Hampton Grease Band - Music To Eat

When he played live, Bruce Hampton — or rather, Colonel Bruce Hampton, as he'd decided to call himself — always lived up to his reputation as an eccentric. So when he collapsed onstage at the Fox Theater in his hometown of Atlanta, during one of the concerts put on to celebrate his seventieth birthday, nobody quite understood what had really happened, and everyone assumed it was just another one of his stunts; his own musicians kept playing for several minutes without batting an eyelid, only to realize, eventually, that no, this wasn't one of his usual tricks. It was May 1st, 2017, and the Colonel was leaving this world due to a severe heart attack. There was no massive media outcry, because the Colonel had never been an A-list artist — quite the opposite, in fact: he'd always done everything he could to stay as far away from the spotlight as possible.
He lived, in other words, proudly in the underground, loved and admired by all those who'd had the chance to hear him sing and play trumpet for the first time with the Hampton Grease Band, the group with which he'd made his debut in the early Seventies on, of all labels, Columbia, and about whose members he once said their dream was to play until they died — or rather, more than that... to "die onstage"!
But let's back up now, and take not just one step back, but many.

Born Gustav Valentine Bergland III in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, on April 30, 1947, Bruce Hampton grew up in Atlanta, Georgia, raised by a family nanny named Liza Mae Williams, who'd had the misfortune of being born a slave, but the courage not to be crushed by despair, building herself up to be as strong as a rock. It was she who, at a certain point, introduced young Bruce to gospel music, the first in a series of musical revelations that would go on to shape his imagination and inspiration. "Hearing her when I was two, three, four years old was something incredible," he would recall many years later. "She'd play Mahalia Jackson, Rosetta Tharpe, and all the greatest gospel music. I remember that music very vividly."
As he grew up, it was only natural that he'd cross paths with the earliest echoes of rock'n'roll: "In the early '50s, I got to hear a lot of stuff, and then Little Richard and Chuck Berry came along. That's when I realized I'd found something I truly loved. It was 1955 or 1956. I was a very small kid, but I remember being spellbound, because that music carried with it so much joy, chaos and rebellion. It was Eisenhower's '50s, and suddenly Little Richard showed up and I thought, 'My God!'. As far as I'm concerned, there still isn't a better rock'n'roll singer than Little Richard."

By the time he was a teenager — the early Sixties — young Bruce had gotten into the habit of sneaking into the Royal Peacock Lounge to listen to B.B. King, Otis Redding, James Brown and Albert King. At first, he'd hide under the stage, then he was allowed to just quietly hang around somewhere in the venue. Fired up with passion for that music and more, at sixteen he decided to buy his first instrument — a electric guitar, of course, a "Fender Stratocaster with no case" that a kid his own age, John Huey (yes, the very same man who would one day become managing editor of Time magazine!), had put up for sale for sixty dollars. From that moment on, setting aside his flirtation with wrestling (!), his greatest wish was to play in a real band, since sitting at home alone with those six strings held no appeal for him whatsoever.
Thanks to one of his best friends at the time, Harold Kelling, in 1963 he started tagging along with The Four Of Nine (or The IV of IX), in which Kelling played guitar. The band, who liked to haul their gear around in an old hearse, often played at high school dances, and their specialty was instrumental hits by the Ventures. Their real strength was Kelling's guitar, a Mosrite Sunburst run through a rolled and pleated Kustom amplifier, capable of producing a sound that resembled "a shimmering silver electric current crackling through the air," to borrow the words of Glenn Phillips, another great hero of this small, grand saga.
At the time, Bruce still couldn't really play much of anything, so at most he'd tag along with the band to strum something, without much conviction, especially whenever he found himself swept up by Kelling's charisma — all things considered, one of the most interesting young musicians in the Atlanta area.

