Death
For The Whole World to See
Drag City
By Jose Fritz
In cryptozoology there is a concept called the Out Of Place Artifact (OOPA). These are not the leavings of spacemen or time travelers but just artifacts whose appearance seems incongruous with their era. Famous examples of this would include the Baghdad Battery, and the Antikythera Mechanism among others. In ethnomusicology we also have bands that seemingly spring forth from the void, decades ahead of their time. Instead of relegating them, we celebrate them.
Death is one of those bands. Seven years before Bad Brains formed, these Chicago punks recorded a hard ass punk record. This was back when the Ohio Players were still funky, before disco; before the word punk there was Death. They were a fantastic mix of acid rock, garage rock and R&B that was heretofore unknown. In their moment we even lacked the language to describe them.
Until it was catapulted into our vocabulary by Dave Marsh and Lester Bangs the poly-semantic term “punk” wasn’t a genre of any kind, nebulous or otherwise. It was a derogatory term that means inferior, bad, homosexual, novice, or prostitute. It came from the Algonquin word “ponk” meaning dust or ash. Before the word punk there was very little music that could at all be described as punk. In large part the language and the sound were born together like fraternal twins. It makes those few bands that predate it all the more monolithic. We know all their names: The Stooges, The MC5, New York Dolls, the Electric Eels… and now one more… Death.
The mogul of darkness himself Clive Davis took notice of the band and met with Don Davis of Groovesville Productions for a tentative sniff at them. Death began recording what was supposed to be a 12-song record. Davis liked the band; he saw potential but disliked the morbid band name and asked them to change it. They refused and he slunk back into his dank sulfurous lair. The recording process stopped and the tapes were shelved.
Death was nearly as ferocious as fellow proto punk band Rocket From the Tombs. But RFTT failed to leave any formally recorded oeuvre. Death had two known songs, the A and B sides of a 45 on Tryangle Records; a piece of vinyl incunabula now obsessively hunted by collectors. But as the band grew more cohesive, disco became the dominant force in music. For Death that spelled the end, unable to penetrate radio, they faded away and the members began other projects. But they left us a future legacy in their lost recordings, so that today they may finally get the accolades that are so long overdue.
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