Creem Review by Miller Francis

Miller Francis was a regular contributor to The Great Speckled Bird on

cultural and political matters. Though Hampton Grease Band didn't fit very

neatly into The Bird's radical agenda, the paper supported them without

reservation. Miller was there from the beginning, and he was HGB's most

astute critic. Here is his excellent review which appeard in Creem.

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Music To Eat

Hampton Grease Band

(Columbia)

The music of of Atlanta's Hampton Grease Band, Music to Eat, is something

like a Rock & Roll equivalent of Warhol's Campbell Soup can. An even more

accurate metaphor would be an image from one of the most exciting "songs" on

their new Columbia album: Spray Paint - these contents under cataclysmic

pressure. The feel of the Grease Band's music is a blend of some heavy

romanticism and lyricism, present mostly in sections of instrumental blowing

and a tense, paranoiac, uptight sound and fury that reminds me more than

anything else of the moods evoked by 50's horror movies with their stark

black and white photography and their heavy load of psychic repression.

Something about the music of the Grease Band evokes the surfaces and

superficialities of the 50's decade - the plastic, the technological

paranoia, the anti-communism, Madison Ave., Eisenhower, the

military-industrial complex, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, bee-hive

hairdos, the birth of Rock & Roll, higher education, all black and white and

grey, the contents of Amerika under pressure. Something about their music

seems perpetually caught in an impasse of this 50's repression of life, as

if they never made it through that period but were traumatized to

continually relive and replay its forms and symbols. Despite the heavy

changes that have come down since the Eisenhower era, the Grease Band still

has both feet planted firmly in the Pentagon. Their Rear-View Mirror Rock

says: if we can't have what we want, we can at least (choke) try to want

what we (gasp) have...

If sources and influences will help you to turn on to a group you've never

heard before, then the Hanpton Grease Band definitely plays out of a stream

of complex music, the best of which is produced by Captain Beefheart and the

Mothers of Invention: the marriage is between elements of 50's Rock & Roll,

especially the campy R&B and flipped out Little Richard, and elements of

contemporary Black Liberation music. With the Grease Band, it's the Ventures

and Bill Haley plus electric Pharoah Sanders. This recording focuses on the

music played by two lead guitars, bass, drums, plus vocals, with occasional

horn additions - the basic form of a blowing band that has played mostly in

and around Atlanta, Georgia for almost five years. To audiences that were,

and are, half freaked out, one fourth repulsed and one-fourth spellbound.

Part of the aesthetic of the Hampton Grease Band grows out of the

half-hostile, half-delighted response they have elicited from audiences.

Most people either love them or hate them. A look at anything on this album

will show you why. "Halifax" takes up one whole side and is a brilliant,

challenging piece of word and sound. The lyrics seem lifted verbatim from

some encyclopedia entry on the Nova Scotia city. "We wish you would come to

Halifax," Bruce Hampton repeats, along with such persuasive attractions as

"six thousand and six / hundred and thirty-eight / miles of graded road And

a lot of gravel, too." Who could resist? The music played by guitarists

Harold Kelling and Glenn Phillips, however, is stunning - intricate webs of

electric guitar set in Mike Holbrook's solid, pulsing bass and drummer Jerry

Field's mixed rhythms. No way to describe it further, just listen to the

whole thing a couple of times and see if you dig it. The hard part will be

Hampton's crude vocals, yelps, shouts, and hysterical laughter.

It is the lyrics, and Hampton's presentation of them, that give most people

the most trouble when it comes to the Grease Band's music, Jerry Field sings

a song occasionally, fairly straight ("Maria" on Music to Eat), the others

add their voices on a few selections, but mostly it's Bruce Hampton, never

"singing" but doing something else with vocals so well that Zappa and

Beefheart in comparison sound like Lennon and McCartney. Madness is the

goal. Most songs contain lyrics so straight and characterless that they are

exasperating: "Spray paint keep away from flame"; "avoid breathing of

vapor"; keep out of reach of children"; "contents under pressure." All of

"Halifax." Others sound straight but sing weird: "Look at Jim Evans / Look

at his head / He's got a compass, and a rollaway bed!" In addition, there is

a while Hampton Grease Band language in which new, unheard of verbs and

nouns are tossed off casually, unknown planets are referred to, and an

entire antimythology becomes more and more obviously the source of allusion

and meaning. Thus, from "Six," almost a personal statement (or

anti-statement) of how the Grease Band looks at itself, "In the year Oted,"

when "krebe became krobe," "we were born of the fixed oil sign," arriving

"early" in order to perform a "key nutritional experiment." Sometimes this

language almost evolves into a vocalese in which Hampton parodies the

yodelling techniques of Leon Thomas. Here, the primitive, magical use of

language itself is in play, where the sound words serve to evoke, rather

than to "mean." The Hampton Grease Band has always been obsessed with

certain words which they shout during performances and space throughout

their music. Listen to "Evans," "Major Bones," "Six," and "Spray Paint," for

examples.

Because of the difficulties of their music, and the often discouraging

experiences the Hampton Grease Band has had during the years they have

played together in the south (with an occasional tour), they have almost

become enraptured by the idea of repulsing audiences; they point with pride

to the time not too long ago, when they received one of their biggest fees

to date, by an employer at an exhibit in Atlanta called Aquarius '70, NOT to

play at all. But, listening to sections of this new album, remembering

incredible performances by the band (they are essentially a live Rock

group), I often wonder if they just might not transcend the trauma that

hangs over them, and move from parody of Black Liberation music to a deep

understanding of the lifeforms from which it flows. Going from Karma to

Music to Eat is to move from the sublime to the ridiculous.

With both feet in the repressed '50's, and only a couple of toes in jail

with Angela Davis, the cry of liberation of the music of Ornette Coleman,

Sanders, Coltrane and others, often degenerates into the frustrated shrieks

and shouts of a child of the 50's when the Hampton Grease Band draws on it

for inspiration. But the dues are being paid by these musicians, the glow of

their accomplishments, while dimmed, are certainly real, and if the aerosol

paint can were ignited by a flame somewhere, and the contents under pressure

were to explode, who can tell just what kind of music will come out of that

experience?

- Miller Francis

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