Lord Larehip

Back in 1971, three brothers in Detroit decided to make their own rock band. They were very inner city--nothing sophisticated about them. They were David Hackney (guitar), Bobby Hackney (bass, vocal) and Dannis Hackney (drums)--yes, Dannis.

They grew up in true Detroit fashion in the 60s the way we all do around these here parts--listening to CKLW and Keener radio. Their mother let them transform one tiny room in the upstairs into their music room with drums in one corner, bass in another and guitar in another. She said they could practice from 3-6 but after that it had to stop.

Although we tend to stereotype black people as only listening to black artists and all, their father--a minister--made them watch the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show. Bobby said when he saw Paul playing bass and singing, he knew that's what he wanted to do. Dave took a shine to John's playing and singing and Dannis to Ringo's drumming.

So they formed a band. They liked funk too and listened to all the Motown hits. One thing they liked about CKLW is that they played everything going on in the rock and pop scene. All us Detroiters remember CKLW--the Big 8. Their mother came into some money and enabled them to buy instruments and good ones! Dave bought a Rickenbacker guitar, Bobby bought a P-bass and Dannis got a set of Slingerland drums. They played a combo of funk and rock--not being sure what their identity was.

Then when the Who came to Detroit, Dave went to see them and was turned on by their energy and wanted to go into straight hard rock. They also liked Alice Cooper for his theatrics onstage. Dave said if he could play chords like Townsend and leads like Hendrix, he'd be the greatest rock guitarist ever.

Dave was the prime mover. He led the band, wrote most of the songs and named them. In 1974, he decided to call the band Death. Dave was an inner city philosopher. He said death was the only reality and life was a waiting room for death. He got them into a recording studio--United Sound (THE recording studio of Detroit in those days) and they cut a slew of songs.

The heads of the studio had never heard anything quite like it and thought it might have hit potential but...maybe they needed to change their name. Dave said no, the name of the band is Death and that's that. So they pedaled the demos around and Columbia was interested. But Clive Davis would only offer them a contract if they changed their name but Dave said no. The name of the band is Death. The deal fell through and Dave took the master tapes from United Sound and stored them away.

Eventually, the Hackney Bros. left Detroit and went to New England. Dave tried to tack up Death flyers everywhere but the cops tore them down thinking it was a gang thing. The band became a Christian rock band called Fourth Movement (named by Dave again). It was slagged by reviewers as too preachy. Dave had enough and split back to Detroit with a wife in tow.

He still continued to write songs and record. The other two played as a bass and drum duo waiting for Dave to come back but after a while realized it wasn't going to happen so they joined up with a couple of other guys and formed Lamb's Bread--a reggae band. Dave would go back out to Vermont to visit and to attend one of the brother's weddings and filmed it.

He told them before he left for home that they were not going to see him again. He said that they would make it in music but he would not live to see it. He gave one of them the master tapes of Death and told him to hold onto them because one day the world would ask for them. Both brothers thought he was crazy for talking like that. Dave returned to Detroit and died of lung cancer a short time later (he had been a heavy smoker).

The tapes languished in an attic for over three decades when one day, one of Bobby's three sons. a musician and punk rocker, had a girlfriend who hung out with DJs who played obscure records at parties and she was crazy about this one released in '76 (but recorded in '74) by a band called Death. When he finally heard it, he heard his father's unmistakable voice. He called his brothers and told them about the single and they--all reggae and punk rock lovers--became very excited. One of them called his father up and asked if he had ever played in a band called Death and released a single called "Politicians in My Eyes." Bobby was stunned. Out of nowhere, one of his songs came across the old single that he thought had long ago disappeared. It brought back painful memories of the brother he had lost and he said that yes, he and Uncle Dannis and Uncle Dave had recorded that in Detroit in the 70s. "WHY DIDN'T YOU TELL ME ABOUT THIS?" his son yelled. Punk rockers and DJs have listening to it for years and never knew anything about the band.

It turns out that one of the first people in the punk movement to acquire it was Jello Biafra who played it for other people who also loved it. It was so rare that one punker who was also collector of punk memorabilia bought a copy on ebay for $800!! The son asked his father if he wouldn't happen to know where the tapes were because if there were enough songs to make an album, there were these underground records people who wanted to press a full Death album--35 years after the fact. Bobby went to the attic, not believing that he would ever do it and dug out the tapes and handed them over. In 2009, the Death album was finally released.

I learned all this by watching a documentary of the band. It interviews with Henry Rollins, Kid Rock, a guy from the Dirt Bombs, Joey Ramone's brother, Alice Cooper. Credits also mention Wayne Kramer, Jack White and like that. None could believe the stuff escaped notice for all these years. It was punk before there was a true New York scene, before there was even a Ramones.

