DEATH RESURRECTED. PUNK BEFORE PUNK WAS PUNK

This Sunday's New York Times contains an article about a Detroit Band from the 1970s entitled "Death was Punk before Punk was Punk".

The band consisted of three brothers, David, Bobby and Dannis Hackney from Detroit. They began playing R&B in Detroit in the early 1970s before moving to rock and roll in a style of the Stooges and MC5, other proto-punk bands from Detroit.

A RESURRECTION AND A GENERATIONAL REVIVAL

The NYT article begins:

ON an evening in late February at a club here called the Monkey House, there was a family reunion of sorts. As the band Rough Francis roared through a set of anthemic punk rock, Bobby Hackney leaned against the bar and beamed. Three of his sons — Bobby Jr., Julian and Urian — are in Rough Francis, but his smile wasn’t just about parental pride. It was about authorship too. Most of the songs Rough Francis played were written by Bobby Sr. and his brothers David and Dannis during their days in the mid-1970s as a Detroit power trio called Death.

The group’s music has been almost completely unheard since the band stopped performing more than three decades ago. But after all the years of silence, Death’s moment has finally arrived. It comes, however, nearly a decade too late for its founder and leader, David Hackney, who died of lung cancer in 2000. “David was convinced more than any of us that we were doing something totally revolutionary,” said Bobby Sr., 52.

The New York Times contains a link to one of the Death's songs, "Politicians in my eyes."

Forgotten except by the most fervent punk rock record collectors — the band’s self-released 1976 single recently traded hands for the equivalent of $800 — Death would likely have remained lost in obscurity if not for the discovery last year of a 1974 demo tape in Bobby Sr.’s attic. Released last month by Drag City Records as “... For the Whole World to See,” Death’s newly unearthed recordings reveal a remarkable missing link between the high-energy hard rock of Detroit bands like the Stooges and MC5 from the late 1960s and early ’70s and the high-velocity assault of punk from its breakthrough years of 1976 and ’77. Death’s songs “Politicians in My Eyes,” “Keep On Knocking” and “Freakin Out” are scorching blasts of feral ur-punk, making the brothers unwitting artistic kin to their punk-pioneer contemporaries the Ramones, in New York; Rocket From the Tombs, in Cleveland; and the Saints, in Brisbane, Australia. They also preceded Bad Brains, the most celebrated African-American punk band, by almost five years.

Give the links a try. The music is unchallegned and feral. And a link to an enduring moment in the musical wasteland of 1970s Disco.

AGAIN WITH THE OLD SCHOOL IN THE DESERT OF THE REAL!

DEATH RESURRECTED. PUNK BEFORE PUNK WAS PUNK