As time went on, Bruce grew more confident above all with his voice and trumpet, and so, when Kelling's band broke up in 1967, the two of them, together with guitarist and saxophonist Glenn Phillips, his brother Charlie (bass), and drummer Mike Rogers, founded the first incarnation of the Hampton Grease Band. Its definitive line-up settled a few weeks later, once Charlie Phillips and Mike Rogers departed, replaced respectively by Mike Holbrook and multi-instrumentalist Jerry Fields, aka Bubba Phreon (drums, percussion, trombone), two decidedly more seasoned musicians. The band's intention, with Phillips and Kelling as its two main songwriters, was to play more or less orthodox blues-rock. In this regard, Phillips's arrival proved decisive — a truly talented musician. "The first time music exerted its influence on me was in 1956. I was six at the time, and my older brother Charlie was ten. He talked me into giving him my weekly allowance so he'd have enough money to buy records. In exchange, he promised to read me the Sunday comics every week, and even though he didn't keep his end of the bargain, he more than made up for it by giving me an invaluable musical education through his collection of 45s, which traced the birth of rock. I'd noticed that the singles lasted about three minutes, so whenever nobody else was home, I'd go into the kitchen and pretend it was a recording studio. Inspired by artists like Bo Diddley and Jerry Lee Lewis, I'd watch the big clock on the wall and, for three minutes, I'd sing my lungs out and go wild."

Discovering the guitar ("the moment I struck those strings, it was as if a door opened in my mind, which filled up with sound") gave Phillips a way to escape a brutal family reality, given both his parents' alcoholism. He wasn't drawn to any particular genre, but rather to "the emotional content of the performance." The first guitar he bought was a Telecaster, then came a Les Paul SG, and later an original '50s Gibson Flying V. In the end, though, he settled on a guitar custom-built for him by a certain Jay Rhyne, who had a reputation around Atlanta as someone with real skill at fine-tuning the electric instrument every young rocker coveted. Perhaps Phillips was playing that very guitar when Lowell George of Little Feat first saw him, later telling friends that this was, quite simply, the most extraordinary guitarist he had ever seen.

(From left to right: Harold Kelling, Jerry Fields, Mike Holbrook,
Glenn Phillips, Bruce Hampton)

Phillips himself explains the choice of the name Hampton Grease Band like this: "Harold had this particular way of talking, where he'd take words and twist them around. 'Grease' was one of the words he latched onto the most. For him, it probably had something to do with '50s rockers, even though Harold was the oldest guy in the group. He was, I don't know, five or six years older than me. Anyway, back then we used to go up to New York to hear the music we wanted to hear, since it never got played on the usual radio networks... music that was so original and revolutionary for us, coming as we did from the South, an area that wasn't part of the touring circuit. One day, with Harold, my brother Charlie and Bruce, we were walking down the streets of New York and we ran into Frank Zappa. Harold said 'Grease' to him, and Zappa played along and became his friend, and our supporter too. Somehow we got across to him our strange sort of compatibility, and he invited us into the recording studio, where part of our conversation was recorded and ended up on the album 'Lumpy Gravy'. When we got back home, we named the band Grease Band. Then we found out Joe Cocker had a band with the same name, so we added Bruce's name to make it different."
As for the word grease itself, Hampton would end up giving it a particularly absurd meaning: "It's about a concept of music. A concept of life. It means lobster eggs and brilliantine. It basically means to suck, yeah, basically to suck. It's hard to define."

At first, it wasn't easy for the Hampton Grease Band to land gigs, because down there in the South, blues-rock — even though by then, in 1968, the genre had already gone mainstream — simply wasn't in fashion. What held sway instead, as Phillips recalls, were "high school cover bands playing Top 40 radio hits." Undeterred, the guys started playing every weekend at Piedmont Park, thanks to Kelling, who one day, during an afternoon stroll, had discovered an electrical outlet in one of the park's pavilions — in short, everything he and his friends needed to plug in their instruments and let everyone know that yes, they existed too.
Show after show, the Hampton Grease Band's local reputation grew, and a few magazines began to take an interest in these strange musicians who didn't consider themselves hippies (they didn't even use drugs!), but whom the hippies had nonetheless come to appreciate, even though that music resisted easy categorization. Hampton himself, who claimed the Hampton Grease Band had arrived on Earth from Krele, a planet located "eight light years from here," still liked to say that there were only three people in Atlanta who actually understood his band's music, which he also liked to call "suckrock." Here's what he told the underground magazine "Great Speckled Bird" back in October 1969, for instance: "When we play live, usually some people wonder what the hell we're doing, because they clearly have some local psychedelic be-bop group in mind. What we're trying to do is create power. We're just trying to destroy. See, our main ambition in life, apart from growing a breast on our heads, is to die onstage, and when that happens, that's when we'll finally reach Grease. People around here are afraid of us and they don't let us play much. What they're really afraid of is that, by listening to us, they'll discover they're truly as much a part of what we're playing as we are. We want to be as honest as possible. It's total sincerity. There's no trickery, no need for showing off. The goal is complete expression, and when you achieve that fully, you won't sound like anyone else. You've got your own sound, and you just destroy."

