Hello Friends,
Grab your popcorn and pull up a stool, its Movie Night on Vinyl in the Valley!
Tonight we're watching another great documentary about a band that almost no one had ever heard of before, A Band Called Death.
The Hackneys were three black brothers growing up in Detroit in the early 70's. Being heavily influenced by Alice Cooper, The Who and Jimi Hendrix, they formed a raucous garage band and basically invented punk rock years before bands like The Ramones came along. Local record labels and radio stations were hesitant to promote a band called "Death" and producers & promoters begged them to change their name to something more marketable. Amazingly enough, they refused and they rest is rock & roll history!
The Hackneys were three black brothers growing up in Detroit in the early 70's. Being heavily influenced by Alice Cooper, The Who and Jimi Hendrix, they formed a raucous garage band and basically invented punk rock years before bands like The Ramones came along. Local record labels and radio stations were hesitant to promote a band called "Death" and producers & promoters begged them to change their name to something more marketable. Amazingly enough, they refused and they rest is rock & roll history!
The story of Death is a microcosm for the story of rock & roll: boredom and living on the fringes of society leads to immense creativity, artistry, vision and rebellion which ultimately mutates into various vices, egos, heartbreak and tragedy. Sometimes in the story's third act, if we're lucky, there's some semblance of Redemption, comeuppance or the last laughs. Its like a Shakespearean classic (if Shakespeare lived in a ghetto, played punk rock music and had dreadlocks!)
The documentary itself is pretty good, but like we said about the Big Star documentary, the actual story and people involved are so amazing that you'd really have to screw the pooch to make a movie that's not entertaining! Directors Mark Christopher Covino and Jeff Howlett do a fine job telling their story especially when taking into consideration that there wasn't a lot of archival footage of some noisy, pre-cell phone, pre-You Tube, Detroit punk band who never released an album, who never toured and who refused to change their name! DEATH!
If we had to rate it, we'd give it two enthusiastic cocktail glasses up! Cheers!
The documentary itself is pretty good, but like we said about the Big Star documentary, the actual story and people involved are so amazing that you'd really have to screw the pooch to make a movie that's not entertaining! Directors Mark Christopher Covino and Jeff Howlett do a fine job telling their story especially when taking into consideration that there wasn't a lot of archival footage of some noisy, pre-cell phone, pre-You Tube, Detroit punk band who never released an album, who never toured and who refused to change their name! DEATH!
If we had to rate it, we'd give it two enthusiastic cocktail glasses up! Cheers!
We'll see you next time, friends, until then the Tiki Bar is closed*.
(* not really)
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