Ray of Gob

One of the first and still the single greatest mashup I've ever heard. What we have here is no less than one of the truly great supergroups ever, in itself an extreme rarity: two disparate yet tremendously important artists, Madonna (perennially underrated by rock and roll fans due to her choices of genres and her gender) and the Sex Pistols (perhaps the most underrated famous band ever), coming together to create something unique and brilliant. In other words, it's two great tastes that taste great together. It's a shame that they never actually existed in reality.

It's worth remembering that Madonna came out of the underground, and something of a street urchin, the kind of poor, struggling artist which many of the early middle-class punks could only wish they were. Stripping away the original's dance beat and replacing it with the incisive, searing guitar of Steve Jones and the feral, punishing drums of Paul Cook works so much better than it should. And yet if you didn't know any of the original tracks, you'd have no idea this was a mashup. It takes two (or, really, three) brilliant recordings and manages to create an entire new and equally brilliant piece of art by mashing them together. This isn't why the internet was created, but it should have been.

Madge should really do a short run of club dates backed by only a small punk combo.

And I feel like I just got home

Nazi Punks Fuck Off

Favorite Song Friday: People Who Died

One of the great things about punk, past all of the anger and the pathos and the defiance and so much else, is that so many of the standard bearer punk rock songs, when you cut to the core, are just so melodic. Think Patti Smith at her best. Or the Stooges with "Search and Destroy," among others. Or basically the entire Ramones catalogue. The list goes on, from "London Calling" to "American Idiot" and everything else in between. All of these young (and not so young) punks had something loud and urgent to say, but dammit if you couldn't sing along with it while they did. Or even, in some cases, dance to it.

That's what I love about today's entry in our occasional "Favorite Song Friday" series.

Favorite Song Friday: People Who Died — The Jim Carroll Band

This is punk rock. I mean this is punk rock with a capitol damn P. Jim Carroll was many things and was really really good at all of them. He was a neo-beat poet who grew up worshiping the likes of Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs. He was a best-selling author whose The Basketball Diaries remains as visceral a depiction of the urban nightmare of despair and addiction as anyone has ever written. He hung with and had the respect of the the proto-punk New York crowd, the likes of Patti Smith and Lou Reed and Robert Maplethorpe. He was a young basketball star who lived through addiction and survived addiction, with the scars to prove it. And in his spare time he fronted a punk/new wave band, The Jim Carroll Band, that while they weren't quite The Clash or The Ramones or Black Flag, for a brief while in the early 80s they were pretty damn good and a pretty damn clear representation of what New York City punk rock was really all about. Carroll's poet's soul, his storyteller's mind and, yes, his punk rocker's heart resulted in at least one truly great piece of punk artistry, "People Who Died."



There's not much more to this song that a churning 4/4 beat, a breakneck bassline, a couple of very tasty guitar solos and an eight-stanza glimpse into Jim Carroll's personal definition of hell. "People Who Died" is a literal list of what the title says; people in his life who died young and painfully, either from disease, ODing, war, murder or suicide. Every inch of the eight verses (three of which are repeated at the end) gives us a rapid-fire memorial of people in life whom he lost.

Carroll doesn't really bother trying to sing, he more raps and rasps his way through the hyperpaced list of the lost. And the words are so tragic and gripping you practically want him to stop, to say "No mas." But then comes the chorus and the song shifts from the frenetic poetic dirge to a fist-pumping rally cry to the lost. "Those are people who died, died!" he shouts/sings, "Those are people who died-died! They were all my friends! And they died!"

You shouldn't be able to dance to those words. Or sing along with passion to those words. Or allow those words to liberate you and make you rise from street-level where all the dead bodies lay to a place beyond death and despair where actual life can be celebrated. There's no way that should be possible in a song that is so riddled with death from opening to close. But you can. You can because Jim Carroll didn't just write down a list of people who died. He wrote a song to remember, mourn and, yes, celebrate them.

