In a nearly 30-year-old episode of The Simpsons, Homer & Co. arrive backstage at the Hullabalooza Festival just as a stage manager walks in with a question.
“Who is playing with the London Symphony Orchestra?” the stage manager asks in “The Simpsons” episode “Homerpalooza,” which premiered on May 19, 1996.
“Come on, people,” he continues. “Somebody ordered the London Symphony Orchestra … possibly while high? Cypress Hill, I’m looking in your direction.”
B-Real, Sen Dog, and DJ Muggs of the Southern California rap group huddle together, whispering to each other for a minute.
“Uh, yeah, yeah, we think we did,” B-Real says as he turns to face five tuxedo-clad musicians. “Do you know ‘Insane in the Brain’?”
“We mostly know classical,” the violinist replies. “But we could give it a shot.”
It was a funny bit. After the orchestra wings it through “Insane in the Brain” and “Throw Your Set in the Air,” the rappers from South Gate find out they’ve actually hijacked the orchestra from Peter Frampton, who, like Cypress Hill, Smashing Pumpkins, and Sonic Youth, all voiced themselves as characters on the episode.
And that was that. Or so Cypress Hill thought.
Decades passed. Then fiction became reality. On July 10, 2024, Cypress Hill joined the London Symphony Orchestra on stage at the Royal Albert Hall in London, performing the group’s 1993 sophomore release “Black Sunday” and a few other hits.
A live concert film, “Black Sunday Live at Royal Albert Hall,” arrives in theaters for three nights starting March 30, with a live album following on June 6.
“I had an uplifting feeling to be able to do that show,” says Sen Dog on a phone call from his home in Henderson, Nevada. “I kind of felt like it was going to be something spectacular, something very special for everyone involved, not just us performing, but for the fans as well, and the orchestra.
“But when I walked out there and all the people were there, and I got to look around at everything that was going around, I was like, ‘Wow,’” he says. “You know, goosebumps up and down my arm. I was like, ‘This is something else.’
“Then when we performed it, it was just an incredible sensation to be part of hip-hop and see how far it’s gone and where it’s going,” Sen Dog says. “Just the whole fact that people were into the idea of one of their favorite rap acts performing with a symphony, I think that was special.
“It definitely left an impression.”
A ‘Simpson’ kind of fame
The orchestra gag wasn’t what Sen Dog, the stage name of Senen Reyes, was thinking about as Cypress Hill, by then well-known for its pro-marijuana advocacy, recorded its lines for “The Simpsons.”
“I just remember being hella nervous, like, really, really nervous,” he says of the day he recorded his voiceovers for the animated show. “Every time that I do rewatch that episode, I can hear that nervous energy I had with me that day when I did my line. I was like, Man, I should have performed it better. Did it a little bit more wild or something.”
He might have been nervous because of the drug reference in the scene, he says.
“I just thought, Wow, can they actually say that? – ‘while we’re high’?” Sen Dog says. “It wasn’t the time we live in now. It was still highly illegal, and marijuana still had some taboo stigma attached to it.
“I was just wondering, ‘Is this cool?”
“My manager at the time was like, ‘Yeah, that’s fine. That was their idea,’” he says. “So I went, ‘Cool, we’ll see what happens,’ and it turned out to be very well received by the public.”
“The Simpsons” appearance also introduced Cypress Hill to a new and wider kind of fame, Sen Dog says.
“I remember one time I was in the supermarket after the episode came out, five or six months later,” he says. “I’m doing my shopping and I see a lady walk up to me. She goes, ‘Excuse me, sir. My son keeps insisting that you’re on “The Simpsons.” Can you tell him that’s not true?’ The kid’s like 5 or 6 or 7 years old.
“I said, ‘Ma’am, … I’d love to help you out,’” Sen Dog says. “‘But he’s actually right. I was on there one time.’
“I got a feeling at that point that we just opened ourselves up to a younger audience. People in that age bracket, that I know have never heard of Cypress Hill, now had heard of it.
“So the whole thing all the way around, from us doing that show up until the symphony, it’s all been unique things that have happened,” Sen Dog says. “Even though it’s taken its time, we did see the effects of it, at least I did, from way back then.”
A joke gets serious
On March 11, 2017, the official Cypress Hill account on Twitter, now known as X, posted a quote and a screengrab from “The Simpsons” episode with the orchestra.
A month later, the official London Symphony Orchestra account replied: “We mostly play classical … but we’ll give it a shot!”
