- The front man of the hard rock band Helmet.
- Beyond his self-described "indulgence" for jazz, he is also a student and fan of classical music. He says his eclectic taste in music mainly only excludes pop music.
- In the early days of Helmet, he used to hang out and talk to fans after their shows. He resumed this habit in the last few years.
- Given the difficulty of defining Helmet's genre, he prefers to refer to their music as "minimalist sludge".
- He grew up in Medford, Oregon and studied music at the University of Oregon. Moved to New York City in the 1980s to study jazz guitar at The New York School of Music. He ended up living in New York for nearly 20 years before moving homes to southern California in 2002.
- Is mostly a fan of older jazz records and has been since he was young, favorites including John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, Sun Ra and Miles Davis. In his small hometown of Medford, there was no punk scene and he had disliked the rock music that was popular at the time such as Foreigner and Boston. The first rock he had been inspired by was Led Zeppelin. Later, he started also like Black Sabbath and AC/DC. Later, he had moved to New York City and happened to answer an ad for a guitarist for the Band of Susans, a position he got. He credits band member Robert Poss as broadening his music taste and exposing Hamilton to bands that had a more obvious influence on Helmet such as Gang of Four, Killing Joke, Sonic Youth and The Melvins.
- After Helmet broke up in 1998, he did some journeyman guitar work and producing. In this time he produced a solo effort by Gavin Rossdale and joined David Bowie's touring band for a while as lead guitarist. At the encouragement of Interscope Records, he reformed Helmet in 2002 but said none of the original band members would return his emails or voice mails and so he assembled a new band. Since 2006-2008, Helmet has included the same band members, therefore they are now the longest landing band lineup for Helmet.
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