And read the lyrics. This is gutter poetry at its very finest, something only someone who had lived it and somehow emerged from it could possibly write:

Teddy sniffing glue, he was 12 years old
Fell from a roof on East 2-9.
Kathy was 11 when she pulled the plug
26 reds and a bottle of wine.
Bobby got leukemia, 14 years old
He looked 65 when he died, he was a friend of mine.

Those are people who died, died!
Those are people who died, died!
Those are people who died, died!
Those are people who died, died!
They were all my friends! And they died!

G-burg and Georgie let their gimmicks go rotten
So they died of hepatitis in Upper Manhattan.
Sly in Vietnam took a bullet to the head
Bobby OD'd on Drano on the night he was wed.
They were two more friends of mine, two more friends that died!

Those are people who died, died!
Those are people who died, died!
Those are people who died, died!
Those are people who died, died!
They were all my friends! And they died!

Mary took a dry dive from a hotel room
Bobby hung himself from his cell in the tombs.
Judy jumped in front of a subway train
Eddie got slit in his jugular vein.
Eddie, I miss you more than all the others - and I salute you brother!

Those are people who died, died!
Those are people who died, died!
Those are people who died, died!
Those are people who died, died!
All of my friends, they died!

Herbie pushed Tony from a Boys' Club roof
Tony thought his rage was just some goof.
But Herbie sure gave Tony some, some bitchin' proof.
And Herbie said, "Tony, can you fly?"
But  Tony couldn't fly. Tony died!

Those are people who died, died!
Those are people who died, died!
Those are people who died, died!
Those are people who died, died!
They were all my friends! And they died!

Brian got busted on a narco rap
He beat the rap by rattin' on some bikers.
He said, "Hey I know it's dangerous,
"But it sure beats Rikers."
But the next day he got offed, by the very same bikers!

Those are people who died, died!
Those are people who died, died!
Those are people who died, died!
Those are people who died, died!
They were all my friends! And they died!

Teddy sniffing glue, he was 12 years old
Fell from a roof on East 2-9.
Kathy was 11 when she pulled the plug
26 reds and a bottle of wine.
Bobby got leukemia, 14 years old
He looked 65 when he died, he was a friend of mine.

Those are people who died, died!
Those are people who died, died!
Those are people who died, died!
Those are people who died, died!
They were all my friends! And they died!

G-burg and Georgie let their gimmicks go rotten
So they died of hepatitis in Upper Manhattan.
Sly in Vietnam took a bullet to the head
Bobby OD'd on Drano on the night he was wed.
They were two more friends of mine, two more friends that died!

Those are people who died, died!
Those are people who died, died!
Those are people who died, died!
Those are people who died, died!
They were all my friends! And they died!

Mary took a dry dive from a hotel room
Bobby hung himself from his cell in the tombs.
Judy jumped in front of a subway train
Eddie got slit in his jugular vein.
Eddie, I miss you more than all the others - this song is for you my brother!

Those are people who died, died!
Those are people who died, died!
Those are people who died, died!
Those are people who died, died!
All of my friends, they died!

Jim Carroll died in 2009 at 60, far too young but, I suppose, way longer than he may have ever expected to live given his descent in his young life into heroin and hell. But he left behind a diverse and indelible canon of work that any writer would have been proud to call their own.

"People Who Died" was part of that canon. A big part. A song for the dead and dying. Written and delivered by someone who was and remains very much alive in a world he helped to shape.

Substitute

A wonderful marriage. The punk was always implicit in the original version; all Joey and Johnny did was make it explicit. (The backing vocals from Pete Townshend certainly didn't hurt.)

RIP Scott Asheton

Well. No fun indeed. There are never enough drummers named Scott in this world, but this one's definitely a big loss.

Who on earth would ever have expected Iggy Pop to be the sole member of the original band to still be around?

No Fun

On the anniversary of the final show of the most underrated band ever, here's the last song they ever performed. (Until finally brought back years later by the siren call of filthy lucre.)

"You'll get one number and one number only 'cause I'm a lazy bastard. This is no fun. No fun. This is no fun—at all. No fun. Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?"

