Andy Diaz Hope.
Fishbone performing in 1988.
By JODY ROSEN
Published: September 30, 2011
FOR more than a quarter century the Los Angeles band Fishbone has been making music critics reach for their hyphens. It’s been called ska-punk, punk-funk and ska-punk-funk-metal. “The Rough Guide to Rock” deemed Fishbone’s music “jazz/hard rock/ska/funk”; a Rolling Stone writer threw up his hands and went with “orgasmic urban gumbo.” None of these labels aptly sum up the sound of a band that seems to have ingested a century’s worth of American and Caribbean popular music, nor do they capture the manic spirit of the group’s concerts, which earned Fishbone a reputation as one of the world’s great live acts. In a new documentary, “Everyday Sunshine: The Story of Fishbone,” the record producer David Kahne dispenses with the hyphens altogether. Fishbone, he says, is simply weird.
Ann Summa
The documentary “Everyday Sunshine: The Story of Fishbone” celebrates that Los Angeles band, below from left: Angelo Moore, Christopher Dowd, Walter Kibby II (kneeling), Kendall Jones, Phillip Fisher and Norwood Fisher.
Weirdness is indeed Fishbone’s calling card; it’s also its curse. When it emerged in the early 1980s, the band cut a startling figure: six African-American teenagers, with mohawks and thrift-store clothes and guitars and horns, careening through a repertory that compacted all kinds of music — not just ska, punk, jazz, metal and funk, but also ragtime, reggae, soul and gospel — into raucous protest songs and party anthems. The band’s power was undeniable but its strangeness was insurmountable; while its fellow Angelenos the Red Hot Chili Peppers and No Doubt parlayed less interesting versions of Fishbone’s hopped-up style into multimillion-selling superstardom, Fishbone slipped between radio formats, off of its major label and into commercial oblivion.
Today Fishbone is one of pop’s great should-have-beens: a one-of-a-kind band, revered by its cult and by fellow musicians, that never found the success that, for a few heady years, seemed inevitable. That question — why didn’t it happen? — hangs over “Everyday Sunshine,” which arrives in New York on Thursday for a weeklong stand at the reRun Gastropup Theater in Dumbo, Brooklyn.
The film is a parable about racial and musical politics in the record industry and a slice of social history that gazes back at a scene often overlooked in waves of ’80s and ’90s nostalgia. But “Everyday Sunshine,” directed by Lev Anderson and Chris Metzler, is also a portrait of survival, holding up the band — whose latest EP, “Crazy Glue” (DC-Jam), will be released on Oct. 11 — as a scruffy, classic American underdog, a group that has kept the faith through decades’ worth of adversity, shifting fashions and lineup changes, while exerting an outsize influence on a mainstream that has never found room for Fishbone itself.
It was progressive educational policy that brought Fishbone together. In the late 1970s the city of Los Angeles began busing students from poor neighborhoods to the affluent San Fernando Valley. There, at Hale Junior High, five future members of Fishbone from South Central met Angelo Moore, Fishbone’s future frontman, whose family had moved to the valley some years earlier. In “Everyday Sunshine” the origin story is told in animated flashbacks that depict the band —Mr. Moore (lead vocals and saxophone); Kendall Jones (guitar); Chris Dowd (keyboards and trombone); Walter Kibby II (trumpet); Philip Fisher (drums); and his older brother, John Norwood Fisher (bass) —in the funky visual style of the “Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids” cartoon series.
There was a cartoonish quality to Fishbone, in particular the irrepressible Mr. Moore. But by the time the band began playing clubs, there was no mistaking its ambitions. Fishbone became a favorite of punk audiences and attracted the interest of record labels like Columbia, which signed the group and released its debut EP in 1985.
In the documentary Mr. Kahne recalls the confusion the band caused at Columbia Records. (Its black music division scorned Fishbone for not playing R&B; its rock staff couldn’t make sense of black guys playing punk.) Yet the band released some superb records. “Fishbone,” the debut EP, and “In Your Face” (1986), the first LP, were full of catchy, party-hearty ska. Fishbone’s finest records, “Truth and Soul” (1988) and “The Reality of My Surroundings” (1991), refined their musical mélange and added social consciousness to the band’s trademark raunchiness and humor. Today those albums stand with the work of Public Enemy and Ice Cube as defining musical documents of the Reagan-Bush-era black consciousness, with songs that howl out at racism and the crack epidemic.
