GLENN PHILLIPS

by

Jeff Calder

THE LAKE MORTON REVIEW

Lakeland, Florida

Vol. 1, No. 2, July, 1975

Wooden fruit-picker ladders lay warping in the orange groves, and Glenn’s band wasn’t even plugged in. They sat on the sofa in a small Dade City room that happened the be the highest natural point in Florida, a swarm of bumblebees going at it. He led them on with, "Yeah, make it come out like Led Zeppelin—Now you got it!" Later that heated night Glenn Phillips would lead them on again, by a smelly lagoon in the strange territory of Eckerd College. The band blew through the bad PA fidelity while Glenn, a none-too-small dude, handled his guitar with a Herculean authority not unlike one of those superhero character in the comic books he’s so crazy for.

Glenn Phillips, energetic blonde wonderboy guitarist for Atlanta’s now defunct Hampton Grease Band, has his own LP, Lost at Sea on the Snowstar label. He recorded it in his tiny duplex with help from his friends and some members of the old Grease Band. In Dade City, where the band holed-up before the Eckerd College gig, Glenn said this about his latest project: "It’s not so important that you choose musicians that can cut everybody in town. You want to choose guys who work well together, want to be part of the thing, even if your choice involves making musical ability a secondary consideration. Like say, Led Zeppelin, a band I used to hate. Or the old Grease Band. You know, I always thought the Hampton Grease Band would have been a great television band."

Indeed.

The Hampton Grease Band was a marvelous project from Atlanta which, during the turn of the seventies, failed. Failed to "break nationally," that is, while their peers the Allman Brothers became a national sensation (the two had little in common). Success for the Grease Band depended largely on their priceless live displays, insuring terminal cult status of the Beefheart circa Trout Mask sort. Music to Eat, their particularly awful masterpiece, was a double LP on Columbia and an obvious tax write-off, right off. Perhaps it has been best described by Randy Pego, author of "Atlanta Esoterica and Inanity: Its Abuse and Neglect":

Like no band before or since, they had a rambunctious, complex, and often inane thing that resembled mutated cartoon strains played to a hard rock and jazzy beat. Their Columbia album Music to Eat is satirical in a more Dali-esque and indirect manner than Frank Zappa’s early work and totalized it reflects the "reality" of silliness and occasional violence imposed upon everyone: The Tyranny of Chaos.

Well, despite the masterpiece (now selling for as much as $25 in Europe), the corporate savagery, The Tyranny of Chaos, and all that, Hampton Grease Band was set on self-destruct—a vacuum cleaner sucking its own cord.

During the weekend of the concert, Glenn and girl friend Lenore [Thompson] spent a lot of time on the long Gulf piers watching fish spawn. Eckerd was treated to one of his more caustic remarks: "You know, a hundred years ago this place was nothing but sand and palm trees and water and now look. You’ve got Magic Marts, motels and bars. You’ve turned the whole area into a real showplace!" They loved him.

Glenn Phillips and the Hampton Grease Band expatriates are some of the most valuable assets the Atlanta music world will ever have. A city that lets these guys slip by deserves more than a taste of Sherman’s flaming edge.