Meanwhile, the Hampton Grease Band — made up of those whom writer Jesse Jarnow called the “first freaks of the South” — had begun writing a good deal of original material, which was honed show after show, especially during the mostly free concerts held at Piedmont Park, in the heart of Atlanta, where, in the late Sixties, the local hippie community got to see a number of weighty bands at work, chief among them Grateful Dead and Allman Brothers Band.
The band's sonic blend drew on a whole range of influences, but the family history of each individual member also carried real weight: "Like a lot of bands, we all came from somewhat dysfunctional families, which led us to create our own dysfunctional family within the context of the group," Phillips explains. "Looking back, I realize we were all trying to work out our family issues through our music. When we started out, our musical direction was heavily inspired by our heroes, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, even though we were turning the blues into something uniquely our own. Instead of sounding like Chicago's urban blues, our music was more like Atlanta's suburban blues, with a ferocity that in later years would come to be described as 'punk'. We were also influenced by the music we were exposed to through my brother Charlie's record store. At the time, most record stores and Southern rock bands were mainly interested in AM radio hits, but Charlie turned his store into Atlanta's first independent alternative record shop and filled it with underground albums, well before other stores carried them. Charlie was six months to a year ahead of the rest of the South, and his store was where many people first heard Paul Butterfield and Mike Bloomfield, the Doors (who probably released the greatest debut album of all time: it's hard to imagine a band starting out so strong), Tim Buckley, Love, the Velvet Underground (another great debut), Captain Beefheart, the Byrds (whose first four albums kept up a quality level that's still hard to believe), Sonny Boy Williamson, Howling Wolf, B.B. King, Muddy Waters, John Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders, Charles Mingus, Ravi Shankar, the Grateful Dead, and countless others."

The Hampton Grease Band's reputation was bolstered by a run of thrilling shows, full of twists and turns and, on the whole, closer to genuine happenings. "One night," Phillips recalls, "our drummer Jerry Fields stood up in the middle of a song, stopped, and started staring into space. We played the rest of the set with no drums, and Jerry stayed like that for over an hour, until everyone had left the building."
The band's moment of greatest exposure came with its appearance at the second Atlanta International Pop Festival (July 3-5, 1970), held in Byron, a hundred miles south of the Georgia capital. Phillips recalls those days like this: "Jimi Hendrix was there too, playing 'Star Spangled Banner' at midnight during his July 4th appearance, and then he died ten weeks later of a drug overdose. The heat was intense: fire trucks sprayed water on the crowd, hundreds of naked hippies lined up to cool off in a nearby stream, and out on the highway kids were jumping off a bridge that was too high into water that was too shallow. Drug use was more intense too: there was a circus tent on site called 'the OD tent', which treated hundreds of kids struggling through bad trips. Drugs were so widespread that the police simply ignored the dealers, who sold their wares however they saw fit. Some set up their trailers like hot dog stands, selling drugs out of the windows, while others just stood around holding big signs reading: 'Mescaline and Orange Sunshine $10'. There were even girls walking around with trays of drugs strapped to their necks like the cigarette girls of the Forties. The ever-growing drug use left me with the nagging feeling that time was running out for the hippie movement, though I realized my view was colored by the fact that I wasn't using. There were other signs, too, that things weren't heading in a good direction: there was a biker gang called the Outlaws riding around on their motorcycles, some with rifles strapped to their backs, and given the violence that had taken place at the Altamont Festival seven months earlier, it wasn't a comforting sight. There were also reports of bikers guarding the entrance and brandishing belts and chains at hippies trying to sneak in, though all that stopped once Alex Cooley opened the gates to let the overflow crowd in for free. Still, what was mostly there were kids who just wanted to have fun, and the Grease Band was among them. At the start of our first set, a whirlwind kicked up in front of and behind the stage, raising a mini-tornado of dust and debris. I started cutting loose on guitar, playing a 'soundtrack for the whirlwind'. Jerry joined in and started pounding away, and the others followed suit, so that we ended up greeting the audience with an absolute cacophony of noise. It was a moment that captured the spontaneity and fun of both the Grease Band and the era. We played there twice, and both days we got an incredible response and were called back for several encores."
The following August, at a sold-out Municipal Auditorium, the band opened for Fleetwood Mac, improvising for about half an hour and bringing in some thirty people doing all sorts of things on stage, like reading books, watching TV, dancing, sewing an American flag, "playing" a chainsaw, and so on.

