Over the years a tremendous number of musicians have played in Bob Hate's various bands. Here's the only list we were able to find. It's surely incomplete.
Bass:
Jim Filler
Chet Hicks
Javi Silva
Chris Rudo Jake Hill Dave Sleepy Stone
Drums: Kelly Avant Dave Lemonds Camilla Harris Les Someone Damien "Poppa" Womack Richie Vasquez Travis Knepper John Rousseau (aka Johnny Lawamba) DR Johnson Joe Partridge Bill Cranford (aka Rocket Vincent) Marc Axum Jeff Someone (aka Jeff the Fat Guy) Craig Anderson Brian Brock Carl Hamm Daniel the Indian Martin McCall Mark Mutt Stone Matt Crawford Sheryl Something The Guy From Riddlyn Paul Tewksbury
Stephen Gullette
Guitars: Stephen Thomas Craig Wallace Jim Koch Andy Chiles Matt Spencer Kent Gandy (aka The Messenger) Jeff Lewis Chris Baker Hurshel Burton Devin Wickham Brandon Erwin James Hayes
Todd Coke
Singers: Mary Redmond Kirby Jo Dare Beth Bennett Julie Clark
Horns: Pete Teats Branham Keith Stone Mark Kojolkda A Trombone Guy Another trombone guy
Keyboards: Dieter Rae Leora Backer Andy Kirby
Violin: Sonja Ryberg Michelle Feldman
Some Band Names:
The Age
The Gasoline
Oliver Todd
Blue Hotel
Big Stone Cow
Eddy
The Eddy Band
Los Trens
King Hell
Nod
True Story
King Car
Kansas City
Stand Away From the Todd
Influences
Bob Dylan Bruce Springsteen Warren Zevon Rickie Lee Jones Joan Armatrading Van Morrison Johnette Napolitano John Hiatt
When the news came in the winter of 1999, it was shocking and brief. "Our hearts break tonight. We've lost our leader and friend. Bob Hate is dead."
The message, posted on a fan website, came from bassist Buck Rudolph, a member of Bob's last touring band. The outpouring of grief was immediate as fans found their way to the Dallas, Texas, compound where the beloved bandleader and songwriter had lived with his second wife, Ellen Mason.
"We just saw him last week," a young fan sobbed. "He told us to stay in school and stay off the pipe."
Born William Robert Simmons in Bossier City, Louisiana in 1958. Young Will grew up quietly with his parents who owned the Crystal Whip, a decades-famous rock club that was home to countless 70s rock and blues acts. "He was this little fat kid who hung around all the cats who came through," said Dave Felon, longtime doorman at the Whip. "He soaked it all in. Hed sit there eating ham and cheese sandwiches until it was bedtime."
When Will was 17, he started his first band, Grand Theft Otto. They played blues and southern rock at the Whip on weeknights. But in 1976 he left home to start college in Reno, Nevada. Instead of attending classes, Will began playing open mic nights and working on his own songs.
After leaving college early, Will, using the moniker Bobby Wheels, landed in Albuquerque, New Mexico. There he started a rock band called The Wheels that quickly rose to the top of the food chain for southwest regional rock bands with fat lead singers.
It was in 1985, however, that the Bob Hate saga really began. While The Wheels were stranded at a rest area near the Texas border, Chet Hix, a full-blooded Choctaw Indian, pulled alongside offering battery cables and a jump. After Hate and Hix shared a bottle of Pepsi and the band's last 15 donuts, the two knew enough about each other to talk songwriting, Los Angeles Lakers basketball, and which of the original girls on "Facts of Life" was worth going to jail over.
Within six weeks Hate and Hix had left The Wheels behind and started a new group, the Eddy band.
Most of the story after that is well chronicled. The band went nationwide in 1991. The money poured in. The boys found wives and bought houses that made MC Hammer's place look like a toolshed. A vicious on-stage argument broke the band and the partnership up and put a wedge between them in 1994.
"Bob would hate for me to say this," Hix said, "but after the breakup he came to my boat and cried like a baby. I told him to forget it. That we'd had a good run. I encouraged him to get a trade of some kind, something steady. He was always good with cables and wires."
Hix moved to Georgia where he bought nine hundred acres of land and wrote several failed screenplays before he broke through with the 2006 Oscar winning Vin Diesel vehicle "Jesus Frankenstein."
Bob continued to tour and record with a variety of bands throughout the 1990s. In his last performance, he and longtime pals Jim Koch and Dave Thompson played for an hour on a restaurant patio just across the street from the Alamo in San Antonio, Texas. They finished that night with a mesmerizing twelve minute version of the early classic, Swimming.
"It was a great night," Thompson said. "Bob was in rare form. He even let me play a solo during 'Ring of Fire.' That's how you knew you were in with Bob, he'd move out of the way long enough for people to see there was someone else up there playing. Otherwise it was just his big bald head. The rest of us might as well have been a freaking karaoke machine."
At the end of the show, Koch was left to wrap all the cable and pack the van. Hate wandered around the crowd, greeting well-wishers, carrying a $12 highball of vodka and Sprite.
"He kissed me," one fan said. "He kissed all the girls and made them cry."
And then he was gone.
In 2002, Buck Rudolph arrived at Moonguy Records in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, with a dozen unknown Bob Hate recordings. The date on them, he said, was 1998, from a series of secret sessions he had played on about 6 months before Hate's death. But as soon as Moonguy president Steven Fleming began listening to the material, doubts arose. The digital compression ratio on all of the discs was too high for pre-2000 equipment. It appeared as if these last recordings were made after his death, and the news hit fans and rock journalists like a jolt.
"Bob Hate lives, isn't that what they used to write on his headstone," Rudolph said in an interview in Slice magazine this year. "He's in me, in his fans. He's in the old songs and the new."
"In my heart I know he's gone," early Eddy drummer Dave Lemonds said. "But I like to think any minute he's going to walk in here and count 4 into Sin Crowd. I wonder if it'll happen. I wonder if we'll ever get to see that fat bastard again. "
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