It’s a dark night in California and Norwood Fisher’s forearms strain as he applies a tough love chokehold to the throat of childhood friend and bandmate Kendall Jones, whose eyes bulge from their sockets. Nearly unconscious from the lack of oxygen to brain.
Still, Kendall throws elbows, fists, and the full weight of his body against the force of the lock; and his two younger brothers, who’ve traveled there with Fisher to stop a religious brainwashing by their crazy father, have seen enough. “Let him go or we gon’ fuck you up! If he really wants to be here, let him stay.” And the guys get back in the van and roll out.
Just another wild night in Fishbone. Great American band.
The attempted rescue results in a yearlong court battle. “The judge said normally he would throw the case out as a domestic problem," Norwood Fisher remembers, "But because it was so bizarre, he wanted to hear the whole story. I was like, ‘This is our lives. Really?”
Case ended with acquittal, and the band hit the road.
Formed in 1979, Fishbone popped like a funky champagne cork out of the City of Los Angeles underground live scene. Fishbone rule, Norwood proves, his band is stronger than ever.
“It’s easy when you’re young and all the girls wanna take you home,” he says.
“You get older and things take effort. You start to know your band members inside and out, and that’s when a positive mental attitude really means something, when it’s a challenge to be in a band, when you don’t agree.”
In 2013, there were two founding members in Fishbone’s lineup: Norwood Fisher and Angelo Moore. When they started, Fisher’s brother Philip was the drummer. But one day, Phil knocked out a major-label office guy. Another day, he sucker-punched Norwood. Then a decade and a half ago, he walked out on the band.
Over the years, there have been nine other defections, several near-breakups, and plenty of roster swaps.
The band’s first trip to Miami took place “around 1986 or ’87,” Norwood recalls, “with the Beastie Boys, on the Licensed to Ill tour.
“They were fans of Fishbone and came to see us at The Ritz in L.A., and we knew them from ‘Cooky Puss.’ So we were like, ‘Yeah, let’s go!’ We’d play to, like, 15,000 people one night, and maybe a smaller venue the next with 3,000, all over the country.”
But not all the memories are golden. The American South was shocking. “I saw the new Jim Crow for the first time on that tour in Georgia or the Carolinas or some shit,” Fisher says. “They brought the guys from jail to do the work to set up the concert, the stage, the lighting rigs. I was like, ‘What the fuck is this shit! Slave labor. Legalized slavery.’
“The privatizing of the prison system is atrocious. I’ve toured the world, and the U.S. more than anywhere else, and I’ve seen firsthand that white people are doing more fucked-up shit than anybody. I didn’t get it till we started playing a bunch of ski towns and everybody was on drugs, but nobody got arrested. And the police were doing that shit too.”
The good road trips outnumber the bad memories. One of Norwood’s favorite Fishbone tours was with heavy metal Biohazard, who dealt out fistfuls of fighting all over the States.
“They were rugged as fuck. Real people,” Fisher laughs. “They would get out there and fight every night. They had little weapons and shit too. They handled business. And musically, they were really fun to listen to.
“We partied really hard. It was sex and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. But some of the best memories is just playing pool in the venue, drinking beer, smoking pot, hangin’ with the fellas, shootin’ the shit, and laughin. The simple shit is all that’s really necessary.”
“We’ve had the privilege of stepping on some really cool things in our career,” Fisher says. It all started when he was eight years old and got a weight set for Christmas.
“My cousin came over and said, ‘You ain’t gon’ lift them weights,'” Norwood says, laughing. “He said, ‘I’ll trade you my bass, my amp, and I’ll throw in this collection of rock records I ain’t gon’ listen to no more.’ And it had Jimi Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane, Mountain, Chicago, the first Funkadelic, and a bunch more.
“For a long time, I hadn’t seen that cousin. But a couple years ago, we had Thanksgiving at his house, and he said, ‘I guess you put that bass to good use.’ And I was like, ‘Thanks for giving me my life man. I love my life.'”