RST – How many Bobby Lee songs are currently in the Code Talker rotation?
CBH – We’re trying to use all of ‘em! We got about twenty of mine, and we’re learning’ all of his which number in the fifties. We’re rehearsing them every day and we’ve recorded almost all of his songs. I made him record them. I said, ‘man, you’re the best songwriter in the United States. We need all of these recorded.’ I’ve recorded 13 albums, I want all of your stuff. I’ll do one or two, maybe. But I want this album to be his album. I want to introduce the world to this guy. It’s just crazy that he’s not heard. He’s one of the best songwriters of the world right now.
RST – He uses imagery very well.
CBH – He sure does! He’s also not as oblique as I am. I like the communication in his tunes. They are just simple and beautiful, and (a word that we hasten to use in the year 2000), melodic! It seems melody left in about 1973, and went somewhere. I don’t know where it went. I just don’t hear melody in anything anymore, and he certainly has tons of it.
RST – How much do the Code Talkers improvise on stage?
CBH – There’s improvisation inside the tunes. We’re a jazz band masquerading as a rock band. We might do a solid hour of just improvisation at times, and then there might be none for an hour. It depends on the tune and the structure of the tune. They’re different every day no matter what. We try to set different tempos and change the key a lot – just keep it fresh every day. But to me, I’d be satisfied with doin’ one note and one chord. I’d never get bored. One note’s all right with me, if everybody would be into it.
RST – As long as it’s coming from the right place, right?
CBH – Right, time, space, tone, and intention is music to me. If you can “drop the brick” right, and catch the moment of “dropping the brick” then you’ve done it.
RST – I think intention is everything, there’s an intangible there that is vital to how a performance hits me. There are some nights I walk out of show, and a group has moved me, and I’m not sure why, and I wasn’t expecting the artist to have such a profound effect on me. The only thing I can point my finger to is that there must be some purity to what they’re doing.
CBH – Yeah, it’s the intention. I know groups that aren’t that good, but their intention kills me! I’d rather go see them than a “good group.” Just ‘cause they have intention. I won’t name names.
RST – I won’t put you on the spot. Let’s shift gears and go back in time. Do you have any memories of Four of Nine?
CBH – I have memories, it was thirty-seven years ago. There were six people in it, and that’s where I started in the music business. We were wild and crazy teenagers, completely insane. We drove an unmarked police car with a painting on the side of it, and it was pulling a trailer with garbage cans nailed to it. We would nail band members to the back of it and they would ride in it. It had a thousand coats of paint on it. This is pre-Beatles and pre-hippies and we wore eye patches and orange Day-Glo jackets. Nobody knew quite what to think. It was the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test years before it happened. And there was no acid involved either.
RST – Did you and the guitar player from that band conceive the Hampton Grease Band together?
CBH – More or less. He was to me the leader of it. His name is Harold Kelly. He’s the one that pulled me into this stuff. He saw me out playing basketball every day in a sport coat. It had a yellow sleeve painted. He just thought I was the weirdest guy he had ever seen. He just said, “Man you want to come sing?” And it was like asking you if you want to go do brain surgery.
RST – I’ve heard that The Grateful Dead opened for Hampton Grease Band once, is this true?
CBH – There was a show with The Allman Brothers, The Grateful Dead, and The Hampton Grease Band. I think we were all billed basically together.
RST – But you took the stage after The Dead performed, right?
CBH – Man, it’s been over 32 years, I can’t remember to be honest. We probably went on first, they were a little bit known at the time. I know there were no more than 500 people there though. It was like three bucks a head, and it went on for like 12 or 14 hours.
RST – Do you remember what the venue was?
CBH – Yeah, oh exactly, it was The Sports Arena. That was on Chester Avenue in Atlanta. Long since gone.
RST – How do you think The Hampton Grease Band would be received if it had hit the music scene today as opposed to when it did?
CBH – Very well! I think it would do very well today. It was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. People just didn’t get it.
RST – While we’re in this time period, I was wondering if I could ask your memories on a few musicians?
CBH – Sure!
RST – I’ve only been seeing shows for about twenty years. When I talk to true veterans of music who have been seeing shows for thirty or forty years so many of them comment on the intensity of Otis Redding’s performances, and they say his guitar player Johnny Jenkins.
CBH – …the greatest thing I’ve ever seen in my life – scary was the word on that. That was the shit. That was the stuff. That was it. I saw ‘em twice. Johnny Jenkins still plays once in a while; he came out and played with us (recently). He did seven songs, which is the longest he’s done in thirty years. Having him and Otis Redding together, there’s been nothing like it since. It was an energy that does not exist today. You cannot find what they did live. There’s no way to describe what it was… scary. You know Bill Graham said, “I did over three thousand acts and none were close to Otis Redding.” That’s quite a compliment, isn’t it?
RST – Oh yeah! There’s a guy who’s been a DJ in Boston for over thirty years named Charles Laquidara.
CBH – Yeah, I know him.
RST – He said that Otis Redding at Monterey was the most powerful thing he had ever seen, and this guy has seen a staggering amount of music.
CBH – Yeah, I saw Otis here in small clubs. I’ll tell you something, man, it was the scariest thing I’ve ever seen in my life. It was like, energy levels you don’t even know about. I mean, they’re not here anymore, they don’t exist. It was just like…. it was possession. I mean that room would change colors man, it was like a drug. It was a religious experience to say the least.
RST – What were the crowds like? Would it be hard to get into the shows? Did they sell out and stuff?
CBH – I was one of the only white guys there. At the time Allen Walden was managing them. There might have been five white people there, no not even that many, three maybe. I was a teenager at the time. Otis Redding and Bobby Bland would play shows together and I knew Wayne Bennett, the guitar player for Bobby. He would sneak me in. And, I guess I would also go to the City Auditorium, occasionally, I don’t even know how I got in there. It would be Otis Redding, Aretha Franklin, Albert King, Sam and Dave, Solomon Burke, and it would be three bucks to get in. There would be three thousand people in there. It was amazing, that’s all I can say. Nobody was close to Otis Redding, and Johnny Jenkins, that was it, the original group. I saw ‘em at a frat party once. It was scary, that’s all I can tell you. I saw ‘em at the Royal Peacock in Atlanta, 181 1/2 Peacock Avenue. (RST note – I guess he saw him more than twice?) Still to this day, that ranks as my top concert I’ve ever seen. That ruined my life and changed my life. That made me quit golf! (Laughter) I knew I had to do music after that day. That was it.
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