But no recording could do justice to Fishbone’s live shows. It was a punk-rock group with prog-rock skills, the rhythmic precision of an old-fashioned soul band and a feverish stage presence that was equal parts punk, vaudeville and revival tent. The band was led by the antic Mr. Moore, who seemed to sum up (and send up) the tradition of iconoclastic African-American performance that stretches from Cab Calloway and Louis Jordan to Little Richard and Sly Stone. “It was wild,” said Vernon Reid, of the black rock ensemble Living Colour, who warmed up for Fishbone at its first New York appearance. “They were all over the stage. Chris would be playing his keyboard, and suddenly a trombone would come flying through the air. He’d catch it, play a few bars and then toss it back over his head to a roadie without looking.”
“Everyday Sunshine” is full of vintage concert footage, capturing the band at its full-fathom best. But the story follows a downward spiral, with some grimly comic turns into “This Is Spinal Tap” territory. The film recounts Fishbone’s near breakthrough: “The Reality of My Surroundings,” released the same year as Nirvana’s “Nevermind.” It cracked the Billboard Top 50, and for a moment it seemed that Fishbone might ride the alternative rock wave that made stars of many left-of-center bands.
But even with a spot on the 1993 Lollapalooza tour, Fishbone proved too odd — or was it too black? — for mainstream rock audiences. Soon internal tensions fractured the band. During the recording of “Give a Monkey a Brain and He’ll Swear He’s the Center of the Universe” (1993), Mr. Jones, the guitarist, began behaving erratically, quitting the band to join a religious group in Northern California. Convinced that Mr. Jones needed professional help, Norwood Fisher tried to stage an intervention but was arrested and charged with attempted kidnapping. (He was acquitted in 1994.)
By the time that “Everyday Sunshine” was filmed, Norwood Fisher and Mr. Moore were the only remaining founding members. The film centers on the pair’s volatile Laurel and Hardy partnership and their struggle to keep Fishbone going amid an existence that Mr. Fisher describes as “hand to mouth.” There are poignant scenes of an album-signing event in a nearly empty record store, and of sparsely attended club shows. Mr. Moore is evicted from his apartment and moves back in with his mother; he struggles with alcohol abuse and the toll of constant touring, the life of the “famous but not rich,” as Mr. Moore calls it.
But “Everyday Sunshine” ends on an upbeat note, capturing a one-off concert reunion with Mr. Jones. The band is shown hanging out backstage with Mr. Dowd; Mr. Kibby also recently rejoined. The movie dangles the possibility, tantalizing to longtime fans, of a reunion of Fishbone’s original lineup.
Whatever Fishbone’s future holds, there is no doubt that Fishbone-ism is with us to stay. “Everyday Sunshine” includes tributes by a number of 21st-century stars audibly in Fishbone’s debt, including Eugene Hutz of the Gypsy punk group Gogol Bordello and Ahmir Thompson, known as Questlove, of the Roots. You could add other names to the list of Fishbone’s heirs: the racially and stylistically polymorphous indie rockers TV on the Radio, the Atlanta hip-hop and soul bohemians Cee-Lo Green and Janelle Monáe. Then there’s Outkast, which acknowledged its debt to Fishbone by casting Mr. Moore and Mr. Fisher in its 2006 film “Idlewild.”
In a recent interview Mr. Fisher expressed the hope that the documentary would raise the band’s profile. “Do I think that there’s more possible for Fishbone?” he said. “Hell yes. And there’s more possible doing things our way, without doing stuff that we don’t want to do.”
There’s no sign of compromise on the new EP, “Crazy Glue.” The record leans more toward grooves than tunes, with lots of heavy riffing from the guitarist Rocky George, a former member of the Los Angeles punk band Suicidal Tendencies, who joined Fishbone in 2003. The lyrics have turned inward, away from politics and towards confession, with Mr. Moore singing about his anxieties and personal demons. The results can sometimes drag; Fishbone has never recovered the deft melodic touch that departed with Mr. Jones and Mr. Dowd, the band’s most pop-savvy songwriters.
But Fishbone’s best music is still crammed with energy, ideas and originality. Speed-metal guitars thrash up against New Orleans funk; a slinky reggae verse accelerates into a power-pop chorus, then dissolves into clamorous, dissonant psychedelia. In “DUI Friday,” about a drunk-driving arrest, Mr. Moore croons and bellows over music that brings together metal power chords, a swing beat and jump blues-style brass blasts, with a theremin simulating the whine of a police cruiser’s siren. Like many Fishbone songs “DUI Friday” makes unlikely musical connections feel inevitable, while playing hard times for mordant laughs — turning a lament into a party. At such moments Fishbone is exactly where it has been since the 1980s: freewheeling down its own road, waiting for the world to catch up.
