Memories Can’t Wait (Living Colour, CBGB’s)

(Photo from Tergiversation’s Flickr account.)

Thirteen years ago, I was in this same club – oh, about ten feet that way, slamming into a bunch of other people – watching these same guys on that same stage. 

Living Colour started here, and they keep coming back to renew themselves.  “Hilly Kristal was the only one who’d book us,” guitarist Vernon Reid said, Friday night, about the CBGB’s owner.  “This was the only place you could go to see bands like... well, like us.”  The group – Reid, vocalist Corey Glover, drummer Will Calhoun, and original bassist Muzz Skillings – came together at this club.  Before they somehow caught the ear of Mick Jagger, before they somehow had the single and somehow won those Grammys, they would come into this Bowery shithole, get up on that stage, and put out.

The first time I saw them it was in a whole ‘nother universe.  The Tower Theater in Upper Darby, Pennsylvania.  This was... 1988?  ’89?  “Cult of Personality” was the Big Shit, and the theater rows – reserved seats, of course – were filled with suburban kids who’d dragged their mommies and daddies along.  I remember that parking was a bitch, that when they finally played “Cult” Glover ran through the aisles with a wireless mic and wound up singing from the balcony, that these guys were a whole lot better than a band with a single album (I grew up on classic rock, and only trusted veteran acts) should be.

The second time – this would have been late ’89 – they were opening for the Rolling Stones on the Steel Wheels Tour at – was it JFK or Vet Stadium?  We had floor tickets, I was standing on a folding chair, with a broken foot.  They had a bit of trouble dealing with a football field; whenever they showed him in close-up on the video screens, Glover looked scared.  “There are a lot of people, here.”  They played a new song, “Information Overload” – longer and richer than the stuff on their debut album.

If all you know about Living Colour is “Cult,” I beg you:  Run out and buy their second album, Time’s Up.  Don’t get a greatest hits CD, get Time’s Up.  That – along with License to Ill (I really want to lie and say Paul’s Boutique, but that’d be we-were-cool revisionist history...) – was one of our go-to CDs in college and, despite more than a decade of mash-ups and genre-fusion, it really holds up.  Some of that’s because the band never settled on being any one thing, and had the talent to go wherever it wanted to.

Which is why Stain was such a disappointment.  Largely humorless and sludgy, the songs were – for all their complexity – very one-note, very angry, very uninviting.  When I saw them at CB’s in ’92(?), they’d come back to test material for the new album and break in their new bassist, the aggressive, jazz-educated Doug Wimbush.  That material, with its thundering lower-register stuff, and this club, made for a great hardcore show.  Like I said in my last rambling CBGB’s post, what I remember most about that one is the energy and the immediacy.

Stain didn’t make any mark, and the band splintered, each member dabbling in a number of side projects.  In 2000, drummer Calhoun invited Reid and Glover to sit in with his and Wimbush’s outfit Namesake.  At, of course, CBGB’s.  It led to a reformation, a new album (2003’s CallideØscope, which came out to positive reviews, though I found underwhelming), a new tour.

*

And now that CBGB’s is in trouble, they’re back, again.

“I feel like I was just here last week,” Glover said when he hit the stage.  While Reid noodled with his guitar, finding his way into the Hendrix-flavored Talking Heads cover the band’s been playing since their inception, the singer stared out over the packed house.  He sighed a quick “Man, I’m too old for this shit,” and then showed everyone he wasn’t.

These are musicians’ musicians, and this was a far cry from the slamfest I attended back in the early nineties.  They’ve always been creatively restless – you’ll never hear Glover stick to the melodies he sings on the records – and they’ve gotten jazzier as they’ve gotten older.  They can do just about everything, and enjoy doing just that.  Reid – there was this kid in high school who hated him, insisted that he was playing guitar all wrong – can make his instrument sound like it’s calculating higher math, then have it growling like an Allosaur; he’ll slide from pretty little blues into speed-metal without thinking. 

They will stretch a song to extremes, and sometimes it breaks.  The band came out with so much energy and determination that, after they’d settled into a groove, the show deflated, a little.  Every song got ripped apart and smacked back together again.  It was a rock-funk-hardcore-punk-metal-prog-reggae-ohmygodisthatcalypso? concert, and some people in the audience got a little annoyed that things weren’t a little more straightforward.  The musicianship was jaw-dropping, but the exactitude could go from exhilarating to exhausting.

