Vernon Reid was the founding member of Living Colour
and led the band through a successful 10 year career, highlights
including a platinum selling debut album Vivid (1988),
two consecutive Grammy Awards, opening for the Rolling Stones on
their 1989 stadium tour and appearing on the first Lollapalooza tour
in 1991. Vernon has played with many other musicians and in many
other musical contexts, such as with Decoding Society, Defunct, Mick
Jagger, Public Enemy and John Zorn, and he is also the founder of
Black Rock Coalition. Vernon's latest release is a solo album
entitled Mistaken Identity (1996).
UV: There's a Jimi Hendrix book called Crosstown Traffic
by Charles Shaar Murray that's partly dedicated to you. Have you read
it?
VR: Yeah, yeah...
UV: What did you think of it?
VR: I like it because it places Hendrix in a context of other music.
It's the first book to deal with Hendrix as an R&B guitarist that
says the reasons that his playing was the way that it was is not that
he was a blues guitar player, it's that he was a rhythm and blues
guitar player that could play blues. And that's the
thing. His sense of rhythm is like if you listen to Curtis Mayfield
playing guitar - that's the school that Hendrix came from. Curtis
Mayfield is an amazing guitar player. So that book is really useful
in that it identifies something that is generally overlooked. It's
sort of like, here's an R&B band and it sucked and he got away.
Generally it's never acknowledged that all of that stuff was part of
what made him who he was.
UV: Can you remember the first time you heard Jimi Hendrix?
VR: Oh yeah... I remember the first time I saw Jimi Hendrix was on
the Dick Cavett Show and I just thought, "Who is this black man all
in blue?" 'Cause black folks were so rare to see on TV - period - so
to see a freaky black man was like, "Oh my God!" Umm, the first time
that I heard Hendrix... What was the song that I heard? It might have
been "Foxy Lady", it might have been one of the singles and I
thought, "Wow, I like that." And I was so young I couldn't explain
it, I just totally reacted. "Oh that's cool - what is that? I like
that."
UV: Have you got a favourite Hendrix album or track?
VR: Pretty much all the albums were really great to me. I wanna say
Electric Ladyland but it's hard because Band Of
Gypsys is like a perfect concert and in that version of
"Machine Gun" Hendrix was able to encapsulate where the country was,
the feeling of the time, in his guitar playing which is...
No one has done anything like "The Star Spangled Banner" - to me it's
the greatest rock guitar solo of all time because his interpretation
of 'The Star Spangled Banner' was completely in line with what was
happening to America. He brought it to life and I'd say the same
thing about "Machine Gun". You feel the Vietnam war in it - you feel
what it is to walk through a rice paddy and have friends shot down
around you. He went completely there with total abandon like the way
he lived his life.
UV: What do you think he'd have done had he lived?
VR: Well, it's hard to say... Speculating about what Hendrix would
have done, it's like you got a couple of different options. We both
know that Carlos [Santana] lived and Clapton lived. Carlos went on a
deep spiritual quest and he did some of his greatest work in the '70s
- Caravanserai [1972], a terrific record. But life goes
on and you do other records and some records are not so great...
Clapton nearly killed himself several times and we live to see him do
a commercial in America!
If Hendrix had lived I would like to think that he would have broke
out of the funk and had been freed. 'Cause the thing at the end of
his life - he felt completely trapped, a terrible thing. He was
really pissed off and he was around negative people. His manager was
negative, it was a real drag. So I would like to think that he would
have gotten rid of all the jerks and bloodsuckers and hangers-on and
did something magnificent - whatever it would have been. Hendrix and
Miles Davis? I could hear that. But we'll never know. He's like James
Dean - he'll always be beautiful and young and sexy... Forever in our
hearts.
UV: Hendrix wasn't especially interested in politics or racial issues
- do you think he ought to have done more along those lines?
VR: I think Hendrix was very, very concerned. In the stuff he was
doing with Roland Kirk and the Ghetto Fighters - I think he was
trying to figure it out. There was part of him that was really
bothered by the fact that for the most part black folks weren't with
him. I mean, there were always black folks that were down on him - a
very small minority - and it bothered him. I think he had a lot of
conflicts and I think partly the Band of Gypsys was about that - it
was a complete statement at the time. I think Hendrix did what he
should have done - he was an amazing artist and he lived his life and
he represented freedom more than anything else and so for him to have
taken on a doctrinaire point of view would have been a drag. You do
what you can. Do what you feel - that's the key. Do what you feel not
what people expect - that's the real challenge of living this life
whatever you're doing. Of course, there are other aspects that come
into play but if you're an artist the best thing you can do is do
your art 'cause that's what you're called to do. You don't have to be
a selfish prig about it but you really do have to be honest. Even if
you're dishonest you have to be honest about your dishonesty - it's
like David Bowie's best work is completely artificial but it's
completely great. Like an actor tells a lie to tell the truth.
This interview was originally published in 'UniVibes' issue 24,
December 1996.
Copyright UniVibes 1996 - reprinted by permission of UniVibes,
International Jimi Hendrix Magazine, Coppeen, Enniskeane, County
Cork, Republic Of Ireland
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