Underrated Favorites Vol. 4: Living Colour

Look in my eyes. What do you see?

First things first: whatever your criteria, Vernon Reid’s guitar solo(s)¹ on “Cult of Personality” is/are a top 10² all-time guitar solo. And, no, I will not be taking questions or comments on that one. It’s indisputable. It checks the boxes: breath-taking, wild, singable, adds to the song, furious, musical, a little show-off-y, not a little mind-blowing.

Living Colour guitar god, Vernon Reid

Guitar solo out of the way, let’s get to the band responsible for “Cult of Personality”: Living Colour³.

A genre-defying NYC band that has largely and unfairly been relegated to a footnote in music history (and a song featured in the video games Grand Theft Auto and Guitar Hero, as well as an iconic entrance song⁴ for WWE wrestler CM Punk).

Speaking of music history, this eclectic band absorbed and internalized and synthesized⁵ the history of music in a big way. They were⁶ as versed in the punk CBGBs/new wave scene like Talking Heads (great cover of “Memories Can Wait”) as they were in old school soul like James Brown (“Talkin’ Loud & Sayin’ Nothin’”) and Al Green (“Love & Happiness”). They made fans out of the old school (Mick Jagger of The Rolling Stones) and the new school (Chuck D⁷ of Public Enemy).

The story of Living Colour is not at all dissimilar to that of funk-rock pioneers Fishbone, who tragically didn’t receive the same commercial love that their (all-white) L.A. funk rock counterparts (and outspoken Fishbone disciples) Red Hot Chili Peppers or ska-popsters No Doubt or political-rap-rock Rage Against The Machine⁸ did.

I never saw Living Colour live⁹, a massive and unrelenting regret of mine, knowing I could have seen them in their prime. I did see Fishbone a few times, though, the first time was when they played a mid-afternoon seven-song set in a giant dusty field beneath the scorching summer sun, somewhere in the middle of the bill for the Lollapalooza ‘93 festival tour and theirs was—by considerable distance—the best, most electrifying set of the day. Headliners Alice In Chains and Primus weren’t even close. And both those bands were good, very good¹⁰. (Alice In Chains came out and played a menacing, hair-raising version of “Would” that I’ll never forget¹¹.) It’s just that Fishbone owned that stage. Branded it with a big ol’ F (or outline of a fish skeleton perhaps). Trademarked it. Held the proverbial deed. The band opened with “Swim”, the first song on their then-most-recent album Give A Monkey A Brain…¹² and may as well have set the stage on fire. The entire field, for that matter. Ferocious. Crushingly heavy. Aggressive. Menacing. Possessed. Groovy. All-out. All over. An onstage party. A furious mosh pit, the moshiest I’ve seen. They should’ve shut the fairgrounds down right then and there because what was the point of continuing on? And then Fishbone launched into “Sunless Saturday” with its manic thrash-meets-Funkadelic vibes. Followed that with the metal-tinged art-piece “Drunk Skitzo” which chugs as hard as any Metallica song before hitting a hard left turn at the bridge where it turns jazzy easy-listening. And then, knowing perfectly how to pace themselves and the crowd, they ditched the heavy, aggressive thrash side of things and launched into the endless, sunny¹³ optimism of “Everyday Sunshine”, like the clouds literally parting and the party truly kicking into another, previously unheard-of gear. It was as if they were erecting a giant sign splattered with the words “WE CAN DO ANYTHING.” Metalhead? Got something for you. Grunge acolyte? Same. Funk kid? Yep. Hip hop? Yep. Ska? Sure, buddy.

The day-conquering nature of their set—to put it simply: the energy and one-of-a-kind-ness that makes Fishbone Fishbone—was the same reason the music industry never had the slightest idea¹⁴ what to do with them. When you write the same song over and over again, like The Ramones (good!) or Everclear (not as good!) or Goo Goo Dolls (no comment!), that’s something that the narrow-minded suits can easily wrap their minds (and marketing strategies) around, know how to package and send out to the world. When you’re Fishbone and, song to song, you’re all over the map, the suits are lost. They love tidy boxes, not sprawling houses with trapdoors, secret slides, messy floors, fireman poles, and unexplored wings.

Wait, this is supposed to be about Living Colour, right?