The thing is, Death was totally off on its own trip. There was no real punk scene and they weren't trying to found one. They simply loved rock and roll and were trying to create the best high-energy rock they could. Their stuff was so radical because people criticized them for not playing funky like black guys are supposed to and for their morbid name. The more they criticized, the more Dave refused to listen and inspired his brothers to play louder and heavier and wilder.

Bobby and Dannis admit that without Dave, there would not have been a Death and that they would have changed their name to get a recording contract and that they argued with Dave about that but they admit now that Dave was true to his art and never wavered and they respect him more than ever realizing how he knew that someday the world would beat a path to their door and say, "Hand over them tapes!"

Dave recorded a single called "Rough Francis" that was a nickname he had. Today Bobby's sons play in a band called Rough Francis and always play a few Death tunes at every show. Meanwhile, Death has reformed with a new guitarist and are also performing and making a new record after 35 years. what amazes is that many of the guitar riffs became standard in punk and hardcore before most of those bands knew anything about Death.

It only feeds my conviction that punk started in Detroit.

"Politicians in My Eyes":

Death - Politicians in my eyes - YouTube

The full album:

Death - ...For The Whole World To See (Full Album) - YouTube

Mondo Bungle

Definitely top 5 all black punk bands. Behind Bad Brains and in front of Pure Hell.

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Lord Larehip

Except they preceded them. They preceded pretty much every punk band other than the Stooges and MC5. Dave probably listened to that stuff too because he told his brothers that REAL rock stuff they never play on the radio. FM was only getting started at that time.

The opening riff on the full album is virtually identical to Fear's "I Don't Care About You." This stuff was absolutely prophetic.

Engine

What are the other two?

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Like an arrow,
I was only passing through.

Screen13

Great stuff! Certainly up there with The 5's High Time and The Stooges Funhouse when it comes to solid Advanced High Energy Rock from Detroit in the Early-Mid 70's that led to Punk - the anger in the streets from the Summer of '67's riots and the short lived revolutionary music scene of '68-9 was still within a few adventurous musicians. The saddest thing was that this was seriously in the Post-Grande era where the bar bands, Arena Rock that was the business, and boogie bands were all around and FM in the SE MI and NW OH areas, sans WABX and WWWW and maybe a couple more if I missed, were following the FM Rock ratings lead of WRIF (which I think started in 1971 - owned by the ABC network) while AM already moved into an MOR dump was reflective of that business move - WKNR-AM's final year I think in 71-2 with it's short lived FM side was gone. Too late for "the party", but seriously way ahead of the time for Punk - I can seriously hear them as the precursor for Bad Brains as you can hear that killer vocal delivery forcing you to listen and pay attention. If things would have been right in the heart of '69, they would have been heard right away, but as things usually go we know that story all too well.

The single was certainly one of those which attracted the few seriously in the search and in the know.

Lord Larehip

The Grande Ballroom closed in '72. That was owned by Russ Gibb who also owned Keener radio. The Grande was the MC5's home venue. They were considered the house band. I went to the Grande once but the 5 were not playing that night. I saw Pentangle and someone else. Gibb was very in tight with the MC5 and John Sinclair and all those folks.

W4 was not that progressive until about '72 and they were never as progressive as ABX was in the '69-'71 era. ABX went downhill and became a standard classic rock station by the mid 70s although some of the old DJs were still there like Jerry Lubin and Harvey O. I remember listening to ABX in late '69 or early '70. That was when I first heard King Crimson, John Coltrane, Taj Mahal, White Noise, Eddie Harris, Pharoah, Arthur Brown, Graham Bond, Amon Duul, Beefheart, Quicksilver. Totally changed my outlook on music and life. I was 11 then and when I turned 12, I used my paper route money to buy these records and I knew I had to smoke pot. I just asked around and a neighborhood guy who was a friend of my older brother (who was a folk-singing college antiwar radical) hooked me up with this really good dope and also gave me LSD and mescaline and I would listen to all that stuff f-ucked out of my mind on psychotropics and having religious visions and psychedelic experiences coming out my ass.

Meanwhile, CKLW slid more and more into "adult rock" which was kind of an AM version of WNIC--a station I hate with every fiber of my being. Eventually, it went over to talk radio. Today there is AM 580 CKWW broadcasting from the old Big 8 studio in Windsor. They are an oldies station with the identical format of CKLW but without the shlocky DJ Top 40 voices (although some of them are still same DJs that used to do the CKLW gig). They stream over the internet if you want to hear them. That was the Detroit-area rock radio of the 60s and early 70s until FM snatched the market away. Now, it all sounds like s-hit. I listen to satellite these days.

