ATLANTA – Col. Bruce Hampton (Retired) has passed away. During the second encore Monday night (May 1st) at the Fox Theater in Atlanta, GA, the musician kneeled down beside a monitor onstage as if in homage to 14-year-old guitar prodigy Brandon Niederauer. He laid his arm over it and never got back up. The 18 musicians on stage paying tribute to him on his 70th birthday kept playing on. Nothing seemed amiss at first, as both his fans and fellow musicians had seen this familiar antic many times over the years. It happened while the large group jammed to “Turn on Your Love Light.”
Former band mate and lifetime friend Jeff Mosier said that he could “have never imagined a more joyful departure.” During the four-hour show members of his former avant-garde groups Hampton Grease Band, Aquarium Rescue Unit and The Codetalkers and musicians including Derek Trucks, Susan Tedeschi, John Popper, Oliver Wood, Dave Schools, Chuck Leavell, Niederauer and many other rock and jam band luminaries came to honor his legacy.
Hampton dubbed “the granddaddy of the jam scene” and his Grease Band’s impromptu free performances in Piedmont Park opened the door for acts including the Grateful Dead and the Allman Brothers Band to take the stage in the urban green space.
Typically downplaying his importance to the music world, he laughed once, “I’m not good enough to be humble.”
By the early 1990s, the Aquarium Rescue Unit, with its blend of progressive rock, jazz and funk, eclipsed the popularity and recognition found by the Grease Band some two decades earlier. Hampton soon became an esteemed elder statesman on the jam scene, with acolytes ranging from Widespread Panic to Blues Traveler. In 1992, Hampton and company helped create the H.O.R.D.E. Tour, the jam band answer to Lollapalooza.
“It really started with Fats Waller in the ’20’s,” he says of the jam band scene. Instead of just noodling in one key, they were actually composing every two minutes or twelve bars. They would be playing a Dixie jazz vamp, someone would hit a Bach note, and off they would go. It requires a lot of listening and sensitivity.”
While on earth, he established his surrealist world, Zambiland. “It’s our absurd religion. It’s basically built on nonsense,” he explained. “It’s creative processing. One and one is two, but what’s one?”
His uncanny memory and almost telepathic ability to zone into a person’s individuality, made him a friend to everyone he met.
Born Gustav Valentine Berglund III, on April 30 1947, he enjoyed a varied career that ranged from his progressive jazz-rock leanings to appearing in a 2014 video for “Blockbuster Night, Pt. 1” with rap act run the Jewels.
Hampton was also the subject of a documentary, “Basically Frightened: The Musical Madness of Col. Bruce Hampton, Ret.,” that premiered at the Atlanta Film Festival in March 2012. In it, actor Billy Bob Thornton referred to Hampton as “the eighth wonder of the world.”
Though born in Knoxville on April 30th, 1947, his roots in Atlanta go back to 1820 when his ancestors settled in Decatur, GA. Hampton has long been a supporter of the iconic Fox Theater, recalling his fond memories as a child at the Fox, watching movies in the early ’50’s and later seeing Elvis in 1959, during a recent interview with WABE’s Lois Reitzes. Proceeds from the show last night will benefit the Fox Theater Institute and Musicares.
During the interview, Hampton looked back to his first day as a musician at age 16. “We were playing a Georgia Tech fraternity, and there was a band with Johnny Jenkins and Jaimoe of the Allman Brothers and Otis Redding on bass, and I went ‘Oh, that’s how it’s done.’” He adds “That was the bar and for the next 53 years I’ve been trying to find the tonal center.”
Monday night, still in pursuit, surrounded by a family of fans, musicians, and the people he loved that extended far beyond the walls of the Fox stage, it welcomed him home. His soul will be enshrined in the infamous theater forever.
His family has requested privacy and more details will be published as we receive them.