Well, Fishbone and Living Colour were kind of the west coast and east coast sides of the same coin, meaning the same hard-to-categorize (and, not coincidentally, black) thing could be said of Living Colour—because they weren’t interested in just repackaging the same song over and over, weren’t hunting for the Billboard charts necessarily (but also weren’t being willfully obscure), but were rather exploring the boundaries of what a rock song could be, incorporating and blending elements of the music they loved: soul, funk, thrash, rap, hip hop, metal, classic rock, alternative (whatever that means), pop, punk, fusion, psych, (ska, in the case of Fishbone), West African calypso¹⁵, even Caribbean touches, a bit of prog¹⁶, new wave, all of it. They weren’t a rehash or Body Glove-wearing Xerox of something you’d already heard. They were as influenced by Led Zeppelin as by Bad Brains and John Coltrane. They hit hard AND virtuosically (the main riff of their biggest song, “Cult of Personality”, is far more sophisticated, technique-wise, than the vast majority of the simple¹⁷ pentatonic riffery by Living Colour’s rock peers). There’s nothing in the least bit tidy about Living Colour’s genre. By design. They had the musicianship, the history, and the soul that made it so they could pull off anything, so…they did whatever they wanted. Their sound sprawls. If you follow guitarist (and, in my estimation, guiding creative force) Vernon Reid on Twitter, you’re just as likely to see him wax poetic about Muddy Waters and Parliament and De La Soul and Wu Tang as about Tracy Chapman and Blondie and The Doors and Aretha and Brian Setzer and Prince and Johnny Cash and The Cult and Chaka Khan and Buddy Guy and Eric Dolphy and Pink Floyd and Al Green and Mariah Carey and New York Dolls and Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway and Nirvana and Erykah Badu and Donna Summer and Henry Rollins and Whitney Houston and…and…and… (and, upon audit, those are just artists he’s mentioned glowingly in the past month!) I love what Paul Hamingson, who engineered Vivid, said, “Vernon brings a record store with him every time he plays.” You think a guy with a love of music that wide was gonna be tethered to some restrictive category and genre orthodoxy? Nope.

So, yeah, record label marketers didn’t know what to do with them. Neither did radio programmers. Living Colour were outsiders¹⁸—not metal enough for rock radio, not black enough for R&B radio, not alternative enough for alternative. Credit (for once) to Lollapalooza founder Perry Farrell who saw Living Colour as the embodiment of the eclecticism he was trying to turn into the inaugural Lollapalooza tour, and made them a lynchpin of the first tour’s lineup (with Jane’s Addiction, Nine Inch Nails, Ice-T, and not coincidentally Fishbone).

And if we look at Living Colour from a historical context, we can’t ignore the fact that, routinely over the course of rock history, white people have gotten famous for doing the same¹⁹—sometimes photocopied²⁰, sometimes mildly obscured²¹, sometimes watered down²²—thing as black acts that don’t get their due. Former band co-manager Roger Cramer said, “Rock music was made by white people at that point. It was the heyday of the hair band. And Living Colour came along and could play and sing circles around those bands. But they were black.”

Here’s a little exercise: name the most-famous, most-prominent all-black (or even mostly black) rock band of all time.

Who ya got?

Mine? I was thinking the original Jimi Hendrix Experience, but Jimi was the only black guy, so that doesn’t make the cut. But, when original bassist Noel Redding left in a huff, Billy Cox (who is black) replaced him. So you could make an argument that one incarnation of The Jimi Hendrix Experience was 66% black? Later on, Jimi’s short-lived Band of Gypsys (Hendrix, Cox, with Buddy Miles on drums) fits the bill, though they were short-lived (Hendrix died) and are, for reasons unbeknownst, less well-known than the Experience.

Or how about Sly & The Family Stone (considered the first racially integrated²³, mixed gender American band)? Or Parliament/Funkadelic? (Both of which could be categorized as rock but also not necessarily rock, so we see a theme emerging about black musical eclecticism and marketing departments not knowing how to handle that).

Almost anybody else you’re likely to think of—Prince, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Tina Turner, Stevie Wonder, Lenny Kravitz—is a singular, black marquee star backed by hired musicians who might as well be, in the eyes of the average listener and in the terms of modern video gamers, NPCs²⁴. Not a band of all black musicians.

Got anyone else?

