Jimi Hendrix
Photo: Don Nix/Authentic Hendrix LLC

Several performers from last year's gangbuster Jimi Hendrix jam session at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame will get to re-Experience the magic at this year's Street Scene festival in San Diego.

Last September 12, an all-star concert featuring former Hendrix bandmates Billy Cox (bass) and Mitch Mitchell (drums) as well as members of Kid Rock, Double Trouble and Buckcherry celebrated the opening of the Jimi Hendrix Surround Sound Theater and Museum and the release of the box set The Jimi Hendrix Experience.

The Street Scene performance on September 8 will feature Hendrix's post-1969 rhythm section, the Band of Gypsys (Cox and drummer Buddy Miles), performing alongside a roster of guitarists including Kenny Olson of Kid Rock, Doyle Bramhall, Eric Gales and Cesar Rosas of Los Lobos.

Rich Robinson of the Black Crowes, Police guitarist Andy Summers, Jonny Lang and the Reverend Horton Heat may step onboard as well, according to the Band of Gypsys' manager, who is still confirming artists for the tribute.

Non-guitarists who will participate include Stevie Ray Vaughan's rhythm section of Tommy Shannon (bass) and Chris Layton (drums) and Living Colour vocalist Corey Glover, the manager said. He also said he hopes some of the artists already scheduled to play Street Scene — including Counting Crows, Taj Mahal and the Phantom Blues Band, Soulive, G. Love & Special Sauce and the Long Beach Dub Allstars — will also show up.

"This kind of collaboration doesn't happen anymore," said event organizer John McDermott, catalog manager of the Experience Hendrix foundation. "So we're invoking Jimi's legacy to make it happen. The goal is to continue to reach out to music fans of all ages and make them aware of Jimi's music."

In addition to witnessing the all-star jam, Street Scene attendees can visit the Red House Exhibit, a traveling museum of Hendrix memorabilia.

Other acts scheduled to play the 2001 Street Scene include Outkast, James Brown, En Vogue, the Offspring, P.O.D., Burning Spear and his Burning Band, Cake, Big Head Todd & the Monsters, Sugarcult, Third World, Eek-a-Mouse, Rollins Band, Cheap Trick, X, Social Distortion, Doug E. Fresh, Jurassic 5, Whodini, the Fixx, Berlin and Rufus Wainwright.

• Jimi Hendrix
• Kid Rock
• Los Lobos
• Buckcherry
• The Black Crowes

Living Colour
Photo: Sony/Columbia

They rolled into Central Park in New York dressed for battle. Wearing camouflage and khaki, Living Colour faced down a hometown crowd for the first time since their 1995 breakup, and they had a lot to prove.

Although they were on the leading edge of new music between 1984 and the early '90s, blending guitar-blazing metal with deep-rooted funk, simmering R&B and experimental jazz, music history has not been terribly kind to them. Before Korn, Papa Roach or Incubus were around, way back when the elder George Bush was occupying the White House, Living Colour wove together disparate musical styles with political polemic. Sadly, aside from occasional radio spins of their biggest hit, "Cult of Personality," Living Colour have largely been forgotten.

"Man, you all look be-wil-dered," guitarist and bandleader Vernon Reid said several songs into the band's set. "I know where you're coming from. If someone had told me two years ago that we were gonna be getting back together, I'd have said, 'Yo, man, stop frontin' me.' "

And with good reason. As explosive as Living Colour were on disc and onstage, they were equally emotional behind the scenes, fighting each other as fiercely as the powers they opposed (racists, corrupt landlords, sadistic cops).

After it was introduced, it took the band another five minutes to start playing. And the gig was strangely paced, with new, previously unheard songs interrupting the momentum of catalog hits. Also, the sound mix was pretty poor. For the first couple of numbers Reid's guitars and Corey Glover's soulful vocals were barely audible over the throbbing bass and battering drums, and the audio improved only slightly from there.

To Living Colour's credit, their comeback was as chancy and experimental as their arrival. Instead of presenting a by-the-numbers greatest-hits set, the band went out on a limb, introducing three new songs, two covers and a couple of towering drum solos. Three of the tunes were from their most poorly received album, Stain, which seemed like a strange move considering the band omitted crowd-pleasers like "Open Letter (To a Landlord)," "Desperate People" and "Glamour Boys." Even when Living Colour dove into standards like "Love Rears Its Ugly Head" and "Middle Man," they shook them up by integrating drum'n'bass beats and industrial embellishments between volleys of kinetic rock.