Also taken with the Hampton Grease Band at the International Pop Festival were representatives from Columbia Records, whose enthusiasm was further stoked by the approval of the late Duane Allman (a close friend and admirer of Hampton's); once back at the New York head office, they told label president Clive Davis that this "hot new band from Atlanta" absolutely had to be signed. Duane Allman had already lobbied Phil Walden of Capricorn Records, and it was Walden himself who put Columbia in touch with the Hampton Grease Band — though not for free. Once the contract was signed, all that was left for the band was to record its debut album.
"Over Halloween weekend 1970," Phillips recalls, "we recorded three tracks with our friend and sound engineer David Baker at LeFevre Sound Studios in Atlanta: 'Halifax', 'Hendon/Spray Paint' and 'Evans'. It was all basically done live, in one take. Then we sent the tapes to Columbia, and the people who were supposed to deal with them didn't know what to make of it, since to their ears it all sounded incredibly strange. The whole album was made up of just three songs: the shortest ran over twelve minutes, and the other two were twenty minutes each. But Columbia wanted something shorter and more commercial, so they could get the record played on the radio, and so they told us to record more material so we could put out a double album, figuring that if we did, we'd have to come up with something more commercial than what we'd already sent them."
Trying to tame that unruly sonic beast ("the most outrageous band anyone here has ever had to deal with!"), the Columbia bosses summoned the band to Apostolic Studios in New York, putting them in the hands of a new producer, Tom McNamee — who, however, turned out to be a huge fan of theirs, so what came out of the new sessions was, if anything, even more esoteric!

(The Hampton Grease Band at Phil Walden's Capricorn Records studio)

Music To Eat (7 tracks; 88:38), the title of the album released on April 7, 1971, with a cover reproducing a painting made by Kelling together with his friend Espy Geissler, is a work that fuses the long improvisations of the Allman Brothers Band, the lysergic visions and taste for erratic digression of the Grateful Dead, the Dadaist and anarchic approach to blues-rock of Captain Beefheart, the lyrical and musical derision of Frank Zappa and his Mothers, and, to finish, a pinch of jazz, free jazz for preference. "On the whole," Phillips is keen to point out, "the music on this record is an honest reflection of who we were at the time, as well as of the times we'd grown up in."
Kicking things off is "Halifax", whose first section moves between clownish swagger and a measured mockery of the blues-rock body, enriched by glockenspiel digressions and then, from the sixth minute onward, by a scorching 5/4 jazz-rock jam, like Frank Zappa and his Mothers on a runaway roller coaster, awash in guitar solos (Kelling on the left channel, Phillips on the right), a solid, pulsing rhythm section, and Hampton perfectly cast as a bizarre master of ceremonies, "like John Belushi doing Joe Cocker", to use the wise phrase coined by the bard Julian Cope. "'Halifax' was a song of mine that ran twenty minutes, which the band had worked up," Phillips tells us. "Just before we recorded it, I added a few guitar and bass melodic lines that I'd then play together with Mike Holbrook. Usually, whoever wrote one of our songs would also play the main part, but here I wanted to leave that to Harold, so I could focus on my interplay with Mike. As for the lyrics, Bruce had nothing to sing, so, after getting worked up about it, I grabbed an encyclopedia open to the entry on 'Halifax' (the Canadian town and capital of Nova Scotia, ed.) and told him: 'Sing this!'. It was really a unique chemistry, because Bruce was a great, charismatic performer, and like any good performer, he loved grabbing people's attention. And we pushed him to do just that. As for the two guitars, Harold and I started feeding off each other, bringing out the best in one another, and ended up turning the music into a really elaborate affair."

