The fish that landed on its feet

>> Fishbone's Angelo Moore on the band's upstream battle

by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

Oooooh, the '90s were not kind to L.A.'s Fishbone. The first band to fuse funk, punk, ska, metal, psychedelic weirdness and rude humour (they call it "nuttmeg" for short), it took them two albums and two EPs to reach the zenith of 1988's Truth & Soul. That disc should have established them as a centrepiece of pop in the coming decade, but the public still couldn't wrap their heads around this furious, fusionist freak show. Then the bad shit started to happen.

Drummer Fish, brother to bassist Norwood Fisher, punched their manager in the throat and split. Guitarist Kendall Jones had a mental breakdown/religious freakout, initiating an intervention by band members that led to a court case. Labels dropped them, picked them up and dropped them again. Singer/saxophonist Angelo Moore got divorced and lost custody of his child. Keyboardist Chris Dowd got fat and crabby and was handed his pink slip. The band was broke and bitter, as reflected in the ponderous and often pointless tunes they churned out for most of the decade. To add insult to injury, the ska wave hit and bands that had taken their cues from Fishbone, such as No Doubt and the Bosstones, left their forerunners eating dust in their rush to the Grammy podium.

But Fishbone's tougher than that. Their latest album, Fishbone & the Familyhood Nextperience Presents the Psychotic Friends Nuttwerx, features the revitalized lineup--Angelo, Norwood and trumpeter "Dirty" Walt Kibby II joined by a trio of young guns--and a plethora of interesting guests. Moreover, it makes the space of time since Truth & Soul seem like a bad dream--like Dallas, dig? The Mirror spoke to Angelo about the renewed charge at superstardom, something Fishbone richly deserves.



Mirror: First off, I gotta tell you that the new album's amazing. It really feels like the fish has landed on its feet.

Angelo Moore: Right now it seems like we're standing on our feet, but we're still on shaky ground, y'know, and we're waiting for a whole 'nother level to kick in with this record. We're on the right tour, with the Chili Peppers, so we get to play to a lot of people that haven't seen us yet, and it seems like they're diggin' what we're doin'. Even though we're playing to more chairs than people when we start out, because we only get 30 minutes, within them short 30 minutes, we gotta try and catch as many people's eyes and memories as we possibly can. So that the unconverted could be converted to Fishbone.

M: Gotta ask you this one--what's up with Donny Osmond's appearance on the album?

AM: Everybody trips offa that! Well, Donny Osmond, his son likes Fishbone, and he said, "Dad, I want you to get hip to this." So he hipped his dad to us, he liked us and got us on his show. Donny's cool, a real down-to-earth guy.



Nuttmeg soup

M: Blowfly's on there, too.

AM: All those people are like family, man, real close like that. Blowfly, he's real cool. He was on the Trulio Disgracias tour--that's our bass player Norwood's project. Sometimes he has tours where he gets everybody we know, all our musician friends, and learn a couple of songs real good, maybe four or five songs. Because it's a 30-piece band, man. Thirty members in the band! Sometimes we'll pick up musicians on the way. As long as they can learn the main frame of the song, shit, then anything goes, man. We did a couple of tours like that, and Blowfly was there. He'd be gettin' up, cracking dirty jokes every morning. Aw, shit, man, he's funny as hell, every doggone day.

M: Right on.

AM: A lot of those people are on the record, man. H.R. from Bad Brains is on there, the Red Hot Chili Peppers played on "Standing on Shakey Ground." Billy Base, the original writer of that song, from Funkadelic, he played on that, too. We had the Fowler brothers from Frank Zappa, we had Gwen Stefani from No Doubt, we had Perry Farrell from Jane's Addiction on there singin'. We had Rose Stone from Sly and the Family Stone, George Clinton, Rick James, Lenny Castro who's the percussion player for Bette Midler. Man, we had so many people, we had everybody and their mama on that damn record. And it's good, too.

M: Must have been a headache, rounding up all these people in the studio.

AM: It was a big headache because, see, we had to stop and go on tour to pay the rent while we were recording. We wasn't gettin' no money from nowhere, so we had to stop, go on the road, pay the rent, come back and finish the record. Still didn't have a solid drummer. So we was like, "Aaagh!" It didn't quite fall apart, but it was on its way, now we're rebuilding everything.

Fishbone open for the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Stone Temple Pilots at the Molson Centre on Saturday, Aug. 19, 7:30pm (get there early!), $32-43