In this wide-ranging interview, Fishbone frontman Angelo Moore discusses his lifelong creative journey, the necessity of side projects like Dr. Madd Vibe, and how mastering multiple instruments and modern technology has allowed him to maintain absolute artistic independence.

___

Sounds Visual: Angelo, where does the journey in music start for you?

Angelo Moore: ell, the journey in music starts for me from within. It just starts from an idea that I have in my head — like a little melody or a phrase that’ll come up in my head. And then from that melody, I’ve got to find the instrument to play it on. Saxophone was my first instrument. But throughout the years, I had to learn other instruments in order to produce the sound or the idea that was running around in my head. So eventually I ended up learning how to play drums and keys — well enough to produce the song that’s in my head and get it out of me.

But the music is everywhere, man. You hear music all the time in nature. You hear it in the birds, you hear it in the sounds of nature, you hear it in the sounds of the city. You hear it a lot, everywhere. And if you’re an artist, you can catch that and record it, and then relate it to an instrument that you play.

SV: With your dad playing sax for Count Basie, and your mom filling the house with theater — how much of your theatrical stage presence, and your genre-defying appetite, can be traced directly back to that household? Is that a huge part of it?

AM: Yeah, I guess it would be a part of me whether I knew it at the time or not. That’s all I was hearing in the house — music. And, you know, both my mom and dad were English majors, communication majors. My dad was a speech pathologist. Communication — it’s important to communicate, and to know how to have the words to do it, even outside of your career. And yeah — my dad played sax with Count Basie. That’s the family tree.

SV: Is there an unfinished song, or a frustrating musical idea, that’s haunted you for years? And do you ever find that characters like Dr. Madd Vibe help you finally crack open those stubborn concepts?

AM: Oh my God. (laughing) It’s funny that you mention that, man, because that’s why I have Dr. Madd Vibe — that’s why I had to create that outlet. If I can’t get it through Fishbone, you know I gotta get it out somewhere. So then you either have to do it yourself, or you have to do it with another group of people who do understand it, or who are willing to go there with you — willing to do that musical, artistic, uncomfortable thing, walk the high wire with you.

And it’s frustrating when you might trust some of these guys, but then you find out they’re scared — scared to go that far, to go to that limit with you. And then you gotta find somebody else, or you just gotta do it yourself, man, and that’s when you have to learn your own instruments, and your own way of recording things, in order to get it out of your head and manifest it. So — if there’s a will, there’s a way. You just gotta have the want.

SV: Has a Fishbone lyric, or a song you’ve written, ever completely changed meaning for you decades after you wrote it — making you feel like a completely different person singing it?

AM: Yeah, because when you grow, when you survive, you always have a different perspective on what it is than you had before. So there’s a different perspective — you gotta sing it from a different perspective, and for a different reason. Like, for example, “Ma and Pa.” When I wrote that, I was writing from a victim’s perspective. And later on, after I had my daughter, and went through the divorce and all of that, I was like, man, I can’t be singing this song from a victim’s perspective for the rest of my life, because I’m not going to want to sing it if I still feel like a victim. I feel like I’ve gotten past that, and I’m the winner, or I’m the survivor. So I have to sing it like that.

And plus, people come to the show — they don’t want to hear that you’re not singing a certain song anymore for whatever reason. They want to hear their favorite song. They don’t really care what you went through — they just want to sing along, because they paid for it.

SV: Do you ever write lyrics or poetry that are too raw or personal to become a Fishbone song, and where do those boundaries live for you?

AM: Well, they definitely live in Dr. Madd Vibe. Dr. Madd Vibe became necessary because I was being misunderstood by certain members that I had in the band, and I couldn’t get anything out. So there was a side door, a back door, a window — a side project — for me to get my thoughts out through poetry or through another band, because you can’t just sit on that stuff. It just runs around in a circle, unable to get out — it keeps hitting the corners of your brain, but it can’t get out. So you get it out through poetry, or music, or whatever. Dr. Madd Vibe has definitely been that outlet, and Brand New Step as well — Brand New Step is a group that’s more topic-oriented, more of a concept, very ska-driven.

SV: As you’ve aged, how has your relationship with live musical improv changed? Do you trust the chaos more now, or do you crave a different kind of freedom?