Wouldn’t you like to come to Halifax
Air mass is moving eastwardly
Wouldn’t you like to come to Halifax
Air mass is moving eastwardly
The land is fertile and filled with life
We wish you would come there and spend some time
Yes, We wish you would come to Halifax
You like to spend some time there
We wish you would come to Halifax
Come and breathe some of our air
You can worship at the church of their choice, the church of your choice

When the music reaches its climax around the eighteenth minute, we hear David Baker say "let's do it again, I don't trust this tape recorder!", because the 8-track they were recording on was faulty, since only five of those channels actually worked.
"Maria", the very first song Phillips ever wrote, is a folk-country ballad in novelty-song form, played on acoustic guitars that delight us with flamenco interplay. It tells the story of Sancho, a thirteen-year-old boy who desperately desires Maria, a girl five years older than him, with whom he'll eventually lose his virginity. The woman in the title was, in fact, a teacher at the high school attended by Phillips and other members of the band. Her weakness? Sleeping with some of her students…

The following "Six", which at first evokes the Allman Brothers Band, returns to the long-form structure (19:32), moving from crackling jazz-blues-rock textures — with hit-and-run solos on trumpet (Hampton) and sax (Phillips), in the vein of the duels between Beefheart and his cousin Victor Hayden/The Mascara Snake — to pensive clearings, upping the dose of sarcastic madness and repeatedly giving way to exploratory improvisation, with free-form peaks. Right before the grand finale, nothing better than a good old country-pop romp! Wildly erratic, "Six" tells a delirious story in which veiled references to a series of very bizarre and unexplained events that happened to Hampton and Phillips on June 6, 1966 are matched with the adventures of some aliens who, hailing from the planet Zendu, where they were "born under Majodus," reach Earth "to carry out a fundamental nutritional experiment." "On the whole," Phillips recalls, "the lyrics to 'Six' have about the same philosophical depth as a sheet of cling film…"

Born on the planet Zendu
We were born under Majodus
Knowing that was true
We were the fixed oil sign
Heading for Earth
Through interstellar conveyance
We arrived early
To perform a key nutritional experiment
While running amok
We consumed meals on the hoof
With Dill’s Pipe Cleaners
Reaming our nasal passages
Reaming our nasal passages

"Evans", meanwhile, is split into two parts. The first, "Egyptian Beaver", unspools a feverish rhythm'n'blues, over which Hampton growls about "an Egyptian beaver" that "ran out into the fog"; the second, "Evans" proper, moves from a pensive improvisation, in which all the band members drift along on their respective instruments at the edge of a drowsy half-sleep, toward a new jazz-rock/sickrock/fusion apotheosis under Spanish skies, with Phillips and Kelling still at the fore, duelling down to the last electric spark, Holbrook and Fields grinding out the groove, and Hampton ranting in a neurasthenic fit about a certain Jim Evans who "has a compass/and a folding bed," ultimately summoning up Captain Beefheart as he draws from his own guts the David Thomas who would later be lord and master of Pere Ubu. Before taking its leave, the track offers up a martial flamenco progression, inspired by listening to guitarist Manitas De Plata.
"Jim Evans was a longtime friend of the band and went to the same high school as us. There's a photo inside the album sleeve where we're with some of our closest friends. There are twelve of us in all, with four of us kneeling in front. Jim Evans is kneeling on your far right."
As Jerry Fields recalls, "Evans" was one of the first tracks in which the Hampton Grease Band experimented with more complex rhythmic ideas as well, probably inspired in part by listening to "Trout Mask Replica" and the polyrhythmic experiments of the Grateful Dead's "Anthem Of The Sun": "We started playing in different time signatures at once. There are sections in 'Evans' where half the band plays in 5/4 while the other half plays in 4/4. That created a tension that would resolve every twenty bars. Everything would go crazy, and it seemed like everyone was just doing their own thing, and then suddenly we'd all land on the exact same beat at the exact same moment."
Born in the studio as a spontaneous jam between Glenn Phillips and drummer Jerry Fields, "Lawton" opens onto a dark scene, between metaphysical muezzin-like vocalizing and echoes of the Chicago school of the AACM, then moving toward an electric surge of strings. Given Phillips's love of John Coltrane, it's not out of the question that he had in mind, on this track, the sonic explorations of the great African-American saxophonist's final period.
The catchiest moment on Music To Eat is "Hey Old Lady And Bert's Song", a country-blues played with the street-corner swagger of the most unruly, sarcastic proto-punk, centered on an old, mentally ill woman who spends her time "collecting garbage all over town."

