An interview with Living Colour's Vernon Reid about The Chair In The Doorway

  Living Colour's Vernon Reid (Photo: Bill Douthart)

An Interview with Living Colour’s Vernon Reid

By Phyllis Pollack

Living Colour will be playing at the Key Club in Hollywood on September 24.

The band released their fifth album, The Chair In The Doorway a week ago today. The band, comprised of guitarist Vernon Reid, vocalist Corey Glover, bassist Doug Wimbish and drummer Will Calhoun, released their first major label album, Vivid, in 1988. The band came into prominence with the album’s single “Cult of Personality,” now also is heard on Guitar Hero III, which has sold over 14 million copies. Two years prior to that album’s release, Rolling Stones vocalist Mick Jagger heard seen Living Colour play at CBGB’s in New York, and was so impressed by them, he produced a demo for the group. The band would serve as an opening act on The Stones’ 1989 Steel Wheels tour. That year, Living Colour won Best Hard Rock Performance at the Grammy Awards, and three MTV Music Awards for Best New Artist, Best Group Video and Best Stage Performance in a video. The three subsequent releases were Time’s Up, Stain, and Collideoscope until the release of their new album.

Guitarist Vernon Reid has done session work, both producing and playing, with a number of artists. Among them was a session work including Mick Jagger’s second solo album, Primitive Cool, recording with B.B. King, The Ramones and Carlos Santana. He has released solo albums, as well. One of Reid’s greatest accomplishments was co-founding the Black Rock Coalition (B.R.C), with Greg Tate, in order to bring awareness to black rock and roll, to serve as a reminder of where rock and roll’s roots came from, to show that black artists were still playing rock, and to confront an atmosphere wherein record label A&R reps would claim they could not market black rock acts, andwere refusing to sign them. As it turned out, the Black Rock Coalition would not be an organization, it would become a movement, spawning more rock acts, plus fans of all races.

  Living Colour (Photo by Bob Bernstein)

Ironically, exactly six days later after the B.R.C. was formed, something very polar happened. Spearheaded by Senator Albert Gore Jr., his wife Tipper Gore, and Susan Baker, wife of Secretary of State James Baker, the Parents Music Resource Center (P.M.R.C.) of which the three were founding members, would hold a Senate hearing, demanding that something be done about rock music, in order to stop lyrics that Washington politicians and their wives found offensive. The P.M.R.C. had sent a letter to the Recording Industry Association of America (R.I.A.A.), which had a series of proposals, including warning stickers being placed on albums that they felt encouraged satantism, homosexuality, and a host of other subjects. The P.M.R.C. came to the music industry with several dictates. Among them, albums with “objectionable lyrics,” would be kept behind the counter at record stores, rather than in the bins. The P.M.R.C.’s members and their literature proposed a series of measures that included banning rock fans under the age of 18 from being allowed to attend concerts performed by artists that the powerful Washington group, comprised of politicians and their wives, found to be “offensive.” Among the countless artists listed by the P.M.R.C. as having offensive product were Van Halen, AC/DC, Motley Crue, Prince, Judas Priest, and Def Leppard. The P.M.R.C. published a series of newsletters and other materials castigating popular musicians. In their final newsletter, every musician that was listed was black. When the organization became a political liability to the Gores’ political aspirations, and it became apparent that it was difficult for the Gores to get press opportunities, money and other political support from recording artists and record companies, Tipper Gore distanced herself from the P.M.R.C. after the Gores met with record company executives in Los Angeles at a highly publicized closed door session that had been taped by one of those present. The Gores realized their strategy to be seen as having “family values” backfired politically when they saw it interfered with them generating the youth vote they needed. After that, they would keep most of their anti-free speech opinions to themselves, realizing that they needed support from rock stars for their various campaigns. Al Gore would begin making positive references to rock songs in his campaign speeches, and trying to undo damage he did in his relationship with the music industry. The Gores had underestimated the importance of popular musicians when it came to election campaigns and other enterprises, a mistake Gore would not make again. The year that Living Colour released their first album, Tipper Gore, then a Presidential candidate’s wife, released a book excorciating artists ranging from The Who, The Rolling Stones, and even Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video.

