69 Years Ago Today: Molly Hatchet's Bruce Crump Is Born

Bruce Hull Crump Jr. was born July 17, 1957, in Memphis, Tennessee, to Donna Crump, the great-grandson of longtime Memphis political boss E.H. Crump, per Wikipedia's account of his life. He grew up between Jacksonville and St. Augustine, Florida, and got his start in music the way a lot of great rock stories start: by accident. "Somebody told me about Molly Hatchet, so I snuck out one night to see them," Crump told Richmond BizSense in a 2013 interview later quoted by Ultimate Classic Rock. "Through some mutual friends I heard that their drummer was leaving, so I contacted one of the members to see if that was true, and he said, 'Yeah, we pretty much don't have a band.'" He joined in 1976 at age 20.

By his own account in a 2008 first-person piece for Modern Drummer, the lineup that stuck was guitarist Dave Hlubek, guitarist Steve Holland, bassist Banner Thomas, and Crump on drums, with singer Danny Joe Brown added after he sat in one night at a Neptune Beach club called La Vida's and, in Crump's words, "we couldn't get rid of him." Guitarist Duane Roland, who Crump and Thomas already knew from local gigs playing what Crump called "sold-out audiences" in his grandmother's living room, rounded out the band's signature triple-guitar attack.

In 1977, Lynyrd Skynyrd's Ronnie Van Zant took the still-unsigned Molly Hatchet under his wing, even letting the band cut demos at Skynyrd's own studio. Then, as Crump recounted in the same Modern Drummer piece, the band was riding back from a gig near Lynchburg, Tennessee, when their manager boarded the bus "white as a sheet" with news that the plane carrying Van Zant, Steve and Cassie Gaines, and Skynyrd's road crew had crashed. Molly Hatchet signed to Epic Records that Christmas Eve anyway, finalizing the deal, by Crump's telling, at a McDonald's in Valdosta, Georgia.

Their self-titled debut, recorded in Atlanta with producer Tom Werman in the spring of 1978, went platinum. 1979's Flirtin' with Disaster, powered by its title track, became the band's biggest seller at more than three million copies, per Ultimate Classic Rock's account of the band's run. Beatin' the Odds followed in 1980, also platinum, before 1981's Take No Prisoners barely cracked the Top 40 and the band's hitmaking years came to a close. Crump stayed on through 1982, then rejoined for a second stint from 1984 to 1991.

After Molly Hatchet, Crump played in the Canadian band Streetheart, then reunited with former bandmates in Gator Country in the mid-2000s. He memorably rejoined the current lineup of Molly Hatchet on stage for a 2004 performance in Richmond, Virginia, the city he'd come to call home. From a base in Midlothian, Virginia, he ran a home drum-instruction business, worked as a licensed real estate agent, and later formed the band Red Star Crush. At the time of his death he played in two more groups, White Rhino and China Sky.

Crump died March 16, 2015, at 57. Molly Hatchet announced the news on Facebook without stating a cause, and neither Ultimate Classic Rock nor Loudwire reported one in their contemporaneous coverage. Wikipedia separately documents a throat cancer diagnosis years before his death, without tying it directly to the cause. "This is a great loss to the Molly Hatchet family," the band wrote on Facebook. "... Rest in peace, Bruce. We will always love and remember you."

Crump's own cymbal and drumhead choices aren't documented in the kind of source-backed detail CYS requires before naming a setup, so we won't guess at a spec. What's well established is the era: late-1970s Southern rock drummers overwhelmingly reached for a bright, cutting A-family ride to sit underneath twin- and triple-guitar lines, and Zildjian's A series is the standard-bearer of that exact sound.