The confrontational "Elvis Is Dead" was interrupted halfway through with a techno-treated rendition of "Papa Was a Rolling Stone" and a visceral, crunching cover snippet of Elvis Presley's "Can't Help Falling in Love With You." And judging from the new songs, it sounds like Living Colour's reunion won't be a mere nostalgia ride. "Trance" pitted Will Calhoun's tribal beats against a mantra-like rhythm as bassist Doug Wimbish and Reid repeatedly chanted "In a trance, in another world." And "R&D" married Middle Eastern melodies with polyrhythmic beats.

Visually, Living Colour might not be as frenetic as they once were, though they still put on a vibrant show. Reid, who had his hair styled in two giant braids, dove into solos with reckless fervor, Wimbish sagely thrummed out groovin' basslines and Glover paced, pranced, jogged and jumped, proving why he's been able to land some plum acting jobs over the years (he appeared in Oliver Stone's "Platoon"). During "Cult of Personality," he stormed from one side of the stage to the other, urging the audience to sing the chorus, and at the conclusion he dove over a six-foot chasm into the sweaty crowd.

The band's encore was as surprising as its main set. First, Living Colour performed Jimi Hendrix's "Tower of Soul," and the coup de grace came when they ended with Bruce Springsteen's somber "American Skin (41 Shots)," a song about Amadou Diallo, a black man who was shot 41 times by New York policemen when he put a hand in his pocket to show them identification and they thought he was reaching for a gun. Even though Reid's complex solo sounded out of place, the song was still trenchant and chilling — especially the climax, in which Calhoun bashed out rounds of rapid but staggered snare blasts to emulate gunshots. By the end of the song, Glover was in tears, and while a cynical viewer might credit his method acting abilities for the display, his shoulders continued to heave with sobs after he left the stage.

• Living Colour

Living Colour
Photo: Sony/Columbia

Living Colour have announced the dates for the second U.S. leg of their comeback tour, which will find the hard rockers playing the East Coast and a couple of Midwest dates in early August.

Following their unannounced first gig together in nearly six years in December (see "Living Colour Reunite Onstage At CBGB's"), Living Colour played several sold-out club dates along the West Coast in May.

So far this summer, the "Cult of Personality" crew has also hit South America and the European festival circuit.

The members of Living Colour, vocalist Corey Glover, guitarist Vernon Reid, bassist Doug Wimbish and drummer Will Calhoun, have taken on various other projects since the original demise of the group in 1995.

Currently, Glover is acting in the independent film "Reunion 81," Reid is planning a mini-tour with jazz bassist Jack Bruce, and Calhoun and Wimbish are performing with Mos Def in Japan, according to Living Colour's publicist.

The band is discussing recording a new album, but no specific plans have been made, the publicist said.

Before disbanding, Living Colour released three studio albums, though none were as popular as their 1988 debut, Vivid. "Cult of Personality," the album's first single, was a smash hit and garnered the group a Grammy award for Best Hard Rock Performance.

Living Colour tour dates, according to their publicist:

• 8/1 - Old Bridge, NJ @ Birch Hill Nite Club
• 8/2 - New Haven, CT @ Toad's Place
• 8/3 - Hampton Bays, NY @ Canoe Place Inn
• 8/4 - Washington, DC @ 9:30 Club
• 8/5 - New York, NY @ Central Park SummerStage
• 8/7 - Chicago, IL @ Metro
• 8/8 - Ferndale, MI @ Magic Bag
• 8/10 - Philadelphia, PA @ The Trocadero

• Living Colour

Living Colour's<BR>Vernon Reid
Photo: MTV

NEW YORK — It was billed as a gig by Headfake, but a Thursday night show soon turned into a full-fledged Living Colour reunion as the hard-rock band that broke down the genre's color barrier played together at CBGB's, the club where they were discovered more than a decade ago.

Tipped off by the promise of a "special guest," fans packed the legendary downtown club to capacity. After Headfake — a group featuring singer Corey Glover, bassist Doug Wimbish and drummer Will Calhoun — finished up two charged drum- and bass-infused songs, Glover faced the crowd and grinned. Laughing a bit, he asked, "So what brings you out here on this cold-ass day?," and then, as if to answer his own question, turned and yelled offstage, "Hey! Come here, man." Living Colour guitarist and co-founder Vernon Reid then joined his former bandmates on the small stage. Energized and none the worse for the time off since their 1995 breakup, Living Colour hit the ground running with a thundering version of "Middle Man" and never slowed down during a seamless and intense 12-song set. Playing for almost an hour, Living Colour touched upon favorites from their three-CD catalog. Highlights included a fist-pumping rendition of the band's breakthrough single, "Cult of Personality", from 1988's Grammy winner Vivid; "Love Rears Its Ugly Head," which Glover gave a delicious dramatic flair; "Time's Up", "Bi," Talking Heads' "Memories Can't Wait" (also from Vivid) and "Everything Goes Round." The band encored with a breakneck version of Jimi Hendrix's "Crosstown Traffic," which the foursome tore into with the fervor of newcomers.

