Col. Bruce Hampton, Ret. - Part 2

Slightly Trashy
Offering #2 - Side B

Here’s what Mama Jules sent me:

Woodpecker.

Characteristics: You display great persistence and determination when it comes to digging deeply into situations. Not satisfied with superficialities, you probe beneath the surface to discover what lies within. You hold firmly to your position and don’t back down until you’ve accomplished your goal. With your individualistic spirit, you usually rely on your own inner guidance and experience. You like to do things in your own unique way. Because this bird’s rhythmic pecking sounds drum-like, some people with a woodpecker totem have natural rhythm and enjoy drumming.
Strengths: Determination, self-reliance, insight
Weaknesses: Stubbornness, repetitiveness
How to use this bird’s power: Call upon a woodpecker to assist you with a project that requires patience and persistence. If you want to discover a secret or find something that’s hidden, ask a woodpecker to be your guide. This bird can also help you be more independent and to follow your own path.
Symbolic meanings: A woodpecker could advise you to delve more deeply into a matter - don’t just accept what’s apparent. If you see one of these birds, whether outside or in a dream, it might also mean you need to be more diligent, or, conversely, that you need to break away from the repetitive pattern you’re in.

I just didn’t know what to do with it. I still don’t.

But I didn’t resist it.

Jake was thinking about life after baseball. After several weeks of getting to know this crew I pitched him a wild idea. I believe it was as uninformed and not thought through as telling him..

“If I were you, I’d buy up all the buildings in downtown Mobile, turn it into a music scene, spearhead a cultural renaissance and increase the value of the real estate.”

And that’s what he hired me to do.

So I quit the fire department. I walked away from it. And we started buying buildings. We opened a recording studio. We opened clubs. We started festivals. We did all kinds of things.

When people asked what I did for a living, I often said, “I kinda ran away and joined the circus.”

In the years that followed I became a bit more articulate when I described this part of my life and explained it more as an incredible real estate play. However, the facts remained - at the time I had no idea what I was doing. But.. I was laser focused on doing it.

And in the middle of all that momentum, my obsession did what it always did..

It went looking for something impossible.

Throughout his career Jake had always put together a version of charity events during spring training in Scottsdale, Arizona for veterans. One of the first things I did when joining his team was to jump in and help. I had very specific opinions about how to interface with the San Francisco music scene, because I was apparently incapable of being normal about anything.

The first thing we did was book an artist named Jackie Greene - a Bay Area musician, big baseball fan who also happened to be connected to Phil Lesh and Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead. Jackie is an amazing artist but he was also in a number of bands with these titans and founding fathers of the jam band scene.

Jake and I’s first collaboration together was truly spectacular. It not only opened my eyes to a much bigger realm of philanthropy - it opened the door to a music community I had just dreamed of being a part of.

Not long after, Jake moved back to San Francisco to start the regular season and I quickly followed and immediately made my way out to my new friend Jackie’s residency at Sweetwater Music Hall. The band was gracious enough to invite me to play with them which led to me sitting in the dressing room with Bob Weir - casually strumming guitars, talking about baseball (because of course Bob wanted to talk baseball) while I just wanted to talk about Bob.

And I remember thinking.. this is what it feels like when your private obsession turns into a public room. Not glamorous. Not perfect. Just… real. Human. Close enough to touch.

This new dynamic - me buzzing around San Francisco, Jake’s access and willingness to invite everyone he’s ever met into his world, everybody’s worlds overlapping - became the theme of a brand new journey I suddenly found myself on.

It wasn’t long before all of the brand building and reputation of Jake as a music lover led to the first ever Jake Peavy Band gig - a real band that wasn’t really a band, a cover set, a rock club in downtown San Francisco, and suddenly the circus became a vehicle.

This was also the year the Grateful Dead turned 50. And a very special thing happened. The reunion shows and in turn the ramping up of this particular culture. The relics.

Throughout all of the publicity that surrounded the reunion shows a lot of spinoff stories began developing.

Jerry Garcia died in 1995 and left behind his highly recognizable custom made, signature guitars. Some of these had been sold into auction following his death and would occasionally pop up in the hands of musicians. Being that Jake and I had a band now, I thought it only proper to see if we could possibly coax the owners of one of these iconic instruments into allowing us to use them in some of our endeavors.

