Let's Hear It!

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I was never into punk rock. To me, it was all about boys chopping off their pretty early-eighties locks for punk haircuts (and from there it was a downward slide to skinhead-dom) while they talked bad about The Go-Go’s and Prince, which meant they were talking bad about girls and blacks. So I did not know a thing about Fishbone until I read that Everyday Sunshine: The Story of Fishbone was playing at the Guild Cinema. After seeing the documentary, I wish I’d known about them back then. I’d have loved them. At least, I think I would have. Hindsight is golden; after all, I used to shut the door to my room when Mom played her Led Zeppelin records, and didn’t find myself rocking out to “Whole Lotta Love” until I was in my mid-twenties. But I digress.

Fishbone’s dense, layered, vibrant music is a blend of punk plus what I felt was missing from punk music: rhythm, melody, rise and fall. As narrator Laurence Fishburne said, “They brought the funk to the punk.” When I watched their live performances, a stunning juxtaposition of chaotic energy and tight orchestration, I was surprised they didn’t achieve bigger stardom. One fan who was interviewed for the film said that Fishbone’s music was too complex for the masses to latch onto; another fan said they were too stylistically diverse to be contained in a marketable niche. The segregated music industry that had no idea what to do with an African American punk band was a factor as well.

At the Q&A session that followed the film, the audience got to ask film director Chris Metzler about his experiences working on this film. One viewer commented that it seemed like bassist Norwood was the grounded sensible one to lead singer Angelo’s crazier self. Chris Metzler said that after getting to know them, he concluded that both of them were kind of crazy. They were just crazy in different ways, so they balanced each other out. (One telling quote in the film was by Angelo himself: “Norwood and I are kind of like a married couple that want to be divorced for a minute, but they can’t because they’re f***ing married. We got kids. That’s the music.”) In listening to and watching my fellow film viewers who knew of Fishbone from the beginning and followed their career, it struck me how intensely they adored the band and cared about the band members’ happiness and relationships with each other.

Oh, what it would have meant to me to know of Fishbone during their heyday in the mid-eighties, when I was starting to realize there were repercussions to being both black and white, that I neither fit into the white world nor the black world, but a blend of both. Come to think of it, this is how Gwen Stefani describes Fishbone.

But the time is now. Time to go find Fishbone on iTunes.

Related articles

• Chris Metzler on his Fishbone Doc, Everyday Sunshine (blogs.sfweekly.com)
• ‘Everyday Sunshine’: Near-rise, fall of Fishbone (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
• Black Rock Biopic Hits Theaters (theroot.com)
• Movie Review | ‘Everyday Sunshine’: ‘Everyday Sunshine: The Story of Fishbone’ – Review (movies.nytimes.com)