Split into three parts — "Spray Paint"/"Major Bones"/"Sewell Park" — the first eight minutes of "Hendon" (which, according to the liner notes, was recorded in a single take) show us the Hampton Grease Band still in fine form, with Bruce reciting, in his own inimitable way, the warning label on a spray paint can ("Spray paint!/ Keep away from flame (aaaah!)") and the names of some of the band's friends: Moseur, Fred Thompson, Shelton, Blaise, Whishire, etc. In the long closing "Improvisation" (a good eleven minutes of pure, unfiltered emotion), the band finally sets sail toward its own "Dark Star", with brushes rolling, bass pulses carrying Ravel's "Bolero" at their core, shards of silence shattering between strings facing off to listen to one another and outdo one another, forever poised between ecstatic rapture and a burning longing for the earth, the hostility of time, and the foothold of utopia.

Despite being one of the greatest records of its era (or maybe precisely because of that?), Music To Eat sold very, very little (some sources put it at just 500 copies in the short term), ending up, over the years, as the second-worst-selling record in the entire Columbia catalogue, beaten out — or so the story goes — only by an LP on which Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (yes, the very same one who turned the Beatles' heads!) gave yoga lessons… "They labeled it 'comedy' and filed it in record store bins alongside stuff by Don Rickles and Bill Cosby…" Phillips recalls, not failing to mention one of the record's possible "virtues" as well: "A friend of mine told me that whenever his wife wants to end a party at their house, she puts on 'Music To Eat'!"

To console themselves, the Hampton Grease Band (now with the addition of Syd Stegall, a classical pianist who'd never been in a band in his life) kept playing live, even opening for Frank Zappa at the Fillmore East in New York (June 6, 1971), a show for which critics were quick to voice their full support. Harmony among the band members, however, began to erode day by day. As Kelling would later recall, "we started heading in different directions, both musically and spiritually, and as those tensions mounted, the split became inevitable."
A few weeks later, it was Kelling who quit. Not long after, he went on to form the Starving Braineaters, who never managed to record their music, described by those lucky enough to hear it as a kind of "fusion on steroids."
The spot left vacant by Kelling was filled by Mike Greene, who wasn't a guitarist but a keyboardist and saxophonist. With this new addition, the band kept grinding out shows, pushing ever further into jazz-rock/fusion territory (fittingly, in May 1972 they opened a Mahavishnu Orchestra concert), while only reinforcing the nickname the press had pinned on them: "the strangest band in the country."
At one point, there was even talk of recording a second album for Bizarre, the label launched in 1967 by Zappa and Herb Cohen, though in the end nothing came of it, partly due to the disputes that broke out around that very time between the great high priest of the counterculture and his first manager. At that point, worn out and demoralized, and temporarily without a singer (since Hampton had left for California, where an audition awaited him — which turned out to be a bust — for a spot in Zappa's band), Phillips, Kelling and the others went their separate ways in May 1973, each heading off into solo careers of varying degrees of satisfaction and interest.

The Hampton Grease Band officially reunited only once, on June 2, 2006, at the Variety Playhouse in Little Five Points, a commercial district of Atlanta. They played the whole of "Music To Eat" plus a few rock'n'roll covers. Harold Kelling wasn't there that night, having died of a heart attack the year before. Taking his place was Bob Elsey of the Swimming Pool Q's. "It was a great night," Phillips recalls. "Everyone was really into it and put a lot of time into pulling the material together. As for tickets, they sold out. My only regret, of course, was that Harold was no longer with us. Luckily, though, we'd had the chance to play together a couple of times before he died, even if Bruce wouldn't have anything to do with it."

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