{"id":1436,"date":"2009-03-17T22:39:55","date_gmt":"2009-03-18T05:39:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/2009\/03\/death-is-punk\/"},"modified":"2009-03-18T15:51:51","modified_gmt":"2009-03-18T22:51:51","slug":"death-is-punk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2009\/03\/17\/death-is-punk\/","title":{"rendered":"Death Is Punk"},"content":{"rendered":"

from The New York Times<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

This Band Was Punk Before Punk Was Punk<\/nyt_headline><\/h1>\n

<\/nyt_byline><\/p>\n

By MIKE RUBIN<\/p>\n

Winooski, Vt.<\/p>\n

\"death.jpg\"<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

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 \u2014 Bobby Jr., Julian and Urian \u2014 are in Rough Francis, but his smile wasn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

The group\u2019s music has been almost completely unheard since the band stopped performing more than three decades ago. But after all the years of silence, Death\u2019s 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. \u201cDavid was convinced more than any of us that we were doing something totally revolutionary,\u201d said Bobby Sr., 52.<\/p>\n

Forgotten except by the most fervent punk rock record collectors \u2014 the band\u2019s self-released 1976 single recently traded hands for the equivalent of $800 \u2014 Death would likely have remained lost in obscurity if not for the discovery last year of a 1974 demo tape in Bobby Sr.\u2019s attic. Released last month by Drag City Records as \u201c… For the Whole World to See,\u201d Death\u2019s 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 \u201970s and the high-velocity assault of punk from its breakthrough years of 1976 and \u201977. Death\u2019s songs \u201cPoliticians in My Eyes,\u201d \u201cKeep On Knocking\u201d and \u201cFreakin Out\u201d are scorching blasts of feral ur-punk, making the brothers unwitting artistic kin to their punk-pioneer contemporaries\u00a0the Ramones<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

Jack White of\u00a0the White Stripes<\/a>, who was raised in Detroit, said in an e-mail message: \u201cThe first time the stereo played \u2018Politicians in My Eyes,\u2019 I couldn\u2019t believe what I was hearing. When I was told the history of the band and what year they recorded this music, it just didn\u2019t make sense. Ahead of punk, and ahead of their time.\u201d<\/p>\n

[ click to continue reading at NYTimes.com<\/a> ]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

from The New York Times This Band Was Punk Before Punk Was Punk By MIKE RUBIN Winooski, Vt. 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1436","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-art"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1436","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1436"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1436\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1436"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1436"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1436"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}