nicole_powers

The rest of the world is just now figuring out what David Hackney knew way back in 1974: that his band, Death, had created something groundbreaking. Death, made up of David and his brothers, Bobby and Dannis, was one of the earliest bands to make the kind of rock music we now think of as punk. The hard-rocking Detroit sound they helped pioneer would become a major influence on Bad Brains and other important punk acts, but Death themselves only ever put out one single, with only 500 copies pressed. They didn't know they had become underground legends until recently, when Bobby's sons discovered Death, and the Hackneys found themselves with all the attention they deserved, just 30 years later.

Thanks to a collection of old studio recordings and demos originally recorded on reel-to-reel tape, some of which were literally kept in the attic, Death has its first full album out on Drag City Records. It's very appropriately called ...For the Whole World to See. Sadly, David Hackney, the leader and main songwriter of the band, passed away in 2000, before he could see the band's success play out exactly as he predicted it would. The rediscovery of Death is a fitting tribute to David's memory and talent. In a turn of events that even David couldn't have predicted -- but that he probably would have loved -- the next generation of Hackneys formed a band called Rough Francis, and they play Death's old songs live.

SuicideGirls had the privilege of talking with Bobby and Dannis on the phone from their home in Vermont, about their brother, their sons, and how rock n' roll never dies.


Jay Hathaway: So, if I could just go back to the beginning, why did you decide to call your band Death? Where did the name come from?

Bobby Hackney: Well, the name came from our brother David, back in the 1970s. Well, I would say '73, really. He had a concept in rock n' roll that he was going to spin death from the negative to the positive. So it was really our brother David's concept.

JH: That's interesting, because not everybody saw it as a positive thing. I heard the story about how Clive Davis wanted you to change the name...

BH:: [laughs] And that was our brother David! See, the thing is, Don Davis, who was the owner of Groovesville Productions, who were signed up with -- they were a production company, and they owned United Sound Recordings in Detroit -- he had signed us up, and we were in United Sound recording these tracks. In the meantime, some of the demos of the tracks, he was shopping around, because he had relationships with Arista Records, Columbia Records, Stax Records, he had relationships with a number of record labels.

He had given our tape to a bunch of music moguls at that time. Clive Davis had heard the tape, and we could possibly have had a deal, but he didn't like the name. If we had changed the name, we would've probably had a deal. David just adamantly refused to change the name and said "no way." But at the time, we were young, and we didn't articulate to Don Davis that David had come up with the name Death, and that we had even written a couple of rock operas around that name. Like cocky rock n' rollers at the time, we just took it as an insult for anybody to tell us to change our concept.

JH: Did you ever record any of those rock operas?

BH:: Some of them...It's interesting, because throughout this whole process, we've re-digitized our whole songwriting archive with Death, and our demo archive. We have a lot of bits and pieces to those rock operas that David was working on. We've got a chance to do some really interesting music and maybe even put out some of it, if we can remaster it, and yet keep it within its true form.

JH: Is that something you're working on right now?

BH:: To be honest with you, the whole Death situation has kind of overtaken our lives. We had moved on, because of the fact that we had moved to Vermont years ago, and we've done reggae music and some other things since. That didn't define us, because of the whole Clive Davis thing, because we moved here with David and recorded two more albums under the name Fourth Movement. So, we continued to make rock n' roll music, but David got homesick and went back to Detroit and Dannis and myself continued on just as bass and drums. We were exploring the music, and reggae just happened to come along our way. We really got attracted to reggae music 'cause the bass and the drums were the lead instruments. So, we formed a band called Lambsbread, and we thought that that episode was over, with the whole Death thing, and now it's kind of resurfaced.

JH: Now that that's happened, did you have to put your reggae music on hold to work on Death again?

BH:: Our music now is a train that actually connects, and you could say that Death is the locomotive that may be running everything, but we have the Fourth Movement, we have Lambsbread, that are all interconnected with each other. So, it's kind of like a train, and we're just developing a way to bring this to an audience and present the whole picture. I know that Death will be the dominant thing that people will see.

JH: But you still have to stay true to the original ideas if you put all of this old music out ...

BH:: Exactly! That's what we're trying to do. We're trying to be true to each original idea, 'cause each one was a music of its own time. Death was a big influence for the Fourth Movement, and the Fourth Movement was a big influence for Lambsbread. Ironically enough, Lambsbread was a big influence for resurfacing Death.

JH: How do you think things would have been different in your lives and in your music careers if you'd stayed in Detroit instead of moving to Vermont when you did?

BH:: The problem with Detroit was that up until 1976, Detroit was an awesome rock n' roll town. You gotta understand, our big emphasis wasn't on doing shows. If you were a band in Detroit at that time, the big emphasis was always on getting into the studio with your original music, and getting the best original music that you can out on the airwaves. We got caught up in the disco tsunami, the ebb tide that hit Detroit and every other major city around that time.

When we put out "Politicians in My Eyes", we only pressed 500 of 'em. Up until that point, in Detroit, you could usually walk in with your acetate or your 45 and say to a disk jockey, y'know, "Play this for me, man." They would play it a few times, give it a week or two weeks, garner some response, and then you'd have a local hit. Nobody had told us that the whole corporate scheme was developing in radio to where tapes were being fabricated of pre-recorded music somewhere else.

