WANT TO GO?
Who: Fishbone with openers Downtown Brown
Where: Oddbody's Music Room, 5418 Burkhardt Road, Dayton
When: 7 p.m. Saturday, June 4
Cost: $20-$25
More info: 937-813-4272 or www.oddbodys.com
Artist info: www.fishbone.net
Fishbone co-founders Angelo Moore (vocals, saxophone), Norwood Fisher (bass) and Walter Kibby (vocals, trumpet) were initially reluctant when filmmakers Lev Anderson and Chris Metzler first approached them about making a documentary about their pioneering punk-funk outfit.
The members of the group, performing at Oddbody’s Music Room in Dayton on Saturday, June 4, were still active, touring and recording, and weren’t ready to reflect on the past.
However, the musicians eventually agreed to participate and they’re glad they did. “Everyday Sunshine: The Story of Fishbone” (2010) has attracted new fans to the band, which formed in Los Angeles in 1979.
“We kind of fell off the radar even though we never stopped but the documentary opened up a lot of doors for us,” Fisher said recently. “We’re getting a lot of documentary people that don’t really care about music so much. They come up and say, ‘I don’t really go see a lot of bands, I’m not really that much into music, but I saw your documentary and I really had to come see that live.’ When people come up to you time and time again and say that, you know you’ve touched something new.
“Some of them are coming out with their families,” Fisher said. “That’s an amazing thing. People are bringing their nephews and nieces. Some of our fans have turned into grandparents and some of them are bringing their grandkids, especially to the festivals. We’ve heard all kinds of really amazing stuff about the film’s impact from the people we’ve encountered.”
Although the group has released several recent EPs, “Crazy Glue” (2011) and “Intrinsically Intertwined” (2014), it’s been 10 years since Fishbone’s last full-length, “Still Stuck in Your Throat.”
“I personally like the format of the EP and the single in the digital age,” Fisher said. “If it was left up to me we’d be dropping three EPs a year but Angelo wanted the new one to be a full-length. Our goal is to craft a concept record about being in a band based on the centerpiece of Angelo’s poem called ‘Road Dogs in the Can of Ill Repute.’
“We’ve been in the songwriting process and hopefully we can all get together during this tour and get to the business of crafting these things,” Fisher added. “I’d like to be able to drop a couple of singles this summer until we can put it all together for a full-length release. We’ll be touring all summer. We’ll do this run and then, hopefully, go record hot off the tour.”
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