“The Word” on Music
Death: Punking Punk

By WordMan

Punk music is like any other smack in the face to the system: in exposing and challenging the existing rules, you end up creating an alternate set of rules, which are sometimes just as restrictive as the original set. The argument about “what is punk” has been a passionate one over the years. So what if I were to tell you that a band has recently resurfaced which raises some questions about punk — a band that, in hindsight, appears to be a group of fully formed punk visionaries. Would it be worth considering that band’s place in punk? Absolutely — because doing so upsets the Dogma of Punk, which is a very punk thing to do

So, to further appreciate the irony, let’s talk about Death, and what it means to be punk.

In a couple of essential-reading books on punk, Please Kill Me: An Uncensored Oral History of Punk and From the Velvets to the Voidoids: The Birth of American Punk Rock,  punk music is described as emerging from scenes in a few cities, including New York, Cleveland (really!), and Detroit, with a dash of the Doors’ provocation from California thrown in. Detroit, in particular, gets a lot of credit when you look at bands like the MC5, with its song “Kick Out the Jams”  and screw-the-system image, and their little brothers from the Motor City, Iggy [Pop] and the Stooges. Iggy (ne Jim Osterberg) is often referred to as “The Godfather of Punk,” and songs like “I Wanna Be Your Dog”  and “Search and Destroy”  began to establish the blueprint for punk before the label had even been coined.

And about that label, punk — before it was about the sound, it was a word used to describe those scenes. In this SDMB thread  a couple of years ago, Doper Biggirl asked if Blondie was Punk or New Wave. Most posters replied that they were New Wave, but that misses the beginnings — punk was a scene in New York, at CBGB’s, the Mudd Club, Max’s Kansas City, and a few other places. It started being referred to as “punk” because of the magazine called Punk started by three guys (including Legs McNeil, one of the authors of Please Kill Me) who covered that scene. Bands like Television, Talking Heads, Suicide and Blondie — all charter members of the New York punk scene — don’t sound punk as we think of it today.

But the Ramones, also part of the New York punk scene out of Queens, sure sounded punk, and their music became the established canon, building out the blueprint started by bands like the MC5 and The Stooges: hard, fast songs with a bludgeoning attack and snotty-melodic vocals. And when the Ramones played in the UK, the bands that followed took a page from the MC5’s book and re-added the final punk ingredient: political posturing and instigation. Although the Ramones and many, perhaps most, of the New York punks were provocative but not particularly political, the British interpretation of punk was trying to push political buttons. You can trace this in part to Malcolm McLaren, who died a few weeks ago. McLaren tried to add a politically provocative slant to the New York Dolls when he took over managing them — he had them don red leather outfits and put hammer-and-sickle flags behind them in concerts — but they were too busy flaming out to make it work. McLaren ended up back in London in the mid ’70s. There, aware of the stir that the Ramones had made, he built the Sex Pistols and encouraged them to take political shots; not with a plan, but to stir the pot. At the same time, Joe Strummer was leaving his pub-rock roots, going from the 101’ers to form the politically-charged “only band that matters,” Clash, with Mick Jones, Paul Simonon, and Topper Headon. A bit after that, in the States, punk morphed into “hardcore” and bands like Minor Threat and Fugazi, both fronted by Ian McKaye, also took clear stands on commercialism and drug use (against both, by the way), further cementing a Punk Dogma.

This dogmatic approach persists to this day, and, to some people, what is and what is not punk matters. Just mention Green Day to certain groups of punks and see them react — Green Day “went commercial” and betrayed their Gilman Street roots (where the punk clubs were in Berkeley, CA) and totally lost any “punk cred” they had.

So, the point is that punk seemingly took a straight line of development from the late ’60s through the mid ’70s, starting off with a basic outsider insolence and raw expression, but collecting attributes (a type of sound, dress, and attitude towards society) over a few years to become the more fully formed version of punk as folks tend to think of it today. And that’s what happened, right?