Here, Vernon Reid talks about his career, the Black Rock Coalition and he reflects on other matters.

When Living Color was forming, there was a highly publicized campaign at the time from right-wing groups, trying too promote the idea that free speech in the recording studio should be stopped. Anti- rock organizations were founded on superstitious and racially based ideology. Literature claimed that Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards’ guitar playing was a form of voodoo, because of his playing Chuck Berry riffs, and these organizations kept harping on this idea that this was a devil beat derived from Africa. The PMRC and others would cite Jimi Hendrix’s quote, “You can hypnotize people with music,” which was supposed to be proof or infer there was some great conspiracy to undermine youth through this music.

Yeah.

In the last conversation I ever had with the late Frank Zappa, he said to me, “The devil stuff only plays in certain parts of the country, but unfortunately racism is everywhere.”

Right. I remember the time period very well.

Vivid was released in the midst of a backdrop of this hysteria about rock music and race, during a time where the two were very intertwined, and often very interwoven.

There’s nothing more dangerous than ideas matched to melody. Songs are very powerful. That’s why so much human emotion is attached to love ballads, and our rituals of mating and rituals of battle or sportsmanship are tied to music. Anthemic songs if you will. Your school fight song, and so on. Music has a strong potential. I am always struck at how we will take an idea, and ideas work in opposition to each other. For example, ‘dog is man’s best friend,’ ‘you ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog, cryin’ all the time, you ain’t never caught no rabbit, and you ain’t no friend of mine.’ And it’s funny how that song started out as a black blues number, and became, it was a great song, and great songs transcends whoever did them. You know, songs have a life of their own. This is one of the things that is so funny about taking our music, or stealing our music, that sort of idea. The problem is that one group dominates the other group socially, politically, economically. By that same token, jazz is a combination of African rhythms and European harmony. The giving and taking goes back and forth, and has always gone back and forth. Language is the battleground. We hear it all the time. The writer George Orwell said, it best, “Political language is not to be trusted.” This hysteria around the music, let’s be frank, was about sex and race. It’s about race, but the hysteria is really about race and sex. And all of those things, you know, political ideas, how are my children going to turn out, who is going to influence my children? Everyone wants their hands on your kids. The government wants their hands on your kids, the churches want their hands on your kids, advertisers want their hands on your kids.

And then here comes rock and roll. And here comes that part of the hysteria around it. Every generation of parents has a terror of what’s going to happen. And I think at that time, the PMRC was just a manifestation in that particular time of parental hysteria. That hysteria is manifested in these are crazy ideas, the idea of transcendence, the idea of the door of perception, the idea of freedom. Freedom is a terrifying thing. Freedom and democracy are not the same thing. We conflate them all the time, and that’s the other part of it.

It’s completely tribal. I think it’s a DNA level. I think racism is also an evolutionary strategy to dominate. You know, like why don’t you like me? You don’t like me because you can clearly see I am other than you. The fact that you can see I am other than you, without hearing my voice, right? The thing is that white men have been killing each other in Europe. We focus on race and racial violence. But the reality of it is that Europeans have been murdering each other for centuries, millennia, in fact. Part of the thing about language is, people listen to accents. Somebody told me that when two Englishmen meet, the first thing they do, is they try to figure out who the other person is pretending not to be, or what neighborhood they’re pretending to not be from. At a certain point, one of the things that a gentleman would do is to master several accents of his own language. So if he’s from a certain area, and he has to speak a courser language, then he could do that. In a way, the fact that race is homogeneous, I think it’s a mistaken idea that people don’t find differences. Race just makes differences obvious. Race is obvious. But when you go to places that are homogenous, you find murder and abuse, and terror all the time. So in a weird way, it actually takes a little bit of heat out of the race, because this is a human problem. It’s a problem between the genders, between lifestyle choices, the conflict. I was struck by how if you go to Germany or Italy, listening to people from the south of Germany, how they talk about the people in the north of Germany, and what they’re focusing on is their accents. They make fun of their accents. The Italians and the French do the same thing.

