We saw Fishbone open for Parliament Funkadelic at the Capital Theater in Port Chester just the other day. I’ve been a big Fishbone fan since the 1980’s and seen them a few times before, most notably at the Lollapalooza Festival of 1993, when I was working at MTV’s Electronic Carnival. Their sound is a bit hard to describe, but I guess they came up as part of that L.A. ska punk scene, combined with deep funk and melodic vocals with great harmony. And of course great songwriting that shows of all their strengths. It looks like they still have their original bassist, singers and horn players, but the guitarist, keyboardist and drummer were younger looking guys. They put on a fantastic show. The lead singer also played a variety or saxophones, including an impressive black and gold baritone. He seemed to suffer some kind of wardrobe malfunction while crowd surfing; I’m not sure if it was part of the act or not.
Parliament Funkadelic were great too. George Clinton is still out there doing his thing in his eighties, although he mostly sat in his chair, sang now and then, and conducted the band from time to time. I could mention that I met George Clinton once in the ’90s when I was working at MTV doing music video games, and he wanted license his whole catalog to us to sample and use in a game. I thought that was a great idea, and worked on a bunch treatments and prototypes for a game in which you go around doing funk jams, and set up different beacons on different levels to ultimately call the mothership, and at the end a bug UFO comes down and the P Funk band jams with you. It would’ve been amazing! But alas, that game never got made.
There were probably twenty musicians on stage including horns, multiple singers, two bass players, several guitarists and just one guy on keys. The whole thing was one continuous stream of songs, jams, segues and solos. At one point, when they just finished playing Give Up the Funk, it looked as if they might end the set, but instead they moved into a slow, sparse bass pattern. The one by one half the guys in the band took an extended solo: trombone, synthesizer, bass, alto sax, guitar, it went on for like a half an hour on the same minimalist groove, and it was amazing. The alto player in particular had that searing wailing altissimo sound, and cut above everyone else. The band brought it up after that and did two more songs, another half hour at least.
Last week was the one and only five-day work week in August for me. Over the weekend I took the Mustang out, caught up on the yardwork again, this time mainly the north side of the house, plus the neighbor’s willow tree and weeding under the hedges. We got back into going on bike rides on Sunday morning. I did fifteen miles this time. Went out to Long Island for a visit before Michelle goes back to school. That’s it.