Why Did All These Incredible Musicians Think This Lunatic Was a Genius?

Colonel Bruce Hampton could allegedly guess your birthday.

Serendipitously.

Not after being told it. Not after knowing you. He could meet you and sometimes that thing would just come to him. He couldn’t explain it and he couldn’t always do it.

Fine. That's cool.

He also had multiple birth certificates.

Three or four depending on who’s keeping score, which feels like a few to many. I’ve gotten by fine with one.

Bruce also claimed he wasn’t human, he managed professional wrestlers, created his own religion of sorts, appeared in Sling Blade, and made what he claimed was the second-worst-selling record in history.

There’s shockingly way more, but we need to keep the show moving.

The strange part isn’t that Bruce merely “existed”. Music has always been phenomenal at finding work for out there guys who would otherwise be telling you about numerology at a municipal golf course.

The strange part is that Jimmy Herring thought he was a genius.

So did Oteil Burbridge.

So did Derek Trucks.

Phish kept letting him near the equipment.

These are not guys who needed help finding middle C.

So what the hell did they see?

Long before his band, Aquarium Rescue Unit, Bruce fronted the Hampton Grease Band.

At one show opening for Fleetwood Mac, Bruce came on stage with a chainsaw.

Someone allegedly determined the chainsaw was running somewhere near the key of D.

Now, this is where I really start to have questions.

Who got that assignment? Did they get a second opinion? Who knew about this plan? Was there a guy side stage who heard a running chainsaw and went, yeah, that’s D all day.

Regardless, nobody suggested shutting the thing off.

The band went to D.

Bruce took a chainsaw solo.

Now that's cash.

How much respect must you have to hop on stage with Fleetwood Mac, with a chainsaw in hand, and no one bats an eye? This guy was a lunatic.

Bruce called this sort of thing “going out”. He’d also gargle peanut butter during guitar solos and occasionally play saxophone flat on his back if you’re into that sort of thing.

It sounds less like a musical philosophy of sorts and more like a guy realizing nobody was willing to physically stop him.

But here is where things really get out of hand.

Bruce MIGHT have actually known what he was doing.

Years later he assembled Aquarium Rescue Unit.

Jimmy Herring played guitar. Oteil Burbridge played bass. Jeff Sipe played drums.

Bruce was also there.

As you all know, Herring eventually became Widespread Panic’s guitarist. Oteil became an Allman Brother and later joined Dead & Company. Sipe was a monster as well.

So Bruce had somehow collected an unreasonable amount of musical talent while operating like a man who’d been banned from at least 10 bars in town.

But they all listened to him.

That’s the part I can’t get over. Why listen to this sicko?

What the hell was Bruce going to teach Jimmy Herring about guitar?

Herring could already fucking play.

Oteil didn’t need Bass 101.

Derek Trucks met Bruce as a kid and seems to have come out of the womb knowing his way around a slide.

Bruce wasn’t teaching these guys how to play.

He was teaching them how to stop knowing how to play.

He made them improvise.

Great musicians spend their lives figuring out what works.

You practice enough and eventually your hands just know where to go. You have the lick. You know how to get yourself out of trouble. You have a sort of muscle memory.

At some point, that's like bowling with guard rails (and to Bruce, that isn’t fun).

Bruce wanted to take these guard rails away.

Make mistakes. Get uncomfortable. Listen instead of execute.

He also reportedly said “tuners are for cowards.”

I’m not prepared to endorse this nationwide. There are some brave men playing guitar at bars who desperately need to stand down.

But I get it.

A tuner gives you the answer.

As we have learned, Bruce didn’t seem interested in conventional answers at all.

He wanted great musicians out over their skis, where the stuff they’d practiced couldn’t bail them out.

Which sounds like complete bullshit at the time until you now look at the guys saying it worked.

Jimmy Herring.

Oteil Burbridge.

Derek Trucks.

At some point you have to give the old man the floor.

It also explains why Bruce fit so naturally into the early jam scene.

Some may say that he IS the early jam scene.

Aquarium Rescue Unit ran around with Phish, Panic and the rest of that world.

At one show, Fishman sang “Wind Beneath My Wings” to Bruce.

Bruce read a newspaper.

No huge point here. Just a killer move by Bruce.

Then Phish’s 1996 Halloween show rolls around and Bruce joins them for “The Overload.”

His instrument was a jackhammer.

Trey had a saw. Mike Gordon had a drill. Fishman had a vacuum.

Finally, a union shop.

At this point, the chainsaw from 20 years earlier starts looking less like an isolated incident and more like company policy for Bruce & co.

Maybe Bruce was full of shit.

Very possible?

Maybe the birthdays were bullshit. Maybe being an extraterrestrial was bullshit. Maybe half the operation was held together by bullshit.

But it wasn’t exactly lucrative bullshit.

Bruce once estimated that he made around $28,000 from music during the entire 1980s.

Not per year.

$28,000 for the entire decade.

Most guys would’ve mailed it in around ’84 and gotten into literally anything else to provide a little stability.

Bruce stayed on the horse.

And somehow, the musicians around him kept getting better.

In 2017, a lot of them came back to Atlanta for Bruce’s 70th birthday.

Hampton 70 at the Fox Theatre.

The lineup looked like somebody had subpoenaed the jam-band scene.

And really, that’s the best evidence for this whole thing.

Everybody showed up.

Near the end of the show they played “Turn On Your Lovelight.”

Bruce collapsed onstage.

For a moment, people weren’t sure if it was real.

Of course they weren’t.

This was a guy who had spent his entire life making that question difficult to answer.

A man who once heard a chainsaw in D and decided to get involved.

Bruce Hampton falling down during his own birthday concert was still well within the established parameters that he had set.

But this time it wasn’t a bit.

He actually died.

Maybe that’s what all of those musicians understood.

Great musicians spend thousands of hours eliminating the uncertainty.

Bruce kept putting it back.

Was that note wrong?

Does anyone know what comes next?

Do you?

No?

Money.

Just how he would have wanted it.

Maybe all Bruce Hampton ever did was get great musicians a little off course and see if they could find their way back.

Turns out they always could.