No fun? Maybe not. Was there an awful lot of cheating? Absolutely. Was transcendent art created in the meantime. Beyond question.

Favorite Song Friday: I Wanna Be Sedated

"There are six of 'em. That's why they're called the Sex Pistols. And they all sleep in the same bed." 

I was an unusually gullible kid, but even at 11 years old, this didn't sound right to me. For one thing, I saw how "six" and "sex" were related, kinda sorta, but...yeah, no, I was pretty sure, with all the wisdom of a Catholic school sixth-grader, that the "sex" in their name was all about, well, sex.

But they sounded pretty shocking and gross, all the same—I may not have bought the pseudo-homonym thing but everyone in one bed? Sure, could be—as did the entire punk scene. In 1979, punks weren't really much of a presence in suburban verging on rural Connecticut—I mean, we were still finding the notion of hippies hiding in the woods a terrifying thought. (True story.) So the few photos I'd seen of punks, combined with the whispered tales, were powerful juju. (Never mind that the final Sex Pistols show was already a year in the past at that point.) And not in the way it was for others I've known, who heard similar stories and were immediately dying to listen to the stuff. No, what I heard about punk simply scared me the hell away.

I was a hardcore Beatles/Stones/Who fan back then, with lots of Bowie, Clapton, Springsteen, Floyd, Zep as well. Punk? Thank you, no. Not for the likes of me, that stuff. My tastes were more refined. (Well...I did like Aerosmith and the Doors. Back then.) None of that barbaric punk fare.

And that's how it went for the next many years. Not a note of punk defiled my pristine ears. Until the day my brother came home from college and played a song that...

"What...what is this?" I asked.

"The Ramones," he said casually.

But...but...but...I thought. The Ramones are...punk. 

This was punk? This couldn't be punk. Punk was nasty and scary and stupid and gross and this...this was awesome.

Well...yeah.

And that was that. I mean, it wasn't, not really. It was still years before I investigated the likes of the Dead Kennedys, for instance—and, oddly, quite a bit longer before I acquired Nevermind the Bollocks, an album I was literally a bit scared to put on and which preceded to rip my ears off the first time I heard it and which I still think is maybe the most underrated classic masterpiece ever from the most underrated major band ever. And although I took 20 years off from listening to almost all the artists of my youth, I never really turned my back on (most of) them.

But it was those four misfits from Queens that not only started me down that wider, far more varied and interesting path, but in the meantime prepared me for the likes of R.E.M. and the Replacements, which to a kid from suburban verging on rural Connecticut in the mid-80s had some stuff that pretty damn punk. Which is why, despite later finding other Ramones songs I may prefer in many ways ("Sheena Is a Punk Rocker," I do so love you), "I Wanna Be Sedated" will always have a very special place in my heart. The insanely goofily fun lyrics, the catchy melody, the ringing non-guitar-solo-guitar-solo? Punk or no—and punk it is—it had me at hello. And then they hit first the key change and then the "bam-bam-bam-bam" section, the clouds part and a mighty hand emerges holding the third tablet which reads only "LET IT ROCK." And it's clear how these guys are simply part of a line that stretches forward to Nirvana and Green Day and back to the Beatles and Elvis and Hank Williams and Robert Johnson and it is good.

Get Up, Stand Up / Hitchin' a Ride

Now this is what I'm talkin' 'bout.

As I've mentioned before, I'm a big fan of mashups. Sure, some are lazy, some don't work at all, and some are simply amusing. But at their best, an unexpected juxtaposition can successfully limn the originals such as to create something that's actually a new and valid work of art—not to mention fun and interesting and cool.

For instance. At first you'd think there's was nothing Bob Marley and Green Day have in common, and musically, you'd probably be right. But both use(d) pop music as a way to express discontent, resentment and disillusionment with the status quo of contemporary politics and socio-economic conditions. (And, of course, to make some money and meet lots of girls.) In some ways, they're actually remarkably similar, even if the end result was completely different.

