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William Shatner heard that we were foolin’ around with George Clinton, and he said ‘why don’t you hop off the Mothership, and get on the Enterprise’.”
Fishbone bassist and founding member Norwood Fisher is talking, of course, about Priceline.com’s ubiquitous, hipster-centric TV ads. The ones that feature the former Captain James T. Kirk ‘crooning’, kind of, while such alt luminaries as Ben Folds, Lisa Loeb, Fisher and bandmate Angelo “The Crazy One” Moore groove gently in the background, trying very hard not to mug for the camera. The ones you either love or loathe, depending on your particular estimation of humanity’s worth.
“It was a lot of fun,” says Fisher, who, after spending twenty years in a band which embodies the term, should know. “[Shatner] was a really nice guy, and I’ve watched Star Trek my whole damn life. I don’t consider myself a Trekkie, but I recognize and respect the innovations, the imaginations of those writers.”
It is surprising, then, that TJ Hooker didn’t end up contributing a track to Fishbone’s latest schizophrenic blast of rock, reggae, ska and party funk. After all, everybody else did. Fishbone & The Familyhood Nextperience Presents The Psychotic Friends Nuttwerx features performances by at least twenty of the legendary Los Angeles sextet’s friends, peers, and idols, from heroes like Rick James, Jeff “Skunk” Baxter, and the aforementioned Clinton, to contemporaries such as Gwen Stefani, The Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Bad Brains frontman H.R., to, uh, Donny Osmond. This huge and talent-saturated guest list helped to shape not only the disc’s laid-back, celebratory vibe, but also the music itself.
“You know what, that did have a little bit of somethin’ to do with it,” confirms Fisher. “Like on ‘Standin’ on Shakey Ground’. I knew that when [funk session legend] Billy Bass wrote bass parts for the Temptations, he wrote three different basslines, and I knew that me, Billy and Flea were gonna get together on it. It had a bearing on why we did that song, I thought it would be a great vehicle for getting all three bass players together.
“And the same with ‘Everybody Is A Star’. The whole thing has a nod to Sly & The Family Stone. The song is a perfect vehicle for all of us to get together, George Clinton, Gwen Stefani, Rick James, Perry Farrell, Blowfly, and everybody else who’s on that track. It lends itself to that kind of thing,” he concludes.
The sessions’ communal atmosphere also served to curb some of the band’s more scattershot sonic tendencies – it’s a lot easier to teach someone a melody for twelve bars of rock-steady rhythm than one for three minutes of style-splattering blitzkrieg. Psychotic Friends Nuttwerx is perhaps the ‘bone’s most cohesive effort as a start-to-finish listen, and certainly their best album in over a decade. Less metallic than Chim-Chim’s Badass Revenge or Give A Monkey A Brain And He Thinks He’s The Center Of The Universe, Nuttwerx gives the aural nod to War, Parliament, and the greatest of Motown’s infectious liquid bounce. It’s largely a collection of deceptively loose, alternately mellow and booty-possessing R&B grooves, shot through with the occasional hypnotic reggae/ska breakout and speed-rock freakout, a quintessential party record built for lifting the body, without a whole lot of their usual attempts at melting the mind.
But Fisher swears they didn’t plan it that way.
“It was just kind of the way the cards fell. There wasn’t a lot of thought from the band to do it that way,” he avers. “We just kind of see how things go. There was a lot more material that we had written [for Nuttwerx], that we could’ve gotten into. It just kind of fell into place like it did. It could’ve gone a thousand different ways.”
A perennial underground favorite with a large core of die-hard lifelong fans, Fishbone’s commercial profile has soared and plummeted wildly over the course of their lengthy career. The group’s last brush with certifiable Big Time Rawk Stardom came in the early Nineties, with the advent of the Lollapalooza generation and the hit single ‘Sunless Saturday’. A couple of years and trends later found them once again as college-radio staples, a band to get nostalgic about rather than breathlessly awaiting their new release, but they’ve ridden that particular roller coaster since their very first EP came out in ’85. And while more than one major-label employee has probably developed an ulcer over what and how big the next Fishbone single was going to be, the band themselves, judging by both reputation and output, really couldn’t be bothered.
“That’s one thing that we’ve never done,” agrees Fisher. “Everybody was like, ‘you need another ‘Party At Ground Zero’, you need another ‘Sunless Saturday’’, but that’s not the concern at all. Just to move forward.”
He does, however, believe that somewhere in amidst the debris of genres obliterated, there may well be something that could be called ‘the Fishbone sound’, or, at the very least, ‘the Fishbone feel’.
“There may be an overall feeling. Like on this record, in the end, when we looked back, it made me feel like a combination of the first EP and In Your Face. But that wasn’t a conscious effort. We just talked about being the best Fishbone we can be, not trying to be someone else.”
And where, really, on a radio dial crammed with fabricated angst, overzealous Eddie Vedder acolytes, teen pop and the good old bling-bling, would Fishbone, purveyors of Truth and Soul, fit in, should they be driven to try? It doesn’t matter. They’re not.
“It’s a producer game, that’s going on now. It’s not about artistry,” Fisher laments. “We were fortunate enough to witness great artistry through some of the 80’s and 90’s, and now we’ve reached the point where it’s basically about producers, where pop manipulation rules. If I was thirteen years old right now, I’d just be feeling like becoming a serial killer, murdering pop stars,” he muses with a laugh.
But Fisher does see a high point in the current commercial music low, both for the future of music in general, and for his network of psychotic friends in particular.
“One thing that’s for sure, is I know that it’s all going to create a rebellion. That’s why I like it, the fact that all that stuff is happening, because there’s going to be a reaction to it.
“It’s already happening. Somebody is in the underground right now, you know? There’s somebody called Fishbone that’s formulating the next move. We won’t sound like our last record. We wanna dive headfirst into the future. We’re bringing the ‘nutts’ of a different kind.”
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