AM: I’m no longer taking whatever comes and running with it blindly — I’m always looking for something different. I always end up looking for a different way to get the idea out of me. As far as trusting chaos — lately, the chaos has been working for me, because I like to be a little more organized, since I’ve already got a lot of chaos in my head. That’s just the way my head works. So I really try to be more organized, so that when the chaos comes through, it’s not thwarted by distraction or ADHD, or attention deficit disorder, which actually helps me when I’m creating music.

People demonize that a lot, man — “he’s got ADHD.” I can deal with that, because the ADHD isn’t in the way. It’s not like I don’t even know what to talk about. ADHD is the reason I can capture some of this magic that’s coming into my head — these messages. All I gotta do is focus enough to write it down as it’s coming through, through my ADHD, through the attention deficit disorder.

SV: It can be a superpower!

AM: It’s a superpower, man. Just like autism can be a superpower — being on the spectrum can be a superpower. You just gotta know how to harness it. It’s like harnessing a tractor beam through a tube.

SV: Was there ever a specific show where everything went completely wrong technologically or logistically, but somehow morphed into a legendary, transcendent night because of it?

AM: Well, yeah — thank God we had acoustic instruments. I remember all the juice went out [at one shiw], but you got your voice. That automatically takes you to the organic presentation of your art. Because at one point, there was no electricity — it was only sticks, rocks, and something you could beat on, or a piece of wood you could beat on, and it made a noise. And from that rhythm, that noise became something hypnotic. It hypnotizes you musically.

SV: Are there any classic Fishbone songs that you’ve consciously retired simply because they no longer feel emotionally true to who you are today?

AM: I don’t know, man. I don’t think so — being the band member that hasn’t left the band, I’ve experienced all of the different formations of Fishbone. I’ve only missed one gig in my whole life with Fishbone — that was my dad’s funeral. Other than that, I’ve been there the whole time, and I’ve played all these songs a hundred cities’ worth of times.

SV: Growing up popping and locking and street dancing in Hollywood before picking up an instrument — how does that physical background dictate the way you command the stage and move through a crowd?

AM: Well, the dance and movement part comes natural, because when you’re doing a bunch of street dancing and stuff like that, you’re just around the energy of people anyway. I remember when I gave up street dancing for music, because the music is the puppet master and dance is the puppet. And I figured I wanted to be the puppet master — I wanted to be the one operating the instrument that makes the dance happen, rather than being on the other end of it.

SV: Between publishing comic books, writing poetry, and doing visual art — do these mediums scratch a creative itch that even the high-octane energy of a live stage can’t reach?

AM: Oh yeah, dude. Because when I’m making a cartoon, that cartoon takes you over into a level of fantasy you wish you could go to, but you have to render it on a TV screen to relay that fantasy to people. So when I’m doing stuff like working in Final Cut, and putting different assets together, I get to take it to that whole other dimension where I make my make-believe come true. That definitely scratches an itch that live performance can’t reach — because everybody, when they watch TV or look at their phones, that’s them accessing the fantasy realm of creativity that comes up in our heads. And if you know how to work technology to make it come true, you scratch that itch that you can’t scratch any other way.

SV: Looking back at the pressure the majors put on Fishbone to shorten songs, write something poppy, or co-star on projects like Psychotic Friends Nuttwerx only to watch them stall — what did those frustrations teach you about independence?

AM: Man, it taught me that you have to learn how to play the instruments you don’t already know how to play, and learn the technology, in order to manifest your idea — or else you’ll be waiting on somebody else. You’ll suffer having to wait on somebody else, or having somebody decide they want to shorten or abbreviate your idea for the purposes of fame or money.

And when I make music, I don’t make it for money — I make it purely for the art, for the original, pure, organic intention of the idea that comes up in my head. And afterward, if that idea happens to earn money, well, then the floodgates open. (laughing) But the first thing isn’t to make a song with money in mind, because that’s a lucha idea — that’s one of the things that’s happened, and that’s how record people are: “We gotta make the song three minutes, it can’t be a six-minute song, people’s attention spans are short. Oh, we gotta change the lyrics. It’s not the proper length, the measures aren’t right, you don’t put a sharp next to — you don’t put a minor next to a major,” stuff like that. And I’m thinking to myself: well, who says you can’t do this? Who says it? In what book? Who wrote it, and why do you believe in that?

