Biography
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Born
30 April 1947
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Born In
Knoxville, Knox County, Tennessee, United States
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Died
2 May 2017 (aged 70)
Bruce Hampton (born Gustov Berglund III in 1947) is a surrealist American musician and founding member of Atlanta, Georgia's avant-garde Hampton Grease Band in the late 1960s. Adopting the moniker "Colonel Bruce Hampton, Retired" and often playing a sort of dwarf guitar called a "chazoid", he later formed several other bands, including the Late Bronze Age, Aquarium Rescue Unit, Fiji Mariners, and The Codetalkers. His recent project is known as Quark Alliance.
As a member of the Hampton Grease Band, he helped record the 1971 album Music to Eat, said to have been the second-worst-selling album in Columbia Records history. Hampton and his bands were frequent participants of the seminal H.O.R.D.E. tours throughout the 1990s—the best-known is the jazz-rock outfit Aquarium Rescue Unit, which featured improvisational music all-stars Oteil Burbridge, Jimmy Herring, Rev. Jeff Mosier, Matt Mundy, and Jeff Sipe. Hampton plays a character based on himself in Billy Bob Thornton's 1996 film Sling Blade, and also appears in Mike Gordon's 2001 film Outside Out. As a founding member of The Codetalkers, he provided some of their material, though Codetalker front man and former Berklee College of Music professor Bobby Lee Rodgers provides the majority of the band's song catalogue. Basically Frightened, a film chronicling Hampton's career, is expected in 2007.
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