"Favorite from my youth"

I went to high school with Glenn and The Grease Band in North Atlanta. As soon as we all graduated, they closed our school. I don't know if it was us, the music or what....These guys were great. I remember having a garage band at the time and hanging out with Glenn in Brookhaven. At that time, he had an original Gibson Flying V and it was totally awesome! Just last week I was listening to some old Cream (Clapton) and I vividly remember Glenn sitting in at a club at the corner of 14th Street and Peachtree in downtown Atlanta (The Catacombs) during the summer of '68 or '69 and cutting loose on Sunshine of Your Love and White Room! It was the time of Flowers, Peace, Coffee Shops, Piedmont Park and Great MUSIC! Wish Glenn and everyone from that era the best....time is moving on...from Don, now in Huntsville, AL

Artist: Glenn Phillips

Formed: 1950

Member: Hampton Grease Band

Instrumental rock guitarist Glenn Phillips grew up in New England and moved with his family to Atlanta, GA, when he was 12 in 1962. At 16, he began playing guitar, and at 17 he co-founded the Hampton Grease Band, also featuring singer Bruce Hampton and guitarist Harold Kelling, which built up a following around Atlanta, culminating in a contract with Columbia Records and the release of the double-LP Music to Eat in 1971. The Hampton Grease Band broke up in 1973, and Phillips launched his solo career with the self-made album Lost at Sea in 1975. The album attracted the attention of British disc jockey John Peel, who played it frequently on his BBC show, leading to its release on fledgling Virgin Records in the U.K. Virgin also issued Phillips' second solo album, Swim in the Wind, in 1977. But the failure of the label's American division led Phillips to return to making records independently, usually releasing them on his own Snow Star label. Living in Atlanta, he managed to support himself by renting out half of his house and doing occasional tours while working on his recordings. Dark Lights appeared in 1980, followed by Razor Pocket (1982) and St. Valentine's Day (1984). Shanachie released Live in 1985, and SST put out Elevator in 1987. Scratched by the Rabbit came out on ESD in 1990, and ESD issued the double-CD compilation Echoes 1975-85 in 1992. Phillips next released Walking Through Walls on Brendan O'Brien's Shotput label in 1996, then remained silent until the March 2003 release of Angel Sparks on Gaff. Gaff also simultaneously released Guitar Party, a collaboration with Henry Kaiser that was recorded in 1990. ~ William Ruhlmann, All Music Guide

Artist: Hampton Grease Band

Born: 1968

Styles: Prog-Rock/Art Rock, Psychedelic

Hampton Grease Band may have ultimately been a band easier to appreciate in concept than to listen to in practice. They are also, for most listeners, a band that's much more fun to read about than to hear. For a brief period, though, they were offering some of the wackiest rock ever to be found on a major label. Clearly influenced by both Zappa and Beefheart, but more grating and even less accessible to the rock underground, they took early-'70s avant-rock aesthetics near their extremes. This guaranteed an eternal cult reputation for the group but also ensured that their commercial success in their own time was virtually nil.

Hampton Grease Band began as a blues-rock-oriented outfit in the late '60s in Atlanta, where the underground rock scene was barely big enough to support them. They managed to carve a reputation at a local underground club, as well as by playing support to psychedelic/progressive acts like the Grateful Dead, Jimi Hendrix, Procol Harum, and the Allman Brothers. The group steadily developed a more original sound, emphasizing intricate, Zappa-esque guitar lines and Bruce Hampton's off-the-cuff, non-sequitur lyrics, usually shouted in a throaty, scratchy wheeze that made Beefheart sound like Pavarotti. The band often betrayed the Zappa influence in their theatrical, sometimes confrontational stage show, in which Hampton would throw chairs at the audience, or sing while standing on a pizza. They polarized audiences, to say the least; they were pelted with cups of ice at one memorable gig that found them playing to a crowd of 10,000 as the warmup act for Three Dog Night (a bill that must have been devised by Salvador Dali).