Now, how many prominent, famous all-white (or mostly white) bands in music history can you name?

It’s not even remotely difficult. The British Invasion bands alone. 80’s hair metal. 90’s alt-rock.

Surely, our ability to easily name scores of white bands and nowhere near as many black bands is not because the latter didn’t (and don’t) exist. Or because they weren’t as good as their white counterparts. That’s not the case.

If you read the backstory of Living Colour, you see how much they had to fight and claw to get where they got and, even then, still “needed” the stamp of a white legend (Mick Jagger) to get over the hump. Imagine how many incredible bands never even got a shot, toiled away in obscurity, couldn’t afford to keep going without opportunities…

It’s tragic.

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You could argue that Living Color (and even more so, Fishbone; at least Living Colour broke through to radio with “Cult of Personality”) never wrote their chart-crossing, genre-agnostic “Under The Bridge” like the Red Hot Chili Peppers did, whose fame rose to the constellations (and stadiums) once they had a rock hit AND a ballad (you can clearly see a pre-Bridge/post-Bridge demarcation and how they pivoted to write “more songs like that²⁵” afterward).

For Living Colour, following their muse, making the music—however eclectic, however untidy—they wanted to make, it had a financial and commercial cost²⁶.

And for the Chili Peppers it had a credibility cost.

Ask most musicians about the Chili Peppers and you’ll get responses ranging from Nick Cave’s brutal dismissal²⁷ to “they’re a guilty pleasure” to secret sentimental enjoyment to (this is mostly mine) “John Frusciante is a fun guitarist to listen to.” There are fans out there, but, in my experience, you’re not gonna hear a lot of unreserved praise. Here and there, but certainly not universal.

Meanwhile, nobody is torn about liking Living Colour. Widely respected. Widely loved. Doing your thing, results be damned, has staying power, demands respect.

1. The album version of the guitar solo is allegedly a first take. Vernon tracked five more solos, but they stuck with the first one.

2. My personal 10 favorite guitar solos, in no order
Cult of Personality / Living Colour, played by Vernon Reid
Cortez The Killer (live) / Neil Young & Crazy Horse, played by Neil Young
If I’m Unworthy / Blake Mills, played by Blake Mills
Comfortably Numb / Pink Floyd, played by David Gilmour (most Gilmour solos qualify)
The Wind Cries Mary / Jimi Hendrix, played by Jimi Hendrix (there are flashier Hendrix solos, but this one gets me)
Impossible Germany / Wilco, played by Nels Cline
When I Go Deaf / Low, played by Alan Sparhawk
With Or Without You / U2, played by The Edge (if you call the motif a solo)
Bullet The Blue Sky (live) / U2, played by The Edge (this is the kind of solo you can’t imagine the song without, so I’m breaking my arbitrary “one entry per guitarist” rule)
Deathly / Aimee Mann, played by Michael Penn
Glory Box / Portishead, played by Adrian Utley (restraint)
Bottle Up And Explode / Elliott Smith, played by Elliott Smith (song-first)
Little Wing / Stevie Ray Vaughan, played by SRV himself
Big Dipper / Cracker, played by Johnny Hickman
Hospital / Madison Cunningham, played by Madison Cunningham
Taxman / The Beatles, played by Paul McCartney
Something / The Beatles, played by George Harrison
Revelator / Gillian Welch, played by David Rawlings
I Am One or Drown / Smashing Pumpkins, played by Billy Corgan
Mountain Song / Jane’s Addiction, played by Dave Navarro (Navarro has shreddier solos, but this one really raises the intensity of the song)
Ordinary World / Duran Duran, played by Warren Cuccurullo (I know it’s wanky but I still love it)
Blues For Roy / Jim Campilongo, played by Jim Campilongo
Sometimes Salvation / The Black Crowes, played by Marc Ford (Marc Ford leaving the Crowes was the beginning of the end)
Only In Dreams / Weezer, played by Rivers Cuomo (if you call the outro a solo, which I do)
Just What I Needed / The Cars, played Elliot Easton (a great example of touch)
Our Love / Rhett Miller, played by Jon Brion
Little White Dove / Jenny Lewis, played by Smokey Hormel
Midnight In Harlem / Tedeschi Trucks Band, played by Derek Trucks
Communication / The Cardigans, played by Peter Svensson (talk about subtlety)
Little Sister / Queens of the Stone Age, played by Josh Homme
I’d Run Away / The Jayhawks, played by Gary Louris (underrated songwriter, EXTRA-underrated guitarist)
Starship Trooper / Yes, played by Steve Howe (just the last :40 of a 10-minute song)
Witness / Sarah Mclachlan, played by Yves Desrosiers (unexpectedly, joyfully noisy)
Heart Shaped Box / Nirvana played by Kurt Cobain
Fire on the Mountain (live, Dead Set) / Grateful Dead, played by Jerry Garcia (really. gets to the fluid melodicism Jerry had)
Born on the Bayou / Creedence Clearwater Revival, played by John Fogerty
Paranoid Android (or Just) / Radiohead, played by Johnny Greenwood
Rattlesnake / St. Vincent, played by Annie Clark
The Beast and Dragon, Adored / Spoon, not sure if it’s Britt Daniel
Feel Us Shaking / The Samples, played by Sean Kelly (Sean’s pointy ultra-compressed guitar sound is basically my teens in a single tone, he has a kind of fidgety Neil Young way of playing, lots of whammy bar but never trying to speed demon the notes… “Birth of Words” and “When It’s Raining” have nice song-centric solos too, but the simplicity of “Feel Us Shaking” gets me)
Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum / Bob Dylan, played by Charlie Sexton and/or Larry Campbell
Pictures of You / The Cure, the entire guitar part of the entire song by Robert Smith
Runnin’ Down A Dream/ Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers, played by Mike Campbell