It’s good to know all that stuff — music theory, everything, I’m not saying it isn’t. All of it is good to know. But when you get an idea, and it comes to your head straight from God, or out of space, there ain’t no majors or minors attached to it. It’s a pure sound, or movement, and that’s what you’ve got to manifest through your body, through your instrument.

We’ve got to put that stuff out there if we want to reach people, because we don’t want to do this and have it sit in the closet. It’s like people who make great music but leave it on the hard drive, because they’re constantly perfecting it — they’re going for perfection, and perfection doesn’t exist. So you’ve got people who make all this great music, but it does nobody in the world any good because it’s sitting on a hard drive.

SV: If a tree falls in the forest…

AM: If the tree falls in the forest and nobody’s there to hear it, man — you want people to hear that tree fall, so you gotta let them know: hey, at three o’clock, in such-and-such forest, this is gonna happen, you need to be there to see the tree fall, and the wind blowing the leaves around.

SV: We live in an era now of streaming services and algorithms driving consumption, and bypassing a lot of fair compensation for artists. Are there any alternative economic models or distribution systems that you think musicians actually need to fight for today?

AM: Distribution systems — well, the first thing I think of is Facebook, Instagram, all those social media platforms where people get their music out. Go get your band out there — it’s all out there, for people to use. As you get that stuff out there — it’s important. Otherwise you just sit there with something in the dark, all by yourself, and it stays closed off.

You gotta put it out to a lot of different platforms, but people take advantage, because they know you want to get your music out. Some people make it difficult, they overcharge you to get your music out there, because they know some people don’t know any better. So you gotta learn how to be your own damn lawyer, and that takes away from the music — no, it takes away from the creativity, because now you gotta learn how to be your own watchdog, be your own everything.

SV: Having experienced everything from touring vans to major-label chaos over 40-plus years — do you think things are easier or harder for independent artists today than they were back in the day?

AM: I think it might be a little easier, because you can actually take your career into your own hands. So if you succeed, it’s your doing; if you mess up, it’s your fault. At least you’ve got it in your own hands. There’s nothing worse than being attached to a record company — if they decide they want to make a U-turn in the middle of your journey, which is your life, then you can’t do anything about it, because you’re attached to a record contract. They’ll drop you and go find the next thing they think they can sell, and put you on the shelf, and you can’t even use your own material because somebody at the record company doesn’t believe in it anymore. So I’m a full believer in the entrepreneurial journey.

SV: We’ve shifted a lot over the decades toward home recording, laptops, and DAWs. Do you feel today’s young musicians miss out on valuable creative friction, or do you think the democratization of gear has finally set the underground artist free?

AM: That’s definitely set me free — the answer is yes. I remember sitting in the studio with Fishbone, many times, looking at the back of some guy at a soundboard, wondering, “What’s he doing? What are those knobs he’s turning, those faders he’s pushing?” And once laptops and computers and Logic came out — Logic, Pro Tools, all that — I was like, man, look at this, it’s a whole studio in a computer. And once I learned how to use it, oh my God — I didn’t have to wait on anybody, I didn’t have to pay a ridiculous amount of money just to record my stuff, because I knew how to do it myself.

Nobody could tell me “this doesn’t work” or “you shouldn’t do that” or “that doesn’t go with this.” I could just sit down without anybody telling me theory, or something that goes against my original, raw idea. Then you can switch yourself out — get past somebody else’s opinion, or their limited knowledge from a book, or what I call the Almighty Antenna.

SV: The Great Magnet.

AM: The Great Magnet. There’s so much you can capture from that Great Magnet — you just have to know how to see it, or know what you’re listening for, in order to catch it.

SV: So as pretty much the one constant member steering the ship through decades of turbulence and lineup changes, how have you stayed motivated through the darkest periods to keep preaching the band’s gospel?

AM: Well, thank God we still had shows and tours being booked — that’s number one. If there’s a show booked, a venue or a platform for you to put your heart out, and you have people coming to see you — whether it’s two or three people, or two or three thousand — you still have an opportunity to put it out there.

You’ve got a mic that’s working, you’ve got a band behind you, and that’s when you do it. Even if there’s no band backing you up — if you’ve got poetry, or you know how to play an instrument, then you do it like that. You take it to the street corner, or take it to the boardwalk. As long as you have that strong will to keep putting it out, as long as nobody’s physically stopping you from stepping forward — that’s the main point. Nobody’s physically getting in your way.

