Playing Licks and Spinning Yarns
Remembering a musician, Colonel Bruce Hampton, who was far more influential than he was famous.
4:35 PM, May 02, 2017 | By Chris Deaton

Colonel Bruce Hampton, a four-star general of the South's jam band scene, contemporary of the Allman Brothers and Grateful Dead, influence and mentor to blues artists, occasional actor and constant character, passed away early Tuesday in Atlanta after collapsing onstage during a concert celebrating his birthday. He had turned 70 on Sunday.
By his own count, Hampton spent 53 years playing licks and spinning yarns—both were integral to his distinct persona—and creating a culture around his art. Some critics labeled him "surrealist." For evidence, he created (and often sang about) "Zambi": a philosophy he explained in both unintelligible poems and pithy sayings and applied to his music. "Without Zambi, you're nobody. But with Zambi ... you're nobody," he said in the documentary Basically Frightened: The Musical Madness of Col. Bruce Hampton, Ret.
Whatever it is, it could help describe his emphasis on feel in his songwriting and performing. "That's what music is to me, is intention. I don't know what good or bad is, you know, but intention, that's the bottom line," he recently told Atlanta public radio.
His acts included the Hampton Grease Band and Col. Bruce Hampton and the Aquarium Rescue Unit, the latter an influential group in the 1990s that associated with Blues Traveler, Widespread Panic, and others. He had a long friendship with Billy Bob Thornton, with whom he acted in the 1996 film Sling Blade, and counted artists such as blues singer Susan Tedeschi and her guitarist husband Derek Trucks, R.E.M.'s Peter Buck, and Dave Matthews among his many professional admirers. He was also a mentor to younger players who rotated in and out of his touring lineups. One of them is my cousin, Jacob, a fellow Atlantian.
I first met Hampton during one of his gigs in Memphis. Jacob alerted him in advance that a few people bearing our family name would be in the crowd that night. He reportedly was thrilled, having invented some mystique about what it was to be a Deaton. Get to know him for even 15 minutes and you'd become aware he was all about such mystiques. Before stage time, he looked at me from the opposite end of Lafayette's Music Room, about five or six rows of dark wood tables across a hardwood floor of a lighter hue. He rested his arm on the bar, let his greenish button-down drape over his jolly frame and khakis, and sized me up. This is the part where you're supposed to look behind both shoulders to check who else he possibly could have noticed—he and I hadn't been introduced, and Jacob was nowhere around. They linked up and walked over a few minutes later.
"I knew you had to be a Deaton!" Hampton proudly drawled as he grabbed a chair. He chortled in a low pitch; he is the first and only person I've encountered who modulated his laughter the way vocalists jump around octaves. It was an endearing and hilarious tic. What followed next has been chronicled by the journalists who interviewed him: Questions about numbers, history, and a key, and an effort to divine your astrological sign and what it could mean. He was impressed I told him Buchanan was America's worst-ranked president, depending on the survey. He stumped me with one about the oldest president with a living grandchild (Tyler). He missed by days on guessing I was an Aquarius. But once he knew, he said I had a gap in my two front teeth at some point during my late pre-teen years.
May any photographic evidence forever be kept private.
Hampton was a jokester and regarded by some as a savant. But he wasn't eccentric—he was simply a riot. He was friendly, generous, and utterly revered by those who knew and learned from him. He could be self-deprecating: "I'm not good enough to be humble," he cracked earlier this week. And he was grounded in the roots of his craft. He was asked before his final show to give some career highlights. He said:

There's been so many. I guess the second job I ever played, I was 16, and I had no idea what I was doing. A guitarist invited me, and I had so much fun the first night, the next 50 years I was trying to find the total center of what music was. We were playing at 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." And I said, "That's the bar." And I said, "I don't know that anybody will ever hit that bar again."