That might be more than 10. I’m not so hot at math.

3. For all of high school, I put a British “u” in the word “colour” 100% because of this band.

4. which is how my WWE-obsessed 11 year old knows the song.

5. Not the keyboard. The verb.

6. *are. The band still tours regularly.

7. Yes, now an elder statesman, there was a time when Chuck D was the new fire.

8. RATM were highly influenced by Living Colour too.

“When I first heard the song ‘Cult of Personality,’” Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello said, “I was absolutely blown away that clearly there were other African Americans who unapologetically loved Led Zeppelin and wanted to shred. Vivid opened the doors to my career.”

9. They played the legendary Speedway Cafe in 1989, but I was 12 at the time and wouldn’t have known.

March 1991, this was the one I whiffed on. Touring their second album Time’s Up (probably a Top 5, for sure a Top 10*, album of 1990 for me), they played the Fairpark Coliseum in SLC. I didn’t get tickets and was filled with regret no more than 24 hours later. Worse, my Google search just indicated that it was a co-bill with PRIMUS?!?! I don’t know how I let that one slip past me. I ended up seeing Primus at least three times in high school….what in the world?

The next time they played SLC was October 2013. I either didn’t know about it or had two kids under the age of 5?

And then in fall of 2021, my friend Adam & I had tickets to see them during a work trip in Philadelphia but it got canceled two days before.

*A footnote WITHIN A FOOTNOTE!?!? What are we even doing here?
My Favorite Albums of 1990 AT THE TIME
Jane’s Addiction / Ritual De Lo Habitual
Living Colour / Time’s Up
World Party / Goodbye Jumbo
Black Crowes / Shake Your Money Maker
Paul Simon / The Rhythm of the Saints
Neil Young & Crazy Horse / Ragged Glory
Midnight Oil / Blue Sky Mining
the Sundays / Reading, Writing, Arithmetic
Big Head Todd & The Monsters / Midnight Radio
Blues Traveler / self-titled
Eric Johnson / Ah Via Musicom (“Cliffs of Dover”, baby!)
you won’t believe this but….Steve Vai / Passion & Warfare

10. Grading the day’s other bands:
Dinosaur Jr. / C+ / I wanted to love their set but it was so insanely loud (a trademark of theirs, I’m well aware) even outdoors where the sound should have somewhere to go, that the songs were practically indiscernible
Arrested Development / B+ / Extra points for being a much-needed injection of positivity amid a lot of gloom and dissonance.
Babes In Toyland / D / Not my jam at all.
Front 242 / C- / Also not my jam, but points for being the industrial band in the mix and doing that thing proficiently.
Rage Against The Machine / n/a / they were still new enough that they played early in the day (maybe even on the second stage) and, because I was going with a group and at the mercy of the group timeline, we showed up late and missed them (and Tool). I know: I was frustrated then and still am. I have learned my lesson about group concertgoing since then and make sure I drive myself.
Fishone’s D’Angelo Moore Hawking His Poetry Book In Some Small Tent Back By The Merch and Food Vendors / A (for effort) / it’s a credit to Fishbone’s set that it made me interested enough to hear him read aloud from his insane book of poetry.

