It's nice of course for a pioneering band like Fishbone to have the likes of Gwen Stefani (No Doubt), Flea (Red Hot Chili Peppers), Perry Farrell (Jane's Addiction), ?uestlove (The Roots), Vernon Reid (Living Colour), and Ice-T (Ice-T) singing their praises in this bittersweet documentary. One person after another comes forward to testify to how the band's dynamic mixture of ska-funk and punk, and blazingly intense live shows inspired them all and convinced them that this was destined to be one of the great bands of our time. The problem is that the breakthrough never happened. As pleasant as the encomiums are, they don't pay the rent. This leads singer and lead visionary Angelo Moore -- reduced to living with his mother -- to muse on the irony of "living a lifestyle of famous but not rich."
Filmmakers Lev Anderson and Chris Metzler take an approach here that's
somewhat all over the place, which is appropriate for a genre-erasing
outfit like Fishbone. Laurence Fishburne narrates in a tone of deep and
measured cool, but only occasionally. The early years are literally
sketched out with Fat Albert-style cartoons that show the various
members coming together in high school, a small knot of
musically-obsessed black kids mostly from South Central who had been
bussed out to a majority white school in the Valley, circa 1979.
Contemporary interviews are interspersed with old video footage shot by
the band themselves. Concerts are shown in all their raucous glory, the
band pummeling their instruments before an exploding sea of fans, Angelo
pirouetting and leaping and howling like the ace frontman he is. It's a
style that doesn't take the normal rise-fall-rise arc of the music doc,
allowing the chaos of real life to rough up the time sequence. Because
this isn't just a music doc, it's a low-level tragedy.
Everybody in the film who opines on the band both knows that Fishbone could have been great and yet seems to have an inkling of why they didn't. The stage was perfectly set when Moore, a gangly goof from the suburbs with a penchant for Bootsy Collins-type spaceman jabber, started jamming with Norwood Fisher, a tall and personable bass player from South Central, along with Chris Dowd, Walter Kibby, and Kendall Jones. Their sound was complex but danceable, their stage show a freak circus that gave them instant credibility when they started playing clubs in Los Angeles' mostly-white punk scene. All who saw them were transfixed, and yet here are the filmmakers, capturing Moore and Fisher (the two original members who "keep the dream of Fishbone going" playing to a couple dozen bemused onlookers in a square somewhere in Hungary.
The filmmakers attempt to answer the question of how a band so overflowing with greatness essentially imploded in the early 1990s, at the exact moment when underground musicians were starting to see popular success. Part of it is simply that they were never quite able to bring that live energy to album in a way that guaranteed a radio and video hit. Another part of it is that the band started cracking at various points, whether it was the tragic circumstances of guitarist Kendall Jones having a mental breakdown in 1993 (leading to him joining a cult and later suing the band members who tried to rescue him from it, claiming kidnapping) or Moore's constant schizophrenia about success (Fisher notes dryly, "he's a conflicted brother"). There was also the simple fact of race; as Parliament's George Clinton puts it, the band's mix of punk fury and funk rhythms made them "too black for white people and too white for black people." Though they shared Fishbone's love of bringing those worlds together, No Doubt and the Red Hot Chili Peppers also were clear in their drive to make hit records. Fishbone could never quite agree to make that jump, as the scenes of Moore (as his Bootsy-like alter ego, Dr. Mad Vibes) playing around with a theremin to the annoyance of everyone, shows.
Everyday Sunshine doesn't do the band the disservice of falling at their feet in worship, like too many recent films about legendary musicians (Greg Oliver and Wes Orshoski's fawning, endless Lemmy comes to mind). It's honest enough to show that genius all too often comes with a price and that uniqueness and vision are more likely to be ignored than rewarded.
Everybody in the film who opines on the band both knows that Fishbone could have been great and yet seems to have an inkling of why they didn't. The stage was perfectly set when Moore, a gangly goof from the suburbs with a penchant for Bootsy Collins-type spaceman jabber, started jamming with Norwood Fisher, a tall and personable bass player from South Central, along with Chris Dowd, Walter Kibby, and Kendall Jones. Their sound was complex but danceable, their stage show a freak circus that gave them instant credibility when they started playing clubs in Los Angeles' mostly-white punk scene. All who saw them were transfixed, and yet here are the filmmakers, capturing Moore and Fisher (the two original members who "keep the dream of Fishbone going" playing to a couple dozen bemused onlookers in a square somewhere in Hungary.
The filmmakers attempt to answer the question of how a band so overflowing with greatness essentially imploded in the early 1990s, at the exact moment when underground musicians were starting to see popular success. Part of it is simply that they were never quite able to bring that live energy to album in a way that guaranteed a radio and video hit. Another part of it is that the band started cracking at various points, whether it was the tragic circumstances of guitarist Kendall Jones having a mental breakdown in 1993 (leading to him joining a cult and later suing the band members who tried to rescue him from it, claiming kidnapping) or Moore's constant schizophrenia about success (Fisher notes dryly, "he's a conflicted brother"). There was also the simple fact of race; as Parliament's George Clinton puts it, the band's mix of punk fury and funk rhythms made them "too black for white people and too white for black people." Though they shared Fishbone's love of bringing those worlds together, No Doubt and the Red Hot Chili Peppers also were clear in their drive to make hit records. Fishbone could never quite agree to make that jump, as the scenes of Moore (as his Bootsy-like alter ego, Dr. Mad Vibes) playing around with a theremin to the annoyance of everyone, shows.
Everyday Sunshine doesn't do the band the disservice of falling at their feet in worship, like too many recent films about legendary musicians (Greg Oliver and Wes Orshoski's fawning, endless Lemmy comes to mind). It's honest enough to show that genius all too often comes with a price and that uniqueness and vision are more likely to be ignored than rewarded.
