Warm and Fuzzy Side of Rap : Leaving gang life behind, B-Real of Cypress Hill has message for the homeboys: ‘These songs are my therapy, ‘cause I’m able to let people experience some of the things I’ve been through.’

Louis (B-Real) Freese, leader of the hugely successful rap group Cypress Hill, likes to show visitors the bomba that he keeps in the garage of his secluded Hollywood Hills home.

It’s a 38-year-old hulk of steel that Freese and a few Eastside carnales have painstakingly refurbished from scratch, using wires and chrome parts to ensure that the two-ton mechanism is in perfect working order.

Given the blood-splattering images and paranoid ravings about the need for self-protection that fill the group’s last two albums, it’s easy for outsiders to assume this device could blow up half the neighborhood.

Isn’t that the kind of thing that Cypress Hill is always boasting about in such profanity-laden party songs as “When the Ship Goes Down,” “Hand on the Pump” and the new “Throw Your Set in the Air”?

But B-Real isn’t out to level buildings.

“She’s beautiful, isn’t she?” says Freese, grinning with the pride of a new father as he brushes a rag over the aerodynamic curves of Nice Dreams, his immaculate, forest-green 1957 Chevrolet Bel-Air bomba , a true, old-style lowrider.

B-Real, 25, loves to tinker with his pride and joy when he’s not holed up in a recording studio or on a tour like last summer’s Lollapalooza, where the group battled Courtney Love and Hole for attention night after night on the main stage.

Unlike most of his scowling peers, the rapper has a casual, understated manner and an inviting, warm personality. He walks with a confident stride, head up and eyes forward, a habit from his days of walking the dangerous streets of South-Central Los Angeles as a member of the gang Neighborhood Family.

Cypress Hill fans, who bought enough copies of the new “Cypress Hill III” album to give it a No. 3 debut on the national sales chart earlier this month, know him by his stage name, or simply B, but his friends call him Louie.

“I’m just a regular guy,” he says, leaning on the driver’s door of Nice Dreams. “I don’t trip off of having money, or any of that other kind of [expletive]. I just love making records, and I couldn’t care less about the fame. I’ll continue to make albums until my voice finally gives out. It’s all about consistency and long-term respect. I want Cypress Hill to be the Grateful Dead of hip-hop. The Dead never wore out their welcome, and I hope in terms of rap our group is the same way.”

The Grateful Dead of hip-hop is an apt parallel, but there’s a big difference between the peaceful hippie vibe that carried the Dead into the annals of rock history and the spirit of Cypress Hill in 1995.

The group embodies the rebellious spirit of the vato loco (crazy dude), that figure of urban lore bumping down the boulevard in search of attractive rucas (women), potent yesca (pot) and the run-of-the-mill locura (chaotic action) from which fearsome reputations are honed.

Using his nasal whine as a brush, metaphorical rhymes as his colors and DJ Muggs’ ominous, low-rumbling beats as his canvas, B-Real paints a bleak picture in his music: streets overrun with trigger-happy youngsters, a generation alienated by their parents, police and other authority figures. The underlying motto is “Never turn your back to the street.” You never know who will suddenly emerge from the darkness or who’ll end up in the cross-fire.

“Throw Your Set in the Air,” the group’s new Ruffhouse/Columbia Records single, is not a protest song against television. Set is a colloquial term for gang, and to “throw up a set” means to flash hand signals that indicate gang and neighborhood affiliation.

The song arrives at a time when Latino gang violence in Los Angeles is again in the headlines, from the shocking killing of a 3-year-old girl in Cypress Park last September to the Halloween slaying in Paramount of a 32-year-old pregnant woman whose husband was believed to be involved with drugs.

Although Cypress Hill and Columbia Records insist that the song is anti-gang, it’s easy to see how the lyrics can be misunderstood.

By speaking from the perspective of a gangster who’s admired by a neighborhood kid, B-Real could be accused of personifying the very figure he’s supposed to be warning young people about. But he thinks his audience understands what’s going on in the song, whose lyrics include the lines:

*

Let me take you to the dark side of the moon,

Tell Mama that you won’t be coming home any time soon,

‘Cause I got you under my thumb, [expletive],

What set you claiming? Better be the same set I’m claiming.

*

“When I do these songs, I see it as something I put out there to let people know how these things happen,” B-Real says.

About “Throw Your Set” specifically, he adds: “The story is just one example of how a kid can get manipulated into joining a gang. The song shows how an older guy is filling a void when he puts more energy into a kid’s day-to-day life than his parents do, even if it’s negative energy. As parents, you’ve got to explain to your kids why they shouldn’t join gangs, and not just leave it at ‘Don’t do it because I told you so.’ I would never tell a kid to join a gang. I think God would punish me for that. I don’t fear anybody but God.”

Not that fearing God or his mother helped Louie Freese escape the streets.

