Photo by Blaine Schultz
Fishbone - Summerfest 2021
If you blinked you missed them. Fishbone played an explosive hit and run set Thursday afternoon at Summerfest’s Johnson Controls World Stage. Front man Angelo Moore was a neon blur, mugging and zipping across the stage; he also wailed on saxophone and commanded a theremin. Band namesake and drummer Philip Fisher played with his back to the band, as if to say, “You all follow me!”
The Los Angeles band that rose to fame in the late ‘80s, played with a whirling blast of punk, funk, ska and rock ferocity that would leave most younger bands in the dust.
Fishbone zig-zagged from the social commentary and theatricality of “Hide Behind My Glasses” to the stone groove of “Everyday Sunshine.” It was as easy to trace the group’s musical DNA back to James Brown, Sly and the Family Stone and George Clinton’s Parliament Funkadelic, as it was to see how they captivated the MTV generation.
This is not a band of shrinking violets. Bassist John Norwood Fisher’s slapping broke speed limits and the horn trio of Walter Kibby on pocket trumpet, Christopher Dowd on trombone and Moore on sax, bellowed like the foghorn from a Lake Michigan freighter.
As the saying goes, if you weren’t moving, have someone check for a pulse.
