Living Color - Pride (1995)

It took a combination of factors to make Living Colour possible: several years of the Reagan administration's attack on progress, a volatile indie rock scene that spawned important changes in the music industry, and the growth in success of rap music that brought elements of African-American culture to a receptive white mainstream. Into this atmosphere stepped one of the funkiest, baddest, hardest rocking and most technically adroit rock & roll outfits to grace the genre (that just happened to be composed of four talented Black men). Living Colour's debut, Vivid, was released in 1988 and instantly received almost universal critical acclaim. The album broke down barriers of race, musical style and fashion that had been long-standing in rock.

The band's members brought varied backgrounds to the creation of Living Colour. Singer Corey Glover was an actor with little or no musical experience, possibly enabling him to develop a unique and individually powerful musical style. Drummer Will Calhoun was a Berklee School of Music grad, his jazz background serving to shore up the band's complex and diverse stylistic experiments. Guitarist Vernon Reid, an alumni of Ronald Shannon Jackson's Decoding Society, came into the public eye as a player in Mick Jagger's solo band. Together with bassist Muzz Skillings, Living Colour made Vivid an international success, the disc's masterful blend of hard rock, blues and jazz riffs winning them a loyal audience that cut across race lines.

Successful tours and multi-platinum status was to follow as, over the course of three albums and an EP, Living Colour developed its unique musical voice and identity. The recent release of Pride showcases the incredible talent that is Living Colour. Much more than a mere greatest hits album, Pride serves quite well instead as a musical document of Living Colour's first six or seven years. The hits are all here, of course, from the raging Cult Of Personality or the confrontational Funny Vibe to the memorable Open Letter To A Landlord and the band's "theme song," What's Your Favorite Color? Pride culls a lot of material from the band's ground-breaking debut, with a handful of cuts thrown in from Time's Up and only a couple from Stain and the Biscuits EP. A number of unreleased songs and a single release round out the disc.

Of the previously unreleased cuts included on Pride, Release The Pressure particularly stands out. A wicked, no-compromise rocker, Corey Glover's vocals are menacing, primal growls backed by some wonderfully chaotic guitar playing. Sacred Ground is a metallic thrasher run amok, echoed vocals laid on top of a frantic beat and Reid's heaviest playing yet. A jazzy beat and muted guitar open These Are Happy Times, the focus on Glover's soulful reading of the song's lyrics. Bassist Doug Winbush, who replaced Skillings after Time's Up, performs some understated but tasteful fretwork to underline the song's social message. These three cuts show the band's enormous musical diversity and skill at improvising upon a standard hard rock foundation.

A lot has been written of Vernon Reid's six-string prowess, every compliment quite justified by the man's large talent. As evidenced by Pride, it is Reid's guitar that lends the band the greatest part of its identity, filling each song with a creative energy and breathing life into an otherwise morose musical genre. After seeing and experiencing Reid perform live more than once, I'd personally place him among the legends of rock guitar, artists like Jimi Hendrix and Stevie Ray Vaughan who redefined styles and pushed the envelope. It is also shown by Pride, though, that it is a combination of talents, from Glover's vocals and Calhoun's rock-steady drumming along with the contributions of two skilled bassists that play along with Reid to make Living Colour great. The band is made up of four very talented men without which the accomplishments of Living Colour would not have been possible. Pride is a wonderful showcase for the band and what they can do musically. (Epic Records)

(Click on the CD cover to buy Pride from Amazon.com)

Living Colour - Live From CBGB's (2005)

I remember seeing Living Colour perform during their 1989 tour in support of the band's debut album. I had seen the band once before, prior to the release of Vivid in 1988, but this 1989 show at the infamous Exit/In club in Nashville would become the stuff of legend. Since I had met them once before and had interviewed both the band's extraordinary guitarist Vernon Reid and excellent drummer Will Calhoun, my friend Mark S. and myself hung out with the band backstage after the show. Reid and I discussed music; cyberpunk sci-fi writers like Bruce Sterling and William Gibson and horror writer H.P. Lovecraft. The band members were genuinely friendly, intelligent, talented and obviously on their way "up" in the music world–and they put on a hell of a live show.

By the time Living Colour would play Nashville again the band would blow up big-time. Vivid would go platinum, selling over a million copies–quite an accomplishment for an African-American hard rock band that every record label in the world passed on. The band was all over MTV at the time with its video for the raging "Cult Of Personality" and would subsequently walk off with a pair of Grammy™ awards. The release of Time's Up in 1990 along with a couple of high profile tours would solidify the band's superstars-in-the-making status. Unfortunately, the band's commercial fortunes would quickly diminish and, with only three albums under their collective belts, Living Colour became one of the casualties of grunge and the Seattle scene. The band would break up not long after the 1993 release of Stain.

If any live recording could capture the band's on-stage energy and chemistry, they would have been even bigger stars than they already were. Sadly, the band never released a live album during its initial run, something that might have revived its prospects and found Living Colour a wider audience. Although Live From CBGB's comes along about a decade-and-a-half too late, it's definitely a case of "better late than never" for Living Colour fans who have been living with seedy bootleg tapes of live performances for 15 years. This particular show, a homecoming of sorts for the band, was captured live at the legendary CBGB's in the Bowery in New York City in December 1989, between the releases of Vivid and Time's Up.

