Living Colour

During the 1980s rock had grown increasingly formulaic and racially divided, a sharp contrast to the late 1960s and early 1970s when Jimi Hendrix, Sly & the Family Stone, and Santana had all dominated the charts. New York’s Living Colour helped reverse that trend by decade’s end, opening doors for the broader acceptance later enjoyed by Rage Against the Machine and Sevendust. Singer Corey Glover, guitarist Vernon Reid, bassist Muzz Skillings, and drummer Will Calhoun first assembled in the mid-1980s; only Reid brought substantial prior experience, having played with Ronald Shannon Jackson’s experimental jazz ensemble, recorded alongside Defunkt and Public Enemy, and released the 1984 solo album Smash & Scatteration with Bill Frisell.

Several years of rehearsal at CBGB’s finally coalesced the quartet’s sound. Mick Jagger became an unexpected champion, mentoring the musicians, overseeing a demo session, and steering them toward an Epic contract—though Glover briefly stepped away to portray a soldier in Oliver Stone’s Platoon. Vivid surfaced in summer 1988 and gathered steam gradually; by winter the video for the anthem “Cult of Personality” saturated MTV, lifting the album into the upper chart reaches and earning platinum certification. At the 1989 Grammy ceremony “Cult” captured Best Hard Rock Performance, the first of several trophies for the band, which then spent the autumn opening the Rolling Stones’ first American tour in eight years.

From Vivid onward the group demonstrated that rock could still carry pointed messages, as tracks such as “Open Letter to a Landlord” and “Funny Vibe” made clear. The same lineup returned with the 1990 follow-up Time’s Up, which charted modestly yet never matched the debut’s commercial force. A slot on the inaugural Lollapalooza bill in summer 1991 and the odds-and-ends EP Biscuits kept the band visible. Skillings departed soon after, replaced by studio veteran Doug Wimbish, and the darker, more abrasive Stain arrived in 1993. Though sales dipped, the album sustained a loyal audience while the musicians appeared poised for a bold new chapter.

Attempts to shape a fourth studio album the following year collapsed under conflicting artistic visions, prompting the group’s dissolution in early 1995. Reid issued the solo set Mistaken Identity in 1996 and contributed to other projects; Glover released the 1998 album Hymns, served as a VH1 VJ, and appeared in the 1996 film Loose Women. Calhoun and Wimbish formed the drum’n’bass outfit Jungle Funk, whose self-titled debut surfaced in 1997, while Wimbish also put out the solo album Trippy Notes for Bass in 1999. By the early 2000s Calhoun and Wimbish had joined Glover in the New York-area project Headfake. Reid sat in with them at CBGB’s a few days before Christmas 2000, sparking reunion rumors that proved accurate when the original quartet toured together again in summer 2001.

Sanctuary issued the experimental Collideøscope in 2003. Two years later the rarities set What’s Your Favorite Color? appeared, followed in 2006 by the compilation Everything Is Possible: The Very Best of Living Colour. A fresh label arrangement with Megaforce yielded the 2009 album The Chair in the Doorway. Family commitments kept the musicians relatively quiet until 2014, when they reconvened to develop new material. Working intermittently with pop/R&B producer Andre Betts, they completed the blues-inflected Shade, which arrived in 2017 behind the aggressive lead single “Come On.”