If you’re like I was, and you’ve never heard of an MC5-esque black punk band from Detroit called “Death,” A Band Called Death is going to take a long time getting you there. But when it does, hold onto your handkerchiefs because shit’s about to get touching. In telling the story of a forgotten punk trio with a vision, Drafthouse’s new documentary from Mark Covino and Jeff Howlett bears more than a passing similarity to the 2013 Oscar-winning documentary Searching for Sugar Man. Amazingly, it might be even harder to get through without tearing up, at least for lesser viewers (NICE TRY, PUNKS, THESE EYEBALLS DON’T RUN, OOH RAH!). And while A Band Called Death might suffer a bit for having been pre-empted thematically, Searching for Sugar Man had to massage the truth a bit to spurt that heartwarming ending. They conveniently left out the part where Rodriguez toured Australia with Midnight Oil years after we’re led to believe that he assumed he’d been forgotten. Sorry, bros, that’s cheating. To my knowledge, A Band Called Death doesn’t commit any similar lies by omission, and in any case, the unfairly-forgotten rockstar story it has to tell is even wilder and more emotional. And I mean that in a good way, not in a bipolar actress kind of way.
Raised in Detroit, David, Bobby, and Dannis Hackney are three brothers – by virtue of biology as well as by being three black guys hanging out together in the seventies – who dreamed of playing loud and kicking ass like The Who. They called themselves “Death,” based on a vision David had while staring at the clouds, and in 1974, recorded a demo of fast, hard-driving rock songs that inadvertently stole the balls-out sound of later bands like The Ramones, Bad Brains, the Sex Pistols, et. al. Only no one wanted to buy it at the time, mainly because the band was called “Death.” Which doesn’t seem like that much worse of a name than “The Who” or “The Guess Who,” but whatever. They could’ve just changed the name, but hey, man, you don’t argue with clouds. The demo collected dust in an attic somewhere for a while, while the members of the band gradually gave up and went on their separate ways, playing, at various times, Christian soul music, and cheesy reggae, with songs like “Fire Up the Ganja,” which might be the most generic-sounding reggae track of all time.
And then… And then…