And the relic I couldn’t stop thinking about was Jerry Garcia’s guitar “Tiger.”

I’d read all the lore. I knew where it was. I knew everyone said it was impossible. But just like not to be easily deterred.. I kept chipping away at it.

The story of how this came to be could be its own volume of this odyssey but eventually I was connected to a gentleman who worked with Jim Irsay - the owner of Tiger as well as a museum’s worth of rock & roll history.

I pitched a plan that was bold enough to border on delusional - we’d borrow Tiger, bring it to the Bay Area, create this whole moment around it, and return it with a story worthy of the trust.

And in a sequence of events that still didn’t feel real, they agreed.

Tiger arrived, still with the same strings on it Jerry had used the night of his final performance ever, heavy with story.

It was hard to explain what it felt like to hold something you’d put on a pedestal for years and realize.. it was a guitar. A human object. The myth became human-sized.

And I think that was always the point, even when ego wanted the myth to stay mythic.

Because ego doesn’t want human-sized.

Ego wants untouchable.

Ego wants the relic behind glass so it can keep worshipping without ever risking the disappointment of reality.

So, here we were.. a bunch of guys who had talked themselves into borrowing the most expensive guitar in the world (at that time) from the owner of the Indianapolis Colts - and through some phone calls we were invited to come meet another original member of the Grateful Dead.. Phil Lesh.

Off we went.. over the Golden Gate Bridge and up to Phil’s venue, Terrapin Crossroads, where we were welcomed in like family.

I will never forget seeing Phil come into the room and approach the guitar as he reverently picked it up and told me he’d never even held it before.

And for a second the room didn’t feel like a venue or a hang. It felt like a quiet pocket of time where everyone instinctively understood: don’t talk right now.

We were all quiet and watched as Phil had a very sentimental moment right in front of us.

If you want the quickest way to understand that weekend, it is this - everything I had treated as untouchable became incredibly human.

And when people said “don’t meet your heroes,” I always wanted to amend it..

Don’t meet your heroes unless your hero is Phil Lesh.

Somewhere in the middle of all this, I told Jake about Col. Bruce. As we were coming up with things to do with the guitar we decided to host all the members we could get in touch with of the extended family of the Grateful Dead’s orbit. I brought him a copy of the documentary, Basically Frightened, and said we needed to invite Bruce.

Jake agreed.

When I called Bruce and started explaining Tiger like it was the moon landing, Bruce dismissed basically all of it except one question:

Could he go to a baseball game?

That was Bruce in a nutshell.

You could offer him the sacred relic and he’d be thinking about the lineup card.

And that wasn’t dismissal. It was a kind of freedom.

A refusal to be recruited by the myth.

——————————————————————————————————————

So onward we went in the San Francisco Bay Area.

We kept pushing. We continued to play shows as the Jake Peavy Band. I continued to make new friends in a variety of worlds - music, art, tech and business - and everywhere we went we curated these amazing moments around the camaraderie one shares when playing music with friends.

And the thing about those moments is, they don’t announce themselves as “special” while you’re in them. They just happen. You’re busy loading gear, shaking hands, sweating through your shirt, trying not to screw up.. and then later, when you replay it in your head, you realize you were standing inside something you’ll never be able to fully explain to people who weren’t there.

The pinnacle of my time in SF came when I ambitiously booked the iconic music venue, The Fillmore and produced a tribute to Jerry Garcia.

It was a big weekend full of charity, special guests that included our friend Phil Lesh and his entire family that culminated with one of the most special moments for me personally - closing out a show with Col. Bruce joining us on “Lovelight.”

(A side note - Lovelight was Bruce’s favorite song, one that he played at every gig, and famously, the first song he had ever played in his professional career many years earlier). It only seemed appropriate to close the show with this song that had been so famously covered by the Dead.

Because “Lovelight” - when it was right - wasn’t a spotlight.

It was a room.

It was simple enough to invite everyone in, and long enough to expose who was listening and who was auditioning. It had a way of telling the truth about your intentions without ever insulting you.

The next several years of my life focused on life back in Alabama. Through all of this time on the road with Jake and the amazing events we produced I became hungry to focus the momentum into something local. I started a Thursday night residency with a young rhythm section, inviting different local guitar players each week to sit in.

