It made almost too much sense when Fishbone singer and saxophonist Angelo Moore said his love for music came as a child watching Looney Tunes cartoons. My own first exposure to his ska/punk/rock band came from the 1987 movie Back to the Beach, wherein a mohawked Moore made that would make Wile E. Coyote jealous to the strains of Annette Funicello singing "Jamaica Ska."
"I remember that day," Moore tells New Times, backing up the recollection with encyclopedic memories of shooting the comedy, which also featured cameos by O.J. Simpson and Pee Wee Herman. "It was slightly rainy when we shot it. They had lights to make it look sunny. When it stopped drizzling, we'd shoot."
Moore proceeded further down memory lane, all the way back to middle school in 1979 Los Angeles when Fishbone was born. "Our vision at the time was just to hang with the guys. We started in Norwood Fisher's bedroom. I'd take a two-and-a-half-hour bus ride to get there, but I didn't care. We'd listen to Funkadelic, James Brown, Rick James, Led Zeppelin."
In 1984, Moore and the rest of Fishbone went to a Dead Kennedys show and discovered punk rock. "That was my first stage dive. Nobody caught me. I saw people running and jumping off the stage," Moore says. "I thought that looked fun. I landed on my knees and spent the rest of the show at the roller rink holding my knees."
Moore limped out of the concert with a gauge of how much manic energy he and the rest of the band would need to bring to the stage.
Fishbone came of age in the alternative Hollywood rock scene, where they hung out and played shows with the likes of Red Hot Chili Peppers and Jane's Addiction. The band's biggest burst of fame came during the late 1980s and early '90s, when they rode the alternative music boom (and, later, a ska revival), appearing on bills that ranged from the rock of Lollapalooza to punk on The Warped Tour to hip-hop alongside De La Soul and Goodie Mob.
But Moore is quick to rebut the notion that Fishbone peaked in the '90s. "In my mind, we're always blowing up," he declares. "Whether there's five people in the audience or 500, if we're in a dive bar or a big festival, we play and enjoy the music."
Fishbone's current tour has the band appearing with Less Than Jake on Monday, June 9, at Revolution Live, in support of a brand-new album, Stockholm Syndrome, due out June 27. It's their eighth full-length, and the first in nearly 20 years. "It's a lot of songs we couldn't put together lyrically and musically until we got this lineup," Moore sums up.
A couple of the singles are already out, including "Racist Piece of Shit" and "Last Call in America," the latter featuring guest vocals by George Clinton, one of their idols. "We live in a racially scarred society especially with that motherfucker in the government," Moore says. "America is under attack. The enemy is within, Trump says. That's the one time he is right, but I think the enemy is Trump."
Fishbone has always exuded an upbeat, party vibe, but Moore takes pains to note that the band has always been political — from covering Curtis Mayfield's socially conscious "Freddie's Dead" to the prog rock of Give a Monkey a Brain and He'll Swear He's the Center of the Universe. "There's lots of education in our music. Fishbone's been known to tell the future. We end up writing lyrics about things that happen five or six years later. Hopefully, the things we talk about on this record will free the bondage America is under right now."
