It’s a good time to be a forgotten band from the 1960’s and ’70s. While the world might not have been ready for them at the time, over the last few years music fans have been embracing the fascinating stories of these long-forgotten acts that had been been relegated to record store dust bins. Of the recent crop of rediscovered acts that are having a bigger second act than their first is the band Death. Formed in 1971 by brothers Bobby, David and Dennis Hackney in Detroit, Michigan, the trio started out as an R&B act but switched to rock after going to see an Alice Cooper concert. The trio played a particularly ferocious band of hardcore protopunk that was more aggressive than fellow Motor City acts the MC5 and Iggy & The Stooges.
In 1974, according to bandlore, Death was signed to Groovesville Productions, recording seven songs at Detroit’s United Sound Studios with hopes of being distributed by Columbia Records. The band allegedly had a disagreement with label head Clive Davis about changing their name to something more commercially acceptable for the times. In 1976, Death pressed 500-copies of their single Politicians in My Eyes/Keep On Knocking, but found it impossible to get radio play in their native Detroit as disco was ruling the airwaves.
It wasn’t until roughly three decades later that they finally got their due, when Bobby’s sons had discovered that the single had become highly sought after by record collectors, and considered something of a missing link between 1960’s garage rock and the CBGB’s punk scene.The master tapes to those 1974 sessions, which had been sitting in Bobby’s attic, were restored and reissued by Drag City in 2009 as For the Whole World to See
