The Music and Mythocracy of Col. Bruce Hampton: A Basically True Biography

By Jerry Grillo and Chuck Leavell

Col. Bruce Hampton was a charismatic musical figure who launched and continued to influence the jam band genre over his fifty-plus years performing. Part bandleader, soul singer, storyteller, conjuror, poet, preacher, comedian, philosopher, and trickster, Col. Bruce actively sought out and dealt in the weird, wild underbelly of the American South. The Music and Mythocracy of Col. Bruce Hampton is neither a true biography in the Boswellian sense nor a work of cultural studies, although it combines elements of both. Even as biographer Jerry Grillo has investigated and pursued the facts, this life history of Col. Bruce reads like a novel—one full of amazing tales of a musical life lived on and off the road.

Grillo’s interviews with Hampton and his bandmates, family, friends, and fans paint a fascinating portrait of an artist who fostered some of the best music ever played in America. Grillo aims not so much to document and demystify the self-mythologizing performer as to explain why his fans and friends loved him so dearly. Hampton’s family history, his place in Atlanta and southeastern musical history, his significant friendships and musical relationships, and the controversies over personnel in his Hampton Grease Band over the years are all discussed. What emerges is a portrait of a P. T. Barnum of the musical world, but one who included his audience and invited them through the tent door to share his inside joke, with plenty of joy to go around.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Release date: Apr 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9780820358499

Jerry Grillo

JERRY GRILLO is a longtime journalist whose work has appeared in Georgia Trend, Atlanta Magazine, Paste Magazine, Newsday, and jambands.com, among other publications. Grillo has won numerous writing awards from the Society of Professional Journalists, the Atlanta Press Club, the Magazine Association of the Southeast and the Georgia Press Association.

Book preview

THE

MUSIC

AND

MYTHOCRACY

OF

COL. BRUCE HAMPTON

MUSIC OF THE AMERICAN SOUTH

THE

MUSIC

AND

MYTHOCRACY

OF

COL. BRUCE HAMPTON

A Basically True Biography

JERRY GRILLO

Published by the University of Georgia Press

Athens, Georgia 30602

www.ugapress.org

© 2021 by Jerry Grillo

All rights reserved

Designed by Erin Kirk

Set in Minion

Printed and bound by Sheridan Books, Inc.

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for

permanence and durability of the Committee on

Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the

Council on Library Resources.

Most University of Georgia Press titles are available from popular e-book vendors.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Grillo, Jerry, 1960– author.

Title: The music and mythocracy of Col. Bruce Hampton : a basically true biography / Jerry Grillo.

Description: Athens : The University of Georgia Press, 2021. | Series: Music of the American South | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020041537 | ISBN 9780820358482 (paperback) |

ISBN 9780820358499 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Hampton, Bruce, 1947–2017. | Singers—United States—

Biography. | Rock musicians—United States—Biography. | Jam bands—United

States. | Hampton Grease Band. | Aquarium Rescue Unit (Musical group)

Classification: LCC ML420.H125 g75 2021 | DDC 782.42166092 [B]—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020041537

For Samantha and Joe

and my best friend, Jane

CONTENTS

Foreword, by Chuck Leavell

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION. Bruce Gets His Backstage Pass

CHAPTER 1. Origin Myths and the Old Grey Goose

CHAPTER 2. Dispatches from Millbrook

CHAPTER 3. In Search of the Tonal Center

CHAPTER 4. Suckrock

CHAPTER 5. A Singular Thing

CHAPTER 6. Losing a Woman, Finding a God

CHAPTER 7. A New Ice Age

CHAPTER 8. Creating a Landslide

CHAPTER 9. Building the Band

CHAPTER 10. You’ll Be Famous

CHAPTER 11. Rise and Fall of the Greatest Band

CHAPTER 12. To Fiji and Beyond

CHAPTER 13. Baking the Cookies of an Acting Career

CHAPTER 14. Talking in Code

CHAPTER 15. Bruce: The Movie!