Jamaicans grow up speaking Patois, but there are situations due to class pressure, where there are some Jamaicans who tell me they feel pressured not speak in that manner, although everyone was raised speaking that way.

Well that’s the thing. The Caribbean accent is a funny thing, because there are a multitude of Caribbean accents. People default to the Jamaican accent. But the Jamaican accent is very, very different from the Trinidad accent, the Antiguan accent and the St. Lucian accent, but people have a tendency to lump them all together. One accent people hear all the time is the Jamaican accent. So that’s kind of the dominant accent that people know. But the thing about it is all those accents are derived from Scottish and Irish brogues. They were the overseers that were sent there. So some of those people were from County Limerick, and some of those people were from Belfast. If you listen to the different accents, you are struck when you actually hear them, that they’re very different. Even though you hear a Limerick accent, you identify it as an Irish accent, but if you heard a Belfast accent, you identify it as out of Ireland, but it’s vastly accent. Difference, that’s part of the human thing. Like I am me, and the opposition of the other. The most revolutionary idea is that the other is myself. That’s one of the things the far right; the far right is terrified of things like the United Nations, because the loss of self-identity is what terrifies. The notion of an increasingly browning of the planet, so that different people are mixing, is a very terrifying thing for many people. But it’s terrifying at an illogical level. That’s why this notion of getting your kids to toe the line is important.

And rock and roll has changed the lives of many racists. I mean, rock and roll has done that. That’s another reason why rock and roll is dangerous. There are people who will tell you, “You know what? I grew up in a redneck, we-don’t-like-niggers home, and I heard a particular song, and I went to this neighborhood, and my life changed.” That’s what the terror is. That is why Barack Obama is freaking people out. When he gets up and talks to kids, and he says, “Do better in school,” this is not controversial. But it is because he is the most powerful individual, possibly in the world. Like that fact is too much for people to bear. So they come up with instant conspiracy theories, like him talking to the nation’s kids is somehow indoctrination. It’s crazy, but the thing is on a certain level, when kids think about their potential, and I’m talking about all children, Barack Obama changed the game, utterly. They used to say, “Anyone can grow up to be President.” And I mean, that was a goddamn lie my whole life. It’s a lie, and it’s that kind of hypocritical lie America won’t speak on. We never had to speak on it. But it was total hypocrisy, and Barack Obama changed that lie into the truth. That freaks folks out. Sotomayor coming from the Bronx as a Supreme Court judge? Like the fact that she’s Supreme Court judge, and Barack Obama nominated her? It’s another log in the fire. Like, “Oh, no!” That’s why it becomes indoctrination in his agenda, da, da, da, and it becomes this freak out. And he’s a centrist. I mean he’s far to the right of me. I voted for him, I supported him. I hope he is successful, but it’s fascinating to see the reaction. You would think the country elected Eldridge Cleaver by the way people are acting. You would have thought that we literally elected a member of the Black Panther Party.

Or Assata Shakur.

Exactly.

The new album, The Chair In The Doorway, is obviously incredible. You have always been experimental in what you’ve done, and on this album, even more so. The different rhythms on it make it really interesting, too. It’s an interesting album to listen to. It’s a very hard album. It’s structured, but it doesn’t feel constricted like many other rock albums that do. There is obviously a lot of freedom that you give yourself in your music, where you put yourself into less confines than a lot of other guitarists do.

The truth has always been it’s like a hard won piece of art. It took a lot for us to make the record. I refer to the album as an unintended concept album in the sense that the central idea of The Chair In The Doorway is how do we get in our own way? How did I get in my own way? The Chair In The Doorway is based on a theme of Corey’s, which really came out from when we were working on Collideoscope. It was kind of like we had a big subject that gave us an excuse for that album, as 9-11 gave us a reason to talk about stuff. In a way, while other bands were kind of shying away from it, it was literally like, "Oh, we can talk about this." But there was a lot of other stuff to try to deal with, and we weren’t really going to deal with that. When we would have difficulties making the record, Corey, would say, “Well, you know, the chair’s in the doorway.” Meaning, we put stuff in the way, we won’t move it. And I thought, “That’s the title of our next record.” I didn’t even know what it means. We didn’t even have songs written. I said, “The Chair In The Doorway is the name of the next record."