Or was, until the magic of the mashup.



You can fool some people sometimes but you can't fool all the people all the time.
Now everybody do the propaganda and sing along to the age of paranoia.

Unsatisfied

DT already shared his Introduction to The Replacements story, in which I figure prominently. Here's the story of my own introduction to the 'Mats. Coincidentally, I figure prominently in this one as well.

I first heard the Replacements in the summer of 1987. I was working at Strawberry's, a record store chain in the northeast, when Pleased to Meet Me came out. It was one of the featured albums that month, so we had a tape sent out by the head office with three songs and a spoken introduction. Each of the dozen or so featured albums per month had three songs with an intro on those tapes. Naturally, we only played the mandated tape when the district manager was around. Otherwise, we played the actual album in its entirety once or twice, unless we liked it, in which case we'd play it a few dozen times. Or play whatever album we felt like hearing. We were an eclectic lot, so it was pretty hard to find something we all agreed upon.

The Replacements was one of them. At least for the others. I wasn't sold, not at first. The opening cut on Pleased to Meet Me is "I.O.U." and it was too chaotic, too noisy, too...well, too punk for the very mainstream me I was at the time. My guard and my dander were both up. So much so that even the album's second song, the utterly magnificent "Alex Chilton" didn't manage to win me over, not right away. And the third track, "I Don't Know," was like the first, just too punk for me. But the curveball that is "Nightclub Jitters," with its sultry lounge appeal, made me reconsider. And the last song on the first side, "The Ledge," which sounded pretty damn mainstream, albeit great mainstream, made me decide I kinda liked these guys. Yes, it took a song about suicide. By the time I hit the album's closers—the gorgeous, delicate, yearning "Skyway" and the seemingly celebratory "Can't Hardly Wait"—I was a fan.

Sorta. That is how the tracklisting goes, and it is how my love of the 'Mats was born. But in truth, it took hearing that album at least a half dozen times before that all sunk in. Fortunately, my manager was a major Replacements fan. So naturally, he was pleased I saw the error of my initial ways and encouraged me to delve into their back catalog. Wisely eschewing for the moment their earliest stuff, he lent me Let It Be and Tim.

Once again, I was not initially captivated. I taped them, of course, as one did at the time, one album on each side of a 90 minute cassette. And I listened a few times. But again, what jumped out at me the most was the punkish side of the band. For all they've said they were a terrible punk band and for all they were always the most mainstream of what was then called college rock and later was termed alternative before everyone decided they hated that label and it didn't make sense anyway, the fact remains that the Replacements had a distinctly punk edge to them—in a good way: they refused to play the game anyone's way but their own. And whether or not they had short hair or played at the speed of sound or refused to sign with a major or were straight-edge, that's the very best part of punk. (It's also, of course, one major reason they never achieved the kind of mainstream success they deserved.)

It wasn't until many months later that I popped the tape in again. And this time, I got it. And from that moment on, I knew I'd found my band, the one that somehow was singing the things I wanted to, but not only couldn't, but hadn't even known I wanted to until then.

It was "Unsatisfied" that did it. The oh so lovely acoustic intro grabbed me from the first. It was just so damn beautiful and even after "Skyway," I never would have guessed they had this sort of fragile beauty in them. Then the whole band kicks in and suddenly, unexpectedly, it's pure rock and roll. The guitars still shimmer rather than howl or scream, it's still mid-tempo, and yet it's rock and roll all the same. Even before the lyrics start.

But oh the lyrics. "Look me in the eye," Paul Westerberg sings, and it's not a plea, not even so much a request, as a flat demand. "Then tell me that I'm satisfied."

Sweet Jesu. I'd never heard anything quite like that before. One line, so simple, so direct, so plain-spoken and so very, very right. He's not singing about loving a girl that doesn't love him, he's not singing about the darkest depths of Mordor, he's not singing about unemployed auto workers, he's not singing about a princess on a steeple and all the pretty people—all fine song topics and all part of songs I love dearly. But this is a world away. So simple but so powerful, it was like getting punched in the chest. 

