‘No Bammer Weed’: The album that put SF rap on the map turns 30 – SFGATE

… And, oh yeah, they squashed a multi-neighborhood turf war in San Francisco. 

A pretty tall order for one group, much less a debut album. But the Hunters Point-based collaboration of young writers, producers, rappers and hustlers did just that. They invented a sound that would unite and shape the city, provide the key inspiration for the hyphy genre and help originate some of the beats and tropes that gave rise to gangsta rap on both coasts. 

In tracks like “Don’t Give Me No Bammer,” “More Like an Orgy” and “G’s by the 1-2-3s” they did it by crate digging — blending never-before-used samples with the latest snippets from rap contemporaries — and even … Steve Miller Band, creating a gangsta-meets-party-starting sensibility and introducing an homage to everyone’s favorite frustration: bottom-of-the-barrel weed.

Along the way they redefined their neighborhood, their city, the bay and the West Coast forever.

So how come you don’t know about them?

“I mean, I get it,” Tomie Witherspoon, aka DJ T.C. — a producer and sampling guru who helped cut a number of RBL’s first tracks in his family home in Bayview — told SFGATE. “Some people had better management and had better placement. People forget, every time our stuff came out it hit the charts: Detroit, LA, New York, Atlanta, we had those places on lock down … 

“We never got chances, got sabotaged somehow.”

Lessons from the dawn of Bay Area rap

The album with a prescient title, “A Lesson to Be Learned,” celebrates the 30th anniversary of its release on Oakland-based In-a-Minute Records today, Sept. 16. The DNA of “A Lesson to Be Learned” has bled into mainstream Bay Area and West Coast culture and hip-hop writ large so much that listening to it today feels almost like a sample-heavy, lyrically divergent cheat code: the definitive instruction manual and the foundation for what was to come. 

It started with the sampling, where Witherspoon bonded with Christian Matthews, aka Black C, the lead MC and producer for RBL.

“Black was like, ‘I got some samples.’ And I’m like, ‘All right cool.’ But in my mind I’m like, ‘Let’s see what he got,’” Witherspoon says, chuckling. “And he was playing some cool stuff, but some of it was falling off beat and all the intricate parts … he didn’t know. But he had it. He had it already, all the parts. It wasn’t a hard job to do, to make sure he did it clean.”

The samples crossed genres and traversed time on nearly every track. From Marvin Gaye’s flute on 1977’s “Intro Theme” to Samuelle’s “Get with the program” vocal from his 1990 R&B track “So You Like What You See” on “Don’t Give Me No Bammer”; from Parliament’s 1979 hit “The Big Bang Theory” to Digital Underground’s 1990 smash “The Humpty Dance” on “More Like an Orgy” — it was all about blending old and new, making music and having fun, Witherspoon explains.  

“No real expectations and we knew we was good,” he says. “We had the confidence with everyone that was there. But the regional thing, growing out from beyond us, the impact — we never thought about it.”

San Francisco becomes Frisco

The summer of 1990 started out like any other for Matthews. It was a time, he recalls, of innocence and freedom even though he’d already seen more life as a teen than most experience in a lifetime, he recalled to San Francisco-based hyphy rapper and graffiti artist Dregs One earlier this week on his “History Of The Bay” podcast.

“[San Francisco] was lovely as far as my era, ’80s, going into the ’90s,” he said. “What I love about Frisco is we had the tourist areas to go play around in. You know what I mean? You could leave the hood and go to Pier 39, the Presidio — slide up to the Cow Palace, we was doing a bunch of crazy stuff, stealing and what have you. But … the city was universal, I liked the diversity. … Just having different cultures just made us more universal.”

As the new decade dawned, Matthews, who was just about to turn 20, was a dope dealer and small-time gangster who lost an eye from a drive-by at age 16 and had bounced around from various San Francisco high schools to juvenile hall to a transition home that would purportedly ready him to get back into society, he told Dregs One. Without much direction, he was looking for what was next.

He soon found it in a cassette deck.

Straight from juvie into the studio

While finishing up his time at the now-defunct Log Cabin Ranch juvenile delinquent facility, Matthews was introduced to the music of Ronald Fields, aka Cougnut, a resident of the mostly Black Broad-Randolph Street corridor of the Lakeview neighborhood. 