It became representative of where your guys’ heads were at the time.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. The irony of it is the album is going to be about conflict and how we all have our own demons to struggle with, and the thing that is weird about that is, when you put that energy out in the universe, you are going to have to deal with it. You are going to have to put up or shut up. Making the album was exactly like that. It was contentious in the sense that even the title of album, and Corey came up with the title, everyone in the band, at various times fought with the title, didn’t understand the title The Chair In The Doorway. It sounds too dark, it sounds too this, it sounds too that. The irony of it is that how we were acting about the title was exactly what the title was about. Eventually we got to a place where we had these votes, and everyone had to sacrifice. I had this song I wrote that I really liked, and it didn’t make it on the record. I’m really happy in retrospect it didn’t make it on the record, because it didn’t fit.

Parts of the album have a sound that is metal on metal. It is really powerful. Segments of it sound very intricately layered. Is there anything you want to say about how it was produced to give it that sound?

We co-produced with Count from San Francisco. It was funny, because he is not a metal guy, but there was a certain amount of tension about that. At the same time, we got really good results with him, because he challenges, he questions certain things. He liked some things, and not others. Eventually, that sort of back and forth collaboration, along with Pavel Karlik and Milan Cimfe, who were engineers at the studio, that kind of back and forth thing, produced the album. We worked with Mark Stewart, and English songwriter; we’ve collaborated with him before, and he brought a very quirky sensibility to some of the words. So all of that stuff kind of worked together, and turned out very well at the end of the day. We recorded the recorded mainly in the Czech Republic, which is kind of wild because it was a very isolating experience. We were on tour. The only way we were going to make it happen was we were away from home, we were away from the family, we were away from everything, and we actually made it happen. At the end of the day, we had (Ron) St. Germain mix the record, and he did a great job.

Listening to the song "Hard Times" especially, it shows cohesive and how infused the band is as a unit. The tightness in that track makes you forget that there are actually four people in this band; it is just this cohesive unit. The communication between band members, musically, is so intense. Did you anything different on this album?

Well, one of the things that we did with some of this record is that we did it with a lot of parts. We recorded a lot of parts. It’s strange that the record has the sound that it has, because many bits of it were not recorded live together.

That was going to be the next question. Going back to this thing of it sounding like metal on metal, it sounds very intricately layered in places.

Yeah, very much so. And then there’s like the song “Bless Those.” What’s so funny about when that song comes up is, like when you hear “Method,” it’s a lot of very different sounds. It’s got a very sci-fi vibe to it, but “Bless Those” is one of the tracks recorded that was before the four of us played live. But “Bless Those” is one of the son where even the solo that was recorded live in the studio. Like we recorded the title track live, the super heavy one live, as well. We recorded “Hard Times” live, then deconstructed it, and then went back and we focused on the drums. So it was recorded live, and there was the cohesiveness of that. Then we came back to it, and did what we did, and we replaced parts and things. So there is a combination of like layering, and a real focus on our parts and bits. There’s a lot of information in the song “Behind The Sun.” But that song is based around this kind of tapped arpeggio, and that was recorded live, but then I did it over and over and over and over and over and over again, until it was coming out of my ears basically.

You can tell when you are listening to this album that it was recorded very meticulously in places, with a lot of layering, without it sounding overproduced. That is a really hard thing to do. That is an achievement in itself.

The main thing is the feel of it. It is the feel of it above of all things. That’s the key to it. A good example of it is we had a couple of tracks we really did feel were a little overdone, and those tracks didn’t make it onto the record.

You can tell it is very intricately layered here and there, you can tell it was meticulously produced. Yet it still has that raw, hard sound to it.