SV: Do you ever feel like, with the lineup shifts and new members cycling in, it was ever hard to successfully channel past institutional trauma into a unifying creative force, rather than letting old wounds in the band clash destructively?

AM: Sometimes it’s been hard, because I definitely do have trauma. I’ve gone to a lot of therapy and counseling, I’ve gone to a lot of AA, still go to AA. I got sober during the quarantine — that’s when a lot of people got messed up, but I was able to take all that seclusion, and as long as I had my essentials around me, I was able to create. But it did erupt, and I was also going through a rehab program throughout quarantine.

SV: Looking back at, I’ll say the late 1980s–what do you think was the biggest misconception the mainstream public or media had about Fishbone’s identity?

AM: The misconception was that these Black guys were playing the wrong kind of music — Black guys playing rock music. Rock music is supposed to be for the white boys, the Black guy is supposed to play soul and R&B. If you’ve got dreadlocks, you’re supposed to be playing reggae. If you’re Latino, you need to be playing cumbia. If you’re white, you need to be playing rock. These are the lanes that the record companies and music-industry people decide you’re supposed to be in, because that’s what they believe you’re supposed to be — they think you’re supposed to stay in your lane. Sometimes the lanes are necessary, but you should be able to cross the lane if you want to. The only thing that holds that back, man, is somebody at a record company who’s scared, or doesn’t know how to step outside the lane.

SV: You’ve often described your lyrics as a form of social forecasting, or a kind of radar for cultural shifts. So my question is: when you look at modern civic discourse, where nuance is completely flattened nowadays, do you feel a heavy burden that your artistic predictions keep coming true?

AM: Well, I know that when I end up writing about something, and it ends up coming true later, I wasn’t really thinking about it like that when I was writing it — like I’m trying to predict the future on purpose. It just ends up being that way, from channeling different experiences.

SV: Stockholm Syndrome leans really heavily into a protest ethos. How much of that record was built on older, unfinished songs from prior lineups, and how did you approach blending those styles together?

AM: Probably about half of those songs on that record were leftover from Fishbone songs that had never gotten finished. Some of them were new, but I feel like it’s not good to waste good material, man — sometimes it’s hard to come by.

SV: When you look at the state of political discourse today, do you feel like society has evolved, or do you feel like you’re still dealing with the exact same foundational problems of racism and division that existed when Fishbone started?

AM: Oh, man, we’re still dealing with it. It’s wild to think that we’re still dealing with that stupid stuff. We really haven’t learned yet that everybody, even though we’re all different colors, is still part of the human race — like a rainbow, all different colors, but made out of the same gases. People haven’t learned that yet.

And then you gotta think — maybe this is supposed to be here. Everything is the yin and the yang. I believe in God, or at least a higher power, but I don’t really consider myself religious, because religions are just different filters made by man — an imperfect being. So we all have our different filters, or interpretations, of how we see life. Some people see the wind as just wind, some people see the wind as God, or water as God.

So — I digress — God created everything, the universe, all the planets, as far as it goes. We’re just a speck in the universe. When God put all this together, on the planet we call Earth, God had a plan for us. We don’t really know what it is, other than being born and dying, and whatever we experience in between. So you’ve got the yin and the yang — good and evil, north pole and south pole, up and down, light and dark. Without the darkness, there wouldn’t be light, and without light, there wouldn’t be darkness.

Now, God is supposed to be a loving God — but how could God permit a phenomenon like racism, where a person can hate another person because of the color of their skin, which is a vanity-based disease? Blind people aren’t racist — they can’t see color, they can only hear.

SV: Reminds me of that famous Dave Chappelle sketch where the blind guy was racist...

AM: That’s fucking hilarious, man. That’s a classic sketch, for all time. But you’ve got that going on, and I think — without racism, how would we look for the light? Sometimes I think, playing devil’s advocate, worst-case scenario — we’ve got racism here, it’s messed up, it’s stupid and evil, but it’s one of the things that makes us laugh the most when it comes to comedy.

SV: You frequently talk about magic, energy, and vibration in other interviews. What does magic actually mean to you — not as a poetic metaphor, but as a literal, driving force in your life?

AM: I think magic, to me, is being able to tune into something beyond our physical bodies, because there’s more than just us here on this planet. Magic is the wind, magic is the water. When you watch a documentary on the ocean, and you see a whole world of life under there, that’s magical. It’s magic to be able to hear the music in the wind — to actually hear it, and be like, “that’s not just a bird chirping,” there’s a melody in that. And if you can tune in to something like that, and translate it to your instrument, you’ve got some magic going on.

