Artist · chart history
Fishbone
Band Los Angeles United States Formed 1979 US rock band
Fishbone formed in 1979 in Los Angeles, United States. Fishbone has 103 chart appearances on 54 radio countdowns from 14 stations on RockLists, spanning 1988–2026. The most successful song on radio countdowns is “Party At Ground Zero”, which appears on 43 lists with a best position of #65. The station that charted Fishbone most often is CD101 (Columbus, OH), with 49 appearances. The artist’s biggest year on year-end countdowns was 1988.
Fishbone started out as a pack of Los Angeles schoolkids in 1979, and they never quite got around to choosing a genre. Ska, punk, funk, metal, reggae and soul all went into the blender at once: John Norwood Fisher on bass, his brother Philip "Fish" Fisher on drums, Kendall Jones on guitar, Christopher Dowd on keyboards and trombone, "Dirty" Walter Kibby blowing trumpet and singing, and Angelo Moore out front with a saxophone, a theremin and a motor mouth. Signed to Columbia, they lit the fuse with the 1985 Fishbone EP and "Party At Ground Zero", a ska-punk knees-up that sounds like a brass band sprinting flat out.
Truth and Soul followed in 1988 with "Ma and Pa" and "One Day", and The Reality of My Surroundings in 1991 pushed harder still, swinging from the sunny strut of "Everyday Sunshine" to the storm clouds of "Sunless Saturday" and the bark of "Fight the Youth". Those years were their commercial peak, and the goofball humor always came with a jab of social commentary attached, which bought them a devoted cult rather than a mass audience. After Give a Monkey a Brain... the lineup came apart piece by piece until only Fisher and Moore were left from the old gang. Later on, most of the original crew came back together, everyone except Kendall Jones, and the party started up again.
Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.
Songs by Fishbone on radio countdowns
| # | Song | Strength | Lists | Best | #1s | Peak year |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Party At Ground Zero | 43 | #65 | – | – | |
| 2 | Everyday Sunshine | 24 | #42 | – | – | |
| 3 | Sunless Saturday | 20 | #72 | – | 1991 | |
| 4 | Unyielding Conditioning | 7 | #1260 | – | – | |
| 5 | Ma and Pa | 3 | #51 | – | 1988 | |
| 6 | Freddie's Dead | 1 | #136 | – | – | |
| 7 | Regulator | 1 | #316 | – | – | |
| 8 | Cubical | 1 | #40 | – | 2023 | |
| 9 | One Day | 1 | #48 | – | 1988 | |
| 10 | Rock Island Line | 1 | #453 | – | – | |
| 11 | Fight the Youth | 1 | #1512 | – | – |
Albums with charting songs
Where each song was first released, from MusicBrainz.
Year-end chart timeline
Combined year-end countdown points per year. Taller bars mean more songs placing higher across more stations.
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