performers

Col. Bruce Hampton

A raconteur of the highest order, there are few figures in contemporary music who have had as unique an impact and influence on "outsider" music in the South (and beyond) than Col. Bruce Hampton. With a career that spans over four decades, he has been an inimitable figurehead to legions of radical Southern aesthetes who dared to subvert conventional assumptions about what music is and can be. As lead singer of legendary avant-rock group the Hampton Grease Band in the late-1960's and early-70's, the Col. began his artistic life as an anomaly-among-anomalies in the era of psychedelic music.

Playing to the same audiences as the Allman Brothers, the Grateful Dead, Jimi Hendrix, and the original Fleetwood Mac, the Hampton Grease Band created some of the most challenging, controversial, and groundbreaking sonic excursions to ever fall under the banner of rock n' roll. Peers to the likes of Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart, over the years, the band became a cult favorite among music cognoscenti who fell in love with their surreal antics and extended improvisational jams, and were awarded the dubious distinction of having recorded the second worst-selling album in the history of Columbia Records history with the release of 1971's landmark double LP Music To Eat. After the breakup of the band in 1973, Hampton continued to forge ahead as one of the leading lights in the rock underground and has subsequently staked his claim as one of the great sonic philosophers in modern music. Leading numerous outfits over the years- including the Late Bronze Age, the Aquarium Rescue Unit, the Fiji Mariners, the Codetalkers, and the Quark Alliance- he has become a revered godfather to the current jam-band scene (who has performed with everyone from Phish to Widespread Panic) and remains a distinctive force to all who cross his path.   

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