I gotta say this — when I would go see Jump With Joey, those were some truly magical times. The music moved me — I was out there on the dance floor all night. I didn’t even really know what ska was, I just knew the music made me want to dance all night. And later, when I started doing my own research, finding out what ska was, listening to it more — there’s Jamaican ska, old-school ska, the first form of that music before it evolved. You do your research, you slow down enough to really listen to what you’re hearing.

SV: Have you ever completely changed your mind about something you once wrote or fought passionately for when you were younger? Like, is there a belief you held at 25 that you’ve totally abandoned?

AM: Damn, man — that’s a hard one. I go back to the example of “Ma and Pa” — I’ve abandoned that perspective, and there are other songs like that too. But I have to look at it from a different perspective. Even though I may have abandoned that original meaning, there have been people inspired by it along the way, and for me to stop doing it just because I feel different now would be kind of selfish.

I think about the Rolling Stones, man, and all the songs they’ve done a million times — I’m sure Jagger gets sick of singing certain songs. I bet he’s had to reinvent himself in order to keep doing that. You gotta be able to become a different person in order to find something new, so you’re not just repeating the same thing over and over. At least then you bring a different tone, a different feeling, a different heat, a different cold to it, so when you go back to it, you can look at it from a different perspective.

SV: When you collaborate across your side projects, like Brand New Step or Dr. Madd Vibe — what specifically tells you that someone is speaking the exact same musical language as you, like a kindred spirit?

AM: Well, when they stay and watch the whole show — that’s one thing that lets me know they’re relating to it, that they’re hooked on it. Or when they’re dancing to it. Not everybody’s gonna get what you do. But when they want to make music with you, then you’ve got a kindred spirit. Sometimes you get distracted or discouraged by a person’s delivery — you have to get past that, learn how to filter through the delivery — I call it finding the diamond in the doo-doo. Nobody likes reaching into the doo-doo, but once you grab that diamond in the middle of it, pull your hand out, wash the diamond off, and now you’ve got a nice, shiny diamond.

SV: From your appearance on The Simpsons to various multimedia ventures — how do these unexpected pop-culture crossovers fit into your broader universe of self-expression?

AM: Experimentation — being able to bend your beliefs, not break them. If you can bend your beliefs, you can come up with something new. I don’t particularly care for pop culture — some of it I can do, but it’s not the thing I go to first. But I can definitely learn some of the disciplines of pop culture, because the majority of people on this planet have very short attention spans, and they’ve got the horse blinders on — they only see or think in a small way, because they’re working within the matrix, which is very limited. Music is supposed to be freeing, and a lot of the music you hear on the airwaves is very controlled — it’s not challenging, it doesn’t leave a lot of room for revolution.

That’s some of what I’ve been dealing with lately with Fishbone in the studio — “the song is too long, it needs to be three minutes,” “these chords don’t match,” “it’s not the proper length,” “the book says you’re supposed to do it this way, and if you don’t put it together like that, we can’t do the song.” I’ve had to deal with a lot of that, and I say, all right, I’ll bend my beliefs as much as I can, but not break my integrity to the music.

And when it doesn’t get through — and I’ve had a couple of songs not make it onto a Fishbone record because of that — I’m like, man, thank God I know how to play drums, saxophone, keys, theremin, percussion, all of it. Thank God I’ve got a bass saxophone — I can make my basslines out of that if I don’t have a bass guitar. I can pivot, and make my own style of music. It might be jarring to people who are used to hearing just electric instruments, but there’s a whole culture built on acoustic instruments — marching band music, for instance, as a matter of fact, in New Orleans.

SV: Angelo, thanks so much for your time today! Anything you want to plug?

AM: Check out my website — I just had it redone, refurbished, and upgraded, so there’s a lot of cool stuff on there. I’ve got an art gallery project called “Avant Presidents” and “Avant Icons,” where I redid Lincoln, Kennedy, and Obama, and embellished their images with my own poetry and artwork. Plus I’ve got some performance-art pieces — you can go on there and check those out, see how I’m showing you to view the art, and I’ve got music and poetry that go along with it too.

SV: Take care, Angelo.

AM: All right. Peace.