My Tribute To Col. Bruce Hampton
How do you pay tribute to your best friend, who was more your brother in spirit than physical birth could be, who was as true to you as your blood family. I met Bruce when I was fifteen after my father died, and there was a connection I’ve never known with another human being. In our 20’s people started asking us if we were brothers, and we’d say no, and then a Chinese waitress got angry at us for lying to her, and every time we were asked again we just said yes, rather than argue. There was no one else remotely like Bruce, and everybody knew it. There was nobody who could make me laugh the way Bruce did, cry laughing, and unexplained psychic things happened wherever I went with him. On a dark road one night light balls came out of the sky and hit the side of the car, and there were plenty of other unexplained events. The Universe was always laughing with and for him, and if you were down, when you left him he’d turned that around, changed your perspective, reminded you of the magic in the Spirit, that nothing was to be taken that seriously, and how hilarious life was. His standup comedy, which was like nobody’s, pulled me to the stage with him, The Theater of Embarrassment, and led me to theater and film. He said, “If you bore yourself, you bore others,” which became my first rule of writing and acting. “I don’t care about notes in music,” he said, “I want to know if you can bring a Spirit into the room!” Which was exactly what he brought wherever he went, in a way that made you giddy, made you feel like you were floating on a shining surface of light and laughter, miracles and an ecstatic kind of childlike flying joy. He lived for it, sought it, explored it, and shared it with you. Bruce knew everyone, it seemed, and the world was his adopted family. In the middle of his birthday show at the Fox, after he’d played his opening song, I texted him and said, “This is fucking crazy and great. Thanks for the great seats. You and I saw Hal Holbrook doing Mark Twain from the balcony here forty years ago, and here we are, ha ha. What a night!” and he wrote back immediately, “Why me?” It was so like him to be so loved, know so much, have so much to give, make so many people happy, but not know why he deserved all this, it was probably stranger to him than anyone. I only know I learned more from Col. Bruce Hampton than anyone in my life, laughed more with him than anyone, felt more understood, and feel as great a loss losing him as I felt losing my parents. They say, “After we grieve, the spirit returns to us,” and I know he will never leave us really, I’ll see and hear him in dreams, hear his wildly infectious laughter, and wherever there is a magic sound and light that feels like joy and love and pure Spirit, Col. Bruce will be there, playing, singing in that high pitched, soulful voice, cackling and playing with us all.
Ron Clinton Smith is a film actor, seen on “True Detective” and in “Hidden Figures,” a writer of stories, songs, poetry, screenplays, and the novel Creature Storms.
