Sound Chaser

Once and forever iconoclast Vernon Reid, the Britain-born guitarist for iconic American band Living Colour, is perpetually in pursuit of sonic excellence, regardless the point of entry. "A lot of different things have attracted me—everything from gentle breeze to thunder and lightning," Reid told me during a recent Zoom interview. "I've straddled two centuries where I've been on a mission to explore different emotions, different modalities, and different ways of using the guitar."

Reid's onomatopoeic approach to fulfilling such far-ranging aural pursuits initially helped catapult his four-piece, genre-defying band Living Colour to rapid acclaim and impact with Vivid, their multiplatinum debut on Epic released in May 1988. Vivid is an explosive treatise, awash in blistering, no-apologies, hard-rocking tracks like "Cult of Personality," "Open Letter (to a Landlord)," and "Which Way to America?"

Vivid was the band's commercial peak. After a five-year hiatus, the band reassembled in 2000 and has been making records and touring ever since. Living Colour commitments, though, haven't kept Reid, who is now 67, from stepping out to explore his own muse. His most recent solo adventures led to a new solo album, intriguingly dubbed Hoodoo Telemetry, which was released last fall on the custom Artone/The Players Club label and distributed internationally by Mascot. A heady brew, Hoodoo explores a big chunk of Reid's musical DNA, from the scat-centric, King Crimsonesque cover of Eddie Harris's career-defining track "Freedom Jazz Dance" to the subversive dreamscape of Reid's own tune "Beautiful Bastard."

Making sure Hoodoo made its way to vinyl was of utmost importance to Reid. "I had to figure out the sequencing with my mix engineer Scotty Hard because we couldn't fit the entire record on vinyl," he told me. For the vinyl version, it was necessary to trim the record from the 14 songs on CD to 10 cuts for the limited-edition purple vinyl release. "It's a shame we had to do that," Reid said, "but I think the vinyl experience of Hoodoo Telemetry is still pretty valid. It just has a slightly different effect." Why purple vinyl "I don't know! Maybe it's because I'm still a Prince fan," he replied, adding a throaty laugh. (Proof of Reid's Prince predilections can be found on the new record in the funky grooves of "The Haunting," which features emotive vocals from Kevin Webb, also an avowed Prince fan.)

"In these days of downloads, AI, and everything else, the idea of physical media still having a place is so great," Reid continued. "If you want to listen to music and have it be an intimate experience, where you have to interact with the physical object—the fact that vinyl still exists for doing that is incredible. I love the fact that if you don't want to be tracked online, hey—just get yourself a record. Get yourself a cassette."

"Cult of Personality," Living Colour's signature song, is as vibrantly vivid and culturally valid today as it was when it was written during a 1987 rehearsal at the band's Brooklyn loft. "It was a special day," Reid said. "I had a poem where I wrote, 'Look in my eyes / What do you see? / The cult of personality.' I stumbled on the riff, and then Will [Calhoun, LC's drummer] put a beat to it, and Muzz [Skillings] was playing the bass. The thing about it is, when we were coming up as 20th century people straddling into the 21st, we were defined by the Cold War—and it was a totality. It was all-consuming. Thankfully, even with all the rhetoric, we still haven't done the unthinkable."

There's a direct throughline from "Personality" to Reid's decision to cover Cream's "Politician" on Hoodoo. The Cream cover features vocal turns from Shelley Nicole, Miss Olithea, and Bruce Mack. Reid played alongside Cream bassist/ vocalist Jack Bruce in his 2001 touring band and was part of Spectrum Road, the Bruce-led supergroup that released a single album, Spectrum Road, on Palmetto Records in 2012 (footnote 1).

"Jack was such an important musician—just a wonderful, salt-of-the-earth guy—and I've been wanting to record that song for a long, long time," Reid confirmed. "Those guys in Cream were really young when they recorded 'Politician' (footnote 2). It was really dramatic. They were creating the world they lived in and were responding to, in real time." When Reid was asked to take part in Sunshine of Your Love: A Concert for Jack Bruce at the Roundhouse in London on October 24, 2015—a year to the day after Bruce passed away—he insisted on performing that song, setlist be damned. "I said, 'If I play on nothing, I wanna play on 'Politician.' I don't care about "Sunshine [of Your Love].' I wanna play 'Politician.'"

Reid is a tactile person in an ephemeral, digital world, and he offers no apologies. Whenever he's working on lyrics, he writes them out in longhand on a legal pad. But he also knows what time it is—and he's the rare musician who doesn't hate and fear today's most disruptive technology. "Technology never stays static, so this AI thing is not going away," he conceded. "It'll be slop and dreck to start with—but out of that, there is gonna be genius, because every era will have a Hendrix. Hendrix took advantage of the technology of his day, and somebody is gonna come along and prompt an AI masterpiece. It's just the way it is. Whether we like it or we don't, technology moves on.

"I love the fact that vinyl records have survived the onslaught—but the next thing has to happen. Someone not beholden to the old processes is gonna come up with something new. That's the beauty of it.

---

Footnote 1: The four-piece Spectrum Road consisted of Jack Bruce on bass and vocals, Vernon Reid on guitar, John Medeski on organ and mellotron, and Cindy Blackman Santana on drums.

Footnote 2: "Politician," co-written by Jack Bruce and Pete Brown, first appeared on side 2 of Cream's June 1968 double LP on Polydor, Wheels of Fire.