1985 was a transformative year for emerging black artists living in New York City. Be it the visual explosion of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Spike Lee in Brooklyn shooting his cinematic breakthrough She’s Got to Have It or LL Cool J rapping from every radio on the block, there was a definite cultural shift happening. While the funk and disco of the previous era was being been replaced by rap and R&B, that year, below 14th Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, a collective of artists calling themselves the Black Rock Coalition (B.R.C.) began working towards, as writer/co-founder Greg Tate penned in the manifesto, “...creating an atmosphere conducive to the maximum development, exposure and acceptance of Black alternative music.”

While the primary goal was to help black musicians get gigs, the B.R.C. was open to anyone who wanted to roll. And, within the next few years, the organization became a major entity on the downtown music scene with its flagship band Living Colour, fronted by B.R.C. co-founder Vernon Reid, leading the charge.

British by birth, Reid was raised in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn back when the local bands included B.T. Express and Crown Heights Affair. Nerdy enough to get into Brooklyn Tech High School, Reid discovered the weird sci-fi prose of Phillip K. Dick and started exploring other worlds with his guitar when he was gifted his first Jimi Hendrix album at age 15.

After graduating, Reid began playing gigs with avant-jazz drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson, hanging out with John Zorn and putting together his heavy rock band Living Colour. Along with friends that included bassist Melvin Gibbs, who’d later formed the rock group Eye & I with vocalist DK Dyson, Reid walked in the free jazz footsteps of Albert Ayler and Cecil Taylor, but was also down with the Downtown caterwaul of No Wave.

“One night they might be playing a show with Ornette Coleman and the next they were with James White,” explains Reid’s friend, writer and educator Greg Tate. At the time, though, nobody was checking for a bunch of brothers playing rock & roll. Ike Turner and Little Richard might’ve laid the foundation for the Beatles and the Stones, but many folks of both races believed that blaring guitars and wailing vocals was “white boy music.” It was cool for blacks to be down with jazz, soul, funk or disco, but nothing marked a traitor to the race quicker than your boys hearing Jimmy Page bleeding through the tenement walls.

“I’ve always been proud of my ethnicity,” Reid told me in 1988, a few months before Living Colour’s debut Vivid was released. “I just want to be free to do what I want to do. Black people started this music and I take umbrage that I have to explain that.” Between Reid’s constant rehearsals and various gigs, he also spent many hours with friends at the cheap eats restaurant Dojo’s on St. Marks Place, a posse that included Village Voice cultural writer Greg Tate, trumpeter Flip Barnes, future record producer Craig Street and artist manager Konda Mason.

Taking bites of their stir-fried veggies, soy burgers and carrot-ginger dressed salads, they talked about science fiction novels (William Gibson’s cyberpunk debut Neuromancer was the rage), Marvel comics, heady foreign films and, of course, music. “The commonality that we shared was that we all loved talking about rock music,” remembers Flip Barnes. “We were as into Led Zeppelin as we were into Coltrane.” Barnes first met Tate at Howard University in Washington, D.C., where the two became fast friends, bonding over free jazz, fat-bottomed funk and the frenzy of the Bad Brains.

A few years later, when Tate moved to New York to write music criticism for The Village Voice, it was Barnes who found him an apartment in Harlem. “At Dojo’s, we also began talking about the politics of music and the many black musicians we knew who were into playing rock, but couldn’t get gigs. I can’t remember if it was Vernon or Greg, but one of them said, ‘Maybe instead of us simply complaining about the industry, we should do something about it.’ That’s how the Black Rock Collation (B.R.C.) was born.”

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