But Westerberg's not quite done. "Could you satisfy?" he wonders. But that's not really the question he's interested in—having asked it once, he never really returns to it. Instead, he again sings, "Look me in the eye, then tell me that I'm satisfied." A pause, then a "hey!" A simple interjection by the singer, a singerly affectation, as in tens of thousands of songs? Probably. But it doesn't feel like that's what it is. It feels like he's really trying to get someone's attention, a girl perhaps, that having delivered a sort of pickup line and having lost her because of it, he's trying to get her back, to get her to really listen to him, something he's tried his whole life. It especially feels like that's what's happening when he follows up with the question, "Are you satisfied?", tying them together, binding them with their mutual and burning lack of fulfillment. And the thing is, you don't even need to hear her reply, if there is one, to know the answer. Hell no, she's not. She's not satisfied either.

We go into the bridge, a melancholy "And it goes so slowly on...everything I've ever wanted," and his voice, having dropped, accompanied by the sound of a lapsteel's piercing cry, before he pleads, "Tell me what's wrong."

Another verse of him demanding, more insistently, "Look me in the eye, then tell me that I'm satisfied. Were you satisfied?" No more feigned detachment: this time, his voice, rougher now, leaves no doubt of his emotional state. "Look me in the eye, then tell me that I'm satisfied. Now are you satisfied?"

Unusually, we then go into a second bridge, with different chords and very different lyrics. "Everything goes," he sings, his voice not as hoarse as before but not as melodious, either; his voice doesn't drop this time, instead staying up but semi-talking, before...what? Clarifying? Correcting? "Well, anything goes," he sings, "All of the time. Everything you dream of is right in front of you," and again you feel that ache of wanting, wanting but not being able to have, even though it's hanging, tantalizingly, just out of reach. And then he mumbles the bridge's final line. I'm not sure it's "but everything's a lie"—in fact, despite that being a common belief online, it more sounds like it's not that than that it is that. But it feels right.

"Look me in the eye, then tell me that I'm satisfied," he sings again, and now his voice is getting hoarser and hoarser. No more pickup lines—in fact, he doesn't even care about his listener's state of mind anymore. Instead of turning it around, he follows up desperately "Look me in the eye and satisfy." That's where he is now: pushed so far that even the simple act of being looked in the eye is enough human contact for him, enough to finally, maybe, hopefully satisfy him.

But he doesn't get it. "I'm so...I'm so unsatisfied," he sings, adding, "I'm so dissatisfied." Has he gotten something, at least? A little something? If so, it's not only not enough, it's not even palatable.

"I'm so...I'm so unsatisfied. I'm so unsatisified.

"I'm so...I'm so unsatisfied. I'm so unsatis...

"I'm so..."

And he trails off, exhausted. He'd built up from cautious to nearly screaming, but instead of continuing to build, he hit a point where he just couldn't go on. He didn't give up, he kept trying, but a little less and less passionate if no less emotional each time. And then it comes to a point where he can't even finish the line. He tries but then simply lets go, and lets the music make the point for him. When the lyrics fail, when words just won't do, there's always the music.

And that's what it really comes down to: the music. For all the Replacements broke up so Westerberg could find more simpatico musicians, for all you can't blame him for following his muse even though it's obvious he never did and never will find those musicians he was seeking—and it was pretty obvious at the time—that the evidence was right there, on their fourth album, on this song leading off the second side. The bassline, the drumming, they're the kind of parts that'd never, ever be played by seasoned studio vets, superior technicians, but which are only created by the kind of guys who've grown up together, who've played together for years, slogging it out in the back of vans to get to horrible clubs in the middle of a bitter winter. That for all Westerberg was singing about how unsatisfied he was, for all you can clearly hear in his voice that he meant it, that he was really, truly unsatisfied, down to the core of his being, the tragedy is that if he could have just heard what the rest of us heard, if he had just looked around the studio a little more carefully, he would have seen three other guys feeling exactly the same way. He would have really seen and, more important, really heard this insanely perfectly balanced band, so perfectly encapsulating the "greater than the sum of its parts" truism. And he would have been more than satisfied.

