“More Than Words” meets “Cult of Personality” as Extreme joins Living Colour to rock Hollywood Casino at Charles Town Races in Charles Town, West Virgina on Friday night.
WTOP caught up with Living Colour frontman Corey Glover, who joked that the Feb. 2 concert falls on Groundhog Day.
“We’ll play it over and over and over again hoping for a different result,” Glover told WTOP.
Born in Brooklyn in 1964, Glover grew up listening to all the greats across different genres.
“My parents really liked to have music in the house,” Glover said. “I listened to Bill Withers, Santana … Miles Davis’ ‘B*tches Brew,’ we listened to that constantly. There’s a generation gap between myself and my siblings, so what they listened to, what my parents listened to, and what I listened to were in some cases three different things.”
While he began singing at age 6, he mostly wanted to be an actor, landing a role in Oliver Stone’s Vietnam War masterpiece “Platoon” (1986), which won four Oscars, including Best Picture. Glover joined a star-studded cast, including Willem Dafoe, Tom Berenger, Charlie Sheen, Forest Whitaker, Keith David and Johnny Depp.
“I got the acting bug early on and started going out on auditions,” Glover said. “I auditioned for ‘Platoon’ and originally didn’t get it. A friend of mine got it, then he pulled out and it gave me an opportunity to be in the movie, so that was fun. … I got a call from Sheen about a year ago. I see Depp because he’s a guitar player and goes out and plays, so I see him out at a gig every once in a while, so we reminisce and try to move forward as best we can.”
Glover shifted to music full throttle after meeting guitarist Vernon Reid at a mutual friend’s birthday party.
“They wheeled out a cake and the birthday girl said, ‘OK, Corey, sing ‘Happy Birthday,’ and I was like, ‘By myself? Me?'” Glover said. “Vernon was there with his sister … so we had a long conversation and a couple weeks later he gave me a call saying he had this band and asked if I wanted to audition for it. … Once again, I didn’t get the gig, somebody else got the gig, but that guy decided he didn’t want to do it, so I got the job instead.”
While Living Colour had formed in 1980, it blew up once Glover joined in 1984, quickly becoming one of music’s most exciting, genre-defying, barrier-breaking acts by fusing heavy metal, funk, jazz, hip-hop and alt-rock.
“The alternative scene turned into what later became Lollapalooza, really, so we were ahead of the game,” he said.
The band’s debut album “Vivid” (1988) launched the title track “Cult of Personality,” which won the very first Grammy for Best Hard Rock Performance, defeating Aerosmith, Great White, Guns N’ Roses and Mötley Crüe.
“We had a loft where we rehearsed in Bushwick, Brooklyn,” Glover said. “I had this idea that I conveyed to Vernon (that) turned into the opening riff to ‘Cult of Personality.’ Vernon has a dog-eared notebook that he writes lyrics in and he had those lyrics, so we put it all together, spent all day working on it and basically created the song in one day. Immediately, we played in the now-defunct CBGB on the Lower East Side and it went over really well.”
Social commentaries don’t get any more powerful than “Cult of Personality,” juxtaposing peaceful figures such as Gandhi with deadly fascists such as Mussolini. Glover said the song is just as timely in the age of Trump.
“The funny thing about it is you don’t know it until you’re there,” Glover said. “No one says, ‘Take the red pill or the blue pill.’ It’s not that. It’s like you hear something that strikes you as truth, then you run with it, and the more you’re in it, the more the rest of the world seems to close down behind you, then you don’t know what’s going on.”
The song has also become the entrance theme of WWE wrestler C.M. Punk, who invited the band to perform it live at “WrestleMania” in 2013. It played again this past weekend during Punk’s in-ring return at the “Royal Rumble.”
“For Punk, he was using it when he was a kid; when his Little League went onto the field, that was their entrance music and he dug the song,” Glover said. “He was in backyard [wrestling] doing a bunch of stuff, always using the song. So when he got to WWE, that was the one stipulation he had, that song had to be his entrance music.”
While “Cult of Personality” remains the album’s most famous track, it also included “Glamour Boys,” which earned a Grammy nomination for Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal.
“‘Glamour Boys was, we all, when you’re in a scene, there’s always that person that is always at the height of fashion, that’s always at the place to be when it needs to be there when it seems to be happening. So that was the impetus for the song,” Glover said. “It’s always fun to do.”
Living Colour’s second studio album, “Time’s Up,” (1991) was just as acclaimed, winning another Grammy for Best Hard Rock Performance, defeating AC/DC, Faith No More, Jane’s Addiction and Mötley Crüe. The category was sadly discontinued in 2011, forever putting the band in the history books with Foo Fighters and Smashing Pumpkins as the only two-time winners — and doing it for a title track way ahead of its time on climate change.
“We had never seen anybody talking about what can be done about the environment,” Glover said. “We have a more pessimistic view about what that’s about, but we really leaned into the idea of: what is there left? Is there anything left to save? What’s deep about it is when you hear climate scientists talk about we’re not gonna have all this stuff in another two or three years, that song is over 30 years old! I’d like to say we said that 30 years ago.”
Living Colour fans also love the band’s third album “Stain” (1994), which delivered a fourth Grammy nomination for “Leave it Alone” for Best Hard Rock Performance, ultimately losing to Stone Temple Pilots’ “Plush.”
“You’re always being a part of a faction. You’re always put in a category and that whole idea of how do you reject categories?” Glover said. “How do you reject this funk metal idea? We’re not as much that as we’re anything else. We’re just four guys from New York City, and even that, we’re not even really New Yorkers as much as we are human beings. There’s always a place, a clique that you have to belong to and we kind of reject that outright.”
You’ll note the band predated the Wayans Brothers’ TV sketch comedy show “In Living Color” (1990-1994).
“They wanted music from us, they thought it would be a really good synergy for us and them to do something, and we kindly sort of declined on that,” Glover said. “It became a thing that we don’t talk about really. … We thought that there would be some sort of coming to an agreement that if you’re not gonna use our music, you shouldn’t use our name as your show, but they did. It caused some confusion for a bit, then it didn’t and we’re still here.”
While Living Colour is still going strong, Glover has also toured under the banners of Galactic and The New Stew, not to mention returning to acting as Judas in the U.S. national tour of “Jesus Christ Superstar” (2006).
“I’d love to do some more Broadway stuff, if anyone wants to give me an opportunity. If there are any Broadway producers out there who are looking for somebody that looks like me and sounds like me, I’m here,” Glover said. “It’s funny, the place that we’re playing right now in Roanoke, (Virginia), we did ‘Superstar’ here, so I’m looking at the backstage going, ‘Wow, I remember this place.'”
This year, Glover will turn 60 years old, officially an elder statesman ranking No. 70 on VH1’s 100 Greatest Artists of Hard Rock and No. 45 on Billboard’s 50 Greatest Rock Lead Singers of All Time. In 2016, he joined Public Enemy and The Roots at the grand opening of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture in D.C. Could induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame be next on the horizon?
“I think we could,” Glover said. “It would be nice to be recognized in some way. We wouldn’t turn it down, I’ll put it that way. … It’s interesting, I didn’t think of anything past the age of 30 and now I’m almost 60.”
Listen to our full conversation on the podcast below:
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