Yeah, man. That’s a very important thing. Part of it is like whenever you’re doing what you’re doing, you have to know what you want things to feel like. We all know what we want things to feel like, and we know what we don’t want things to feel like. So whatever path you take, it could be live, it could be done bit by bit. But in the end, it has to feel like a certain thing. If it doesn’t feel that way, then it isn’t working. Like we did a song called “That’s What You Taught Me.” That was the last session we did. We recorded that in Massachusetts. Basically, in a municipal library. It’s a studio owned by the production manager of the Rolling Stones, who we became familiar with, Pierre (de Beauport). It was a wonderful studio. He was just awesome, totally awesome. He opened his place up to us, and let us do our thing. That’s where we recorded “That’s What You Taught Me,” “Not Tomorrow” and “Asshole.”

You had done an interview on KROQ in 1989, in response to Guns N Roses. You were in town to play four dates with The Rolling Stones (October 18, 19, 20 and 21), here at The Coliseum. Having seen your dates with them in other cities on the tour, and due to other reasons, I knew these would be the only shows you were ever going to play with GNR. Backstage, I said to you, “What do you call a Guns N Roses fan with an I.Q. of 125?” And you said, “I don’t know.” And I said, “A stadium show.”

That’s funny! Wow. Oh, that’s funny. I even laughed at the time, too. (Laughs.) That’s crazy.

You remember this, right?

I do remember it, because it was so tense backstage.

Oh, yeah.

And when you said that, I laughed because, it was so…because there was this whole thing about keeping the bands separated, you know, keeping like me away from Axl (Rose), and keeping Axl away from me. Because we had had these words and all. So it was really uptight, and it was the first day, and I was like, you know what? I didn’t want to say anything. I was like, it was sort of already getting to be ridiculous, and then what happens is Axl went on stage, and he went into a whole thing. I was like, I was going to go on stage, we were going to play, and I’m just going to let it go. And then he went off.

Yeah.

And the next day, I was like, I had to say something, because it was just wack. It was very tense.
I remember the tension backstage.

I remember saying that night, “There are different camps back here.”

Bands are on tour, they take on the feelings of their people. And our crew, the guys on our crew had tension with the Guns And Roses crew, and then all the people in The Rolling Stones’ crew were trying to keep everything cool. So it was like a whole thing.

Then there was that whole separate sad soap opera, what Slash had to tolerate with, with what Axl was doing on stage during his other dramatic rant, and Axl stomping off stage, saying, “I’m never going to play with you again.” So there was all of that madness, too.

He went into that whole thing, and I don’t know if he was talking so much Izzy (Stradlin), but he going into this whole thing about, “Some of these guys have to get their shit together;” he explained it in terms envisioning “Mr. Brownstone.”

Yeah, it was a drug reference.

So he was kind of in that, so he was hollering about the whole “One In A Million” thing, and then he had this whole thing with drug use in his band, and it was crazy. It was a completely chaotic thing.

It was almost as if he was using that soap opera, saying he wasn’t going to play with the band again, and the timing of it, in part, as a way to deflect people from talking or thinking about the “One In A Million” issue, because now there was this whole new controversy/cliffhanger now, about would he come back on stage again with his band or not. So there was this whole other controversy now.

I don’t know. I think it was all over the place. The main thing about it, right? Part of it, my upset with him was, and using the “N” word or whatever, one thing I was upset with, is he thinks is there are no African American fans. Like he literally doesn’t think there are black people that actually listen to his music. That’s the thing that was kind of crazy. I was a huge GNR fan. I thought, “Wow, this is a cool band.” And then I heard rumors that Slash was black, and this, that and the other thing. I thought, ‘Dude, why are you hiding? And when you see him without the hat, you see it, you see it clearly. And the whole thing to wear his top hat to hide his features was like, what’s that about? But I never had an issue or a thing with Slash. I always really thought he was really, really cool.

Slash went through a lot, dealing with Axl.

He frankly went through a lot of ill, and probably a lot of racist ass shit, went through a lot of ill shit. And he’s a major dude. I have a great deal of affection for Slash. His name would come up, and I’d say, “You know what? I did a thing with him at the White House, and I really had a riot.” I would love to hook up with him, do something with him at some point, but maybe that’ll happen, whatever. But that was a crazy time period. It was crazy.