11. And not just because, at one point, I thought I might actually be in mortal danger, as the giant amoeba of a crowd churned back and forth, shoulder to shoulder, with my feet not touching the ground sometimes for a petrifying 4-5 seconds at a time. This was not all that far removed from the tragic AC/DC concert at the Salt Palace in Salt Lake when a couple fans had been trampled to death in a similar situation.

12. …And He’ll Swear He’s The Center Of The Universe from 1993, an album title that walked that Fiona Apple’s verbose album titles could run.

13. no pun intended

14. DID YOU KNOW:
Fishbone appeared in FOUR different movies?
- 1987’s Back To The Beach (playing “Jamaica Ska” while star Annette Funnicello! sang lead and stoked the beach party movie nostalgia)
- 1988’s Tapeheads (John Cusack, Tim Robbins)
- 1988’s I’m Gonna Git You Sucka (the Wayans family)
- 2007’s The Tripper (David Arquette?)

AND! The iconic boombox scene in Say Anything was actually originally playing the Fishbone song "Turn the Other Way" until they changed it to Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes” in editing. I won’t say that wasn’t an inspired move.

So the label people were just throwing ideas at the wall, I guess.

15. Can you hear any similarity—particularly in the guitar part and groove of “Solace of You”—to Paul Simon’s work on Graceland and The Rhythm of the Saints?

16. Tell me you couldn’t hear Geddy Lee singing this one.

17. No offense, AC/DC. Those riffs are simple and big and perfect and primal.

18. Guitarist Vernon Reid, in a 1993 interview about their third album Stain, said, “(Stain is about)…how to deal with ambivalence, with being an outsider, with not being part of the mainstream. How do you deal with being the odd man out? How do you deal with being tragically unfashionable?"

19. Big Mama Thornton and Elvis Presley both doing “Hound Dog” and whose version was a hit? You don’t have to answer that. We all know.

20. Phil Collins’s version of The Supremes’s “You Can’t Hurry Love” makes no attempt to hide its mimicry.

21. Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys turning Chuck Berry’s “Sweet Little Sixteen” into the hit “Surfin’ U.S.A.” (and shadily trying not to credit Berry, originally). Wilson became a genius, but that doesn’t mean he couldn’t also be a thief (Edison, anyone?).

Robert Plant nicked lyrics from Muddy Waters/Willie Dixon’s “You Need Love” for Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love.”

22. Can you even fathom that Pat Boone’s toothless, sanitized version of “Tutti Frutti” charted higher (#12) than Little Richard’s electric original (#21)? Make it make sense…

23. That’s the historical term. “Integration” was just beginning to be legally enforced.

24. Non Playable Characters. These are the generic, faceless characters that populate a video game but are not named or critical to what (in the player’s mind) is happening. I don’t personally see the band backing up Prince or Sheryl Crow that way, but I get that most people do.

25. By “like that” I mean songs with a discernible melody and some real emotion baked in.

Of their top 10 most-streamed songs on Spotify, seven of them fall in to the more-singing side of things where the remaining three are more in the early Chili Peppers style of funk-rap (though some songs straddle the two). All of this to say, once the singsong melodicism of “Under The Bridge” broke through, the Chili Peppers made sure to have a few songs “like that” on each record and, consequently, found themselves with more hits.

26. They won a Grammy so they weren’t totally ignored, but they didn’t get the love they deserved.

In a 2018 retrospective on The Ringer, Alan Siegel wrote, “Thirty years later, it’s clear that Vivid as a whole was one of the late 20th century’s most prescient albums. ‘I’m incredibly grateful for that,’ Vernon Reid said, ‘but it’s also incredibly disheartening.’”

27. You can look it up. It’s got an f-bomb and is quite mean-spirited. Chili Peppers bassist Flea (a Cave fan) had his feelings hurt and Cave, less outwardly abrasive in his older years has since retracted and reconsidered his comment as “uncharitable.”