Can I boot into command line only via Kali Live w/ persistence USB?

Sorry if this is a stupid question. I'm pretty new to Kali and a little rusty when it comes to Linux in general (used Debian extensively in the past). Running 2019-1a 64bit via USB w/ persistence per the instruction on the official site. Everything was working fine for a while but now Kali simply crashes a few seconds after launching the window manager (which it does automatically).

I'm assuming this has something to do with my display drivers (laptop with AMD Radeon RX 540) so I'm trying to launch just the CLI of Kali so I can try to get the driver issues sorted.

The boot menu on the USB offers command line options but those just put me into a grub CLI which, to be completely honest, I'm not familiar with at all and doesn't seem to give me access to the operating system itself.

I feel like I'm missing something simple. Is there a way for me to prevent Kali Live from automatically running the modern equivalent of "startx" so I can try to fix my driver issues?

From the GUI, you can access the console via Ctrl-Alt-F1.

Probably something along the lines of "update-rc.d lightgdm remove" or "systemcl disable lightgdm" but I'm not 100% sure (if that's the right manager or the right command).