs.com

Viccenial Victory

This year marks the 20^th anniversary of the release of Cypress Hill’s massive second album, Black Sunday, which debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart and went on to go triple platinum. The first single, “Insane in the Brain,” was one of those songs you just couldn’t avoid—even if you wanted to—and nobody did. To celebrate, the Hill—who continue to play together to this day—is re-releasing the album on vinyl. “Cypress can be on tour with anybody because we harness that rock and roll energy,y so the touring don’t stop,” Muggs says. “And we started production on a new album as well.”