Hampton Grease Band - Evans

underrrated bands ... there are, and will continue to be, bands that deserved to be known, and recognized for their albums.
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.

Hampton Grease Band's only album, now reissued as a double CD, is a one-of-a-kind item, drawing upon jazz, progressive/psychedelic guitar rock, and a generally surrealist bent to back Bruce Hampton's idiot-savant ravings. Comparisons with Zappa and Beefheart are really inevitable, though Hampton Grease Band really weren't on the level of those two fellow weirdos.
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 to 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 warm-up act for Three Dog Night (a bill that must have been devised by Salvador Dali).
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.