The Great Speckled Bird Oct 13, 1969 Vol. 2 #31 pg. 11
Suck Rock
The Hampton Grease Band is one of the most important staples in Atlanta’s fast-growing youth community of identification. We know they’re great, they are always there, and sometimes they’re better than-at other times; but unlike other rock groups in the area, the Hampton Grease Band seems to be taking on a community function in which music—rock and roll music, loud music, electric music, violent music, the high energy force for change that John Sinclair has talked about—serves as a spring in which a community can periodically refresh itself, a musical fountain of youth consciousness.
The HGB consists of vocalist (and now saxophonist Bruce Hampton (Taurus), guitarists Glenn Phillips (Aries) and Harold Kelling (Leo), bassist Charlie Phillips (Libra), and drummer Ted Levine (Pisces). Usually they do a long suite-type of thing which includes many different songs drawn from different periods in the development of rock, maybe laced with a couple of campy pieces, some from a Southern hymnal, some from nowhere you’re familiar with, all placed within the context of a free-floating cosmic music inspired by the best expressions of revolutionary black music in Amerika.
At the old Catacombs two years ago, the HGB seemed to be into a Paul Butterfield/Mike Bloomfield white blues thing, with jazz overtones; Hampton was just as insane then as he is now, but more into a self-destruction bag -one night he made use of an obviously spontaneous nose-bleed to turn one set into a horrific bash of monster, crashing blues rock; another night he seemed to be going absolutely wild and threw a drum set into the audience. The Grease Band still digs rock theatrics, but now more often that not expressed in the music itself. They have incorporated into their musical interaction a vocal shout, an antiphonal, non-verbal call and response series of shouts and yelps and exhortations. Hampton now honks and screams on a saxophone, and is experimenting successfully with jazz vocal techniques introduced into American black music by Pharoah Sanders’ group (it sounds like a hip yodel). His vocals are not as uptight as they once were. Whether shouting out some Howlin’ Wolf blues, running through “Rock Around the Clock,” or telling us about “Mr. Bones,” the strain in the voice is going, and the wonderful things Hampton is doing with the yodel technique indicate that he is even more seriously fashioning a vocal relationship with his instrumental pyrotechnics of the band. Hampton’s priorities are not misplaced: his foray into the territory marked by the great black vocalisms of Amerika stems from inspiration, not exploitation.
Instrumentally, what can you say about the Hampton Grease Band except that they are one of the best rockbands anywhere. Guitarists Glenn Phillps and Harold Kelling are fantastic soloists who prove that virtuosity need not be stultifying; together they do a sort of dual battle improvisational collective onslaught of she senses that free-floats with the bass-drum rhythm in a world we don’t often visit except through chemicals or through some equally shattering experience. Charlie Phillips, bassist for the group, is one of the most exciting, firmly swinging in the field; he answers, speaks to, comments on, disagrees, attacks, undercuts, supports, embraces and becomes one with the musical gestalt through which his own instrumental voice is carried. Now the band has a new drummer, Ted Levine, who is the best one they have ever had, a powerhouse of energy that finally provides the rhythmic foundation they have always needed. Together, they are simply dynamite.
At the same time the HGB moves forward, it seems also to reach farther back into its roots. While traveling freely into the cosmic territory of Pharoah Sanders and John Coltrane, they will suddenly bring up the rear with Little Richard, or their versions of “That’ll Be The Day,” or “Walk Don’t Run.” It’s not a gimmick; they are saying that both approaches work well, they both express different phases, different levels or planes of the new. On a sunlit September Sunday in Piedmont Park, the Grease Band played what they consider to be the best thing they’ve done. The next Sunday was cloudy and rainy, and music turned into blue uniforms, tear gas, clubs and guns and blood. The following Sunday, the Hampton Grease Band, and other rock groups in the community, brought us all full circle back to free music in the park with a long, inter-connected set that seemed to sum up musically the history of our experience. They were heavily into their blues thing, their jazz thing, their basic rock thing; they made sounds drawn from the Ventures, Buddy Holly, Bill Haley, soul, some original stuff, but now they are beginning to reflect the impact of white country music in a campy version of “Wolverton Mountain,” then “San Antonio Rose,” and even in a familiar Southern hymn, “Rock of Ages.”
We don’t recognize them often enough, we don’t “think” about them because they are so much a part of us. We remember them from earlier days, the first band to play in Piedmont Park, the first electric rock band to play at the old Catacombs. We know them from student get-togethers, teeny-bopper clubs in the suburbs, the Lotus “underground” film days at the Peachtree Art Theatre, the Bird birthday party, many beautiful Piedmont Park Saturdays and Sundays—and one ugly one—followed by the Sunday of free music that we won for ourselves by defending our people, our community, from the system that builds Colony Squares it can see and destroys invisible communities of human beings it doesn’t even recognize. There is nothing in the High Mausoleum of “Art” that can approach the relationship between artistic creation and aesthetic response that the Hampton Grease Band has given to Atlanta’s youth community. One kind of art hangs up on the wall, somebody owns it. The other belongs to the people who put the system and its values up against the wall. Hail, hail rock and roll!
-miller francis Jr.