The best thing about “Everyday Sunshine: The Story of Fishbone’’ is that it really is the story of Fishbone. It’s a hearty, thoughtful, smartly assembled, vaguely complete documentary about a rock band that, even by the standards of out-there musical acts, seemed out there both in the mid-1980s and even now. Fishbone was a sextet shaped by both the isolation of Los Angeles’s predominately black South Central neighborhood and the white public schools its members were bused to.
As more than one of the movie’s famous talking heads observes, the music the band made didn’t have a genre. It was its own thing - a catholic fusion of ska, punk, the untamable exuberance of bands like Parliament and Funkadelic and the out-of-body jazz of, say, Sun Ra and Pharoah Sanders. You can see and hear who influenced Fishbone and whom they influenced - No Doubt and Gogol Bordello, for starters. But true stardom never seemed to find Fishbone (its fish-skeleton logo might have been more famous than the band itself; Michele Bachmann’s visit last month to Jimmy Fallon’s late-night talk show put Fishbone back in the news after the show’s house band, the Roots, played an unprintable Fishbone song as Bachmann was introduced). By the early 1990s, real fame always seemed so close for the band. But the band fell apart before it had adequately finished rising. “Everyday Sunshine’’ makes a compelling, compassionate case for why.
