Few guitarists have the technique, sonic daring, and nasty metal-dappled soul of Vernon Reid. His resume extends from the prickly jazz of Ronald Shannon Jackson to the textural wonderland of his Smash & Scatteration duo with Bill Frisell to his most famous gig, rocking like a demon in Living Colour.
After a 10-year break from recording, Living Colour released Collideoscope in 2003 — an album that mated their fusion of rock, R&B, funk, and the avant garde with lyrics about post 9/11 America and crunchy covers of the Beatles’ “Tomorrow Never Knows” and AC/DC’s “Back in Black.” Like America at the time, however, the group — which had weathered a five-year bust-up — was struggling to get a handle on its identity.
That struggle ends with the new The Chair in the Doorway. “That’s kind of a metaphor, like the ‘800-pound gorilla’ in the room, except ‘the chair in the doorway’ is something real. You have the power to move it out of the way,” Reid explains when we catch him on his cell phone walking in Philadelphia.
The band came up with that metaphor — one suited to the personality conflicts and musical differences that had once separated them and still lingered — before writing songs for the disc. So many of its songs, like the straight-on rocker “Burned Bridges” and the title track, which opens with a sputtering expressionist blast of guitar noise that’s pure Reid-gone-wild, are about taking responsibility for one’s actions and resolving their consequences.
Since Living Colour spends so much time touring, The Chair in the Doorway’s songs were written on the road and most of the album was recorded on a tour break in the Czech Republic. Because of that Reid used the same VG-99 guitar synth, hexaphonic pick-up equipped Parker Dragonfly prototype signature model guitar, and pedal board he uses live.
While the album’s a return to Living Colour’s classic hybrid form, there are departures. “I play slide guitar for the first time on two songs, ‘Bless Those’ and ‘Not Tomorrow’,” says Reid, who chalks that new element of his palette to producing three blues albums of the legendary harmolodic jazz guitarist James “Blood” Ulmer.
“Working with Blood has been a constant joy,” says Reid. “He is so deep and real. He’s been living the life of a bluesman all his life, although he had not been playing that music until we got together and I suggested he make a blues album. Working with him has been enlightening.”
Inevitably, as we discussed sonic adventurism, the conversation got around to Jimi Hendrix.
“Hendrix looms over us because he was the dude,” Reid observes. “He combined emerging technology in sound design, he combined R&B and the blues seamlessly, and his love and his rage and noise and melody were all one thing in a way that’s completely avant garde, and yet always spot on.
“When I listen to Hendrix, I’m struck by how free he is. But he’s staying tonally on the mark even when his feedback is screaming. Even though Link Wray and Jeff Beck used feedback earlier, nobody used it the way Hendrix did.
“I don’t deny his influence at all, but I don’t appreciate the iconography that has sprung up around him: dressing like him, imitating him — that’s deeply problematic. It misses the point. A few players — Robin Trower, Stevie Ray Vaughan — distilled and transcended it. Trower plays like the Band of Gypsys and Stevie Ray is Albert King filtered through Hendrix. He’s like Axis: Bold as Love Jimi.
“Jimi himself was so influenced by Bob Dylan, which people forget, and yet he did his own thing. ‘All Along the Watchtower’ is really Jimi’s tribute to the cat who shaped him as a songwriter.
“His lesson to me was ‘Do your thing. This is what I do, now what are you gonna do?’
“If anyone asks me what the greatest electric guitar solo is, I have no problem saying it’s Hendrix’s Woodstock version of ‘The Star Spangled Banner.’ You can say it’s dope because of the lines he plays, because of the technique, because of the dynamics, but with all of that what’s really happening is this is a guitar solo about the way we live — which is rare. Guitar solos are really about ego: ‘I’m dope! Check me out!’ Occasionally they are about music, like Carlos Santana doing ‘Europa’ or Jeff Beck playing ‘ ’Cause We Ended As Lovers’ — the musician disappears into the melody and sound. But for a solo to be a take on the times that we’re living in? That just doesn’t happen.”
Photo Credit: Mario, source: Wikipedia