In Black, White and Living Colour : Guitarist Reid and his band want to break the color barrier wide open

“If I were white where would I be now?” mused Vernon Reid, sitting on the disheveled bed of his West Hollywood hotel room, idly strumming his guitar.

“Maybe nowhere--or maybe on top of the world, the rock world, looking down. I can’t deny that in some sense that would be nice--ultimately for all black musicians. And for my ego--it would be a nice little buzz too.”

Reid--intelligent, commanding and candid--plucked a few more bars of a familiar melody on his guitar. “Don’t get me wrong,” he said. “I don’t want to be white. Some black people may dream about that but I don’t. That’s foolish thinking. I’m just looking for a fair shake. I’ve been confronting this brick wall too long.”

The wall, though, may be crumbling.

Rock has always been a haven for white musicians. Most blacks, figuring it’s too tough to break into that exclusive club, avoid it. But Reid, 30, has been tenaciously looking for a break in rock since the end of the last decade. He even helped form the Black Rock Coalition, a New York organization that has been chipping away at the iron-clad stereotype of the white rock musician.

But it looks like Reid, with his band Living Colour, finally has his breakthrough album--Epic Records’ “Vivid,” the best black-rock effort since Prince’s “Purple Rain” in 1984.

It’s not what you would call an overnight success. “Vivid” has been struggling to find an audience since April. Critical acclaim has helped keep it alive. So has the attention-getting Mick Jagger connection--he produced the cuts “Glamour Boys” and the stinging “Which Way to America?” So has Reid’s ferocious fight--waged in interviews in the nation’s magazines and newspapers--against racism in rock.

Rooted in Black Music

“I’ve been on my soapbox,” Reid said with a chuckle. “I’ve been trying to raise people’s consciousness. I want them to find a new way to think about rock musicians. It doesn’t have to be some blue-eyed guy with long, blond hair playing it. It can be somebody who looks like me.”

One of Reid’s main points is the paradox of rock being considered white music. Rock music, of course, has black roots--mainly blues but some soul. “I think a lot of kids don’t realize this,” Reid said. “If they did, they might think a black rock musician isn’t so surprising.”

Living Colour also features singer Corey Glover, bassist Muzz Skillings and drummer William Calhoun. By the end of last year, the band’s “Vivid” album had sold about 375,000.

Buoyed by the single, “Cult of Personality,” it’s lately been bounding up the pop chart, up to No. 52 this week. Not an impressive chart position for the average album--but a veritable triumph for a black rock album by an unknown band.

No amount of publicity would matter if the album weren’t any good. But this one really is outstanding. Apparently as more people hear it, the album is succeeding on merit.

Glover, basically an R&B; belter, can crank up his voice and growl and screech with the best rock singers. Reid, who is considered by many to be the best black guitarist since Jimi Hendrix, fuels the band’s music with his furious, explosive runs that have the buzz-saw textures of the best rock-guitar lines.

Living Colour’s music isn’t straight rock. It’s colorfully fused with funk and metal and spiced with strains of avant-garde jazz. Some of the songs, mostly written by Reid, are angry (“Funny Vibe” features the rap group Public Enemy).

There’s even savage social commentary (“Open Letter to a Landlord”). But the band wisely sidesteps esoterica. All the songs are neatly structured around appealing pop hooks. This is very much commercial rock.

Radio has been the root of Living Colour’s problem. For a long time, album rock radio wasn’t interested. Other black rockers, like the highly publicized Bus Boys, also were largely ignored by radio. In the history of rock, only a handful of musicians--notably Hendrix and Sly Stone in the ‘60s and George Clinton with his ‘70s P-Funk band--have hurdled rock’s color barrier.

In this decade, the success of Prince’s albums and Michael Jackson’s rock singles--”Beat it” and “State of Shock” (a duet with Mick Jagger)--has neither opened up radio to black rockers nor inspired the formation of waves of black rock groups.

But radio isn’t the only problem faced by black rockers. Record companies, knowing how hard it is to get records by such artists played on radio, usually don’t sign them.

Jagger’s Endorsement

Being a black band and a new band is a double whammy, Reid said: “It’s tough for any new band to get air play. If we were a new, white rock band we’d probably have trouble getting our record on the air. But being black makes it much tougher. Radio isn’t inclined to play black rock bands and record companies aren’t inclined to sign them.”

Born to West Indian parents in London but raised in Brooklyn, Reid was kicking around New York for years, bouncing from band to band--notably hard-edged jazz-rock experimenters the Decoding Society, the Contortions and Defunkt--before forming Living Colour in 1986.

After Reid played on Mick Jagger’s “Primitive Cool” album, Jagger, enthused about Living Colour, produced two demonstration cuts which were instrumental in convincing Epic to sign the band.

“But getting a deal wasn’t an automatic thing, even with Mick Jagger’s name as producer on those tracks,” Reid said. “It helped that we’re a good band. But we had to be real good--better than a white rock band has to be--to convince them to gamble on us.”

Reid became a guitarist by default. He wanted to play flute but didn’t have access to one. But, at 15, a cousin gave him a guitar instead. “Having an instrument, any instrument, made me happy then. That old guitar was hard for me to learn to play. It had heavy strings and I had weak hands at the time. I even stopped playing for a while but I picked it up again. I was determined it wouldn’t defeat me.”

Later Reid improved his skills by studying with two jazz guitarists but still gravitated toward rock. “I was influenced by people like Carlos Santana,” he said. “I realized you could play rock and not be white, and bring your own ethnic feeling to the music. I grew up listening to Sly Stone and Jimi Hendrix. They were inspirations.

“I had this vision of playing the powerful, rock-oriented music, of being this strong, solid musician who could play whatever he wanted--even this kind of music that black musicians hardly ever played. I knew what I wanted and I went after it.”

Playing guitar, Reid said, isn’t just an artistic endeavor or a way to make a living. It’s also an outlet for his rage:

“If you’re black you have some rage in you. It may be buried deep in some people but it’s there. Playing music has helped me deal with my anger at the position of blacks in this country and the position of black rock musicians in the music business.

“I don’t feel violent and I don’t want to kill anybody or hurt anybody. But I’ve just been so frustrated. I don’t lash out. I don’t get crazy thinking about the problems of blacks in this country. I just play the guitar. I get a lot of it out that way.”