Well, we were junior high school kids in 1979. We had known each other for a year. Most of us had known each other for a year and then we started doing music together as 14 year olds.

When you guys first started out, did you incorporate funk, ska, punk rock, and all that together?

Those were some of the first things that evolved. Punk rock was maybe the last step but when we got together we tried to play some funkadelic, tried to play a little reggae, and then Dirty Walt said we need to write our own songs. We started writing our own songs. Kendall’s first songs that he wrote were really like power pop. It was real natural to him. He had no reference to the term. That’s just the way Kendall wrote and then otherwise we were trying to play with reggae rhythms and sped them up as fast as we could play them. I thought we made up something that never had been done before. Punk rock reggae. What are we going to call it? Walt knew better. Walt had an aunt that drove limos that introduced him to The Selecter and The English Beat. About one or two days later Walt brought over a cassette of The Selecter and The English Beat. This is ska music. So we fully embraced it. Kendall had a cousin who worked at a punk rock club in L.A. called The Vex. He was a bouncer. Kendall used to go see punk rock shows at The Vex and except for the hoopla around The Sex Pistols at that time and the media introducing us to punk rock, that was like first hearing about it and then exploring it. Then having fun with it.

I think that’s amazing that you guys had so many influences and you managed to incorporate all of them into your music.

Yeah, it came from the things that we listened to. We were open to rock and roll overall. A lot of us had a lot of rock in our music collections. We lived in the inner city in L.A. and we went to school in the Valley. We lived in black neighborhoods and went to school in white neighborhoods. It wasn’t exactly like the white kids that we went to school with didn’t exactly introduce us to rock but it definitely enhanced our listening because myself and my father listened to rock and roll. Kendall’s dad was actually in love with Arthur Lee for a brief period of time and his dad listened to rock and Chris Dowd’s uncle Alex listened to a lot of rock and roll. Old and modern at that time so there were people around us that listened to it that were black and in our neighborhoods. My record collection I got from one of my cousins had tons of early ‘70s and late ‘60s rock records in it. But really funkadelic made us wide open so I put that on funkadelic.

That’s not really surprising because people have always claimed that rock and roll resulted from listening to blues and stuff like that.

Yeah, let’s say Chuck Berry. Let’s generally give it to Little Richard and Keith Morris from the Circle Jerks once was talking about it. Maybe somebody asked him a question about the beginnings of punk rock and he said he thought Chuck Berry started it.

That guy was very amazing and still is today.

We just did a show with Bo Diddley in Australia. Fuck man, Little Richard is still around. Chuck Berry is still around. Bo Diddley is still around. Somebody should be putting together some damn money to get the three of them together on some tracks before they’re gone.

That’s a concert I would pay to see.

I want to buy the record and I want them to sing about what’s really on their minds.

People don’t seem to do that too much anymore do they?

Yeah, dollar bills ya’ll. That’s what’s on people’s minds I guess.

With you guys being black, do you feel that you crossed a lot of racial barriers and you helped bring people together with your music?

In a big way we do and that might be scary to some people but it gives us a great sense of purpose to know that we are the possibility of a true color blind existence. I like to say we are the order with no borders and no bounds. World citizens.

I think what I find scary is that we’re in the 21st century and there are still people who suffer from the mental illness of racism. That’s what scares me.

Somebody is controlling large portions of people by using those things. By keeping people fearful of the next person or making somebody feel like they have to over exaggerate themselves to survive. It’s unfortunate. We joke about a lot of shit but sometimes the jokes hit home.

They do.

We sit around and joke that if it wasn’t for music and sports, white people would have killed off all the niggers already as a joke. But God damn it, sometimes we’re like well, shit. It could be the case.

My dad is a Cherokee/Choctaw Indian and white people tried to kill off all of them. I know what you mean. You guys just released Still Stuck In Your Throat. It’s touted as being the first record that you guys have released in six years. Why did you guys take such a long break?

Well, in September 2003 we started a record and then we went on tour in Europe and after that tour was done, Dirty Walt who is an original member of the band and Spacey T, the guitar player, left. That grounded the recording process to a halt. Me and Angelo and John Steward shortly thereafter picked up the pieces and then continued. Me and Angelo wrote three songs during the course of that last tour and that was “Forever Moore”, “Jack Ass Brigade”, and “Faceplant Scorpion Backpinch”. Without those guys we went in and recorded those three songs to demo them trying to continue to further the Fishbone cause. After they left we were wondering if we should keep going. Do we continue doing this and Angelo’s response to me was that if we are going to keep doing it then we got to do it full steam ahead. He wants horns and he wants keyboards so we went forward with that in mind. If we’re going to do it, we’re going to do it 100 percent plus. It took some time to find the right people to fit what would become Fishbone in this particular episode of our lives. That’s why it took this long.

You definitely have a large group of people. Most bands are usually four or five people and your band incorporates seven people.

Yeah, it was eight.

Something that I thought was really cool was a lot of the instruments you guys use are saxophones, trumpets, trombones. A lot of people don’t incorporate instruments like that in their music but I think it definitely enhances the sound. You can do so much more.

