From Vivid to Time’s Up to Stain: How Vernon Reid’s expressionist shredding juiced Living Colour through the grunge era
By Matt Wake
Stylistically speaking, Living Colour were one of the only bands that could’ve fit nicely into a Rolling Stones tour and the first Lollapalooza
UNLIKE MANY BANDS that got big in the late Eighties, Living Colour’s sound didn’t require an overhaul to avoid obsolescence once the new decade hit. The prismatic metallics and social consciousness on the New York band’s 1988 debut album Vivid scanned alternative immediately. Their dino-riff breakthrough hit, “Cult of Personality,” in addition to being one of rock’s best singles ever, was an off-ramp from Eighties hedonism to the next decade’s underground-music uprising. In a Reagan-rock sea of perma-sloshed white dudes, Living Colour was full of thoughtful Black virtuosos. So the band, which featured singer Corey Glover, guitarist Vernon Reid, bassist Muzz Skillings and drummer Will Calhoun, was a refreshing contrast to say the least.
Although they were future-proof, during the Nineties Living Colour’s music grew new vines. “We evolved with the times in a way,” Reid, the band’s guitar-artiste, tells GW. “Vivid is a very upbeat record, even though we talked about social things. We were on our mission. We were happy to be in the mix. We were filled with a kind of realistic optimism, you know?”
In the coveted opening slot for the Rolling Stones’ 1989 U.S. stadium tour — Stones frontman Mick Jagger was a fan and did some production on Vivid — Living Colour saw plenty to reflect on. “And on [1990’s] Time’s Up,” Reid says, “we kind of took on a lot of the landscape around us.”
Time’s Up’s opening and gnarly title track served as a tip of the cap to another great all-Black band: Bad Brains, the Washington, D.C., hardcore combo whose roaring 1982 debut album has influenced musicians from Soundgarden to the Roots. “Without Bad Brains,” Reid says, “we probably wouldn’t exist. They were such an essential component of how we arrived.” Glover’s lyrics to “Time’s Up” were about the environment, a brilliant counterpoint to the track’s brass-knuckle grooves. “It was like, ‘This is novel,’ ” Reid says. “We just wanted to say something, and Corey came up with this completely unexpected conversation — and it worked.”
Glover’s yearning, asphalt-opera vocals always peeled ears. On social media and elsewhere, Reid has maintained that Living Colour’s frontman is one of the greatest rock singers of an era overpopulate
