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Rip Magazine June 1993
Living Colour:  Deal with It
by Don Kaye

For all the turbulent emotions that rage through his music, Vernon Reid is as calm and composed a musician, a person, as you're likely to meet. The man whose songs range from the ferocious thrash of "Time's Up" to the stark beauty of "Open Letter (To a Landlord)" exudes a confidence born of adversity. Living Colour, the band the guitarist has nurtured and helmed for years, has had its share of the struggles that all groups go through--and then some--but Vernon remains its pillar of strength.

The journey has taken its toll though:
Bassist Muzz Skillings is gone, replaced by Doug Wimbish, who joins Vernon, singer Corey Glover and drummer William Calhoun. Doug debuts on Stain, the group's third album and a logical successor to 1988's Vivid and 1990's Time's Up. Musically, the album hammers some of the convolutions of the band's earlier work into more organic, smoother grooves without filing down its teeth; lyrically, Living Colour is probing deeper territory, seeing things less in absolute terms and more in sometimes unsettling shades of gray.

As we wait for Corey Glover, who is stuck in midday Manhattan traffic, Vernon discusses the personeel change. "We had gotten to a place where we were hearing different things and had different ideas," he says about Muzz. "We wound up splitting amicably and keeping our friendship intact. If anything can be salvaged from something like that, the one thing you want to salvage is your friendship, so that worked out okay. You have to work at something like that and not let the difference of opinion go places where it doesn't need to go."

Vernon agrees that the departure of a band member can often be compared to the breakup of a marriage. "It's the perfect analogy. A lot of times people wonder what happens when a marriage breaks up, but sometimes the people never had a chance to look at their actual relationship because they were so busy struggling. That's what happened with the band. We did these two albums and were so busy working, we didn't have time to look at the relationship."
Doug Wimbish is a vet, coming from the cult favorite Tackhead and also contributing to sesions for everyone from James Brown to Mick Jagger to Annie Lennox. "He used to check us out," Vernon explains. "He's been a friend for a long time. We've worked with different members of Tackhead on different things, so we've all been kind of relating to one another as friends. Tackhead broke up at roughly the same time as we were going through what we were going though, and Doug was the first person that came to mind. We auditioned some people, but our collective first idea was him."

Doug's excellent playing and constant inventiveness fit smoothly into the group as they began working on Stain. "To my ears," Vernon says, "the new album doesn't sound like a 'put together' band. It sounds like a band, a band that's been making records. Part of that is because Doug was involved in the writing process. They're group-written songs on which he did one-fourth of the writing. The way we all interacted was really natural.

"I think each record has its own kind of feel to it," Vernon continues when asked to compare Stain to previous efforts. "The first record sounds like a band that's played a lot in clubs, and the second one sounds like a band that's going for different things and trying to play different kinds of things and play together while doing it. The third one, even though the diversity is still there, is a lot more focused in a way. The songs are shorter, and everything that's there is there for a reason. There's no excess on this one."

There's no excess in the album's title, either. It begs for interpretation. "I think Stain is just a real strong title," says Vernon. "There are different ways of thinking about it. On one level it means that nobody's perfect and nothing is perfect. We're all stained by whatever experiences we've had. It's definitely not a virginal title."

Vernon chuckles and breaks out into a full-fledged grin as Corey Glover enters the room. "You can jump right in on this question!" Vernon exclaims, Corey dropping into a seat next to him. "We're talkin' about what Stain means."

"The way I saw it was like an indelible mark on one's person of something," Corey begins, "whether that be ugly or beautiful. Lots of things are stained. Your clothes are stained, even in the patterns that on them. My idea was just to say that there was something you couldn't get our of you because it's an intrinsic part of you, just as much as your hair or your eyes or your skin or the way you think."

This feeling also comes across in the lyrics. While previous Living Colour songs have looked outward, commenting on the enviroment, issues and society, Stain goes in a different direction. Some of the songs, like "Go Away" and "Ignorance Is Bliss," introduce characters who don't want to know what's happening in the world around them. "Isolation is definitely a part of it," says Vernon. "A lot of it is lookinginward and dealing with different internal conflicts, like, 'I know I should wanna really be involved with changing the world, but right now I just wanna sleep with a particular girl.' It's those kinds of conflicts and having to really take a hard look at yourself and maybe not liking everything that you see."

"On the other records we sort of said, 'That's bad, this is bad, that's bad, and you gotta change it!" Corey chimes in, pointing around the room at imaginary problems." On this one we said, 'Okay these things are bad, so how does it affect you?' A lot of these characters are based on those little parts of your mind that you don't even want to deal with, those things that you don't even say out loud. How many times have you seen a homeless person on the street, and instead of giving them a quarter, you thought, 'Get a job'? How many times have you had those slightly negative thoughts that sort of creep into your mind when you're up at three in the morning, watching Sally Struthers talk on TV about homeless Third World children--you know, when you think to your self, 'Fuck them'?

"We're just looking at those ambivalent feelings," says Vernon. "On one level 'Go Away' is so..the character is so ultra-ultra-negative, but the only way to look at those kind of attitudes is to say that, instead of saying, 'This person is bad.' What is in the mind of someone who goes somewhere and just shoots up the place, for instance? A lot of it deals with outsiders and misfits, people who don't really fit in or whose thoughts don't really fit in."

Could these outsiders Vernon speaks of possibly the band members themselves? After all, Living Colour have stood apart from the pack since their recording career began. First, the rock industry and audience didn't know how to handle four black men playing hard-rock music after years of stereotyping that had resulted in white=rock/black=R&B thinking. And even after the rock audience got over those preconceptions, the diversity inherent in the group's music left media types scrambling for a new pigeonhole to shove the band into. Corey feels they succeeded somewhat in doing so, and now Living Colour is determined to escape it.

"A lot of times we got labeled 'good guys,'" Corey explains. "We were just really politically motivated, and we stood up on our soapbox and talked about the world, and that was what our gig was. We said there was light at the end of the tunnel. Well, sometimes there ain't. We are rounded individuals, we're human beings. Sometimes there's good, sometimes there's bad. That's what I think is reflected on this record. We're not Boy Scouts, we're people, and as soon as people realize that we're just people and get off the whole thing that we're always politically motivated, the sooner they'll get closer to the music.

"Our music comes from our experience," Corey continues. "Our experience happens to be politically motivated and ethnically motivated, but so is everybody else's. Any music that's coming now is politically motivated in one way or another. What we do on this record is try to deal with all those elements--good, bad or indifferent--warts and all, and that includes what's going on inside ourselves."

Just when many bands are waking up and looking outward, Living Colour is breaking new ground by turning their questions inward. With Stain, Vernon, Corey, William and Doug defy the rules once again.

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