CHAPTER 16. Crepes for Johnny Knapp

CHAPTER 17. Planning a Party for the Uninvited

CHAPTER 18. Bruce Ascending

EPILOGUE. Outroduction

A Basically True Discography/Filmography of Col. Bruce Hampton

Notes

Bibliography

Index

FOREWORD

The first time I met Bruce Hampton, late 1970 or early 1971, we were in the offices of Capricorn Records in Macon, Georgia, and he did what he’s done to countless people over the course of his lifetime. He kind of blew my mind.

I’d been touring with Alex Taylor (James Taylor’s older brother) and recorded the album Dinnertime with him on Capricorn. I’d heard about Bruce (this is before he was known as Col. Bruce Hampton, retired or otherwise), as he already had quite the reputation as a unique if somewhat bizarre and strange performer around the Atlanta area. When we met he looked right at my face and said, April 28. That, of course, is my birthday.

I thought it was some kind of trick. This was long before you could find out anything about anyone on the internet. And that’s when I found out about his uncanny ability to look at people and guess their birthdays. If he didn’t guess it exactly, he was always very close, usually within a day or two. Another amazing thing he could do—it was amazing to me, anyway—was tell you the batting averages of so many baseball players, and throughout their careers. And their runs batted in. And just about any pitcher’s earned run average. I mean, how weird is that?

Eventually I heard his band, the Hampton Grease Band, which indeed confirmed the stories and rumors I’d heard about their performances. Bruce was sometimes known as the Frank Zappa of the South. I felt like that was a somewhat accurate description. But Bruce was even more eccentric in his way than Zappa was. I thought he was hypnotizing, intriguing, inventive, brave, bold, and fun. His performances mixed music, theater, craziness, and confusion, in a most entertaining way.

As time went on and I landed the gig with the Allman Brothers Band, I slowly got to know Bruce better. The Hampton Grease Band broke up, but Bruce kept putting together these other incredible bands that were always interesting. Eventually, I was asked by Bruce and our mutual friend and producer, Johnny Sandlin, to play on a live album with the Aquarium

Rescue Unit. Bruce was the leader, and he had these top-notch musicians: Jimmy Herring on guitar, Otiel Burbridge on bass, Jeff Sipe on drums, Count M’Butu on percussion, and this amazing mandolin player named Matt Mundy. I accepted, and it was one of the strangest and most rewarding things I’ve ever done musically.

I was given very little information about the songs before the show took place and was more or less told, Well, we’re not sure what he’s going to do, so just try to follow along. How’s that for a rehearsal? It put me on my toes like I’d never been before, and it remains one of the recordings I am proudest to be on.

Many of us that played with, worked with, or were just friends with Bruce gathered at the Fox Theatre to celebrate his seventieth birthday on May 1, 2017. This huge mix of musicians gladly and gratefully joined in for the show. Of course, as you know now, during the encore Bruce had a massive heart attack and died. Many that knew him or had followed his career as fans said it was, perhaps, a fitting way for him to go. But I know Bruce didn’t want to die. I believe he had much more that he wanted to accomplish, and he loved life.

However, I will say that there was some degree of poetry in Bruce’s exit, considering that he left this world on a stage, and a stage that he loved so much, the Fabulous Fox. It’s fitting that the profits from that show supported smaller theaters throughout Georgia, theaters that Bruce loved and admired, some of which he’d played during his more than fifty years of performing.

My friend Jerry Grillo got to know Bruce well, and I’m so glad he wrote this book about our friend. Bruce’s legacy is properly documented here in detail, and with respect, admiration, and love. I know you will enjoy this ride with one of the most interesting and influential talents ever to emerge from the South.

CHUCK LEAVELL

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book was an ensemble effort from start to finish, and I believe that credit (and blame) should be shared. For starters, none of this would have happened if it wasn’t for Tommy Deadwyler and Jeff Mosier.

Tommy used to produce live music on a community-built outdoor stage here in our heartbreakingly beautiful Northeast Georgia mountain valley. He brought Jeff’s and his bands to perform numerous times, and the Sautee Nacoochee stage became a familiar pulpit for Rev. Mosier over the years. Through Jeff, we got Col. Bruce Hampton and his bands to perform in our remote corner of the world.