I think when Dave Marsh and I wrote the Village Voice article exposing the F.B.I. letter that was sent to N.W.A., we mentioned that Tipper Gore and the PMRC had never said a word about that GNR song. Like the PMRC didn’t have a problem with that song. I think Dave and I were the only music journalists to come out in print, and describe the song as racist or bigoted.

Axl kind of took the stand of the embattled white man. It’s a very weird thing, cops and niggers, get out of my way. How do you even equate the two, and where are you coming from? But you know, this is the kind of thing, he has this very self-dramatic, you hear it in Chinese Democracy. All the ballads are kind of crazily self-pitying…

He is a victim.

Yeah. Like he’s the victim who can spend twenty million dollars on an album saying he’s a victim. It’s kind of a crazy thing. But that’s part of why he is truly a great American. Because we all are with our hypocrisy. He’s as crazy as a bed bug. There’s part of me that knows it’s bullshit. There’s part of what he says without reflection. When he did “One In A Million,” I don’t think there was any heat there. It’s the kind of bullshit cats say that doesn’t mean anything. It’s bad because the context of it is racist. It’s momentary, not really focused, it’s wack, it’s a bunch of crap. But he’s not challenged on it, and that’s the problem. When no one says, “That’s a problem what you said,” that’s when it becomes a problem. There’s this kind of sputtering self-pitying and self-defense. There’s no ideology.

It’s more of a psychological thing. People who claim to be victims of things, but who really identify with the aggressors. It’s ironic and convoluted. But it’s part of the psychology of it.

It’s like a kind of off-the-cuff kind of thing people say, and when they get caught on it, they say, “I’m not racial, I’m not this, I’m not that.” Yeah, okay, right. I’m not mad at Axl. I think he’s a talented dude. I think Chinese Democracy is not a bad record at all. I think it’s completely overwrought, I think it’s completely crazy that he did it that way. But I ain’t spending no energy being mad at him.

I wanted to bring up that night up, because it is something I will always remember, it was so crazy. On “Bless Those,” what guitar are you using?

Let me think about that actual session. I was probably playing a Hamer guitar. I’ve been playing on Hamer custom Chaparrals. This album, however, I switched over to Parker. I have a signature model Parker Fly. I actually share this model with Adam Dutkiewicz from Killswitch Engage. We have this guitar called the DragonFly. The Parker Fly has different Flys, like the Mojo Fly. That’s why I switched over. But on “Bless Those,” I played my old Hamer on that one. I would say it’s sixty percent the new guitar, the Parker prototype, and forty percent the Hamer. I played slide on “Bless Those” and “Not Tomorrow.” I started playing slide with my solo project, Masque. I did a couple records on Stevie Vai’s label, Favored Nation. There’s a song called “The Slouch.” I used it on that. I started playing silde on my independent and solo projects. On “Broken Hearts” (on Vivid) I played a lap steel guitar, but I only used it for background, a country and western coloresque thing. It’s the first record where I improvise, where I solo using a slide. But The Chair In The Doorway is the first solo album time I actually played solos with slide. I actually make my own slides, too. I make these custom ring slides out stainless steel.

You have some blues soloing at the beginning of “Not Tomorrow.”

The blues thing is where I come from on a level. It influenced me a lot. I’m not from the South, I’m Brooklyn, but I heard the blues coming through Santana and Hendrix, and we are talking on the day Hendrix died. I think you hear the most Hendrix influenced playing on “Not Tomorrow,” and I didn’t even realize it until (bassist) Doug Wimbish turned around and said, “You know, that sounds like something from Electric Ladyland,” and I was like, “Word?”

I was going to bring that up.

It’s weird, because it wasn’t consciously thought of. I was playing in the groove and feeling it, and then I listened to it, and it reminded me of “Voodoo Chile (Slight Return).” Strange. Over time, I’ll hear phrases, because I never sat down to copy solos. I would copy phrases. I would want to find out how you do that. I always felt make up your own thing, but things just kind of seep into your consciousness, and it all just kind of came out.

I was fortunate enough to interview Les Paul, who was responsible for multi-tracking, reverb and Les Paul guitars. Any comment on his death?