From the album's tracklist and relatively brief hour-long running time, I'm guessing that Live From CBGB's doesn't include the band's entire performance from that night. There are only four songs featured here from Vivid, including the set-opening "Cult Of Personality" and the somber "Open Letter To A Landlord." Almost half of the live album features songs from the yet-to-be-released-at-the-time Time's Up, the band obviously showcasing songs from its upcoming album. Two new cuts make their debut here while the band's relentless cover of Bad Brain's "Sailin' On" is a hard-to-find obscurity.

Although a lengthier performance might have made for a hardcore two-CD set, Sony chose to release this version so we have to live with it, which isn't too difficult. The band is red-hot throughout these songs, Reid's six-string pyrotechnics tearing through the smoke and heat of the club while frontman Corey Glover's powerful vocals punch through the darkness with fire and passion. Some of the band's best songs are represented here, from "Information Overload" and "Cult Of Personality" to "Funny Vibe" and "Love Rears Its Ugly Head." Of the two previously unreleased tracks, "Soldier's Blues" offers some tasty guitar shuffles, Hendrix-inspired riffing and Calhoun's jazzy drumbeats while "Little Lies," a tortured ballad spotlighting Glover's vocals, sounds out of place until it kicks into overdrive.

Overall, the band's performance on Live from CBGB's is simply explosive. Reid's incendiary guitarwork, informed by his avant-garde jazz training, still sounds groundbreaking today; nobody currently playing can match the underrated Reid's style and innovation. Glover was a soulful vocalist of some range and heart while the rhythm section of bassist Muzz Skillings and drummer Calhoun were one of the finest in rock at the time, providing a solid bedrock for the dueling frontmen.

Unfortunately, no matter how good it is, Live From CBGB's is unlikely to draw new listeners to the phenomenal, hard rocking Living Colour sound. If this set had been released in 1991 or so, perhaps its impact would have provided the band with a stepping stone to greater things. In 2005, however, with Living Colour considered yesterday's news by young audiences, a "classic rock" band at best, Live From CBGB's will appeal mostly to existing fans. Young music lovers wanting to know what all the hype was about could do worse than checking out Living Colour live. (Sony Legacy)

(Click on the CD cover to buy Live From CBGB's from Amazon.com)

Living Colour - Vivid (2002)

When they came along in the late-90s, Living Colour was an anomaly among hard rock bands. First of all, the members were all young African-American men with musical backgrounds in jazz, R&B and improvisational avant-garde music. Rock & roll at the time was sheer whitebread, dominated by longhaired white boys, the cultural diversity of the late-60s/early-70s overthrown by corporate homogenization. Living Colour didn't fit into MTV's nerf metal demographic, but damned if they didn't rock harder than half a dozen Motley Crue clones. The band seemingly appeared out of nowhere in the summer of 1988 with the release of its debut album, Vivid, but New York City fans knew differently. Living Colour had been banging around town for a couple of years, refining their sound and stage presence with residencies at clubs like CBGBs.

The release of Vivid would break through the barriers of race in rock, opening the door for multi-cultural '90s hard rock bands like Rage Against The Machine and System Of A Down. This breakthrough was accomplished mostly on the strength of a single song, the blistering Cult Of Personality, the accompanying video dominating the MTV playlist well into 1989 and breaking the band with a white audience. It was apparent from the video for Cult Of Personality that Living Colour wasn't kicking out the same old shit. Vernon Reid wasn't just another heavy metal guitar god, but a world-class six-string wizard who had earned his bones as a member of the experimental Ronald Shannon Jackson's Decoder Society. The rhythm section of bassist Muzz Skillings and drummer Will Calhoun provided as big a beat as a band could ever want while frontman Corey Glover – largely untrained and with little experience as a singer – perfectly complimented the band's funky, unpredictable groove with his rough-hewn, soulful vocal style.

Listening to the remastered reissue CD of Vivid shows that the album held much more great music than the celebrated hit single. Living Colour incorporated many styles and influences into the band's sound, placing disparate elements of freeform jazz, funk, soul, heavy metal and guitar pyrotechnics into a hard rock framework. While songs such as Open Letter (To A Landlord) and Funny Vibe showcased the band's social consciousness, visiting themes of poverty, homelessness and race, songs like the hedonistic Glamour Boys or I Want To Know were pop-influenced rockers with an almost new wave sound. (This was the '80s after all!) When the band hit a metallic groove, however, as with Cult Of Personality, Middle Man or What's Your Favorite Color? there were few other bands around who could match Living Colour's powerful and innovative sound.

The CD reissue of Vivid includes five bonus cuts culled from 12" singles; most of which have never appeared on compact disc before. A hip-hop remix of Funny Vibe by Prince Paul includes cameos from rappers like Daddy-O and Chuck D and Flavor Flav of Public Enemy. A red-hot cover of the Clash's Should I Stay Or Should I Go and a live version of Middle Man appeared previously on the Biscuits collection. A Keith LeBlanc remix of What's Your Favorite Color? adds to the funk quotient while a live performance of Cult Of Personality closes Vivid and blows the roof off the mutha! One of the most important albums in rock history, Vivid sold over a million copies and earned the band a Grammy™ Award. More important, though, is the influence the album and Living Colour would have on those that would follow. With Vivid, Living Colour literally changed the face of rock & roll. (Sony Legacy Recordings)

(Click on the CD cover to buy Vivid from Amazon.com)