Hampton Grease Band generated enough of a reputation, though, to pique the interest of Columbia Records, whose curiosity incited Allman Brothers manager Phil Walden to sign the group. The Grease Band quickly recorded two albums worth of material that could in no way be construed as having money-making potential. Half the songs, to begin with, weighed in at around the 20-minute mark; the silvery guitar work of Glenn Phillips and Harold Kelling often took its cues from improvised jazz, while the songs lurched unpredictably between melodies and tempos, all executed with impeccable finesse by the musicians. The crowning touch was Hampton, whose amelodic rants cross-bred soapbox preachers with bleacher bums. The lyrics took the Dadaist bent of Zappa/Beefheart to more inscrutable levels, most notoriously on "Hendon," with Hampton reading many of the words off the label of a can of spray paint. Phillips's silly faux-Latin miniature "Maria" was a much more radio-friendly novelty, but Hampton Grease Band were obviously going to be a much tougher sell than the Allman Brothers.

Confronted with the tapes, Columbia reacted most unpredictably, deciding to make the band's debut (and, as it turned out, only) record a double album, Music to Eat. Legend has it that it was, at the time of its release, the second-lowest selling LP in the Columbia catalog (beaten only by a yoga record). Columbia itself didn't help matters by marketing Music to Eat as a comedy album. Shortly after its release, Hampton Grease Band began to disintegrate, with the departure of guitarist Harold Kelling. Despite a well-received show at the Fillmore East with Frank Zappa, CBS dropped the group, which then signed with Zappa's Bizarre/Straight label. It seemed like a logical combination, but nothing came of it record-wise, and the band finally broke up in 1973 when Hampton left to, ironically, unsuccessfully audition for a job as Zappa's lead vocalist.

All of the members of the quintet that recorded Music to Eat remained active in music, especially Hampton (who recorded albums with the Aquarium Rescue Unit) and Phillips (who has released nearly a dozen instrumental records, including some for the influential alternative rock indie label SST). As is so often the case with the most interesting cult bands, interest in the band actually grew in the decades after their breakup, culminating in the reisse of Music to Eat on CD in 1996 -- on Columbia, the same label that had dumped them when they supposedly sold less copies than anyone else who had ever recorded for the company. ~ Richie Unterberger, All Music Guide

For almost 40 years now, I’ve made my living as a musician. During that time, I haven’t played or recorded a single piece of music that wasn’t in some way influenced by Harold Kelling.

The first group I ever played with was the Hampton Grease Band, and when we got together in 1967, Harold was the only one of us that could actually play an instrument. At the time, he was an accomplished, experienced guitarist, while the rest of us were nothing more than rank amateurs who had no idea what we were doing. Why someone as gifted as Harold decided to play with us is beyond me, but I’m eternally grateful that he did.

Harold was also the source of the group’s bizarre sense of humor and the originator of the abstract word play that became the band’s trademark. He was the one who came up with the title for our album, Music to Eat, and he was also responsible for the inspired artwork on the cover. He was nothing less than a visionary and the living embodiment of brilliant, blinding creativity. It’s no wonder that we all looked to him for guidance, and he showed us everything from how to set our amplifiers, to how to run a rehearsal.

We used to practice in the basement of his mom’s house, and I remember one time when we were going over a song, she poked her head downstairs and told us she was going out for awhile. As soon as her car pulled off, Harold suggested we take our PA system out of the basement and put it outside on the back patio.

After we set it up, he plugged his Echoplex into it, which was a tape echo device. He started fiddling with the knobs, and when he turned up the feedback control, it began to sound like a spaceship. Then he cranked up the reverb on the PA and you’d swear it was a fleet of spaceships. Of course, none of us had actually ever heard a fleet of spaceships before, but we’d certainly seen enough movies about them to know what they were supposed to sound like, and trust me on this . . . Harold totally nailed it.

At that point, he turned the PA's volume all the way up, and you could hear it all over the neighborhood. Then he plugged a microphone into it and shouted at the top of his lungs, "PEOPLE OF EARTH, DO NOT ATTEMPT TO LEAVE YOUR HOMES OR YOU WILL BE MELTED BY THE SUN."

Understandably, this caused a bit of alarm in the neighborhood. Within 10 minutes, the place was swarming with police cars. Of course we didn’t want to get arrested, so we quickly brought the PA back into the basement.

After we shut the door behind us, I asked Harold, "What if the police figure out it was us?" He turned around and looked at me like I had just asked the stupidest question in the world. Then he said, "Look man, what are they gonna do? Send us to Siberia?"

I have many things to thank Harold for, and showing me how to run a band practice is definitely one of them.

-Glenn Phillips