We got a little Duke Ellington in us. A little Cab Calloway thing going on. What we do encompasses the full gamut of musical expression. We got to add a horn. And Angelo on the theremin. That’s what it is like.

That’s an instrument that I’ve heard of before but I’m not quite sure what it is.

It actually is the first synthesizer technology that was invented in the ’30s. It’s been used on a bunch of recordings through the ’50s and actually in a lot of science fiction movies.

Oh, so it’s what makes a lot of those weird sounds you hear in science fiction movie music then. How long did it take you guys to get everyone together and get the record out?

Like I said, that was in 2003 that Dirty Walt and Spacey T left the band. We demoed three songs and then continued to put together the pieces that would become the current lineup of Fishbone and I’d say it was actually to get the lineup straight, we had a couple of people that we thought we had it down but then we made a couple of changes. Curtis Storey was the last member to come in. It seems like he’s been on deck for…it’s hard to say because I could be very wrong. My perception of time is skewered but it could be about two years with Curtis.

When you guys sit down and write a record, what do you use for inspiration?

Well, first and foremost in general is just living life. Just all the things that we experience emotionally as human beings. Then past that I put on some of my favorite records. I make sure to listen to a lot of Elvis Costello, a lot of David Bowie, some Al Green, and some funkadelic. And The Beatles.

I think it’s so cool when people sit there and talk about all the different kinds of music they have because I have been around so many people that limit themselves to one type of music. I like heavy metal and I just don’t listen to anything else outside of that. To me that makes it so easy for you to burn out on music completely.

And the Buzzcocks I’ve got to say. I was listening to the Buzzcocks a lot.

What three songs on the record do you feel describe where the band is at right now?

I think musically “Let Dem Ho’s Fight”. It musically represents an advancement. Something where we move forward in making a song incorporating the dance hall beat with a real heavy guitar influence. There was an MC who was down with Boogie Down Productions era one. His name is Mad Lion. I think me and Mad Lion had been talking about recording. He came up with the title of punk rock dance hall and then there was a band called Skindred and Skindred did it to death. Like real heavy metal dance hall with punk rock edginess. I used those kind of things…we could call those things that led us to where we got with that. Maybe that’s the most forward thing that we’ve got. I’m having a hard time remembering what’s on the record. “The Devil Made Me Do It”. That’s a space we’ve never went into as well. We’ve made new ground with these songs.

There were a couple of songs on the record that I really liked. One of them was “Jack Ass Brigade” and the other one was “Behind Closed Doors”. Lyrically you guys are so expressive and that song really made me think a lot. I live in Dallas and when I go downtown I always see all these homeless people sitting around. I realize how much people really don’t think about that sort of thing.

Yeah, I wrote those lyrics. We were rehearsing in downtown L.A. and it was not very far away from Skid Row. We had been going down there for over a year and I just had to turn that corner just to know what existed over there. One day I went down that street, down what they call Skid Row in downtown L.A. and it just made me cry. I was like wait a minute, they got my people living like this? What the fuck is this? I just didn’t know it was like a whole community that was thriving on the streets.

Yeah, that’s something I see every time I go downtown and I watch how people react to that. They’ll see some homeless person and give them a wide berth. I’m the kind of person who walks up to these people and I talk to them. I buy them a sandwich, sit down, and talk to them. I don’t think it’s a situation you should avoid. I think it’s something you should come to grips with, understand, and know about.

I live on the beach in Santa Monica and when I first moved here in ’92, there were a lot of homeless that lived on the beach but nowhere near like it was downtown. It was actually just a few people compared to downtown. At night when it would get really cold or it would rain, sometimes they would come into my building and I’d have to walk over people to get to my apartment. It didn’t bother me ultimately. Sometimes it would stink a bit but ultimately if I had been in their shoes, I would want to do the same God damn thing. Eventually they gentrified the neighborhood. They moved all the fucking homeless people out of Santa Monica, flipped everything, and put gates around the fucking front of my building. It was like fuck, man where did they go? What did they do with these people?

Just moved them someplace else.

I tell you what, as a society we need to try and imagine what to do about these things. Real solutions. Hopefully you get the song “Behind Closed Doors” and it shouldn’t register as a complaint. It should wake your mind up to say okay, there’s something going on here and a solution is possible. Then we have to go forward and figure that part out because actually for all of the illnesses of society, every motherfucker over 30 years old needs to be looking at the younger generation. I’ve got be a fucking old ass man with these badass bastards running around?

Oh, no shit.

Wait until these kids come back from fucking Iraq.

That’s what I’m the most afraid of. I was in the military myself and my dad was in Vietnam. People don’t realize what wars to do people. You send some kid fresh out of high school over there and he sees people getting blown into fifty million pieces and he’s encouraged to run around shooting people, psychologically what do you think that’s going to do to people?

I think as I grow closer to 70 years old it’s going to be a hellish environment. When those kids are in their 30’s and 40’s and they’re fucking flipped out and everything that they suppressed since they were forced into that situation begin to rise to the top, we’re going to have fucking hell on earth.

