A BAND CALLED DEATH (B) - It was the early to mid-'90s and our music culture was still luxuriating in the Heyday of the Planet of Sound, the era that spanned the emergence of college-radio alternative music until the end of the Pixies (the original iteration) and Nirvana. I was record-shopping in Reckless Records on Chicago's north side near Belmont and Broadway.
The hipster behind the counter decided to spin a disc by some obscure Australian power rockers from the 1970s, a band called Radio Birdman. I heard the opening hooks of their thrash version of the "Hawaii Five-O" theme (the original one), and something primal stirred in me. I walked out with an import version of the disc "Radios Appear" that day, and I've loved those '70s rascals ever since.
I'm sure many others can spin a tale like that. One person's story involved discovering a pristine 45-rpm vinyl recording of "Politicians in My Eyes" by the punk-era band Death. It was one of only 500 copies of the record pressed by the three Detroit brothers who recorded it and distributed it on their own little label. The band Death had disbanded just a few years after recording that song and a handful of others mid-decade. It wasn't until the turn of the millennium that those recordings were finally discovered.
"A Band Called Death" tells the story of the Hackney brothers -- three black kids who preferred the thrash and power chords of the Who and the solos of Hendrix to the sound of Motown R&B. They dug Alice Cooper more than Curtis Mayfield. Here's the B-side of "Politicians," with opening riffs inspired by Pete Townshend:
The documentary by Mark Christopher Covino and Jeff Howlett spends much of its first two-thirds reminiscing with the brothers and chugging through their history. Bobby and Dannis Hackney survive and tell the story about growing up in Detroit, watching the Beatles play on the "Ed Sullivan Show" and following their brother David into hard rock, trusting in his obsession with spirituality and the meaning of death. (David's insistence on that band name, according to his brothers and an early producer, was what ultimately doomed their chances at securing a recording contract.)
Covino and Howlett probably dwell too much on the extensive backstory. To be honest, the Hackneys are not particularly fascinating characters, and Death's recorded music, while vibrant and edgy in a generic way, is not particularly compelling in a manner that would soon be perfected and popularized by alt-rockers like the Replacements. Viewers might squirm a bit while trapped in the Hackneys' Detroit of the '70s and '80s, as Bobby and Dannis split from David, set down roots in Vermont and find moderate success in a reggae band.
David, meantime, returned to Detroit and began to drown in alcohol and recriminations over the failure of Death. He died in 2000, having first hand-delivered Death's master recordings to his brothers. While the filmmakers show proper respect to David, it's hard to escape the feeling that there is a better, less hagiographic film to be made about David and his demons.
Meantime, I was waiting for the Discovery Story. I wanted to know how the band finally found acclaim, why this story was being told 40 years later. Leave it to the hipster white boys scouring the record bins in Chicago and freelancing for the New York Times to revive Death. Eventually, one of Bobby's sons heard his dad's youthful voice bursting from vinyl at a DJ party in San Francisco. He and his own two brothers and a couple of friends formed a cover band (named after one of Uncle Dave's one-off pseudonyms, Rough Francis), and soon Drag City Records in Chicago was releasing the long lost Death album.
That's the charm of "A Band Called Death," though it's all jammed into the final half hour. A little bookending or foreshadowing would have balanced the movie better.
Those are mostly quibbles. By the end of the film, if you're patient and do some cutting and pasting of your own, you'll be able to appreciate the basic story being told here: there is beauty and joy in a random recording full of heart and soul, and whether the world snaps it up immediately and the band becomes rich and famous or whether a few hundred stumble on it decades later, there's no denying that there is joy, too, in a determined individual digging up a piece of vinyl or a cassette or a disc featuring a killer hook or a catchy chorus that few people knew existed.
In the end, this is a movie about audio archeology and the thrill of discovering your new favorite band, even if that band is a long-forgotten flop. Three kids in a bedroom in Detroit threw down some rock 'n' roll and dispersed it into the universe. When I sat in the darkened theater -- with a total of two other people in the audience -- and first heard David Hackney's rough riffs calling out from the era of my adolescence, I immediately thought to myself, "Hey, that sounds like Radio Birdman."
Cool.
Bonus Tracks
Here is the full-length (7-song) album from Death, released in 2009:
And here is a track from the much more polished Radio Birdman, their scorching revival of the epic Roky Erickson rocker "You're Gonna Miss Me," from "Radios Appear":
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