Everyday Sunshine: The Story Of Fishbone

With its impossible-to-pin-down sound and uncontainable energy, Fishbone seemingly burst out of nowhere to top everyone’s short list of the coolest band in America in the mid-’80s. Mixing punk, ska, funk, and whatever else occurred to its members, the group inspired contemporaries like Red Hot Chili Peppers and later acts like No Doubt. Though signed to a major label not long after its first public gigs, Fishbone found its commercial breakthrough remained just out of reach as the ’80s turned into the ’90s, a frustration that added further pressure to the band’s all-for-one, everyone-has-a-voice structure. “Had Fishbone been less of a democracy, they might have been a more successful band,” former band manager Roger Perry says early in the documentary Everyday Sunshine: The Story Of Fishbone. “But had they been less of a democracy, they wouldn’t have been Fishbone.”

Updated 10/21/2011