Exactly and that’s where a lot of these homeless people come from. These people come back from these wars and they’re all fucked up in the head. Their families don’t want to deal with that shit so they just shove them out in the fucking street and then society deals with it.

They can’t get jobs because they’re fucking pushed out because they watched their best friend get blown to bits talking to him while he’s just a torso, arms, and a head. Dying. That shit ain’t them kids’ fault. There has to be some deep contemplation on how we are going to deal with these things.

The ramifications are frightening. I read a news article and people don’t think about that either. The news article was talking about 70 percent of these Iraqi children live with very serious psychological trauma. They tell me they’re helping these people but yet these children are exposed to all this horrible stuff, watching their parents die and shit. That’s helping them?

We only create a deeper insane culture on both sides. It’s like random violence in the United States when these kids come back from Iraq, it’s going to rise.

That’s one thing they never look into. They never do any research on just how high the homicide rate rises right after a war. That would force people to look at the sacred cow of war and look at it in a different light. I don’t think people want to do that.

Obviously the people that make policies are immune to a certain level of damage when it comes down to it. A gunman can go to a bridge and snipe people from many yards away but it’s not necessarily going to happen in Washington, D.C. and get near the House of Congress or the Senate or the White House.

Those people aren’t going to send their kids off to war.

Exactly. They don’t feel that same pain.

That was one song that made me do a lot of thinking. I like it when a band does that.

Thanks. That’s our ultimate goal and intention. To start some thinking and hopefully it’s solution minded thinking.

That’s something I hope for too. Have you guys done any videos for the record?

We did a video for “Let Dem Ho’s Fight”. We just finished it.What’s the theme of the video?

I haven’t even seen the video. How about that? I didn’t talk to the director before we got to the video shoot. I had a remote clue of what he was doing but I think it has sex and violence.

Cool.

It’s going to be funny. It’s making fun of the Jerry Springer culture.

I saw that talk show twice and just couldn’t believe it.

I was fucking hooked and amazed by it. I was like oh, no. This is America right here. Without the people Jerry Springer couldn’t have a gig. He didn’t create those people to be like that.

Sometimes I wonder where he finds those people.

I believe that Ronald Reagan created that.

I figure old Ronald Reagan created a lot of things we could have done without. You guys are going to be on tour and aren’t coming through Dallas.

We’re not?

No, all that’s on here is Austin and Houston.

Okay, we’ll be back. We’re out until September. We’ll come through sometime.

Has the CD already been released or is there a release date for it?

Tuesday. We’ll be in Austin on Thursday. Dallas has just got to come to Austin or Houston.

I wish I could. I’ll just be patient and wait. Any other thoughts or comments?

While you’re listening to the record take a real good look and listen to “Party With Saddam” and “We Just Lose Our Minds”.

I think the song “We Just Lose Our Minds” had some particular significance this past week.,p> Right.

What I thought was funny was that in Tennessee they want to pass some law that people can carry guns with them anywhere. In courthouses, parks, playgrounds. They worry about law abiding citizens not being able to defend themselves. Prior to those two acts of violence, those two guys were law abiding citizens. They legally did buy their guns. Are we dealing with facing hard core criminals or are we facing law abiding citizens who have guns and lose their minds?

I tell you what, there’s one culture and one country where everybody owning a gun has not made them lose their fucking minds and that’s Switzerland. Everybody goes to fucking two years of military training. They learn how to use a gun and how to respect it and then everybody is issued a gun. I don’t own a gun. I don’t want to own a gun. If they take away everybody’s guns it will be the truly determined that get them. That’s criminals that will get them.

What scares me is the mindset of a lot of these people. They get this idea that everyone will carry a firearm and if someone does something I’ll just pull out my gun and shoot them. Sometimes I wonder if they really want to live in a society where there are exchanges of gunfire like back in the Wild West.

Exactly. I never owned a gun because I always thought of myself of just having a snaplike temper. Dude, I’ll end up hurting somebody I love if I own a gun. I don’t trust myself so I never went that direction. Everybody’s got a gun. There are a lot of people who don’t own guns and who don’t need to own a gun.

I think that’s what people need to think about. Do we want a society where everybody is packing a pistol or do we want to get people to be more responsible.

Right or every household has a gun and every kid has potential access to that weapon as well. Shit man, some people might own guns because I got kids and I don’t want my kids to stumble upon this thing. There are all kinds of reasons and I don’t have the answers to that one. What gun control should look like. There should be some form of gun control. I don’t know what it should be like though. I don’t know what the answer is.

If I had it my way, if people applied for a gun two things would have to happen. Number one a background check that not only looks into if you have a criminal record but also what your mental health record looks like. Number two you have to undergo a psychological examination and if you don’t pass it, you don’t get a gun.

Yeah, actually everybody that owns a gun should have to pass whatever test it is that airline pilots have to pass. I ain’t heard of one airline pilot losing his fucking mind and crashing the plane because his wife left him.

Exactly.