That drive and a sense of fun were, according to Reid, part of the motivation to play again. The group, which has maintained varying degrees of contact musically and personally over the years, always had the notion of reuniting in the back of their minds, Reid said before the show. It wasn't until Calhoun asked Reid several months ago to seriously consider the idea of a Living Colour gig that the notion became a reality, because, Reid admitted, "for a change I was open to it." The group held a few low-key rehearsals in the late fall and quickly discovered that the very things that had torn the band apart didn't matter. "It felt like friends having a good time," Reid said. "We were having fun playing." Asked why now, Reid laughed and said, "I've given up being right," adding, "for me, [getting back together] has to do with personal things rather than some reunion fever. I broke up the band, and it was very emotional, 'cause we were really close personally." As the response at the show proved there's an audience eager for Living Colour's ballistic and intricate blur of funk, rock and soul, but according to Reid the likelihood of more shows and the future of Living Colour "is really one day at a time." Reid, Calhoun and founding bassist Muzz Skillings formed the pioneering black rock group in 1983 in New York. The lineup solidified with the addition of Taylor in 1985, and in 1987, the group was discovered at CBGB's by Mick Jagger, who financed and produced songs for the band's demo.

Wimbish joined the band after Skillings' 1992 departure.

• Living Colour

The Roots and guitarist Vernon Reid (formerly of Living Color) are among the artists that have been tapped to perform Prince's "1999" album at a special concert in New York City on December 11.

• Corey Glover
• Living Colour
• P.M. Dawn
• Prince

As Corey Glover, the former frontman for Living Color, prepares to head out on the road in support of "Hymns," his solo debut album, the singer finds himself branching out into a new area of his life brought on by songs he claims are of "inspiration and aspiration."

As the title suggests, Glover, who spent close to four years working on the project, uses the album to deal with the many levels and incarnations of spirituality, a point that was driven home to him by his relatives.

"I come from a long line of preachers," Glover said in an interview with the MTV Radio Network, "my grandfather was a preacher and people in my family are all jack-leg store front preachers. And the concept originally for the record was that the name of it would be 'Reverend Daddy Love's Hymns,' like he was talking about these things."

The inherent spirituality of the new record might lead some to think of "Hymns" as a departure from the more consciousness-raising material of Living Colour, although Glover believes the two are just different sides of the same coin, with his live performance being the point at which the two meet.

"I've always said that your life," he continued, "as it is, is a political statement. But it's also a divine statement as well, and that how you live it and how you ascertain who you are and move forward in your life is a spiritual quest. And to seek out yourself is to seek god."

"My creativeness is my bond with my creator," Glover said, "And if you've ever seen anything I might do live, there's a point at which something else takes over, and Corey says, 'Buh-bye,' and Reverend Daddy Love steps in and he takes over, and I'm channeling whoever or whatever spirit that is." [900k QuickTime]

As we previously reported (see "Living Colour Frontman Corey Glover Gets Soulful On Solo Album"), "Hymns," which Glover collaborated on with V. Jeffrey Smith and Peter Lord of the Family Stand, will be released on May 19.

• Corey Glover
• Living Colour

Corey Glover, former frontman for the funk-rock outfit Living Colour, is about to resurface with a decidedly more R&B sound on his first solo effort for Babyface's La Face Records.

Glover, who along with Living Colour was one of the artists to grace the stage on Lollapalooza's inaugural outing (see "It's A Lollapalooza! Looking Back: 1991"), will release "Hymns" on La Face on May 19, and with it hopes to reveal a more soulful side of his songwriting.

"I really pushed myself as a songwriter," Glover said of preparing his solo album. "I was reaching into areas I never had before."

The fruits of those efforts were revealed when the album's first single, "Do You First, Then Do Myself," hit radio last week.

Glover will take his act on the road this summer in support of "Hymns," but does not have an itinerary firmed up.

• Corey Glover
• Living Colour

• Jane's Addiction
• Living Colour
• Nine Inch Nails
• Henry Rollins
• The Butthole Surfers