Today, I wanted to review one of the best debut albums in all of rock-n-roll, which sometimes gets overlooked – Living Colour’s album Vivid. 
Some of you may know that I have a hard rock side of me that lives happily alongside the more dominant classic rock persona, and it was fairly prevalent during high school. While Springsteen, the Stones, the Kinks, and Cheap Trick were my mainstays, so were Van Halen (though only through 1984), Kiss (through 1985), Scorpions, Def Leppard, and Rush. And then I discovered Guns N Roses Freshman year of college. Another band I got turned on to just after that was Living Colour.
To be honest, I first heard of them because Mick Jagger was one of the album’s producers. Now, I would’ve sworn this record came out in 1987, while I was still in high school, but I’m getting old and my memory ain’t what it used to be. The band was touted as the first true black heavy metal band, which I found disingenuous, because this record was so much broader than metal, which makes sense when one of the producers is Mick. They played loud, and aggressive, somewhat political songs that felt more like punk (which had evolved by then into “alternative”) than metal. By 1988, metal was awash in glam at the mainstream level, with thrash metal (Metallica, Anthrax) bubbling just below the surface. And Living Colour wasn’t either of those things.
Cult of Personality, the first single, was a monster – it grabbed my attention both with the staccato rhythm and the powerful lyrics. The rest of the album was full of songs that hung together without sounding the same. Bandleader Vernon Reid sounded great – his guitar playing was unique and dynamic. The rhythm section of Will Calhoun and Muzz Skillings was tight and substantial – and funky. They were carrying on in the Funkadelic tradition. And I was surprised to see that Francis from the movie Platoon was the lead singer. Corey Glover sounded fantastic on this record. And they looked great.
The video for Cult of Personality was frenetic and exciting to watch, and the band was dressed in day-glo and spandex, and day-glo spandex, and the images of dictators making big speeches reinforced the point of the song. I fell hard for this band, and the four singles they released was, at the time, a lot for a debut record. But all four were good. They even covered a Talking Heads song (Memories Can’t Wait, off of the 1979 Fear of Music album), which made sense if only because both bands got their starts playing at CBGB’s in NYC, albeit a decade apart.
I saw them a year later, in the fall of ‘88 at Shea Stadim, opening for the Stones on the Steel Wheels tour. They were great live. They’re next two albums had tons of great songs on them also. They were on a roll. And then they called it quits – until just recently. Do yourself a favor and check this album out if you haven’t before. And if you do, let me know what you think.
