Growing up in a suburb of Los Angeles, particularly Woodland Hills, meant being subjected to brushes with fame. Movie and television stars would block our neighborhood streets and well-known musicians were next-door neighbors. And this doesn’t even include the cast of hundreds who worked in the industry that lay just over hill in Hollywood, including my father.
In my elementary school alone, I ran on the playground with Suzanne Crough, who played Tracy on “The Partridge Family”; occasionally hung out with David Knight, brother of Christopher Knight from “The Brady Bunch”; and once got the rare chance to go to Ravi’s house—as in Ravi Coltrane, son of Alice and John Coltrane.
The first time I saw the future members of the band Fishbone was when they appeared at our El Camino Real High School’s talent show as the band Megatron. They were dressed in all black, from their sunglasses to their hats, though I seem to remember they also wore white gloves. On weekends, the band would venture into Hollywood to play clubs like the Music Machine before eventually turning into Fishbone.
“We kept getting booked as a heavy metal band until they saw us,” says lead vocalist and saxophonist Angelo Moore during an interview this week.
Our mutual history goes back even to Junior High, when Angelo and I shared a math class with a particularly nasty teacher, who by today’s standards would’ve either been fired or put in jail. Both of us were once sent to a utility closet to spend the rest of the class, but I can’t remember why. Angelo does. “I remember when I peed in the back of Mr. Lewis’s class because I hated his ass,” he says.
My memory from 40 years ago may be a bit foggy, but I seem to remember Megatron came on stage directly after another band that included William Zabka—also known as “Johnny Lawrence” from “The Karate Kid” and now Netflix spinoff, “Cobra Kai” – but I digress.
“You’re kind of f—ing me up with Megatron,” says Angelo, making the sounds of a car braking. “Every time you say that name, dude. It’s like a time warp jolt.”
Megatron blew Zabka’s band out of the water. They left all of us in the audience with our mouths agape. We had never seen anything like them before—they were at times pounding the funk into submission, then they’d twist into some ska riffs and switch over to punk beats—all with blaring horns and precision moves.
To put them into perspective, they were coming to fruition at a time when Los Angeles punk bands like X, Black Flag and the like were just taking off. The Sex Pistols and the Clash were starting to become known, but weren’t famous yet. Many students at our high school probably learned of those bands from the handful of punks who roamed the halls with mohawks and band buttons pinned to their tattered army surplus clothing. Megatron, a.k.a. Fishbone, took all that punk angst and anger and threw in some classic George Clinton funk, added a heavy dash of Two-Tone ska and created a whole new world for all of us.
The first time I properly saw Fishbone was at a gig they played at the Hollywood Palladium. They were sandwiched in between openers, The Red Hot Chili Peppers, and the headliners, Run D.M.C. Like all their shows, they were amazing.
This weekend, Fishbone, which has a history of memorable shows in RVA, including gigs at Rockitz back in the ‘80s, will be playing with icon George Clinton and Parliament Funkadelic at the Altria Theater on Saturday, Aug. 12.
Moore says touring with Clinton is a dream come true. “I get to hear all my favorite songs,” he says. “I get to hear them all and dance to them all.”
Fishbone now includes four of its six original members – Moore, Norwood Fisher, Dirty Walt, and Chris Dowd, who returns to the band for the first time since 1994. They’ve already been touring all over, from Denmark and France to the U.S., promoting their new self-titled album—the first newly recorded music they’ve released in six years. It’s a five-song record that has two amazing singles. One is “All We Have is Now” [see video below] penned by bassist Norwood Fisher. The hook is reminiscent of their classic “Party at Ground Zero,” in that it instantly makes you sing along with it.
The other track is “Estranged Fruit,” an update on Billie Holiday’s classic take on the 1939 anti-racism song, “Strange Fruit” (written by Jewish-American songwriter Abel Meeropol) which protests the lynchings of Black Americans during Jim Crow. Fishbone’s version features lyrics that include the lines: “Limbs across America/might now bear a less strange fruit/because hangings out of fashion/when cops can justly shoot.” And in another verse: “The Christian right and rural white/needs someone to resent/’cause it’s too hard to face that we’re all/owned by the one percent.”
I asked Moore if he feels like Fishbone has a second wind behind them because the new record has been getting really great attention and respect from the likes of Questlove, founder of the Roots.
“F–k a second wind, dude, it’s like a second life,” he says. “I can only speak for me. I can’t speak for the rest of the guys in the band. I felt like we should have been dissolved. Or did a long time ago.”
Moore says in the past six years, they’ve had a rediscovery period, a sort of reinvention of Fishbone.
“So after all that shit, now we finally got a record out,” he says.
When not playing in Fishbone, Moore also fronts Dr. Madvibe and Mission Links, writes poetry and creates art. But on this night in Richmond, the crowd will get a chance to see a bill featuring two legendary frontmen, both well versed in the funk, each taking it to the stage in their own inimitable way.
Fishbone play Altria Theater on Saturday, Aug. 12 supporting George Clinton and Parliament Funkadelic. Tickets are $37.50. Doors open at 6:30 p.m. with showtime at 7:30 p.m.