“Sacred Ground,” a song from their latest CD, got pushed to around the ten-minute mark, and it kept wavering back and forth between show-stopper and show-killer.  There was a phenomenal amount of work put into it, but it sometimes just felt like work.

The set list favored songs that welcomed some sort of expansive treatment – why else play piffle like “Funny Vibe?”  A new song, “Terrorism,” featured Wimbush, who squeezed some incredible stuff out of his bass but could never get the song to rise above its silly-simple agitprop (“George Bush is terrorism/Tony Blair is terrorism/CIA-FBI-CNN-Terrorism;” if there’s ever been anything consistently off-putting about Living Colour, it’s that their lyrics are blunt and over-earnest).  “Glamour Boys”, despite having some residual popularity, is just... well, its chorus is:  “I ain’t no glamour boy, I’m FIERCE!  I ain’t no glamour boy – Woo!”  Um, yeah, no.

The perfectly-crafted pop tunes they have – “Cult of Personality,” “Love Rears Its Ugly Head” – resist redefinition.  When you have a tendency to deconstruct every one of your songs, sometimes you find something new and special, and sometimes – well, sometimes you wind up fashioning a face like a Picasso, with both eyes on one side and a nose where an ear should be.  That’s great on a museum wall, but I wouldn’t want to make out with the bitch.  Just leave ‘em alone, guys.

Oh, and:  The show featured more than one drum solo.

Calhoun is a jawdroppingly good drummer, and his tricked-out set includes glowing electric cymbals and other interesting-looking things to pound.  His longer solo started off with some middle-eastern-flavored playback that he manipulated with one hand while drumming with the other.  It was fairly incredible, for a drum solo.

But the only people who really enjoy drum solos are drummers.

Otherwise, the show never devolved into exclusionary self-indulgence; the performers were too engaging for that to happen.  “I was sleeping back there,” joked Glover, after Calhoun’s exposition.

Reid, who just seems like the happiest, friendliest person in the universe, stopped the show to speechify a couple times.  “I don’t think they should turn this place into a museum.  If they save it... Keep bringing in new bands.  The new stuff.  The stuff no one will play anywhere else.”

The club’s closing seemed to find its way, again and again, into the set.  “Memories Can’t Wait,” “Sacred Ground,” and “Time’s Up” all easily lent themselves to the occasion.  Glover started “Open Letter (to a Landlord)”*  by holding a note so long it made its way all the way up to the Apollo and back... and then interrupted the chorus (“You can tear a building down, but you can’t escape a memory”) to tirade:  “You can tear this place down, brick by brick,” he said, “But you can NEVER take away the music that was made here.”

And boy, they made music.  “Time’s Up,” which is some sort of rhythmic masterpiece, pounded enough energy back into the room to keep everyone spinning straight through the end of their two-hour fifteen-minute show.  “See you next time,” Glover said, as he left.

“Right here.  See you next time, right HERE.”

*Commemorative “Open Letter to a Landlord:  Save CBGB’s” T-Shirts were available at the merch table.

*

The set list, from here:

Memories Can’t Wait (Talking Heads)

Type

Middle Man

Funny Vibe

In Your Name

Sacred Ground

Open Letter (to a Landlord)

Terrorism

Glamour Boys

Go Away

Flying

(drum solo)

Ignorance is Bliss

Love Rears Its Ugly Head

Time's Up

Cult of Personality

encore:

Tomorrow Never Knows (Beatles)

*

Had a ticket for the opening night of Sufjan Stevens’ Pep-Rally-O-Rama, and passed on it in favor of this.  And didn’t regret it for a single second.

Though a band called Reconstruction went on at 8, Living Colour’s opening act was a DJ.  I’d normally get pissed about that sort of thing, but Andrea Clarke played some amazing stuff (Including an amazing cover of “If 6 was 9.”  It had a lot of Morphine-style tenor/bass sax, and everything sounded like it had been loosened – the reeds, the bass strings, the snare heads.  Beautiful noise.  I think it might have been by the Denis Colin Trio.  Anyway, it’s hard to be angry at someone who turns you on to good music. 

But CBGB’s couldn’t get an actual band to open for Living Colour?  Gack.

tags: cbgbs  living colour  music  concert reviews  

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