The Col. Bruce Channel
“Aquarium Rescue Unit” is in the Band Name Hall of Fame. That effortless word collage ricocheted through his extroverted life and extro-spective songs. Col. Bruce’s way of channeling connections between sights, sounds and ideas – between art and reality – was his and his alone. His channel was extro-spective: showing you things about the world around you; threading random things together – weird words, strange sounds, manic motions. An outward-directed vortex streaming random things at you, and making them significant. That’s a wordier version of my impression the first time I saw Aquarium Rescue Unit.
You can plot Six Degrees of Col. Bruce Hampton. ARU; Widespread Panic; Phish; Blues Traveler… we know the list… They all got lasting doses of his wizardry. In a 1996 interview, Michael Houser said The Colonel influenced Widespread Panic in ways that were barely articulable by the band, but their audience could hear every night.
In some ways, the students surpassed the master. In Extro-Spective Connect-Ability, they never could. Wrote Jarnow: “He was a living, breathing weirdo that injected a stream of … absurdism into some often pretty straight musicians.” Oteil Burbridge told me Col. Bruce was “the craziest man you’ve ever met, or ever will.”
John Bell once described being transfixed the first time he watched Col. Bruce perform. “Every musician, or performer, has a door they’re trying to take you through. Well, this was just” – the singer searched for words and had none – “a very different, strange door.” What Bell said next is a spot-on example of Col. Bruce’s power of Random Connect-Ability: “He was doing things you just never expect as part of a rock and roll show. I mean, he was playing his guitar with an egg beater, and it made sense !”
His influence could fill an official Col. Bruce Hampton Library and Museum. Jarnow sees from it “an ongoing connection [of Jambands] to that kind of avant-garde otherness.”
Greg Martens, a Jamband entrepreneur, historian and modern day Cassady, put it like this to me: “If Colonel Bruce and ARU hadn’t been on the HORDE Tour in 1992, would the Allman Brothers have had Oteil as bass player, and now Dead & Company? No. Would Jazz Is Dead and Widespread Panic have Jimmy Herring? No. Would Susan Tedeschi have had Jeff Sipe play on a Grammy Award-winning album? No.”
Damn straight.
Lovelight
Abrams was in the audience for Hampton 70. He said the show was almost over and the house was “absolutely ripping – very high-energy” when it happened. Outside the Fox Theater, the crowd stood around in shock and confusion. People who had been up front told others that The Colonel threw the spotlight to Taz Niederauer; that he seemed to bow reverently to the youngster, and then he fell. Someone had video on her phone. But less was known than unknown. Everyone there knew what had happened, but not what had happened next.
After twenty minutes or so, Abrams saw a roadie sitting in a van. He walked over and asked through the window if Bruce was okay. The man was reserved, detached: “I’m not authorized to discuss it.” Then he saw one of the musicians walking away from the building looking rattled. “Walking fast – striding. And he was ashen. That’s when I knew it was bad.”
Jerry Grillo wrote in Atlanta Magazine this month, “I heard Col. Bruce Hampton say on several occasions that he’d probably die on stage, eventually – that he’d prefer to die there, actually.”
Pretty solid reason not to lament. Still, in the days after, I felt mixed emotions about how it happened. Many didn’t, but I did; my fault. On one hand, you can say with a straight face that he played his heart out. This Seeker went out jamming; surrounded by people celebrating what he found. And he wished for it! What greater reward? On the other hand, the tragedy – the heartbreak – of the moment took over. You didn’t need to be there to experience that along with those who were.
On the third hand (and that’s what it would be), who’s to say the same mysterious keenness couldn’t have interacted with this event? Randomly, perhaps. Maybe there is a third hand here. Maybe it’s like his birthday power – inexplicably possible. “It’s like a wrinkle in the Universe opened really quick and swooped him up,” said Abrams. All that had crossed my mind; probably yours, too. Maybe even, that portal is what he bowed to as he stepped through it.
“Bruce wouldn’t want us to see it as tragic.” Abrams’ voice conveyed the mixed emotions in the front of my mind, and dispelled them with a burst of laughter. I’d been focused on the gut-punch of that moment; he focused on the intensity of it. “He went out like a shooting star; like a meteor!”
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