Living Colour and Me: A Brief History
Jan. 24th, 2001 03:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
p0tat0esLast night I was deciding what CDs I was going to bring to work with me today. I dug out my old copy of Living Colour's Vivid. I haven't listened to this in a loooong time. I used to have it on a tape, with E.U.'s Livin' Large on the other side. (I think it was called Livin' Large...E.U. was the DC go-go band that did "Doin' The Butt" that was used in Spike Lee's School Daze.) But I digress. Living Colour was the band that inspired me to start playing bass. Seeing the video for "Cult of Personality" was the first time that I noticed that there were guitar players who did solos, and then there was always that other guy. I couldn't figure out why they held their guitar differently than other guys, and why they played it with their fingers instead of a pick. I think one of my sisters told me that is was a bass guitar. I just thought their bass player (Muzz Skillings) looked cool. I decided at that point that I wanted to be a bass player too.
That was when I was in the 8th grade. The only instruments I was familiar with at the time were turntables, drum machines, and samplers. You'd be hard pressed to find any tapes in my collection that weren't hip-hop. (I did buy the Beastie Boys' Polly Wog Stew not realizing that it was a punk record.) It wasn't until late in the 9th grade that I became able to pick out the individual parts of songs and hear how the guitars and bass and drums and vocals all interacted. (This came from joining the marching band.) It changed the way I listened to music drastically. From that point onward I could never listen to a song and not pick it apart. All the music I listened to as a kid reopened to me. I listened to ...And Justice For All and realized you couldn't really hear Jason Newsted anyway.
It was about this time that I also picked up the shitty little Peavy bass that was in my high schools band room and started messing around with it. (I think it was made out of pressboard or something.) I couldn't play anything, so I just tuned the strings to how I thought sounded good and pounded on it. It wasn't until junior year that I actually started playing with any regularity. Fast forward 8 years, and I still can't play like Muzz Skillings. Or Doug Wimbish, the NY session guy who joined after Living Colour parted company with Mr. Skillings. Wimbish is a badass too. And I had just missed seeing Vernon Reid (the guitarist) at the Knitting Factory by one night last time I was in Noo Yawk.
Just thought I'd share.
That was when I was in the 8th grade. The only instruments I was familiar with at the time were turntables, drum machines, and samplers. You'd be hard pressed to find any tapes in my collection that weren't hip-hop. (I did buy the Beastie Boys' Polly Wog Stew not realizing that it was a punk record.) It wasn't until late in the 9th grade that I became able to pick out the individual parts of songs and hear how the guitars and bass and drums and vocals all interacted. (This came from joining the marching band.) It changed the way I listened to music drastically. From that point onward I could never listen to a song and not pick it apart. All the music I listened to as a kid reopened to me. I listened to ...And Justice For All and realized you couldn't really hear Jason Newsted anyway.
It was about this time that I also picked up the shitty little Peavy bass that was in my high schools band room and started messing around with it. (I think it was made out of pressboard or something.) I couldn't play anything, so I just tuned the strings to how I thought sounded good and pounded on it. It wasn't until junior year that I actually started playing with any regularity. Fast forward 8 years, and I still can't play like Muzz Skillings. Or Doug Wimbish, the NY session guy who joined after Living Colour parted company with Mr. Skillings. Wimbish is a badass too. And I had just missed seeing Vernon Reid (the guitarist) at the Knitting Factory by one night last time I was in Noo Yawk.
Just thought I'd share.
