“That’s crazy, man!”
I’m talking to Chris Dowd, founding member and keyboardist/trombonist of Fishbone, just prior to the band’s performance on Mempho’s Bud Light Stage last Sunday, October 11th, and he can’t believe my name is Alex Greene. “That’s the name of my uncle who first showed me how to play keyboards!” he says. We’re both bewildered by this twist of fate, but then Dowd does me one better. When I mention that I first saw Fishbone in 1986 at a little dive bar in Lincoln, Nebraska, he immediately lights up. “I remember that place! And what was it called? It had some kind of connection to our band name, right?”
“Close,” I say. “It was called the Drumstick.” Chicken bones, not fish. How could I forget? It was a life-changing performance for this aspiring musician, redefining “high energy,” as most of their shows did. That was also true of their blistering eponymous debut EP, relatively new at the time, which deftly mashed up ska, funk, reggae, and metal — a stylistic stew that has remained at the heart of the band’s sound ever since.
Dowd nods knowingly and adds, “You know who else was at the Drumstick that night? Nick Hexum. He always talks about how seeing us play there basically spawned 311.” That’s not surprising, given the ferocity with which Fishbone burst on the scene some four decades ago, not only stylistically fearless, but boldly fun and funny. Those weren’t always in plentiful supply in the post-punk world, but Fishbone almost single-handedly brought back the idea that a band could be an absolutely gonzo band of brothers. Their proclivity for skit-like interludes predated that same impulse in De La Soul, and those two bands went on to heavily influence others in their wake, including a Memphis group I helped start in the ’90s, Big Ass Truck.
But, as singer/saxophonist Angelo Moore joins us, it’s clear that these guys are not angling for a trip down memory lane. They are completely in the moment, still heady from their true-to-form 2025 album, Stockholm Syndrome, as great as anything from the group’s past. One reason for that, Dowd says, is his return to the band in 2018, after leaving in 1994, and the renewed collaboration between Dowd and Moore that ensued, finally reaching cruising altitude as the last album was being recorded.
“I left the band, but I never stopped loving him,” says Dowd, pointing to Moore, who replies with goofy abandon, “Yeah, yeah! I never stopped loving you, baby!” After a good laugh, Moore adds, “What would the world be without us weirdos? It’d be pretty fucking boring.”
Then Dowd resumes, “I think in my absence, after leaving the band, a lot of pressure fell on Angelo. So when I came back, I realized that all these things had been going on for him emotionally, and for both of us. And then there was just a tumultuousness inside the band that became unsettling and unreasonable. I think both of us had to just kind of go in ourselves and take back our own power.”
“That’s when it became Fishbone Penitentiary,” says Moore of the band’s latter-day “tumultuousness” before Dowd rejoined. “Great music! But it was a penitentiary. There were a lot of misunderstandings and misinterpretations and control issues after a while. You got a little jealousy in there and all those different things. All those things start to creep in. Stockholm Syndrome for me — some of the songs on that record were songs that were still in progress when the last lineup was there, right? And you know, even when the shit started to go south or whatever, I’ve still got to thank those guys for creating a lot of that music, and creating that vibe that’s valuable as we continue. Even though it turned into that penitentiary thing. It’s almost like, you know, praising your captor. So it was a case of Stockholm syndrome, both from an inside Fishbone perspective, but then also in our country as a whole.”
As that last comment suggests, both singer-songwriters are as doggedly political as ever, even while cranking out some of the most fun music of our era. “When it comes up into my head, all the evil-ass Trump shit, and the new Nazis, and all the rest of that shit, I mean, it’s overall just fucked up, but what’s what’s really fucked up about it, but captivating, is the entertainment factor. So as an entertainer, I definitely see the the intrigue, but it’s also blatantly evil.”
When I suggest that they’ve been calling out America’s drift to the right for the past 40 years, all too accurately, they heartily agree. Says Dowd, “I don’t think you can be Black in America and not and recognize this whole thing that’s going on. You can’t be. I mean, even if you’re one of these people that has financially benefited, I still don’t understand it. Like, what profit a man to gain the world and lose his entire soul?”
Which in turn prompts Moore to look around in fear, half-kidding. “Leaving the hotel late this morning, I was asking the driver, ‘Memphis, Tennessee: there’s a lot of racism here, isn’t there? Close to Mississippi?’ And he said, ‘Yeah.’ I’m like, ‘Oh shit, Mississippi! What the fuck are we doing here?’ That’s the first thing that came up in my head. Because that brother got killed. He got his throat cut out, hanging out with with these two white guys, you know, and people are getting hung around here and shit and everything!”
“Like ‘Secret Police,'” Dowd chimes in. “I wrote that song. And now that’s where we are. It’s weird for me because I tell all my friends, ‘You guys don’t see this? It’s getting ready to happen!’ Especially when you realize how [Trump] got his playbook from Roy Cohn. That’s the whole McCarthy era. You see what I’m saying? That’s kind of what we’re reliving. It’s just the 2026 version.”
In any case, we wrap up our chat and I before long I find myself, along with two other erstwhile members of Big Ass Truck, pressed to the edge of the stage, skanking and jiving with the rest of the crowd to Fishbone’s patented funk-ska-thrash. The band, which also included James Jones (bass), Hassan Hurd (drums), John “JS” Williams II (trumpet, vocals), and Tracey “Spacey T” Singleton (guitar), could pivot from style to style on a dime, incredibly tight, yet channeling the band’s loose, gonzo spirit effortlessly.
My trip down memory lane was over. This band had us gyrating frantically in the moment, joyously, furiously. Before long, they had the sizable Mempho crowd singing along to one of their new songs with cathartic zeal, and the past 40 years came rushing headlong into the present:
I see you coming down the street
With tiki torches and hate speech
You’re not a proud boy
You’re just a fuck boy
Drinking the kool aid of a mad orange king
Another Kid Rock
With all the hate talk
Murder, sickness, global crisis
Coup d’état, vanilla ISIS
Ohh… you’re just a racist piece of shit!
