<strong><em>"This Band Was Punk Before Punk Was Punk"</em> | Death</strong> | African-American rock-punk at Schema : more than ethnic

"This Band Was Punk Before Punk Was Punk" | Death | African-American rock-punk

Cool article from the New York Times: "This Band Was Punk Before Punk Was Punk" .

Call it Death, resurrected. The re-release of a record by Drag City Records deemed "for the whole world to see" from a mid-1970s Detroit power trio called Death is considered to be the "missing link between the high-energy hard rock of Detroit bands from the late 1960s and early '70s and the high-velocity assault of punk from its breakthrough years of 1976 and '77." Death even "...preceded Bad Brains, the most celebrated African-American punk band, by almost five years." Detroit's own Jack White of the White Stripes is a big fan.

Death was formed by the teenage Hackney brothers (David, Dannis, and Bobby). They began to play their punk-rock "on Detroit's predominantly African-American east side, but were met with reactions ranging from confusion to derision. "We were ridiculed because at the time everybody in our community was listening to the Philadelphia sound, Earth, Wind & Fire, the Isley Brothers," Bobby said. "People thought we were doing some weird stuff. We were pretty aggressive about playing rock 'n' roll because there were so many voices around us trying to get us to abandon it."

Back to present times, the story goes that the Hackney brothers had never told their kids about Death, but one of the kids heard a Death single at a party in San Francisco, recognized his dad's voice, and currently plays Death's music with the band Rough Francis, named after his Uncle David's nickname.

Read more HERE, and listen to the CBC Q podcast featuring the surviving Hackney brothers (David died of cancer in 2002) @ podcast.cbc.ca.