Cougnut was the featured MC in I.M.P. Their breakthrough second album, “I.M.P. Dogs” (1990), contained the group’s most notable single “Merciless.” That track laid the groundwork for San Francisco’s rap scene for the decade ahead, boldly coming to life with an iconic rush of a car blowing by and a single-word call-out that lay claim to their city: “Frisco.” 

After that, a sample of NWA’s “F—k tha Police” laid out over sirens. Enter Cougnut’s razorblade vocals, reminiscent of Ol’ Dirty Bastard, who wouldn’t debut for another three years. 

Cougnut’s signature rasp perfectly suited his brash and hard-core lyrics talking about life as he saw it on the streets of San Francisco, where his friends were dealing and being put behind bars by cops looking for a quick collar. 

And Cougnut’s lyrics described a side of San Francisco life like nothing the city had seen or heard before. For Matthews and his contemporaries, the rapper they idolized, who died in a car crash on Sept. 4, 2001, showed the way. To them, there was nothing in the city that compared to Cougnut’s bars before or since. 

“I started rapping after I got out of Log Cabin,” Matthews said. “Till I got to the transition home. We all up in there bumping Cougnut. Rest in peace, Cougnut. He was a big influence.”

Black C and Mr. Cee put Hunters Point on the map

Matthews knew he was ready to become Black C as soon as he got out of Log Cabin. Returning home to Hunters Point, he linked up with a friend from the neighborhood, underground Bay Area rap icon Henry Robinson, aka Budwyser. Robinson had been working on beats with Witherspoon at his home. Soon, RBL was freestyling and putting tracks together. 

Originally, Black C was to team up with friend and Hunters Point local T-Lowe, a legend in his own right. T-Lowe “was kind of like the Ice Cube in our neighborhood,” Matthews said. But when it came time to get into the studio, T-Lowe flaked, and Hubert Kyle Church III, aka Mr. Cee, took his place.

Mr. Cee “brought something different to RBL,” Witherspoon says. Younger, with less of a gangsta rap and more a party-starter vibe, Mr. Cee’s lyrics were “funny and infectious” and complemented Black C’s tougher edge. 

The newly formed duo set a genre in motion — gangsta paired with good times — that would soon be emulated by acts that blew up on each coast, from LA’s Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg to Atlanta’s Big Boi and André 3000.

“Mr. Cee was funny as hell,” Matthews recalled. “One of those dudes gonna cap on you all day, hella funny. … A ladies man. The women loved him, the promoters loved him, I’m hella anti-social — he’s coming in to take over the room, smiling and joking. He kept our studio lit.”

‘Don’t Give Me No Bammer’ breaks through

The first showcase of Mr. Cee’s winning personae can be heard on “Don’t Give Me No Bammer.” The catchy banger and unofficial city anthem is the perfect juxtaposition of Mr. Cee’s good-times predisposition with Black C’s gangster bona fides. 

In the fall of ’92, “Don’t Give Me No Bammer” peaked at No. 16 on Billboard’s Hot Rap Singles chart. The track’s oft-emulated mix of obscure and sometimes disparate genres set the standard for West Coast from then on, and the song remains a touchstone, having been referenced by Soulja Boy in 2011’s “Bammer, Bammer, Bammer,” Wiz Khalifa in his 2020 single “Bammer” and Snoop Dogg in his 2021 release “No Bammer Weed.”

RBL’s OG “Bammer” is a singular effort. Not only did the song introduce the general public to the then underground term “SFC,” it helped bring unity to the streets of a warring San Francisco. 

“Soon as I made it I knew it was our biggest hit,” Matthews said of the track. He first recorded it for an independent tape he made for self distribution. Once signed, he said he knew immediately that he had to rewrite the lyrics and re-cut the track to make it a citywide anthem that would unite warring neighborhoods. 

So Matthews reached out to rivals from the Fillmore and the Sunnydale projects and asked them to come to Hunters Point. “It was good and pretty much it’s been a truce, ever since then everybody trusted each other, it ended that day. Fillmore put their trust. I could’ve really set them up. They came up Harbor Road, we squashed it right there, shake hands and hugging, everyone showed up.”

