Fishbone’s New Line : The eclectic L.A. funk band never had trouble ‘crossing over’ to a white audience, but now it wants to cross back

In a bare studio, high in an old warehouse deep downtown, Fishbone is rehearsing for a brief East Coast tour--horns blaring, guitars bubbling into a ska-ish sort of groove. The music is so loud you can hear the band from street level a block and a half away, careening almost randomly from passage to passage without stopping, working out a tricky rhythm here, a smidge of dissonant, trumpet-sax harmony there, all snapped into cohesiveness by Norwood Fisher’s popping bass. Divorced from its context, the horn work has an odd, almost Copland-esque air.

There is a sudden pause.

Guitarist Kendall Jones grins, stomps on a fuzz pedal and reels out a metal lick Ted Nugent would have been proud to call his own. He segues into a dreamy, Van Halen-type groove, then doodles the intro to a song off the new album.

Fish (the only name the drummer uses) kicks in and is joined by the rest of the septet. Lead singer Angelo Moore, who has been known to stage-dive from the top of 15-foot speaker columns at punk shows, unhooks his saxophone and picks up a mike.

Even at rehearsal, Moore likes to climb on things, and, as he sings, he leaps onto an amp case and tickles the ceiling fan, jumps down and duck-walks across the room, then climbs onto a windowsill and watches the cars on the distant freeway, all without missing a beat. The song, a Sly-flavored rave, sounds like a potential MTV hit.

Just working out, Fishbone is more compelling than most bands on stage at the Forum. It’s equally adept at Parliament-Funkadelic-style jams and Black Flag-intense metal, and the band’s sound is coming to be a synthesis of the two. The newest member of the band, guitarist John Bigham, came to Fishbone straight from a couple of years with Miles Davis.

The Fishbone album due April 23, “The Reality of My Surroundings,” is a dense, focused, mature effort drawing equally from metal and classic R&B.; It seems closer to the long-form complexity of, say, “Sgt. Pepper” or Jane’s Addiction’s “Ritual de lo Habitual” than it does to Fishbone’s lightweight 1985 EP debut, or either of the two albums since. Spike Lee directed the video for the screaming headbanger “Sunless Saturday”--the album’s first single--on location in Harlem, Lee’s first rock ‘n’ roll venture since his Tracy Chapman clip.

Fishbone’s 1988 album, “Truth and Soul,” sold nearly half a million copies, and this time the record company is already talking in terms of a possible platinum (million-selling) breakthrough.

The guys were a popular, viable band years before Living Colour made the cover of Rolling Stone. But Fishbone would like nothing better than to break through to an African-American audience of its peers. Call it crossover in reverse.

At a Curtis Mayfield benefit at the Palace last fall, Fishbone followed an intense set by Ice-T, and, as the white kids went crazy, slam-dancing and whooping and jumping around, many of the black kids filed out into the street.

Opening a Public Enemy show at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium two years earlier, right after the release of “Truth and Soul,” Fishbone drove the surfers and white college kids into a frenzy, while black rap fans stood, arms folded over their chests, unmoved.

Back in the studio, the band breaks rehearsal and wanders over to a corner of the room, leaning against walls and hiking themselves onto instrument cases--all except front man Moore, who grabs his sax, scoots out the door and escapes.

“After a girl,” somebody cracks.

Kendall Jones, Fishbone’s resident intellectual, leans forward in an old folding chair, hair in little dreads, clad in a satin Spike Lee promotional jacket. He looks a little angry.

“Black people,” Jones says, “have always listened to rock ‘n’ roll. All things considered, we created the damn thing. It’s just that through the years people have become culturally bankrupted. They’ve forgotten about rock ‘n’ roll. And all it would take is for somebody not just to be successful on the pop charts, but to actually reach our community.”

The rest of the band members nod agreement.

Jones continues: “We did a show at Leimert Park, in the Crenshaw District, for Malcolm X’s birthday. It was cool seeing pimps--well, not pimps, but definite gangsters--getting off into the stuff, moshing in the slam pit. They were having a great time.