It was shortly thereafter that I went to Pensacola to see my friends in the band, Widespread Panic. After the show I walked to an afterparty where a local musician named Brooks Hubbert was playing.

I’d been aware of Brooks forever. He had played with Bruce. He was otherworldly talented - intimidating, ferocious, the kind of player that made you feel your own limits.

That night we became friends immediately.

I invited him to my Thursday gig. He came, sat in, and afterwards he told me I could cancel every other guest because we were a band now.

And off we went.

We needed a name. I told him about Mama Jules calling me Woodpecker. The description. The totem stuff. Brooks latched onto it and we landed on “Yellowhammer.”

Another weird circle closed.

One night in Florida after a Bruce gig, Brooks told Bruce about Mama Jules. Bruce was curious and asked what his spirit animal was.

So we did the party trick - I took a picture, sent it to Jules, who had no idea who Bruce was.

Within an hour she replied:

The Tiger.

If your spirit animal is a tiger you are a born leader. You are passionate, independent and confident. You can be graceful and stealth all at the same time. When you walk into a room you have an intense presence. Many people probably come to you for advice. Tigers see both sides of a situation and provide insightful thoughts to help others choose the right path. It is important to have down time in a sacred place to unwind and be solitary. You have great stamina but remember if you don’t check out mentally from time to time you can ROAR like no other! Tigers like the water and water symbolizes emotions. You may be emotional at times around full and new moons or extra moody. Your intuition is even stronger during these times as well. You have much compassion, devotion and loyalty in regards to your family and workplace. You are a true success and have a lovely light inside that radiates much love.

Again - I didn’t know what to do with that. I still don’t.

But I didn’t resist it.

The gigs grew larger and larger. The visibility of what we were doing grew more and more. It was not always easy to keep the beautiful spirit in which all of this started at the forefront and I must admit at times I lost track of where I was on this particular lap in life and started to believe a little too much of my own bullshit.

And then one day the phone rang.

Col Bruce called and asked if me and Jake wanted to come play his birthday party. Of course we said we would. Bruce said he would be in touch with details and that someone would reach out soon.

The details arrived in the form of a show poster and a lineup announcement.

The Fox Theater, Atlanta, Col Bruce Hampton 70th - a lineup that looked like somebody’s fantasy football team of Southern rock.

We got emails with rehearsal schedules. We showed up the day before and I stood in a room watching people I’d admired my entire adult life going over songs like they were at a family reunion.

It was surreal. It was warm. It was human.

The night before the show we stood outside the rehearsal space while Bruce was ranting about the new Braves stadium being built outside of town.

“Ben, I gotta tell you.. I will never step foot inside that building.”

We laughed because Bruce was the biggest baseball fan in rock & roll.

Then he doubled down, dead serious, “I’m not kidding, guys. I will never go there.”

It wasn’t something that I thought too much about at the time or as we went back to the hotel. I couldn’t believe we were about to be a part of this event and it was all I could think about.

The following evening you could feel electricity in that storied old venue. Someone backstage said, “Col. Bruce Hampton has officially sold out the Fox Theater!”

Five thousand seats. A live stream. Everybody trying to act like they’d been here before - and to be honest, most of them had.

We hadn’t.

Not only Jake and I.. we brought everybody we knew. Everybody from every business we had going in Mobile, Jake’s family, Brooks - just like always we rolled in with a huge posse.

As we started to get into show mode we waited as everyone waited their turn to spend a minute with Bruce. When it was our turn we gave Bruce a baseball signed by Doc Ellis - the pitcher who had infamously thrown a no hitter while tripping on LSD - because it felt like a perfect gift for a man who didn’t drink or do drugs but loved the absurdity and the purity of an outside the box accomplishment.

He lit up. He was happy. He was present. He was human.

When the moment came for us to join the band on stage we did our songs in a complete blur.. and waited to join everyone who had performed that evening because we were invited to take the stage for the encore.

They wanted all performers back on stage for the final two songs - a Col Bruce band member alumnus and legendary drummer, Jeff Sipe led Zambi-land chaos, and then to close with Bruce’s favorite.. “Lovelight.”

As we lined up and went through the avant-garde exercise of “Zambi” (more on this later) the band started to tighten the groove. That old familiar pulse - the thing I first learned in bars and rehearsals and Hank Becker’s living room - started to take shape.

As Bruce walked out for his curtain call the crowd roared.