Tommy is a friend and fellow schemer, and Jeff can put more spirit in the room than a marching band of ghosts. I am forever grateful to him for the love he’s shown my family—the halls of Scottish Rite Children’s Hospital still echo with the joyful noise of Ole Love Ole Tune, a Mosier original that he played at my son’s bedside—and for the stories and insights he has shared with me.

Jeff is a veteran of the Bruce musician army. These are artists who, over fifty years or so, enlisted with or collaborated with the Colonel. I reached out to many of them, and the majority were glad to share stories. Some are mentioned and quoted in this book. Some aren’t. All of them have my sincerest thanks for giving me what they can never get back—their time (but I still expect you to buy the book).

That includes one of my all-time heroes, Chuck Leavell, the founder of Sea Level, an Allman Brother, a Rolling Stone, and a superstar keyboardist, conservationist, and human being. Thank you, Chuck, for writing the fore-word to this book, and for always being so kind.

Thank you, Flournoy Holmes. When the artist who created the album cover for Eat a Peach (and most of Bruce Hampton’s albums) offers to design the cover of your first book . . . Well, let’s just say the reason Flournoy waited a second for my answer is that’s how long it took to lift my slack jaw from the floor.

Thanks to the music-folk who contributed interviews or background information or spent time talking with me. At the risk of forgetting someone, thank you James Jez Graham, Michael Rothschild, Glenn Phillips (whose memoir, Echoes, delves deep into his memories of the Hampton Grease Band), Mike Holbrook, Jerry Fields, Michael Greene, Bill Kreutzman, Neal McElroy, Karl Ratzer, Derek Trucks, Susan Tedeschi, John Bell, Dave Schools, Mike Gordon, Denny Walley, Jimmy Herring, Jeff Sipe, Matt Mundy, Oteil Burbridge, Matt Slocum, Count M’Butu, Charlie Williams, Rush Anderson, Bobby Lee Rodgers, Joseph Patrick Moore, Tyler Falcon Greenwell, Barry Richman, Scott Glazer, Wilma Wilma, Steve Lopez, Larry McDaniel, Matthew Wilson, Thomas T-Dawg Helland, Tom McNamee, Brooke Delarco, Yonrico Scott, Johnny Sandlin, Anathalee Sandlin, Hewell Chank Middleton, Marc Ribot, Ike Stubblefield, Jimmy Dormire, Evan Sarver, Rick Lollar, Joey Papa J Somerville, Ben Jernigan, Vince Herman, Drew Emmitt, Gary El Buho Gazaway, Brandon Taz Niederauer, Tyler Neal, Darren Stanley, Kevin Scott, William Barnes, Jon Marett, Ken Gregory, Tommy Dean, Al Carmichael, Steve Dukes, Darryl Rhoades, Richard Liveakos, Warren Haynes, Tinsley Ellis, Elise Witt, Billy Ratliff, Bob Fortin, John Jojo Hermann, Todd Nance, Duane Trucks, and A. J. Ghent.

I owe a happy truckload of thanks to a mighty throng of writers and photographers whose good work helped point the way and sustain the journey, particularly Doug DeLoach, Tom Patterson, James Calemine, Scott Freeman, Brenda Stepp, Jeff Calder (also one of my music heroes as lead singer, songwriter, guitarist, and cofounder of the Swimming Pool Q’s), Parke Puterbaugh, Candice Dyer, Bill Mankin, Mike Burroughs, Bill Ward, Mitchell Feldman, Phil McMullen, Chris Stigliano, Miller Francis, Steve Hurlbut, Jon Waterhouse, Dean Budnick, Steve Dollar, Russ DeVault, Alan Paul, Steve Walburn, Bo Emerson, Michael Buffalo Smith, Patrick Edmondson, Tony Paris, Lee Shook, Mark Mettler, Galadrielle Allman, and Jo Carson. And I owe a huge debt of gratitude to superlative photographers Carter Tomassi and Michael Weintrob, who donated their art for this book.

