Fishbone doing it naturally
Fishbone blasted out of Los Angeles in the 1980s, taking its hyperkinetic blend of ska, punk rock and funk nationwide. The group purposefully smashed the various music styles its members loved into a frantic but organized ball of concentrated craziness.
Fishbone’s major early inspirations include Jimi Hendrix, Funkadelic and Sly and the Family Stone. Among the group’s later influences were Washington, D.C.’s black punk-reggae band, Bad Brains, and L.A.’s black-Hispanic rock group, the Bus Boys.
“They were doing something different and that made us think it was OK for us to just do it how we felt it,” bassist Norwood Fisher said of the Bus Boys and Bad Brains.
Fishbone formed in 1979, an exciting time in music, Fisher said last week from Miami, where the band headlined at the Virginia Key Festival of Music and Dance.
“Yeah, that period was wide open for music and art,” he said. “Punk rock was still new. New wave was burgeoning. Hip-hop first came to the West Coast. Kraftwerk was doing techno. All of this new stuff. What we did reflected our record collections.”
Columbia Records released Fishbone’s self-titled debut in 1985. The six-song EP includes ska-punk classic “Party at Ground Zero.” A full-length follow-up appeared the next year and then funk-metal album Truth and Soul in 1988.
Despite the band’s major-label releases and its slamming stage show, Fishbone never reached more than cult-level popularity.
A new documentary, Everyday Sunshine: The Story of Fishbone, examines this very influential band’s history. Laurence Fishburne narrates and Fishbone fans, peers and influence-ees Gwen Stefani (No Doubt), Flea (Red Hot Chili Peppers), Perry Farrell (Jane’s Addiction), Questlove (the Roots), Ice-T, Branford Marsalis and Tim Robbins offer their take on Fishbone.
Everyday Sunshine earned a 100 percent positive rating at Rotten Tomatoes, a website that contains links to movie reviews from many media outlets. The film is available for download from iTunes and will be released in physical form Tuesday, Feb. 21.
“It’s really getting an awesome response from people,” Fisher said. “But the film is way too personal for me to judge the entertainment value.”
As a San Francisco Chronicle critic notes in his review, Everyday Sunshine is about almost, but not quite, making it big. In that respect, Fishbone joins a long list of music pioneers whose followers achieved bigger fame and money than the artists who showed them the way.
“I see it as a pattern,” Fisher said philosophically. “Look at Iggy Pop and look at Blink-182. Iggy Pop, he kicked something off but, commercially, there’s a
huge gulf between him and Blink-182. Chuck Berry enjoyed success but he still had to watch the Rolling Stones take his stuff. Those are things that happen, to different degrees at different times.”
On the positive side of an imbalanced rewards system, Fisher added, the Rolling Stones popularized the blues men they loved.
“The Rolling Stones introduced a gang of blues artists to a younger audience in the ’60s and the ’70s. They were really good about that.”
Fishbone experienced similar expressions of gratitude, for instance, from No Doubt, ska-rock stars of the ’90s.
“No Doubt, Gwen Stefani, Tony Kanal, they’ve always been vocal about our impact on them,” Fisher said. “They were always super gracious and continue to be.”
The L.A. music scene that Fishbone, Jane’s Addiction, the Red Hot Chili Peppers and, later, No Doubt emerged from, as Fisher recalls, was not a stereotypically competitive.
“We all gave each other a lot of love as peers,” he said. “If there was any kind of competition, it was friendly competition that made each band hone their skills better. I actually don’t understand competition within the arts, where people get nasty with each other.”
Just in time for Carnival season, Fishbone is rolling into Louisiana for Mardi Gras weekend shows in Baton Rouge, New Orleans and Lafayette. It won’t be the first time the band jumped into a party at Mardi Gras ground zero.
“Oh, yeah, that’s the way we like it, man, especially with a celebration that intense,” Fisher said. “We’re gonna join the hurricane, man, enter the eye of the storm.”