Les Paul was a giant. As an American musician and as an American inventor. What he did changed world culture. That’s as simple as you can put it. What he did changed everything. I mean, multi-tracking and reverb, the Les Paul guitars, it turned the whole thing around. I mean, he’s that guy. He gave us a great deal. He’s an American tinkerer. Tinkering is a grand tradition. Just kind of going in your garage, and fooling around with this thing, and whatever. He came out with a world changing series of inventions. And he was a wonderful musician. So he was a tremendous cat. I think he left an indelible mark on the world, indelible forever.

A large number of the younger bands don’t play guitar solos. They don’t seem to know how to play lead guitar. What happened?

I think the rise of guitar porn turned people off. The aggressive guitar porn, like pornography, guys lording it over other guys, their chops, well a lot of people are responsible, and it turned off a lot of people from playing guitar that way. They think it’s pointless. What’s it adding to the song? It’s just an expression of ego and it really turned people off. So what’s happened is guitar solos have become divorced from context. Like they exist in the context of technique. So it’s just like sex in a porn movie that has nothing to do with sex in a relationship. It’s the mechanics of it. It’s how gorgeous and how perfect the bodies are, how much endurance they have, and it’s not about tenderness or affection, or the rage that leads into sex. It’s not about that.

But when you listen to the solo that Hendrix played on “All Along The Watchtower,” you hear this obvious melody, passion and technique, and those things were a very integral part of what would come out whenever he played a solo.

You know who is an exception to this is Joe Satriani. What people don’t remember is Joe used to play with Greg Kihn. Right now, he is playing in Chicken Foot with Sammy Hagar. I remember talking to him about it. I thought, “Well, that’s crazy.” He’s always had a sense of melody in his playing, and he has a songwriter’s sense in what he does. But to a lot of cats, it’s about, “I want to play this impossible thing that no one else can play,” and it’s this thing about dominating, being “the man,” and being the biggest dick in the room. We’re competitive; we’re a competitive species. We compete on every front. That’s the thing about the human experience. People compete about who’s going to be the most organic, they compete over who is gong to be the most politically correct. People are going to compete about who makes the most literary references. People are going to compete over who plays the fastest guitar solo. People compete about who is more sensitive.”‘I am more sensitive than you.” You take anything, and people are going to compete on it. I am going to be more minimalist than you. Weird shit. I am going to be the most charitable is not much different than the impulse to say, “I am going to show you I can piss the furthest.” When we see the big ego guitar solo, that can blind us to the fact it’s not any different than these other impulses. I am better than you.

I was wondering, have you ever worked on anything with Bernard Fowler? You guys both worked on Mick Jagger solo stuff, you are both from Brooklyn, and you’ve toured together, in that he has been a back up vocalist for the Rolling Stones forever. Have you guys ever conspired together?

I have a great deal of affection for B, for Bernard. He does a lot of great singing. He does a lot of work with our bassist Doug Wimbish, because they were in Tackhead together. They have some great stuff, really great. Some Neil Young stuff, a version of “Cinnamon Girl.”

Yeah, it’s great stuff. I have that on Bernard’s solo album Friends With Privileges.

Yeah, I think that’s killing. Killing. We’re cool, our circles are interlocked. It happens to a lot of people. You think they must have done something together. But because of nothing, just because of circumstances, like circumstances of timing, they never did anything together. That’s basically it. At some point, yeah, it could happen. We certainly have a lot of love for each other. You have to think about the long arc of history, too. I did stuff with Carlos Santana years ago. He influenced me a great deal. The last time I saw Carlos was at the Cream reunion show in New York City backstage, and he has become a great big star again, a massive dude. I actually did some stuff with him that was nominated for a Grammy. Having said all that, I don’t know when, or if we’re going to do work again. Which is weird, because I credit him with the fact I wouldn’t have picked up a guitar if it weren’t for him. But that’s the way life is. But I feel very complete with Carlos. The fact that I’m here, and I love him, just because I do, his music, and he was very cool to me. His circles are different, and he comes from a very different place, and that’s not anything, it’s just it is what it is. But even with that, I could honestly say without hesitation I love the man. I love him as a musician, he’s a terrific dude, he’s a major dude. Life is like that sometimes. Life is like that. Bernard is the best. We always have a laugh, we always have fun, he is a funny guy. We always shared things. So maybe at some point, it will happen. It’s not anything. It’s just what it is.

