COL. BRUCE HAMPTON
TEN QUESTIONS WITH SOUL, GREASE & FRANK ZAPPA by Michael Buffalo Smith
Col. Bruce Hampton is an enigma wrapped in a riddle. He’s an inspiration, a mentor and a rock star. He can tell you your sign, and sometimes even your exact birth date. His name often comes up in discussions of Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, and parallel uni- verses. We recently spoke with Col. Bruce by way of the Bat Phone, as he was driving through the NASCAR-like traffic around At- lanta.
Where were you born, Colonel? Well, my landing spot was Oak Ridge, Ten- nessee, in a nuclear power plant. I was born with four birth certificates around the time of the Roswell incident. I mean, one and one is two, but what’s one?
Exactly. Who were your earliest musi- cal influences? The wind, the air, the water, and Little Richard and Sun Ra - and Bobby Bland and B.B. King. Oh, and Hank Williams, Sr. And there’s 300 others that are tied for second.
You grew up in Atlanta. A buddy of mine told me once that you used to
sneak into the Royal Peacock Lounge to see folks like Otis Redding and B.B. King. Tell me about that. Oh wow. Everybody. Jackie Wilson. I missed Sam Cooke by about a week. I was about 15. Let me tell you how the world has changed. I would sneak out at about 11:30 at night, my parents never knew it. And I would get on my moped with no helmet and drive about five miles. I’d park in front, and the doorman would sneak me in. I’d hide under the stage, and eventually I’d work my way to the side of the stage without anybody seeing me. So I went to college and studied Otis Redding, Al- bert King, B.B. King and Freddie King ... John Lee Hooker, Jimmy Reed, Bobby Bland- I got to see the greatest music ever made. And back then they had a thing called tone and ur- gency. Which was amazing, but is gone today. There was a real urgency that will probably never be heard again, and I got to hear the richest music ever.
I know what you mean by tone, but what do you mean when you say ur- gency? I mean, they meant every dime of it. The bass player, the guitar player- there were no atti- tudes. They meant it. They meant it like they never meant it before. And the essence was
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