As I said in my previous post, this is another uncanny real life story that simply could not have been written as fiction. The Drafthouse Films documentary about the band Death also came out in 2012, the same year the Oscar-winning documentary “Searching for Sugar Man” was released, and is called A Band Called Death. They were one of the first all-black punk bands in America, and they also hailed from Detroit, just like Rodriguez!
Two musical acts making a modern resurgence after years toiling in the limbo of forgotten music are both from Detroit, both had documentaries made about them in 2012, and both have albums retroactively regarded as classics! What are the odds? Check out the super cool trailer for Death’s documentary above.
I think it’s pretty obvious why a band called “Death” wasn’t itching for fame and fortune. It’s a tough band name to make popular. In typical punk fashion, the guys in the band were abrasive, hard-hitting, political, and not the least bit curious about public recognition. A lot of the music from this band has been labeled as punk, or punk rock, but if you listen to tracks like “Politicians in My Eyes”, you see that rhythm, long-form instrumentation, and big riffs, all signatures of metal and hard rock at the time, were being embraced.
Much like Rodriguez and his albums Cold Fact (1970) and Coming from Reality (1971), I bought the music after the documentary. Now Death’s album ….For the Whole World to See (2009), a collection of demos originally produced in the mid-1970s, is considered a must-own album for fans of punk pioneers. They are a classic punk band before Bad Brains, trailblazers that took the unconventional path to notoriety wherein they lay in obscurity for decades before enjoying emergence by way of unexpected means. Dive in further and you see that much of their music is unpolished, demo-based, and certainly rough around the edges. But thanks to the re-release in 2009, the album ….For the Whole World to See is a retroactive classic.
And in the preview you hear one guy towards the end say, “I don’t know of another story like that.” Well, there is Sixto Rodriguez.
