Vernon Reid laughs when I remind him that my first exposure to Living Colour wasn’t Vivid but a Taco Bell compilation CD. “Wow. Taco Bell compilations. Good God,” he says, half-amused, half-horrified. But that’s the 90s for you—tie-ins everywhere, and sometimes the best guitar riffs were hidden between chalupa coupons.
These days Reid is back in the news not for fast food ephemera but for his role on Heavy Lifting, the final MC5 record completed before Wayne Kramer’s death. Reid’s contribution is the song “Can’t Be Found,” and he doesn’t take the assignment lightly. “Wayne called me up and said, ‘I’ve got the song for you to play on.’ Then Bob Ezrin was producing it. I was like, man, let’s do it. His thing was, ‘Do you. Don’t try to be retro, don’t try to be me—just do what you hear.’”
Of course, the temptation to think about legacy is always there. Kramer had positioned the record as a continuation of High Time, the MC5’s 1971 swan song. Reid says he thought less about history than about honesty. “It’s a balance between what the MC5 represented, what the song is saying, and what I can contribute. I gave them a few passes, and they ended up using one of the early takes. Sometimes the first swing is the one that matters.”
Reid’s reverence for Kramer isn’t casual. “Wayne’s guitar was fueled by rage at injustice,” he says. “He was a thinker—he cared about criminal justice, root causes of violence, why people end up channelled into it. He wasn’t just a pioneering guitarist, he was a lovely person to know.” He pauses, then adds: “It’s very sad he’s not here to see this record. But it’s an honor to be part of it.”
Talk long enough with Reid and you realize his definition of rock owes more to ritual than radio. “The MC5 were about transformation. You walk into the show one way, you leave another. Hendrix called his band the Experience for a reason. Santana, Miles Davis, the Dead—everybody was chasing that feeling. And the MC5 added politics to the mix. They didn’t guarantee a safe landing. That’s what made them so visceral.”
Living Colour carried that same unpredictability, particularly in their improv-heavy Free Form Funky Freaks side project. “Improvisation is dangerous. Everything could dissolve at any moment,” Reid says. “I love pop music, but I also love Albert Ayler. I like Hal David’s lyrics, but I also love noise. The tension between those two things animates me.”
Forty years after forming, Living Colour are still animating each other. “We’re willing to get out of the way of the thing we collectively create,” Reid says of their current shows and the early work on a new record. “I’m grateful for that. There are bands out there just punching the clock. We still care about the message—freedom for everyone.”
That message includes rewriting the canon. Reid rattles off an alternate history of rock where the Isley Brothers are crowned America’s greatest band, War is rightfully recognized as an alternative rock group, Funkadelic’s psychedelic chaos gets the same reverence as Zeppelin’s, and Fishbone is credited with giving birth to ska-punk and, by extension, No Doubt. “In my head,” Reid says, “that’s the real lineage.”
For someone who once showed up on a Taco Bell sampler, it’s not a bad place to end up: holding the torch for Wayne Kramer, celebrating 40 years of Living Colour, and rewriting rock history one solo at a time.
Watch the interview above and then check out the video below.
