To hear the soaring craziness of Fishbone’s “Sunless Saturday” is to wonder how such musical inspiration could possibly miss.
But it did. That masterpiece song failed to catch on when it was released in 1991, and the band never reached the upper levels of success. The reasons for that are charted in “Everyday Sunshine,” a new documentary that celebrates the group and checks in with its current status.
The members of the group are interviewed, talking freely about the music and about each other. As with every single rockumentary ever made, the personalities are colorful and divisive, and the center cannot hold.
We know things will fall apart, because the movie’s framed around the present-day struggles of original members Norwood Fisher and Angelo Moore to keep the act going. They’re slogging through a slow European tour and dealing with their dicey friendship as they soldier on before small crowds in clubs and mostly empty town squares.
The band first came together in a suburban L.A. high school, and thanks to their madcap live shows, garnered a record contract not long after graduating. We see enough archival footage to understand that these guys were among the nutsiest live acts ever to take the stage.
From the first, Fishbone didn’t fit into any easy category: As one observer notes, there’s really no place in the record store to carry their music. As hip-hop was asserting itself in the rest of the music world, they were African-American guys who liked punk rock, with a little British-inflected ska music thrown in.
The band’s ups and downs are traced, but what finally makes the movie a success is the way it becomes a character study. There’s Norwood Fisher, who began Fishbone with practice sessions at his mother’s house, and was the kind of high school kid who got other students to join his fan club.
There’s detail on Fisher’s kidnapping arrest when he tried an intervention to get bandmate Kendall Jones, whose hold on reality had become wobbly, away from a perceived cult-like situation.
Angelo Moore, the wild frontman, is struggling to balance his own demonic creativity with a variety of other issues. He describes his partnership with Fisher as a marriage where divorce is impossible “because of the children”—that is, the music.
These knockabout personalities are gathered by directors Lev Anderson and Chris Metzler, who also call on a gallery of music veterans to share the Fishbone love: Gwen Stefani, Ice-T and Perry Farrell included.
Laurence Fishburne (that’s Fishburne, not Fishbone) narrates, often over animations that recall vintage Fat Albert cartoons. An appropriately eclectic mix, given the subject.
“Everyday Sunshine” (three stars)
A spirited chronicle of the band Fishbone, which never quite broke through to the major stardom that everybody agrees they deserved. The oversize personalities of the band help explain the struggles Fishbone had, and vintage footage shows the group at its crazy peak, when they rivaled any live act around.
Rated: Not rated; probably PG-13 for language.
Showing: Grand Illusion.
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