How did you meet Pierre?

I met him because of Keith Richards. I met all the Stones and all the people working with them.

But it was just so much longer later, years later, that you ended up working with Pierre.

But that’s exactly what I’m talking about. That’s like things arrange themselves. I believe that. Things will turn around. That’s why the arc of a story. A good example is the song “Burned Bridges,” the first album on The Chair In The Doorway. It has the lyric, “I tossed my keys in the water, so I can’t go home again. I burnt my notebook so I have to make a new friend.” I’ve had that lyric since 1995, and I could never finish the song. So what happened was we came up with this groove, and I said to Corey, I have this thing, “I tossed my keys in the water, so I can’t go home again,” and I told him that line. His eyes lit up and he jumped up, and we literally wrote that lyric that afternoon in the Czech Republic. So it took over ten years for that song to be completed, and that’s the way I look at things.

Stories have arcs that take decades. The punch line of a joke can take a hundred years to deliver. That’s’ the thing about America. Like Barack Obama. The first slaves were brought to America in the 1600’s, and the oppression was so great that a person could be lynched and there would be no repercussions. Now think about that. I think the Civil War destroyed a lot of evidence of a lot of things. Like the burning of Atlanta, like there are huge slots of history we don’t know about. War wipes out history. We don’t know shit. We can speculate about a lot of things, but we will never know what was at the library of Alexandria, we’re never going to know.

Despite the previous efforts, Jimi Hendrix did not get a star on Hollywood Boulevard, not that it some necessary validation, until 1991, and that was only when a major label got involved.

Well, yeah, because he was eligible for a star on the Walk of Fame because of the documentary about him. Then he finally got it. That was the day I met Steve Vai. I met him and we instantly liked each other. But that’s life, that’s life.

Which leads me to this, my final question.

To be inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame, you have to have your first album out for 25 years. That means in four years, Living Colour will be eligible for nomination into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame.

Right.

Part of that idea with the Rock And Roll Hall of Fame inductees and those who are nominated have to do with not just their greatness as an artist, but, did they influence other musicians? Living Colour, and I have to put you behind this, being that you are one of the people who formed the B.R.C. in the first place, Living Colour is very influential. I think in four years, the band should be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and I was wondering if you have any response to that.

My feeling is it would be a great honor. I am not going to lie. The fact that we are an active band, and making current music is a pretty great thing, and I think it would be…it’s funny. I mean we’ll see. It’s out of my hands. The nominating process is s a community of people and they decide. The fact we have a current record, and we’re fighting the good fight. We’re engaged in hand-to-hand combat. The band sounds great, and people are responding to it. I think we made a really good record, we have a really good single out, and we’re fighting. We out here fighting, and I kind of think that’s what rock and roll is all about. “We’re out here in the fields.” That’s part of what it is. We’re engaged in the struggle, and hopefully that counts for something. There are plenty of worthy people who have not gotten their due in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. So who knows? Beyond, I can’t say. I agree it would be a great honor, beyond how I would feel about it or how the band would feel about it.

Looking back, Living Colour has not just been about a band, but representing a movement. Representing a history that is very deep. Taking back musical history, and reclaiming musical history.

It’s partly like, one thing we brought to this thing is it’s not like black in skin. It’s sort of the African American part of an American story, and we’re bringing and telling American stories.

You’re bringing an experience to the music.

Exactly.

Hendrix said, “Are you experienced?” And he never really specified what that experience was.

Yeah, that’s funny, because that’s my favorite song of all time.

We know there is the process by which the Hall works, but Living Colour is part of a very important legacy that was started out as what culminated as the B.R.C.

It’s a big part of my life. It was the most visible expression of the idea.

As they say, “Time shall reveal.”

This column will feature a review on Living Colour's Key Club show later this week.