The son of a Mexican American father and an African Cuban mother who escaped to Florida from her native Cuba on a flimsy raft in 1968, Freese has witnessed his share of stressful situations.

“I’ve seen it all,” he says. “We moved all the time when I was little because my father never wanted anyone to know where we lived for too long. . . . He was always doing some down-low gangster [expletive] that he didn’t want to tell us about. He got shot 12 different times--and lived.

“I remember once seeing him stretched out on a table with a colostomy bag attached to his stomach. I saw my brother with three big holes in his side.”

(Rappers often try to “glamorize” their pasts with such tales, but Cypress Hill’s manager Happy Walters says that to his knowledge, Freese’s descriptions are accurate.)

“I have so many bad memories, I don’t know how I was able to cope,” B-Real says softly, with no trace of bravado. Indeed, he rarely talks about his personal life in interviews. “I don’t let them get to me. That’s why I feel these songs are my therapy, ‘cause I’m able to let people experience some of the things I’ve been through.”

Born in East Los Angeles, Freese first encountered Senen (Sen Dog) Reyes, the older brother of popular Latin rapper Mellow Man Ace, when Freese moved to the South Gate area at age 12. South Gate had its share of violence in the ‘80s, but not as many gun-related altercations as its South-Central neighbors. Freese has fond memories of break-dancing and tackle football.

Alienated from both school and home life, Freese started getting involved in gangs and adopted a dangerous lifestyle that nearly consumed him. But he also had friends who maintained a calmer existence, including Sen Dog and Lawrence (Muggs) Muggerud, now 26, an Italian American from Queens who was one of L.A.’s best deejays.

Muggerud, who was a featured “mix-master” on the era’s rap radio powerhouse KDAY, came up with the idea of basing a hip-hop group around the everyday experiences of life on Cypress Avenue, a South Gate street where Sen lived. The goal was to make records with a Latin edge, but without the pop-friendly feel of Mellow Man Ace’s 1990 hit single “Mentirosa.”

Sen and Muggs had been impressed by some of B-Real’s informal raps and tried to persuade him to take their music seriously. At the time, however, he was more interested in quick money. That meant the streets and selling drugs.

“My mother tried to make me realize what I was doing would only get me killed, pointing out the numerous times my father and my brothers got shot up,” he recalls now. “Do you know what I had the nerve to say to her? I said, ‘Well, they’re not lucky like I am.’ Soon after that, my luck ran out.”

Running away from an assailant during a job gone bad, Freese was hit in the back by a .22-caliber slug that punctured his lung, he says. It’s an experience he describes in the song “Lick a Shot” on Cypress Hill’s 1993 “Black Sunday” album.

Music suddenly became a lot more attractive.

“When I was laying in a stretcher coughing up blood at Martin Luther King/Drew Medical Center, Sen was one of the first people at my side,” Freese remembers. “You never forget something like that. Sen and Muggs saved my life, because they believed in my talent and gave me something to live for.”

Referring to social critics who maintain that rap is a bad influence on young people, he adds: “People always criticize you about something.

“Nobody will look at my life and say, ‘Look, here’s a guy who could have been locked up, dead, selling drugs or robbing people, but instead he became a successful recording artist.’ It’s not controversial enough to say that he’s made it, he’s done good for himself and he’s a positive role model.”

Waiting at a Sunset Boulevard stoplight later that evening, B-Real guns the motor of the jet-black, $75,000 Dodge Viper that he’s rented for the day, and the engine roars like a caged lion. His ’57 Bel-Air bomba is being waxed in Montebello by fellow members of the Lifestyles car club so it will look bien firme (solid) for the following day’s video shoot.

The flashy Viper convertible isn’t the kind of car B-Real likes to be identified with, but the daredevil side of his personality can’t resist it.

“I could never own a car like this because I would get carried away,” he says, pushing the accelerator to the floor and speeding up the narrow, serpentine roads to his house deep in the hills. “As many accidents as I have, I’d kill myself.”

He smiles as he adds, “If I wasn’t a rapper, I think I’d be a race-car driver.”

B-Real’s voice is barely audible above the engine and the whipping wind.

“My father wanted me to be a truck driver,” he confides. “I spend my life driving across the country anyway, but at least I get to stop and entertain people instead of hauling a shipment, dropping it, and turning right around to come back.”

With Cypress Hill’s success, B-Real can do just about anything he wants. He’s traveled the world and the neighborhood, and has tattoos on his arms from Japan and 89th Street to prove it. His living room has photos from his Woodstock ’94 and Lollapalooza concert performances, showing the group rocking thousands of fans of different colors and backgrounds.

“Making the transition from gangs to music was one of the hardest things I had ever done,” Freese says as he pulls the Viper into his driveway. “That’s because a part of me missed going on missions and doing dirt. I used to feel like ‘This music [expletive] ain’t gonna get me nothing,’ but I waited and I was wrong. I had to eat all of my words. And I’m glad to be eating them.”