“Let’s make something happen for real,” the group replied, adding a fist bump emoji.
“YES,” replied the symphony, adding its own fist bump emoji.
“It was the connection that needed to be made in order to go forward,” Sen Dog says.
Emails began to go back and forth. Slowly, a plan came together.
“The band has always stayed active,” Sen Dog says. “So to them, it wasn’t like they were bringing somebody back from a career that had been finished or failed or whatever. It was like a band that was still active, doing things, and it might be cool to consider this.”
On a regular tour in the United Kingdom, the members of Cypress Hill met with conductor Troy Miller, who told them his plan to finally make the future foretold by “The Simpsons” a reality.
“He wasn’t like tooting his own horn,” Sen Dog says. “He goes, ‘Dude, I’m your guy. I will make this sound incredible.
“He put a lot of my worries about it on ice. He said, ‘You guys are in great hands. You guys are gonna be impressed. Let’s get out there and do this.”
“We decided that day this is the guy that’s gonna do it.”
Sen Dog’s symphonic reveries
Growing up in South Gate, Sen Dog, now 59, was more into sports than music before Cypress Hill formed in 1988. But thanks to his father’s love of classical music, he’d grown up in a house filled with orchestral recordings and had occasionally seen Southern California orchestras play.
“He would take me and my brother with him to go see these performances,” Sen Dog says of excursions he and his brother Sergio Reyes, who was originally part of Cypress Hill before going solo under his stage name Mellow Man Ace. “Even though at the time, I didn’t know why I was there, now I get it. He was showing me music played in different forms than we had known up to that point.
“Just to hear it, and to hear those strings, the violins and everything playing,” he says, while also recalling a Christmas concert with a large chorus. “It was like, ‘Wow, I’ve got to look at this. I have to see what it’s all about.”
Cypress Hill has performed with other orchestras in the United States in the past, but with different arrangements and fewer than the 70 musicians who performed with the London Symphony Orchestra.
The group’s only rehearsal for the Royal Albert Hall show came the day before the concert, and it was then did its members heard the score that Murphy and the symphony had created.
“The first time we heard them it was just the LSO playing,” Sen Dog says. “Then later we came in and we did it with the vocals. To see everything doing what it’s supposed to be doing at the appropriate time, it’s like, ‘Wow, this is really good stuff here.’”
As the concert itself unfolded, Sen Dog says he kept his eye on the sprawling orchestra behind Cypress Hill.
“Every now and then, I’d look back because the sounds that were coming from those instruments were like a mind-blowing type of thing,” he says. “I just had to look back to see them performing their art form.
“At the show, there’s people that dance around a little bit,” Sen Dog continues. “There’s people that are just bopping their heads. There’s people that are just watching, like, ‘What’s gonna happen next?’
“I see kids that are basically just rapping along, rapping the whole song with all of us at the same time,” he says. “I see a person that was out there crying and whatnot. It was crying, but a happy cry, and I’m like, ‘Wow, that’s really cool.’”
Bringing it all home
Cypress Hill typically performs in Southern California casual, tee shirts and shorts, baseball caps and sneakers. So you have to ask: Was this the first time they’d all worn tuxedos on stage?
“You betcha,” Sen Dog says and laughs. “That’s not normalcy. I think that’s the first time I’ve ever had a tuxedo on.”
But it might not be the last. An orchestral show on their home turf in Southern California is something he hopes Cypress Hills can do.
“I would love to do that,” Sen Dog says. “I think our backyard, so to speak, needs to see this kind of thing. It’s good for the soul, that hour and a half, whatever, that they’re watching it. It was good for mine.
“It definitely made me feel like we’re taking hip-hop to another level yet again,” he says.
It would also be cool to have his father, who brought the family from Cuba to California when Sen Dog was little, and then brought him and his brother to the symphony when they were boys, to have a chance to see his son on stage with an orchestra.
“My father is still alive; he’s 92 years old,” Sen Dog says of his dad, who lives in Hacienda Heights. “He’s still a music lover and when he heard we were doing the symphony thing he was really happy. He would love to see it at some point because that’s the kind of music that he was into.
“He tells his buddies, when he talks on the phone to them, ‘You know my son’s doing the symphony now, blah, blah, blah,’” he says. “They’re all a bunch of older musicians.
“I’m glad he’ll be able to see the film here soon, and then hopefully, when we do it in L.A., he’ll be able to come to that.”