Not if you look at Death with the benefit of hindsight. Who’s Death? The three Hackney brothers, David, Dannis, and Bobby, formed the band in Detroit in 1971. Cool, right? They must’ve been part of the same scene as The MC5 and The Stooges, right? Nope — different scene. The Hackneys were inner-city African Americans who moved from R&B to a rock sound, apparently after attending an Alice Cooper concert. They formed their band and played in mostly black neighborhoods, where folks were more likely listening to Earth, Wind and Fire or the Isley Brothers. Death tried to get a record deal and even got heard by Clive Davis, who said he might be interested if they changed their name (how punk is that?). David Hackney, the oldest, band leader and visionary for the Death sound, said no way (very punk, thankyouverymuch) and, after kicking around for a bit, the brothers ended Death, relocated to Vermont, and formed a gospel band (now — how punk is that?).

David died of lung cancer in 2000, but not before safely putting away some tapes of the record demo they had put together. A few years later, Bobby’s son, Bobby Jr., heard a rare, collectible copy of Death’s one single and recognized his father’s voice. It’s been an interesting ride from there: Bobby Jr. and his brothers and some friends have formed a band playing Death covers. They’re getting a lot of attention, including a profile in the New York Times, and playing at places like SXSW and other music festivals.

So the world has come looking, but didn’t find hard rock or shock glam like Alice Cooper. Nor is this a reggae-inflected hardcore punk like the Bad Brains, the most famous African-American punk band. Instead, Death sounds like Jimi Hendrix singing over American Idiot-era Green Day: big blocks of chords interspersed with catchy, melodic hooks, and spiky lead licks; songs that cycle through a few different riffs, more complex than Ramones-style chants; drums that have a dialogue with the guitar, back and forth with punctuated bursts (Dannis Hackney was a really great drummer and complements David’s guitar perfectly). The intro to the first track, “Keep on Knocking,”  hits you squarely with a big, melodic punk feel — really hooky. You expect to hear a snotty British guy come in with the vocal, so it takes a second to register the African American baritone instead. But the whole package works and the song has an insistent beat: It actually sounds like mainstream guitar rock with a punk influence, just recorded primitively. But then the next song, “Rock n’ Roll Victim,”  kicks in. Wow; that’s 1974, people — big aggressive, totally punk riffage fully formed. It is just wild to hear that song, knowing that back then they weren’t part of a punk scene. Same with track #4, “You’re a Prisoner,”  and track #5, “Freakin’ Out.” Both are bursts of pure punk power: guitar riffs with quick shifts and hard, on-beat drumming (punk drumming is fast and on beat, with none of the behind-the-beat swing of bluesy, classic rock).

Overall, the music speaks for itself: poorly recorded, but with clear vision and a sound that makes perfect sense to listen to today, but would have been very tough to process back in the day. And while I haven’t dissected all of the lyrics to the songs, I would say that the band had the whole concept of punk provocation covered: cocky outsiders in a band with a nihilistic, in-your-face name, an edgy hard sound and songs with names like “Politicians in my Eyes” and “Where do We Go from Here.”

So — what does this tell us about Punk Dogma? Not much really — the path to punk got established after the fact, with folks agreeing on some of the major milestones but the rest of its evolution more a messy trend than specific stages. But dropping Death into the mix does nothing so much as illustrate how the population wasn’t ready in 1974 for what punk was to become in the 1990s and 2000s — even the Ramones, at the epicenter of punk’s origins today, never really broke out to become the huge band some folks hoped they’d become. It was only after bands like Nirvana made alternative mainstream and Green Day found that balance between punk and pop that blew them up in the mid-’90s that the “language of punk” was integrated into mainstream music. It was only when emo and mall punk bands came out — second-gen punkers who lifted the sounds more than the sensibility and artistic intent — was punk accepted as part of the overall musical mix. And the world was ready for Death.

Additional links:

Death blog
Amazon listing for Death, For the Whole World to See
Wiki link
Allmusic article
Ramones, “Blitzkrieg Bop”
Green Day, “Jesus of Suburbia” song cycle

About the Author: WordMan has been playing guitar for over 30 years (eek), in a variety of semi-pro (and now mid-life crisis) cover bands. He is a guitar geek.