Detroit also had a counter-culture thing in the late 60s with the Plum Street scene. There was also a counter-culture store on Gratiot called the Plum Pit. I think they were connected to the Plum Street hippies but I've never known for sure. Actually, the Plum Pit is still there and still open. All these years and I've never been in the place. But, yeah, Death would have gotten noticed playing for the Plum Street folks. There wasn't much available to them from '74 on.

Well, there was the Trading Post. It was a headshop on Gratiot about 3 or 4 miles from the Plum Pit. I used buy my smoking accessories and Zap comix there. Back then, you could score just about any drug in the parking lot. They started up a little venue there and I caught the original New York Dolls there and Iggy--of course, he played everywhere in the Detroit area. I think BTO's very first show in Detroit was there but maybe I'm wrong. I thought I heard an ad on the radio for BTO playing at the Trading Post--most people had no idea who they were at that time. It didn't last long, though. Death could have had a shot playing there but it might have closed down by then.

Psy-Fi

Interesting to find out about the Lambsbread connection to the band. I had almost forgotten about Lambsbread. I saw them once around 1987, at The Western Front in Cambridge, MA. I wasn't much of a reggae fan then, but the woman I was dating at the time wanted to see them one night, so we went to the show. I liked them enough to buy their debut album at the show, and still have it, though I probably haven't listened to it in 25 years. One thing that stands out about that evening was the amount of weed and hashish being smoked openly inside the club. I'd been to plenty of shows in arenas and stadiums where there was a lot of smoking going on, but that was the first time I'd experienced it in a small club. Good times!

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She's a Brick House

Screen13

Thanks! According to my research notes via a list of Grande shows, the Pentangle concert you might have saw was with Savoy Brown and The Sun on 7/5/69 - There was one with the Greatful Dead the next night (To those who would like to know such trivia: This was the time when bands sometimes played a certain location three nights in a row).

Myself being from the Punk/New Wave era living in Small Dot MI does have a different perspective on history in comparison to what really happened in the classic days (watered down in my opinion), so I fully understand your opinion on the radio. I do have memories of W4 playing a little more variety and having a killer 60's show and playing "Master Blaster" in Late 1980 (it was a hit, but a bold move for Rock Radio in the area) plus missing said Sunday Morning 60's show when it turned to Country in '81. Plus ABX had a great Alternative show that at least had Dead Kennedys at times and a more edgy playlist - Radios in Motion, brought over from WDTE (Public Radio). A lot of my memories were based on what little classic little known 60's/70's, Alternative, or at least Power Pop they were allowed to play although they were pale shadows of their former selves (There was a New Wave station later on, but that's for another topic).

There was at least one song CK played in '81 that stood out, but it was mainly on their survey show through being #1 (for a few weeks!) in Detroit - Kraftwerk's "Pocket Calculator". They also had a Big Band era around '84-5 if I recall (recoil in horror!).

Getting back to Death and the good call on the "What If It Was All Earlier" thought connecting them to the Plum Street scene, you pretty much hit the target. I'm convinced that they would have wowed them. The thoughts that are going through my brain now are strong!

In a way, heading to '71-2, they also could have been a good connection to what was happening with Funkadelic during their first four albums on Westbound before moving into a smoother but just as classic and freaky style soon after - Psychedelic Funk that broke boundaries with strong messages on albums 2-4 - Free Your Mind...and Your Ass Will Follow, Maggot Brain, and America Eats It's Young, plus having their third and fourth albums containing writings by The Process of their more apocalyptic stuff which certainly fit the albums and the times (it was pretty much end-times of the original Detroit scene, so it wraps things up in a way!), although of course George Clinton was certainly no member as he was an artist onto his own and into his own trip (To those going "WTF", I don't make these things up!). I have not seen the Doc yet (I seriously should!), but did it mention Funkadelic as an influence?

Lord Larehip

That must have been it. Christ, was I that young? I went with my older brother who had a young folkie in training.

WDET--NPR 101.9FM Still operating.

I had been listening to Kraftwerk for some years by '81 (saw them twice) and by '84 I was already in the service and listening to punk.

Everyone in Detroit from the 60s and 70s knows Funkadelic. Hell, I saw them Robin Seymour's Swingin Time once. Everybody had Maggot Brain. I used to see George Clinton all the time at the Disc Recording Studio (still operating) in the 90s when I was an RID student interning there. Good guy. Underrated innovator.

Engine

I didn't read all the text walls here but in case it wasn't already mentioned, everybody interested in this band should definitely watch the documentary film, A Band Called Death:

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Like an arrow,
I was only passing through.