Thank you to these filmmakers: Dr. Steve Bransford at Emory University, who ran the first leg of the relay race that became Basically Frightened: The Musical Madness of Col. Bruce Hampton; the multitalented Michael Koepenick, who coproduced and codirected that movie; Tyler Russell, who directed Bruce’s last big-screen effort, Here Comes Rusty; and a fellow from Arkansas named Billy Bob Thornton, who is a musician, film actor and director, St. Louis Cardinals fan, and Academy Award–winning screenwriter.

Thanks to Jim Hampton, Ron Clinton Smith, Marvin Jackson, Jim Tate, Jonny Hibbert, and Stefan Vansant; and to Anne Silver and Janet Wilson for having coffee with me; and to Deborah Coons, Patricia Zimmaro, Doug Teper, Peter Jenkins, Bill Curry, Angela Ayers, Walter Rich, Pat Allen, Jon Davies, and anyone that I’ve accidentally left out.

Thank you, Andy Estes, for your brotherhood, artistry, mostly complete discography, and invaluable support (including the spare room upstairs). Thank you, April Swing, for working with this sow’s ear. Ron Currens, thank you for your photos, your priceless stories, and your infectious laugh. Thanks to all of the Tuesday lunch crowd, including Jim Basile, Jack North, Tom Ekwurtzel, Michael and Marlon Rhine, David Moscovitz, Unknown Vincent, and Sue the IHOP waitress. Thank you, Johnny Knapp, for pushing me to finish what I’d started. Thank you, Bill Cochran, from across the universe. And God bless Joe Zambie, the most accessible and reasonable and empathetic deity I’ve ever met. He stands where we stand.

Thank you, Bruce Hampton, for your friendship and your permission. And finally, my eternal thanks belong to Mom and Dad (Ann and Tony Grillo), and especially to my daughter (and editor supreme), Samantha; my son (and inspiration), Joe; and my wife (and best friend), Jane.

THE

MUSIC

AND

MYTHOCRACY

OF

COL. BRUCE HAMPTON

INTRODUCTION

BRUCE GETS HIS BACKSTAGE PASS

At a lunch table in a diner that never closes, in some out-of-the-way dimension where up is down, in is out, and nowhere is now here, three spirits gather to shoot the shit and consume ethereal pancakes and crepes, a habit carried over from when they were alive.

Yonrico Scott (patting his heart): Bruce, man, I just want to thank you.

Col. Bruce Hampton (stealing a turkey sausage off Yonrico’s plate, dipping it in syrup): For what?

Yonrico: For getting me the gig with Derek.

Bruce (chewing): Don’t thank me, man. You got the gig.

Johnny Knapp: Rico, don’t waste your time. He’s terrible with thank-yous and compliments. Tell me what he did.

Yonrico: I was in jail for about two months, and the day I was being released Bruce tells me, Derek Trucks needs a drummer in twelve hours. You’re getting out in eight, so you have plenty of time to get your stuff and get to the gig. It changed my life.

Johnny Knapp (who still has a high-pitched Brooklyn rasp in the afterlife): Wow! He changed your life, too?

Yonrico (nodding to Johnny, then looking at Bruce): Yeah, yeah . . . but how did you know when I was getting out of jail, Bruce? I never told you that.

Bruce (laughing maniacally, rolling his arms around each other, then raising spectral hands to the sky): Zambi!

The art of fiction is dead. Reality has strangled invention.¹

Those words (written by the late, great Red Smith on a tight daily newspaper deadline) have haunted me since May 1, 2017, when Col. Bruce Hampton—musician and mythmaker, joker and bandleader, master of the absurd—collapsed in the last few moments of the last song during the encore of his seventieth birthday celebration concert at the Fox Theatre in Atlanta. Rushed to a nearby hospital, he died around 1:00 a.m. on May 2, making more headlines in death than he ever had during a rollicking, mind-bending, and widely influential fifty-year career.