They were playing "Politicians in My Eyes" and "Keep on Knocking" at maybe 3 o'clock in the morning. Our friends used to tell us that they heard it on the radio, but you would never hear it on enough of a rotation that it would make a difference. They told us that we had to get with a major label to get that rotation. So right around '76, this whole disco, corporate thing came in, and we couldn't get our records played. I think if we'd have stayed in Detroit, I don't know where it would have gone. Even in Vermont, it got worse when the whole John Travolta thing hit a couple of years later. We saw a lot of the rock n' rollers we looked up to jumping ship and doing disco.

JH: It's sort of funny how now people look at disco as this superficial trend from that time period, and the kind of stuff you guys were making is seriously influential ...

BH:: We kind of knew that at the time. We were doing this artistic songwriting, and what we were talking about had to do with what was going on at the time. That was during the time of the Vietnam War, a lot of social upheaval, the world was changing. We were tuned in to what was going on. The disco thing to us was the music industry trying to glaze over everything and say, "It's alright, everybody just party. Have a good time. Pretend like the troubles of the world aren't there." If you were a true rock n' roller, you couldn't relate to that.

JH: So when your sons discovered your music, could they relate to it?

BH:: [laughs] That's like years later, you know, when we had moved to Vermont. When we were starting up with Groovesville Records, even though they gave us the blessing to take the masters and they gave us the blessing to put out the single, we still had a contract at least for 10 to 15 more years. In other words, if something was to happen with the music, they would be included. So we weren't really interested in using a lot of the music, because we looked at it like, the statute of limitations will run out and all the rights will revert back to us. We used to talk to our kids all about it, like, "Oh yeah, we were in a rock band in Detroit in the '70s," but we never really got into depth. All that stuff was on reel-to-reel tapes. By that time, we were in the digital world like everybody else, so it just stayed kind of up in the attic and in vaults. We didn't really think too much about it, until it surfaced and our kids kind of dug it up. One of them was in California and heard the music at an underground party.

JH: And he knew it was you?

BH:: Well, he called me up and he said, "Hey Dad, did you know these people are groovin' to your music at these underground parties? Every time they play you, the crowd goes wild, and people just rush the dance floor." I'm like, "What are you talking about? Lambsbread?" I thought he was talking about our reggae band, you know? He was like, "No, Dad, you were in a band in the '70's called Death." And then I got a little quiet ... [laughs] It was just kind of a shock for us to find this out.

JH: Were you surprised that it still resonated with the next generation?

BH:: Well, all the old rock n' rollers back when we were playing, they always told us that good rock n' roll could never die. That's what we always heard coming up as kids, from a lot of the old blues guys and rock n' rollers. I think that this is proof positive of that.

JH: So, are you writing any new songs with your sons for Rough Francis? Do they have their own music, or do they just play old Death songs?

BH:: They started and debuted their album playing a lot of the Death stuff, and now they're playing their own stuff. We are in production rehearsal with the possibility of doing a 10-city tour to see if everybody likes what they see. I think they won't be disappointed.

JH: What was it like to hear them play your songs for the first time?

BH:: Oh man, it was really emotional for us. Very emotional for us because of our brother that we lost. Hearing these songs live and hearing crowds react to them the way we had always envisioned it, I think it was really emotional for me and Dannis.

Dannis Hackney: Seeing the reaction, and thinking about what Dave said all the time when he was listening to it, it gives you goose bumps ...

JH: It sounds like he was right about it all along.

BH:: Yeah, he was. He was.

DH:: Yeah, he was totally right. It was just the fact that he had more faith in it than me and Bob did at the time.

BH:: We all knew that we were doing some really heavy-duty rock n' roll, and we were very into and proud of what we were doing at the time, but after all was said and done, David believed right up until the end of his life that the world would come looking for this music one day. It's just blowing our minds that it's happening almost word-for-word to what he said.

JH: Did you realize at the time that other bands had started making music that sounded so much like what you had been doing years before? Did you know that punk had gotten so big?

BH:: People were telling us, but we never...I mean, we used to hear some of the Bad Brains, and it would remind us of the stuff we did back in Detroit, but we never had any idea that we were a major influence with those guys, and with some of the other bands.

JH: How did you go from that to making reggae music?

BH:: After we moved to Vermont, we changed the name from Death to The Fourth Movement. David was a big influence with that, and they were gospel albums, really, gospel rock albums. They were really experimental stuff, just some far-out stuff. We went through a lot of rejection because of the message we were conveying, and I think David just got a little homesick for Detroit and decided to migrate back there. I think in the back of his mind, he wanted us to follow him there, but we just really wanted to keep moving forward. We loved Burlington. At the time, Burlington was such an awesome music town. It was like Haight-Ashbury. We had a real heavy-duty musical vibe, mixing in with the culture. We got jobs at the University of Vermont. I became a disk jockey, and I became affiliated with a bunch of local promoters. One of them was a reggae promoter who was bringing in Bob Marley and Peter Tosh, and we got to meet all of these people. Peter gave us some real good advice. We did really well. Then along comes the Death thing and just drops on us like a big temple from heaven, you know. [laughs]

JH: [laughs] Wow. It's got to be pretty overwhelming.

BH:: I mean, something like that happens to you, you gotta stop in your tracks, man. You got no choice!

JH: Any other exciting things everyone should know about?

BH:: The record's just been released in Japan, and people are going crazy over it. We're pretty happy about that. We're just going to see what kind of a fun ride this is. The music has come back to us. The feeling has come back to us. We've been enjoying what we've been playing. We're just going to see how far we can go with it.

DH:: It's like Bob Seger said...come back, baby! Rock n' roll never forgets!