The Backstory
In 1979, the California Supreme Court passed Constitutional Proposition 1, initiating a tumultuous phase of mandatory busing meant to combat the racial inequities in the state’s public school system. On the first day of school that year, a young black student bused from mid-city Los Angeles to Hale High School in lily-white Woodland Hills encountered a foreboding scene: “There was parents off campus with some signs that said go home.”
The student’s name was Norwood Fisher. He and his brother Philip, who originally grew up in the Slauson area, had been tinkering around with instruments since they were in elementary school. At Hale they met fellow transplants Kendall “Special K” Jones, Chris Dowd, and Walter “Dirty Walt” Kibby, Jr., not to mention a kid who was already living in the Valley, a charismatic goofball and prodigy named Angelo Moore. An eccentric to say the least, Moore sported a big orange afro, played bass saxophone, and wrote trippy poetry. They all bonded over their shared love of ’70s funk—as well as being, as Moore later put it, “black flies in the buttermilk.” “We wanted to do Bootsy [Collins] covers in Mr. Lewis’ typing class,” Moore told the L.A. Weekly. “That’s where the idea for the band came from.”
They also shared a love of reggae music. “In the late ’70s, R&B radio stations in Los Angeles were playing reggae: Steel Pulse, Black Uhuru, Third World,” Norwood Fisher told writer Mark Spitz in 2009. “We got excited, so we sped those songs up… We thought we invented it! Then one day Dirty Walt said, ‘You ain’t invented shit. It’s called ‘ska.'” Kibby turned the rest of them onto the music of Bad Manners, The Specials, and The Selecter, bands that melded reggae with British punk. “We related to it because it was dance music,” said Fisher. “It spoke to the youth across the color line.”