That show, Hampton 70, ended with the most surreal moment of a surreal life, and the most dramatic rock-and-roll ending in a long history of rock-and-roll drama. It was poetic and horrifying, tragic and triumphant. Art. Fiction. Reality. Here was Col. Bruce Hampton—elder statesman of the jam-band scene, provocateur, and longtime unquestioned leader of great bands stocked with musicians’ musicians—bringing forty-six hundred hearts to the apex of joy, then breaking them all to pieces in an instant.

I’ll probably die onstage, Bruce had said during an actual lunch among the living (Johnny Knapp was there) a few months before Hampton 70— one of several times I heard him say some version of this. I’ve got to die onstage, he said. I mean, it’s inevitable.

He used to talk a lot about intention, specifically regarding the playing, or performing, of music. He would say, What’s your intention, boy? And Get your butt out of your face. And Why are you here? But I don’t believe for a second that Bruce had any actual intention of dying that night, of making that kind of grim spectacle. That said, I don’t think he argued very hard with whatever force takes us when the time comes.

In the days following the concert my thoughts kept going back to Red Smith. Smith’s words here are borrowed from his lede for the column he wrote after witnessing Bobby Thomson’s dramatic home run that lifted the New York Giants from the brink of death to beat the Brooklyn Dodgers in the last inning of a three-game playoff series to win the National League pennant. Bruce, a baseball trivia nut, would have known all of that. And I imagine that he could be somewhere right now (maybe seated with kindred spirits in a transcendent diner) laughing hysterically at my dilemma: how to write his story when everybody knows the ending, which is more far-fetched than any of Bruce’s tall tales.

I was at Hampton 70 and saw what happened, and I still have a hard time believing it. Art. Fiction. Reality. But this was going to be a night to remember no matter how it ended. Ultimately, Bruce wanted to leave a lasting impression, elicit a reaction, put joy in the room—and everything was in place to accomplish that. Look at the show’s lineup, for heaven’s sake: Derek Trucks, Susan Tedeschi, Chuck Leavell, Warren Haynes, John Popper, Jimmy Herring, and Jeff Sipe; musicians from Widespread Panic, Phish, and Leftover Salmon; guitar prodigy Brandon Taz Niederauer; and Jeff Mosier, Johnny Knapp, Karl Denson, Ike Stubblefield, and Denny Walley, among others. Bruce shared the stage with Grammy winners and a Cy Young Award winner (former big-league pitcher Jake Peavy, now slinging a guitar instead of fastballs).

In Denny Walley’s long rock-and-roll career, he’d played with the two bandleaders Bruce was most often compared to: Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart (Don Van Vliet). Of the two, Denny thought Bruce was more like Zappa. It’s the way Bruce and Frank put guys together, said Denny, who grew up in Frank’s neighborhood and went to school with both Zappa and Beefheart. Like Frank, Bruce wanted musicians who knew how to express what he wanted to say musically. He had a real knack for finding exactly the right guys. Like Frank, Bruce wanted you to play like you. He didn’t want to pigeonhole you.

Denny, who at seventy-four was one of the older guys onstage (no one was older than Johnny Knapp, eighty-eight at the time), was one of Bruce’s newest collaborators. But they’d been in each other’s orbits for decades. When Denny was living in New York in the 1970s, Bruce was hanging out there for extended periods, often staying with his friend Tom McNamee, who had coproduced the Hampton Grease Band’s legendary only album for Columbia.

Bruce and I were hanging out in the Village at the same time, Denny said. "We saw the same shows, went to the same parties, probably stood five feet from each other but didn’t meet until many years later, at Smith’s Olde Bar in Atlanta.

We were talking several minutes when he blurts, ‘Aquarius.’ I said, ‘Excuse me?’ He said, ‘You’re easy. February 9 . . . no, wait . . . February 4.’ I said, ‘How’d you know my birthday?’ I’d never met the guy, never talked to him in my life. So I’m checking my pockets to see if I dropped my wallet. After that, we became real close and discovered we’d walked a lot of the same ground.