He walked about thirty feet on stage and took a knee near the front and pointed at a young prodigy guitar player - Brandon “Taz” Niederauer - who dove into a solo.

Bruce stayed down on one knee like he’d done a thousand times.

Except something was different.

He slumped.

He went still.

And he took his last ever breath.

At first people thought it was a bit because Bruce did bits. The band kept pulsing for several minutes because nobody wanted to break the spell.

I saw all of this from on stage and I leaned over to my dear friend Kevin Scott, who was playing bass and a long time Bruce protégé and asked if he was okay.

At first Kevin told me he was fine.

But my gut said no.

And when I saw Warren Haynes from the Allman Brothers reach down and tap him - I knew.

I ran across the stage and together with the help of some people there we carried him off stage and asked for the curtains to be closed.

And suddenly, in the biggest musical moment of my life, my other life showed up and took over.

As I was performing CPR on Bruce with limited equipment I looked up for a split second and I was staring into the faces of people I’d admired for decades.

Not heroes.

Human beings.

Terrified ones.

I stayed with him. I assisted the paramedics. I helped load him into the ambulance and then helped his wife into the front seat.

As the ambulance doors closed - doors I had closed thousands of times on thousands of strangers - but this time it was outside the Fox Theater, and it was Bruce.

Outside, hundreds of people gathered and started chanting as the ambulance pulled away..

“BRUUUUCE!”

And just like that the biggest musical moment of my life became the most surreal moment of my life.

At the hospital, they brought everyone into the family room.

Friends.. there’s no good news that is ever received in the family room in a situation like that.

I knew this.

The other people I had looked up to so much for so long did not.

I could still hear them crying as I got Brooks and we walked from Emory Hospital to the hotel where we were staying across the street from the Fox Theater.

——————————————————————————————————————

Ten years later, I was in my basement holding that magazine he had signed for me twenty years earlier.

And in that same pile, I found something I either forgot existed or wasn’t ready to understand back then - an explanation of Zambi - Bruce’s vocabulary for what he was doing to all of us.

The abolishment of ego.

The refusal of “respect” when respect became worship.

The insistence that you stop performing yourself long enough to hear what’s actually happening.

And reading it then - older, a little more traveled, a little less interested in being impressive - it hit me like a map.

Because the older I’ve gotten, the more I’ve realized ego isn’t just arrogance.

Ego is fear.

Ego is the need to be perceived correctly.

Ego is the impulse to turn every room into a stage and every moment into a referendum on who you are.

And modern life - with its endless microphones - feeds that impulse all day long.

Bruce didn’t feed it.

He applied friction to it.

He kept turning on the room light.

The Point.

Col. Bruce Hampton was proof you can be inside the room without becoming owned by the room.

You can chase what you love without turning it into a cult.

You can pursue authenticity without turning it into a brand.

You can be sentimental without being fake.

You can be slightly trashy - human, flawed, emotional, not above it - and still be true.

And the reason I wrote any of this is not to crown myself as anything.

It is to tell the truth as cleanly as I can about what it costs to stay honest in rooms that reward performance.

Next I’m going to post the Zambi definition I found - in full - with a short introduction and a follow up, because it’s the closest thing I’ve ever read to an operating manual for the exact thing Bruce did to people.

The Charge.

If you’re reading this, here’s what I want from you - and I want it in the spirit of the old process..

Pick one thing you love.

A band. A record. A film. A writer. A restaurant. A hobby. A team. A place. Anything.

And for one week, treat it like it’s 1997.

- Don’t just skim. Consume the whole artifact (front-to-back album, full film, full book).

- Find the credits. Who made it? Who played on it? Who produced it? Who engineered it?

- Pick one name you don’t recognize and follow the thread.

- Learn three details you didn’t know yesterday — not to flex, but to practice gratitude.

- Then tell me what you found… or pick your platform and tell everybody.

And while you’re doing that, notice where your ego tried to grab the wheel - the part that wanted to have an opinion before it had a relationship with the thing.

Don’t kill it. Don’t pretend it’s not there.

Just don’t let it drive.

Because ego wants a spotlight.

But “Lovelight” isn’t a spotlight.

It’s a room.

And the only way you get to stay in the room is to stop trying to be the most important thing inside it.

Next up.. The Definition of Zambi.