They’re Alive and Riffing Again

Vernon Reid is jazzed at the prospect of being back on stage again with Living Colour, the New York City quartet that burst out in 1988 with a double-platinum debut album, “Vivid,” only to disband seven years later because of internal strife.

But Reid isn’t spouting the usual hyperbole about how great it is to get another shot, or how he expects Living Colour to rattle the world with the new music they’ll make.

Mostly, he’s just happy to be playing music again with old friends.

“I’m not attached to the band’s continued existence,” Reid says matter-of-factly. “I’m not attached to the end result of whatever comes out of [this reunion]. At the end of the process, I guess we’ll all learn something.”

A rock reunion as an exercise in personal growth? It’s already been that, and more, for the guitarist and songwriter. “By ‘95, I understood a lot of things I didn’t understand before,” says Reid, who brings the group to the Key Club tonight and the Galaxy Theatre on Sunday. “I understood why my favorite bands broke up. I didn’t get that before.

“I also understand why people who are in love divorce,” he adds, “and I understand why some people abandon their families too. I understand the need to be wanted, and the need to be loved in a particular way, and the need to communicate--all that good 12-step stuff.”

That has the makings of a sadder-but-wiser tale, but Reid comes off happier--or at least more accepting--than wiser about the group’s demise and its incipient rebirth.

“One of the best things to come out of this,” Reid says, “is a really revitalized friendship with [group singer] Corey Glover, which makes me very happy.”

Reid decided to pull the plug primarily because of tensions among the members--Reid, Glover, bassist Doug Wimbish and drummer William Calhoun. It wasn’t, he says, because sales oftheir final album, 1993’s “Stain,” were disappointing compared with those of “Vivid” or its follow-up, “Time’s Up,” which turned gold.

Conventional wisdom on Living Colour pegs it as an anomaly because it consisted of four African American musicians playing the kind of hard-rock music that was almost exclusively the domain of white rockers.

“The thing about so-called rock, or black rock, is that there is literally an alternative history of rock ‘n’ roll,” says Reid. “The question is the documentation of that history. The issue is not were there [blacks playing rock music into the ‘70s and ‘80s]. It’s that their history is just not spoken of.”

What of Living Colour’s place on that history line?

“I think that bands subsequent to Living Colour’s breakthrough, with their own talent and with their own possibilities, kind of built on that, which is as it should be,” Reid says. “Just as Living Colour built on what Bad Brains, the Busboys, Santana, Automatic Man, Mother’s Finest and the Isley Brothers did.”

As important to Reid as Living Colour is Healing Hand Percussion Circle, a group he started last year to raise money for thousands of residents of Sierra Leone whose hands have been amputated as a particularly grisly byproduct of the civil war in that West African nation. “This is beyond the pale of terrorism that we hear of every day,” he says.

Reid is trying to set up an organization that can continue even while he’s busy with the Living Colour reunion.

“That’s one important part of my life,” he says. “As part of a band, I’m an artist trying to create. I’m also married and have a wonderful relationship there. I’m trying to make it all happen. Sometimes it’s a challenge.”

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* Living Colour, today with NTX, Weapon of Choice and Slapbak, the Key Club, 9039 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood. 8:30 p.m. $20. (310) 786-1712. Also Sunday with Cid and Alan’s Wrench, Galaxy Theatre, 3503 S. Harbor Blvd., Santa Ana. 8 p.m. $25. (714) 957-0600.