Living Colour Celebrates A 'Vivid' 25 Years
By Chuck Sudo in Arts & Entertainment on Jan 14, 2013 7:00PM
Living Colour's Corey Glover and Doug Wimbish (right)
Rock music has trafficked in nostalgia from the moment its founders like Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, Little Richard and others stopped charting and hit the road, playing the hits night after night. But the practice seems even more prevalent in recent years as bands we grew up with as teens have hit the road for summer shed and package tours marked as “anniversaries” of the best albums in their catalogs.
When Living Colour released its debut album Vivid in 1988, the album sent shock waves across the country. Here was an all-black rock group (a novel concept to anyone unfamiliar with Parliament/Funkadelic at the time) from New York City, rocking as hard as any band in America and finding an audience with songs that were damning indictments of the latter day Reagan era. The problems addressed in songs like “Glamour Boys,” “Which Way to America?,” “Middle Man” and the centerpiece of the record, “Open Letter to a Landlord” are still prevalent in 21st Century America.
Vivid had a production tailor-made to reach a mass audience at the height of the early MTV years and a strong champion in Mick Jagger, who produced “Glamour Boys” and “Which Way to America?” and tapped Living Colour to open for The Rolling Stones on their Steel Wheels tour (where, if I remember clearly, they made the Stones work during a Shea Stadium show in October 1989). Vivid was a strong debut and their most successful album commercially: It sold two million copies and reached number six on the Billboard top albums chart. Living Colour would follow that with the epic Time’s Up, which won a Grammy but alienated much of the audience that were attracted to Vivid with its continued focus on social themes and expanded, experimental musical palette.
Twenty-five years later, Vivid still holds up musically, thematically and sonically, and the album’s most popular track, the lead single “Cult of Personality,” has found new popularity as the ring entrance theme of WWE Champion and Chicago boy CM Punk. In concert, The band can still put on a hell of a show. Vernon Reid’s guitar playing still goes over the cliff with runs up and down the fretboard that put the shredder gods to shame; Corey Glover’s voice has lost none of its power or range, and the rhythm section of drummer Will Calhoun and Doug Wimbish (who replaced original bassist Muzz Skillings after Time’s Up) hold down a rock solid beat; Wimbish’s bass playing, like John Entwistle’s in The Who, gives Living Colour a second lead instrument and, in some songs, takes the place of Reid’s guitar as the solo instrument.
Living Colour announced a tour to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Vivid that brings them to Park West April 11. Tickets ($25) are available at the Park West box office and website, or at etix.com.