Vernon Reid brings colour tothe Adelaide InternationalGuitar Festival

Tue 27th Nov, 2007 in Features

Guitars, guitars, guitars! Adelaide is set to come alive as the finest musicians from around the world head to town for the 1st Adelaide International Guitar Festival through November and December. One such guitarist and composer that is making the pilgrimage is the legendary Vernon Reid. Without a shadow of a doubt he is a true artist whose work is forever in progress, from his formative years on the downtown New York jazz/funk/punk scene, to his leadership of the pioneering multi-platinum rock band Living Colour in 1985. Vernon Reid has also worked with Public Enemy, B.B. King, and Carlos Santana, and was named one of Rolling Stone’s 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time.

It doesn’t end there with his resume filled with other highlights including a double platinum-selling debut album Vivid, released in 1988, and its gold-certified successor, Time’s Up, in 1990. Living Colour also earned two consecutive Grammy Awards. The band also opened for The Rolling Stones’ 1989 Steel Wheels Tour and appeared on the first Lollapalooza tour in 1991. Vernon reunited with Living Colour in 2000 to release a new album, CollideØscope, in 2003, and continues to tour around the world. Vernon has recorded solo and collaborative albums, organised unique concerts events, and composed for dance, documentaries, commercials and film. All I can say is that was a real honour and privilege to interview him on his brief promotional visit earlier in the year.

This visit to Australia for Vernon hasn’t been an easy one. “It’s kind of surreal,” Vernon thought. “I was in one place and then twenty fours later I’m here. It’s a totally whirlwind thing and it’s been a totally weird thing. Once my visa was knocked together and everything else fell in to place I got a phone from a friend of mine who is really, really sick but still alive. I got a chance to see him and the doctor said he is lucky to have forty eight hours left. With my three-year-old daughter we ended up going to see him, she was totally amazing and really inspiring to me. He’s laying there with an oxygen mask on and an IV drip and it didn’t look good. I would have understood it if she freaked out but she sat down next to me and shared that the moment with him. I was blown away.”

It kind of puts things in to perspective. “That kind of compassion is something you don’t expect from a three-year-old,” Vernon asserted. “Especially with the person you’re confronted with is that ill. I never told her how to be or if it’s frightening let me know. Maybe if I was thinking, maybe I should tell her but having said that I didn’t know how to be. It’s astounding and has been on my mind and these two parallel tracks have been going. All this came in to being because I flew a day later. Life is completely about luck.”

Attention focused on the latest projects that Vernon started working on. “I’ve started working on songs for the next Living Colour record,” Vernon revealed. “We re-recorded Cult of Personality for Activision’s Guitar Hero 3. This next version of the game has actual bands playing some music and we’re going to be in the next version. I’ve just finished producing a number of records for other people in free jazz and blues area.”

Can you give an insight in to the next Living Colour record? “The next Living Colour record is strange,” Vernon suggested. “It’s the first record where there is a concept and an actual album title and we’re going to make a record that goes along with the album title. With all the other things we just had songs and then its like – œwhat is this’. It’s funny because the album as a form if its not already dead it’s about to be. The album as we know it, unless it changes in to something else that can contain it, is forced by the media to be a certain thing. You could only put forty minutes on an LP and that’s why you could only have twenty minutes a side otherwise you’d lose fidelity. That’s why the double album was such an event to fit the medium. The CD made it possible to have seventy minutes and now albums have become much too long. So every album that would come along would be like a double album. When Prince would release a double album it was more like a four CD set and the whole scheme of things is totally weird.”

Eventually, Vernon did mention more specific details about the Living Colour album. “The new album will be called The Chair In The Doorway,” Vernon revealed. “I did a press junket for CollideØscope with Corey Jones and whenever something was going wrong Corey would always say the chair is in the doorway. It was just one of these things he would say and I looked at him and said – œyou know that thing you always say that’s going to be the title of our next album.’ I don’t know what that means but that’s it. What I like about The Chair In The Doorway is that it is a concrete image and a very real thing but why is there a chair in the door way, what does it mean? It’s completely abstract, while being a contract, physical manifestation of what it is.”

Does it make it harder working backwards from a title? “You know what – it does and it doesn’t,” Vernon thought. “The thing about The Chair In The Doorway is that it’s concrete but abstract. The general gist of what I think it’s about is the question of what do we put in our own way. What kind of obstacles, existential, metaphorical do we put in our way in life. We can get in to the wise of it and that seems a lot more interesting as that’s the story of the band. How do we get in our own way? That’s the story of people, aside from all this history of racism, which is very real in essence informs the other question. Ultimately, how do you explain things that go on?”

The Adelaide International Guitar Festival runs from November 23 to December 2. Stay tuned to Fasterlouder for coverage of all the action.