That was typical of Bruce. He walked the same ground with a lot of different people: musicians, artists, journalists, politicians, businessmen. Those connections weren’t just something he collected. They weren’t just names to drop. They were part of the Bruce Hampton galaxy, his orbit, his circle of friends, the colorful ingredients in the stew of his story.

So, how to tell the story? Get other people to do it. That’s been my modus operandi in my thirty-five years as an ink-stained wretch—talking with other people and getting them to share the stories that are uniquely theirs. Since Bruce was friendly with about 4 percent of the world’s population, the challenge was knowing when to stop hunting and gathering. There’s so much about Bruce that isn’t in this book, stuff that I never learned, as well as stuff that I did learn but couldn’t or didn’t use, some stuff you may already know. Even so, I’m confident that you will learn something new about Col. Bruce Hampton.

Anecdotally speaking, most of the people that played in Bruce’s bands considered themselves like a special unit of the music military and deemed their time with him a badge of honor. You’re nothing until you’ve been fired by Bruce Hampton, Yonrico Scott said when he was alive (Yonrico died as this manuscript was nearing completion, which is why he appears in the fact-based fantasy afterlife scene that opens this introduction).

Musicians and other people who knew Bruce, including folks who weren’t his friends or who’d fallen out with him, were my primary source material. They are the reason there is a book about Col. Bruce Hampton. If I’d relied solely on what Bruce was willing to talk about, there would be nothing remotely linear about the story ahead. This work would still feature plenty of fabulous and creative tales, but they would not always be authentic or relatable. Besides, as I first began working on this book, Bruce kept insisting, You’ve got to talk to this person, or This guy has great stories—here’s his number. Consequently, this book is as much oral history as it is anything else.

When I first proposed the idea of a biography in 2011, Bruce was very receptive. He immediately started sharing contact information for old friends and bandmates, many of whom are quoted in this book. By that time, I’d known Bruce for several years. We met at the 2007 Sautee Jamboree, a cool little two-day music festival that once lived a few miles from my house in Northeast Georgia. But I didn’t start getting to know him until 2011, when he came to our corner of the universe to visit Widespread Panic lead singer John Bell, whose wife, Laura, runs a holistic wellness center in a nearby town. Bruce just materialized that day. We all went to lunch, and the more I got to know him, the truth and the mythocracy, the more I thought, I’d love to write about this guy. When I asked his permission to write the book, he acted as if he’d been expecting the question.

I was wondering when you were going to ask, Bruce said over the phone after I’d pitched the biography idea while walking compulsive circle eights in my driveway, where the cell service is better. I know your work—you’re a good cat, he continued. I liked that he called me a cat and was flattered that he’d read the magazine stories I’d written (and that he remembered more about them than I did).

And I was surprised that no one had written a book about Bruce already. He said, Some guy tried, but it was awful, filled with crazy stories about aliens and strange flying objects. I hated it. So I assured him that I was a serious journalist and researcher, a generalist who wanted to tell the real story. Seconds into the first interview he started telling me about aliens and strange flying objects, and I’ve thought ever since, You got me, Bruce, you got me.

Bruce used to talk about being eighty or ninety, like Johnny Knapp, and still performing, at least until he dropped dead onstage. I’ve got a gun to the back of my head, he’d say. I can’t retire. This isn’t really a choice. He’d also say that he was probably supposed to be an accountant or insurance salesman, with a Volvo wagon, two and a half kids, and a white picket fence. But there was the gun and there was the stage, and one compelled Bruce to the other.

Still, dying onstage was just an abstract notion from a master of the abstract. Who took him seriously? He certainly didn’t. And then there Bruce was on May 1, doing the most serious thing in his life. When he collapsed at the feet of guitar superkid Taz Niederauer, everyone in the Fox Theatre thought it was another one of his slapstick bits, the kind of stage antic he was known for. So the band kept playing. Even after three, four minutes, they played. Keeping time and keeping track of time are not necessarily the same things.

"When you’re