Death - Politicians In My Eyes

When many folks think about the Detroit music scene, some of the first things that come to mind are Motown, R&B and Hip Hop, but for some us, it means punk.

Detroit gave us the likes of Iggy and the Stooges, the MC5, destroy all monsters and Death.

No, not the Orlando, FL death metal band Death. I'm talking about Death, a group that became one of the earliest pioneers of punk rock.

The band was formed in 1971 by the Hackney brothers: David, Bobby and Dannis, three young, African-American guys from Detroit. Originally known as the RockFire Funk Express, they started out playing funk, jamming in a spare bedroom at the family's home, but as guitarist and de facto band leader David became more and more fascinated with rock, especially Who guitarist Pete Townsend's playing, he and the band drifted toward a garage rock direction. The description is an apt one...they played their earliest shows in the family's garage, blaring away until the police came to shut down the playing.

In a story from January 21, 2014 published in COS, Sam Willett reports this about Death's earliest days:

"In the 1970s, there wasn’t an audience for this sort of music, at least not in this neighborhood. Neighbors and friends would call the police and pound on their doors to halt the deafening performances, but the Hackney brothers would keep driving forward. The Detroit community expected the black musicians to play Motown or R&B music, as opposed to their boisterous earache."

David and Bobby began writing songs as the band developed, and David convinced his brothers to change their name to Death. In a May 5, 2009 interview published by Suicide Girls [site NSFW], Jay Hathaway asked Bobby Hackney about the name's origins:

Jay Hathaway: So, if I could just go back to the beginning, why did you decide to call your band Death? Where did the name come from?

Bobby Hackney: Well, the name came from our brother David, back in the 1970s. Well, I would say '73, really. He had a concept in rock n' roll that he was going to spin death from the negative to the positive. So it was really our brother David's concept.

JH: That's interesting, because not everybody saw it as a positive thing. I heard the story about how Clive Davis wanted you to change the name...

BH: [laughs] And that was our brother David! See, the thing is, Don Davis, who was the owner of Groovesville Productions, who were signed up with -- they were a production company, and they owned United Sound Recordings in Detroit -- he had signed us up, and we were in United Sound recording these tracks. In the meantime, some of the demos of the tracks, he was shopping around, because he had relationships with Arista Records, Columbia Records, Stax Records, he had relationships with a number of record labels.

He had given our tape to a bunch of music moguls at that time. Clive Davis had heard the tape, and we could possibly have had a deal, but he didn't like the name. If we had changed the name, we would've probably had a deal. David just adamantly refused to change the name and said "no way." But at the time, we were young, and we didn't articulate to Don Davis that David had come up with the name Death, and that we had even written a couple of rock operas around that name. Like cocky rock n' rollers at the time, we just took it as an insult for anybody to tell us to change our concept.

Death only managed to record seven songs out of the dozen they had prepared before Columbia Records president Clive Davis pulled his funding for the recording sessions. He wanted the band to change its name to something more commercially acceptable, but the Hackneys aligned behind brother David and refused to change.

Still determined to get their music out, Death self-released 500 copies of what would be their one and only single, "Politicians In My Eyes" b/w "Keep on Knocking." The single didn't take off (a shame...both songs are terrific). According to Bobby Hackney in the Suicide Girls interview:

"When we put out "Politicians in My Eyes", we only pressed 500 of 'em. Up until that point, in Detroit, you could usually walk in with your acetate or your 45 and say to a disk jockey, y'know, "Play this for me, man." They would play it a few times, give it a week or two weeks, garner some response, and then you'd have a local hit. Nobody had told us that the whole corporate scheme was developing in radio to where tapes were being fabricated of pre-recorded music somewhere else.

"They were playing "Politicians in My Eyes" and "Keep on Knocking" at maybe 3 o'clock in the morning. Our friends used to tell us that they heard it on the radio, but you would never hear it on enough of a rotation that it would make a difference. They told us that we had to get with a major label to get that rotation. So right around '76, this whole disco, corporate thing came in, and we couldn't get our records played. I think if we'd have stayed in Detroit, I don't know where it would have gone. Even in Vermont, it got worse when the whole John Travolta thing hit a couple of years later. We saw a lot of the rock n' rollers we looked up to jumping ship and doing disco."

After struggling on for a few more years, the Hackney brothers ended Death in 1977. They moved from Detroit to Burlington, VT to record and release two albums of gospel rock under the name The 4th Movement in the early 1980's. David, homesick for his native Detroit, moved back there in 1982. Bobby and Dannis stayed behind, eventually forming a reggae band called Lambsbread.

Meanwhile in Detroit, David continued to make music on his own under the name Rough Francis. With the help of his brothers, he released one single before he died of lung cancer in 2000. Shortly before his death, David gave Bobby a box of Death's master tapes with the hope that Death's music would eventually be heard. Bobby took that box home and stashed it away in his attic, opting to leave Death in the past. By 2000, the people closest to the Hackney brothers were mostly unaware of their old punk band. Even Bobby's three sons didn't know much about them.

But that would all change a few years later.

That all but forgotten single, "Politicians In My Eyes," had caught the notice of the music underground. Record collectors made it a sort of vinyl holy grail, and people began to ask about this band called Death.

Some of those people were Bobby's sons, Bobby Jr., Julian and Urian. So taken by the music, they formed a band with friends Paul Comegno and Steve Williams, calling it Rough Francis in honor of their late uncle, and began performing Death songs.

Word began to circulate and record label interest, and in 2009 Chicago's Drag City Records released all seven of Death's songs from their ill-fated 1975 recording session, releasing it on CD and LP titled "...For the Whole World to See."

Since then, Death has, if you'll pardon the expression, taken on a new life. Bobby and Dannis Hackney are performing the band's old material and writing new songs. Their music has been used in movies and TV shows, and a new album of demos and rough cuts predating their 1975 recordings called "Spiritual • Mental • Physical" was released in January 2011.

And in 2012 came the great documentary "A Band Called Death." It tells the tale so much better than I ever could, and it's a wonderful and touching piece of work.

Quite a trip for a little band from Detroit. All of us musicians with a garage band past (like me) can take heart in this story.

Maybe Death isn't the end, after all.