That he couldn't hear what was so obvious to the rest of us, of course, is exactly what enabled him to create art this transcendent. His sad loss is our tremendous gain.

What's Your Favorite Colour, Baby?

In September 1988, all alone on a Friday night, I walked into an old Army hangar on the campus of the University of Connecticut to watch a band I had never heard of play music I never knew existed.

I walked out with my head spinning. And a need to shout to the world that I had just seen the coolest, craziest, most impossibly different band on the planet. Alas, I didn’t do that. Though I did tell plenty of people about it. I really had no clue how to describe them.

They were loud and fast, kind of like heavy metal but so much better than what was passing for “metal” at the time (and what was inexplicably dominating the airwaves). They were edgier, angrier, and way more real. A cross between metal and punk, with a hearty dose of funk to back it all up. They had a dervish of a lead singer whose voice wasn’t at all screeching like most metal of the day, but clear and brutal, menacing and intoxicating. They had a guitarist who seemed to perform calculus on the guitar – that was the only way I could describe his lightning-like precision and mystifying ability to still produce actual, well, music. The two-man rhythm section was tight and lethal as Muhammad Ali’s fist, somehow able to not only keep up with the mayhem, but also propel it along. It was all so unreal.

Oh. Also? They were black. All four of them. Four black men in a rock band, playing a molecularly perfect mix of heavy metal and punk and funk. In 1988, you need to understand, this just...wasn’t...common.

The band was Living Colour. And I was their new Number 1 fan.

I mean, finally! A band that could rock way harder than the countless poseurs of the day – Warrant, Winger, White Lion, whatever the hell that bullshit “supergroup” of asshat Ted Nugent and that dude from Styx was called, they were all awful. Yet the kids I went to school with at the UConn ate it up. But this – what Living Colour was doing – was the real thing.

Singer Corey Glover. Guitarist Vernon Reid. Bassist Muzz Skillings. Drummer Will Calhoun. They even had cool names. All by themselves they would lay waste to an era of hair and vanity, excess and faux rebellion. Even better, they were from New York. Can’t get more real than that! This was the sound of a new era that would send Sebastian Bach slithering back to the primordial ooze that had grown tired of having him crash there.

Only…not really. They never did get to do that. Nirvana did! Oh, did they ever—kicked all of those clowns in the balls but good a couple years later, ruining their top-of-the-bill careers and relegating them forever to the dog track of oldies circuits.

But that’s a different story for a different time. No, Living Colour didn’t change the world as I thought they would that night, and as I really thought they would a few days later when I bought their absolutely mesmerizing debut record, Vivid. But for a while they sure as hell seemed destined to. They had it all – talent, attitude and a boatload of the anger that has always created so much of the best of rock-n-roll.

I’ll admit, the night I saw them, before owning the album, I walked out of there not exactly humming the tunes. Even though yes, they were hummable, I would come to realize. But it was more of an explosion to me, like watching a fireworks show that went on 10 feet from you for 75 straight minutes. Do you remember each individual starburst of magic? No. But you sure as hell recall how the night felt, and looked. And, in this case, sounded.

When I did get the album, my instant love affair was confirmed within seconds of the opening track, “Cult of Personality,” a razor slash through every inch of phoniness the plastic 80s had brought us. (“I exploit you, still you love me.”) These songs were three-dimensional, apparitions that jumped from the CD player and splatter-painted your walls like Jackson Pollock. And they all said something.


“Cult of Personality” and its rollercoaster of sonic mayhem was their statement of purpose, an announcement to all that this wasn’t anything you had heard before, and to get the hell out of their way.

“Middle Man” and “Glamour Boys” were fascinating indictments of the industry, with Muzz doing things on the bass to backup Vernon’s SAT-level solos that could have gotten him arrested in some parts.

