Still Vivid: On Living Colour
By Michael A. Gonzales
The Black Rock Report #2 A few weeks before Living Colour released their latest album The Chair in the Doorway (Megaforce Records), the band performed at an invite-only showcase in Brooklyn. I was hanging with my homie Lisa Cortes, one of the producers of the highly anticipated film Precious, and we were both excited.
As arty graphics rotated on a screen in the background, Living Colour transformed from middle-aged men into cocoa-hued children of the rock revolution, exorcising their demons surrounding racism, politics, relationships, greed and anxiety through unadulterated rhythmic rebellion.
When they launched into a rousing version of their newest single “Behind the Sun,” flaunting fluid grooves, soulful vocals about Katrina survivors, and Reid’s riff-heavy homage to Robert Fripp, Lisa screamed: “They sound as good now as they did in 1988!”
Photo by Earl Douglass
Back in the days when Earl Greyhound were still puppies and TV on the Radio were watching Saturday morning cartoons, Living Colour laid the foundation for a new generation of rockers “of color” to be taken seriously. The electric collective acted as catalysts of sonic change blazing stages from the Ritz, to Lone Star Café, the original Knitting Factory, the Kitchen, Tramps, Wetlands and especially CBGB’s.
“Living Colour was conceptually formed at CBGB’s,” explains Bronx-born drummer Will Calhoun. “Sure, we played weddings and parties, but it was CBGB’s that really shaped us. In those days, we might’ve been broke, but we were fearless.”
CB’s was also the place where rock lizard Mick Jagger witnessed the Living Colour experience first-hand. Excited by Reid’s roar, the Rolling Stones leader invited him to play on his solo project Primitive Cool; later, Jagger used his powerful influence to get the band signed to Epic Records.
“So many people told us that it was not going to happen,” Reid remembers, “but I think the sheer impossibility of a Black rock band being signed to a major label was our inspiration. From the beginning, our dream was simply to be a New York City band telling American stories from our perspective.”
Pouring himself a cup of herbal tea, Cory Glover takes a pause for the cause. Born and raised in Brooklyn, he currently lives in Harlem with his schoolteacher wife and two sons. In addition to being a powerful singer, Glover has also been a professional actor since he was a teenager appearing in local commercials.
In 1986, the same year he joined forces with Living Colour, he played a soldier named Francis in Oliver Stone’s brilliant 1986 war flick Platoon. “I got turned on to wanting to be a performer when my mother and father took me to Fulton Street to see Jesus Christ Superstar when I was a kid,” Glover remembers. “Seeing Carl Anderson as Judas blew me away. That was when I knew I wanted to be an entertainer.”
During another band hiatus in 2006, Glover toured the country playing the same part, but last year he left the theater company to rejoin the Living Colour. Twenty-one years wiser, the members of Living Colour are finally playing nice. “Vernon is never going to be able to sing like me and I’m never going to play guitar like him,” Glover laughs. “After all these years, we finally realize how important it is to be around one another.”
Guitar hero Vernon Reid was born in London to a Caribbean family that immigrated to Brooklyn when he was a tot of two. Gifted his first Jimi Hendrix album, Band of Gypsys, while a student at Brooklyn Tech High School, he became a Santana nut after hearing “Black Magic Woman” on WNEW-FM.
He remains as culturally curious as he has always been, and it’s not unusual to see Vernon Reid, say, hanging out during a Basehead set at Mercury Lounge (one of maybe twenty people in attendance) or checking out new bands and shaking hands with old fans at Brooklyn’s Afro-Punk Festival in July.
“Afro Punk is the next generation of what the Black Rock Coalition and Living Colour helped put out into the world,” 51-year-old Reid says. We are sitting backstage at The Jimmy Fallon Show, where his band was the musical guest. “In the same way I listened to Santana or the Bad Brains, younger bands listened to us. Right now, I’m digging this new group Pillow Theory. The lead singer and guitarist Kelsey is one of my favorites.”
Having met Pillow Theory frontman Kelsey Warren a few months ago at the downtown club Piano’s, where he was moonlighting with Afro art-noise underdogs Apollo Heights, I called him at his Jersey City apartment.
“I’ve been listening to the new Living Colour record like crazy,” 31-year-old Kelsey says. “I saw them for the first time at Temple University when I was 14 and was just blown away by Reid’s phrasings and solos. I went to see them a few weeks ago and I swear, they’ve just got that much better. As a guitarist, I learned a lot from listening to Vernon and how he paints pictures with his music. He is the guitar player for all guitar players.”
Yet, in the twenty-one year since, Living Colour has only managed to release five albums.
“Success is disruptive in ways that some people don’t understand,” Reid explains. “In the beginning, Living Colour was a local band fighting to get noticed, struggling to get a following and battling record labels to take us seriously. But once all of that happened, we still weren’t prepared.”
Onstage and off, the dynamic of Reid and Glover was reminiscent of the Who’s equally volatile relationship between Pete Townsend and Roger Daltrey. “It used to be that Vernon and I were constantly fighting for attention,” admits 45-year-old Glover, who first met Reid at a Brooklyn birthday party in 1986.
Though not cursed with the drinking/drugging decadence of contemporaries Guns ‘N Roses and Van Halen, there were still enough ego wars and creative bickering within the Living Colour camp to cause an implosion. Disbanding shortly after releasing their third album Stain in 1993, they simply worked on solo projects from 1996 to 2000.
Earlier that morning, during the Fallon rehearsal, Living Colour ripped through their 1988 mega-hit “Cult of Personality,” the second single from their double platinum debut, Vivid. Released the same year as landmark New York City soundtracks It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (Public Enemy) and Daydream Nation (Sonic Youth), the band was in constant rotation on MTV, performing on the Arsenio Hall Show and posing for the cover of Rolling Stone.
Sitting in the audience as the introductory Malcolm X sample blares through the studio speakers, I think about a friend telling me he heard Howard Stern musing a few days before, “I wonder what ever happened to Living Colour?”
While Reid and Glover no longer wear long dreadlocks or hideous Speedo spandex as they did in the “Cult” video, the song still packs the same raw power without sounding dated. Back then, when MTV still showed videos on a regular basis, the “Cult of Personality” clip was inescapable and won the group a MTV Best New Artist Award and a Grammy for Best Hard Rock Performance.
Bassist Doug Wimbush, formerly a member of the Sugarhill Records band and industrial funk-rockers Tackhead, is a Connecticut native who began his career playing on gritty old-school hip-hop classics “The Message” and “White Lines.” In 1991, he was recruited by Reid and Calhoun to replace original bassist Muzz Skillings in 1991.
Billed as executive producer on The Chair in the Doorway—a title Glover chose “to describe the numerous obstacles that had been standing in the way of the band”—Wimbush came up with the idea of Living Colour recording in Kafka’s shadowy hood of Prague.
“When we’re home in New York, it’s so easy for the group to become distracted,” explains Wimbush, who has also played with Madonna, Annie Lennox, and Mos Def. “Next thing you know, Vernon has drifted away, Corey is on the telephone, and Will is stuck in traffic. It’s hard to get one person to walk a straight line, let alone a whole band. But, we didn’t have those problems in Prague. We went in pure and the material came out great. There was nothing to interrupt the flow of creativity.”
Without looking back, it’s obvious that Living Colour is still one of the few bands with the skills to propel black rock into the future.
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