“We know we’re going to get white people to our shows anyway, because of the kind of music we do. We’re just black artists playing that music. But I know our people would go and support it if they only knew it existed, if they knew that it was all right for them to come. There have always been progressive blacks who like Fishbone.

“On this record we worked with the Jungle Brothers, we worked with Q-Tip from A Tribe Called Quest, we worked with Chuck D from Public Enemy, and we did a video with Spike Lee. We’re making a concerted effort

to reach out to black people. But we’re not going to sound like Bobby Brown to do it.”

Five of the six original members of Fishbone met as 15-year-old, inner-city L.A. kids bused to Hale Junior High in Woodland Hills (the sixth, Moore, already lived in the Valley). They practiced six hours a day in Fisher’s bedroom. They debuted at Southland talent shows and played the club circuit. They were “discovered” by Bangles producer David Kahne, who signed them to Columbia Records.

In 1985, when they were still teen-agers, their self-titled first EP, powered by the zany, ska-flavored nuke anthem “Party at Ground Zero,” made them instant successes with the party-hearty college-radio crowd, ready-made frat-house favorites. Three albums later, the jam’s still going on--and most of Fishbone is still only 25 years old.

Jones sighs.

“That’s the thing. People listen to Fishbone and say, ‘great party band,’ but nobody catches the satire, nobody listens to the lyrics. Listen to ‘Party at Ground Zero’--I liked ‘One,’ but Metallica was not the first band to write from a Dalton Trumbo book. ‘Johnny Got His Gun’ affected ‘Party’ as well, but we prefer to hide the politics under humor. It seems people just don’t get it.

“I try to think globally as much as I possibly can, but I see so much right here in my hometown that I don’t really have the time to think so much about South Africa. When I see all that’s happening now in L.A., I think Fishbone’s got to address the problems. This is the reality of our surroundings.”

Jones tells a story about being arrested in West Hollywood on a “DWB”--”driving while black”--offense. Fisher talks about the police drug-control checkpoints he has to pass through to get home: “Just like in South Africa.” All six of them discuss Rodney King and Daryl Gates, and the grim-streets lyrics of “Sunless Saturday.”

Fisher speaks up, adjusting the floppy, leopard-print toque on his head: “Art with no conflict is like those paintings you had in your room when you were a little kid, the ones of the puppies with big eyes. . . . There’s no conflict in that art at all.”

“With this album,” Jones says, “people are going to look at us and say, ‘Wow, man, these black guys are militant!’ Hey, we were always like that, but now you’re going to know for real.

“A lot of critics equate (showing solidarity) with your people as being racist, and that’s wrong. They don’t know what it’s like to go through what Rodney King goes through. They don’t have to deal with that, and that happens every day in L.A.”

So why does some of the new stuff sound less urban than, uh, flower-child?

“Flower-child?” Jones says, shaking his head. “You’re probably hearing one cut, ‘Everyday Sunshine,’ and thinking, ‘Man, this is just like Sly & the Family Stone.’ For the record, this is not a Lenny Kravitz album.

“But, back in the ‘60s, rock ‘n’ roll artists made music for people with attention spans, so if that’s what you’re trying to say, cool. Our band and a few other bands--Jane’s Addiction, Primus, the Chili Peppers--are starting to write longer and longer songs, play longer and longer shows . . .”

“It’s going back to quality again,” trombone player Chris Dowd interjects. “People don’t want to go see 30 minutes of somebody lip-syncing and stuff; they want to see a band.”

Jones sums it up: “We were very young when we started, and when all was said and done, the company didn’t want to hear from some 18-year-old kids, and we really sacrificed some musical integrity on some things.

“We’ll never be ignored again. This is the first fully functional, complete, unadulterated, pure Fishbone record: no compromise, no lyric changes, no chord changes, no Beach Boys harmonies. This is us.”