“Desperate People” was the rawest look at the failure of the Reagan-era War on Drugs I had ever heard, each chord change thumping like an axe-handle to the solar plexus. “Which Way To America?” and “Open Letter (to a Landlord)” addressed poverty and helplessness with the same ferocity, the latter demonstrating how melodic they could be, how they were still able to tear the sounds down to their very roots. (“You can tear a building down, but you can’t erase a memory.”)

Hell, they even had a great cover of a great fellow New York band, “Memories Can’t Wait” by Talking Heads. Black people listening to Talking Heads? Black people playing Talking Heads? Black people had heard of the Talking Heads? I was so delightfully, deliciously, delovelely ferschimmeled by all this I could barely contain myself. (Remember, I was only 20 and wasn’t nearly as versed in the cross-racial history of rock-n-roll as I should have been).

And then there was the song, out of all this, that remains my favorite. Towards the end of an album that was such a wall of firepower came “Broken Hearts,” a…ballad? From these guys??? No. No way.

Yep.

An exaggerated hip-hop tinged carnival barker-like opening, replete with a distorted harmonica and snares, suddenly turned into gorgeous, impeccably delivered soul, Glover’s voice snaking through the air as if Marvin Gaye had temporarily taken over his body.

“A breeze reminds me of a changing time and place,
A tear that takes forever rolls down a timeless face.”

Are you freaking kidding me? A line like that in the middle of everything else, so perfect and pretty and seductive? “Broken Hearts” was Living Colour’s way of telling the listeners, “Not only are we tougher than you, but we can be sweeter, too.” And they were right.

Fame came fast for the band. They won awards, made popular videos, appeared on SNL and Arsenio. Got a great gig opening for the Rolling Stones on their 1989 World Tour and, in the opinion of at least this now-aging rocker, blew the Glimmer Twins off the stage. People began talking about that “black rock band” and how fast and crazy they were. And whenever they did I wanted to ask, “Were you there? Were you with me that night in the armory? Did you see it too?” Hoping someone would say yes. A few did and we relished reliving the experience. Most didn’t and that night was left for me to remember as I was, alone and awestruck.

Sadly it didn’t really last, the fame. Their next album in 1990, Time’s Up, had similar moments of brilliance, but was just a little too sprawling and disjointed. Skillings would leave the band and be replaced by a true marksman on the bass, Doug Wimbish (from MY hometown of Bloomfield, CT!), but the band was missing something it had back a few years earlier. Some…thing that rock bands sometimes hold onto, sometimes don’t. Danger? Maybe. Fear of failure? Possibly. A marrow-level connection with each other and the music? Perhaps. I saw Living Colour twice after seeing them open for the Stones, and I enjoyed what I saw each time, but I never saw again what I saw that first time. And hey, maybe that’s on me, as they surely didn’t get less talented. But they seemed to come and go like those fireworks I thought of when I first saw them. Astounding but fleeting.

Did they change the music world? Perhaps, at least a little. Again, Nirvana and their pals from the Pacific Northwest would put an end to the glam stranglehold, but Living Colour’s proof that you could blow it out without compromise and without being afraid to bend genres and styles played a part in shaping the next generation. Listen to Vivid (and some of Time’s Up and their 3rd effort, Stain) and you hear traces of R&B and ska and reggae and new wave and fusion alongside locomotive-paced hard rock, as well as many of the wall-of-fuzz meets pop stylings later heard on Nevermind and In Utero. Music saw more and more cross pollination in the 90s and later at the century’s turn. Maybe Living Colour had something to do with it. Even if they likely won’t ever get into the Rock-n-Roll Hall of Fame. (And sidenote? They should.)

Still? Living Colour had it all on that September night 24 years ago – the look, the sneer, the talent and the vision. And to me, it looked like they had everything they needed to change the face of music.

For a while they did, and the future seemed to belong just to them. It didn’t, as it turns out. But Living Colour left a hell of a mark that will be there forever. Beautiful. Tough. Relentless.

Vivid.