On a broader scale, the song’s impact immediately lit a fire throughout the West Coast rap community. Its subject matter, smoking weed and having a good time in the neighborhood, is the direct predecessor to another dance floor-crowding anthem that would drop just a few months later: “Nuthin’ But a G Thang” from Dr. Dre, featuring Snoop Dogg. From the sampling of old funk and R&B tracks to the lowriders and neighborhood dynamics playing out in the videos, the fingerprints of “A Lesson to Be Learned” can be spotted all over “The Chronic,” Dr. Dre’s debut album post-NWA, which would transform him into an icon. 

“I mean, you know, I just look at it like it’s music man,” Witherspoon says. “We’re all taking from each other. You hear something and go, ‘Ohh, how’d they cut that sample?’ And I’m pretty sure they were doing the same thing with our music.”

RBL followed up with the eponymous “Ruthless by Law” in 1994 and reportedly signed a seven-figure deal with Big Beat, an Atlantic Records imprint. But on New Year’s Day 1996, Mr. Cee was gunned down, shot nine times a block away from his Hunters Point home. And while Black C continued RBL, Mr. Cee’s loss was a the end of the original iteration of the act.

The quick rise (and fall) of In-A-Minute

Signing to their first label, Oakland-based In-A-Minute, turned out to be the first and worst break for RBL and other Bay Area acts. Owner Jason Blaine famously offered RBL $10,000 to ink a deal with the label after hearing the tapes they were pressing and selling on the streets of SF and Oakland. The group and the label in their early iteration forged the blueprint that would launch dozens of contemporaries and give birth to a pair of genres.

Blaine had already signed Bay Area legends like Master P and Rappin’ 4-Tay. Off the success of RBL’s first record, he managed to assemble an all-star roster of industry innovators that reads more like a wing in the West Coast rap hall of fame. The acts include: Too $hort, Hugh E.M.C., I.M.P., Dre Dog (Andre Nickatina) and Dogg Pound Posse. 

While “A Lesson to Be Learned” launched the label into hip-hop’s stratosphere, mismanagement and alleged addiction led In-A-Minute to flame out and declare eventual bankruptcy, dissolving completely by 2000 — less than a decade after its founding. The quick rise and even faster descent left some acts, like RBL, smoldering in the wake.

RBL today and beyond

What survives, however, is the music that would become a touchstone in the industry as well as a fetish property. Today, rap historians and hip-hop collectors put RBL’s “A Lesson to Be Learned” on the Mount Rushmore of Bay Area albums of that era both in execution and impact. 

“Keak Da Sneak and Mac Dre, posthumously, are credited with hyphy, but RBL’s first album has that style, along with all the West Coast influences,” John Leatherwood, who helps run a small independent label that curates and compiles old and sometimes previously lost Bay Area rap tracks, told SFGATE. “There’s no one definitive act or album, but ‘A Lesson to Be Learned’ is up there — in stature and influence — for sure.”

Contemporaries are also keen to recognize what later came up in the bay and trace it back to pioneers like Mr. Cee. 

“I did a track with Mac Dre, Suga Free and Rappin’ 4-Tay called ‘A-B-C-P,’ and it’s sort of like a cycle on RBL,” Witherspoon says. “Like Mr. Cee, who brought the fun to the group, Mac Dre went to jail and when he came back, it was on after that. He brought the fun, brought the party to the party. That’s the legacy that goes from Mr. Cee to Mac Dre.”

Today, Matthews, 50, lives in Antioch, raising a family and still performing as RBL. He made headlines last fall when Mayor London Breed was seen dancing and partying, maskless, to RBL’s live performance at The Great Northern on Thanksgiving. He also spends time writing and producing new music. 

After moving to LA and Atlanta, Witherspoon, 52, father of two and grandfather of two, returned to SF and now lives in his original home in Bayview. He still produces from time to time and is the DJ in residence at the Jazz Room on 3rd Street, spinning blues, funk and R&B “along with a couple hip-hop tracks once in a while.”

Witherspoon says he keeps in close touch with Matthews and others from that era who are still around. “The whole time we were young guys having fun,” he says. “After Mr. Cee died, everyone was kind of in slow motion. Black took it on the chin and pushed forward. He didn’t let the name die. That group has been through a lot — a lot. For him to be still going, still releasing good music and doing shows today — that guy’s a champ and will always have my respect and love.”