Show #112 November 30, 2013

We dedicate this show to Jeane ...and The Hackney Brothers!

Jeane- The Smiths The Sound Of The Smiths
Let's Go- Stephen Lawrenson Somewhere Else 
Keep On Knocking- Death ...For The Whole World To See
Love Round The Corner- The Motors Airport - The Motor's Greatest Hits
One-der One-der- Travoltas Teenbeat
Searching- Runarounds Waiting For The Hurricane
Channel 13- Student Teachers Ork Records Single
Piccadilly Circus- Stiff Little Fingers Go For It
^Let's Go- The Cars Just What I Needed - Anthology
I Couldn't Get Along Without You- Yachts S.O.S Singles 1977-1981
Tell Me Soon- Rooney Calling the World
Why Say No- Summer Suns Greatest
It's Love- Librarians The Pathetic Aesthetic
My Home Is Not A House- Jason Falkner Yellow Pills Vol 4 The Best of American Pop!
*Let's Go- The Reducers Let's Go
*Let's Go- Nikki and The Corvettes Romantics And Friends-Midwest Pop Explosion
*Let's Go- Blitzkrieg Bop Waves: An Anthology Of New Music, Vol. 1
*Let's Go- The Ramones End Of The Century
Chips Ahoy!- The Hold Steady Boys and Girls in America
She Do- The Volcanos The Volcanos
Ten Years- The Starjets God Bless Starjets
Any Day Now- The Vertebrats A Thousand Day Dream
A Different Me- Dogs Different
Angels Rearrange- Bob Mould Silver Age
>Let's Go- The Routers Let's Go
Somebody Knows- Code Blue Code Blue
Your Baby's Gone- The Revillos Attack of the Giant Revillos
Older Guys- Teenage Fanclub Thirteen
Baby Gets it All- Holly and the Italians The Right to Be Italian
Door- The Toms The Toms
Teen City- Modernettes Teen City E.P. 12"
You Get What You Deserve (Alternate Mix, 1973)- Big Star Nothing Can Hurt Me: Original Soundtrack 
Let's Go- Matt and Kim Let's Go 

^Power Pop Prototype: #14 Billboard Hot 100 6/12/79

*SacroSet:  "Let's Go!" Songs

>Power Pop Prototype:  1962

Sonoma California is a beautiful place to live and raise children.  For a town of about 11,000 people, Sonoma is surprisingly cosmopolitan with world class wineries, an art museum, and annual film festival.  (With this setup you just know I'm about to crap on my town...)  Yet time and time again I have bitterly joked with my wife, "I would love to see that movie but I live in a rural backwater."  When you've got a town with about ten film screens and a surrounding area with sixty, why in the name of all that is holy do you have to put Grown Ups 2 on 30 of them!  Seriously, when that piece of crap opened you could see it in Sonoma, Petaluma, Santa Rosa, Rohnert Park, Sebastopol... in some theaters on two screens so it showed every hour!  The Sebastiani Theater in Sonoma (the tall building in the postcard) and Summerfield in Santa Rosa are trying but I still never got to see Big Star:  Nothing Can Hurt Me, In A World..., Blue Caprice, Ain't Them Bodies Saints, Short Term 12, Drinking Buddies, A Touch of Sin, Blue Is The Warmest Color and the list goes on. 

DVD hasn't been much of an option either since ten years ago Blockbuster put TWO stores in Sonoma effectively killing local video stores All Video, Movie Merchants and Moon Valley Video.  (I later learned that a Blockbuster franchise would have been granted exclusivity in a town the size of Sonoma so the two corporate stores in Sonoma were specifically designed to destroy their local competitors.  Videos edited for "content," predatory business practices- oh Blockbuster, may you burn in hell.)

Granted, not getting to see all the movies I want to is a classic "white people problem" but it still irks me.  The good news is that Netflix has helped level the playing field.  Case in point, thanks to Netflix Jaime and I watched the documentary A Band Called Death a few weeks ago and we both loved it.  The Hackney Brothers from Detroit, Michigan are true originals; three black guys playing heavy proto- punk music in 1975!  That's a year BEFORE the first Ramones album came out.  In 1971 David, Bobby and Dannis Hackney, like most of their their contemporaries, played R and B music as Rockfire Funk Express, probably aspiring to be the next Temptations or Sly and The Family Stone.  After seeing The Who and Alice Cooper, David convinced his brothers to take the band in a different direction and Death was born.  They didn't mention The MC5 or The Stooges in the documentary but Death's

music certainly fits that Michigan sound.  David Hackney's vision for Death included the cool triangle logo and cover art for what was to be their debut album ...For The Whole World To See, recorded in 1974.  Despite considerable resistance to the band's name, David refused to change it "because death is real," even when this meant passing on a record contract with Clive

Davis.  The band's sole release ended up being a single they put out themselves the following year (on Tryangle Records of course) including two songs from the '74 sessions, "Politicians In My Eyes" backed with tonight's All Kindsa Girls selection "Keep On Knocking."  That was it- Death broke up in 1977.

David Hackney

Lung cancer took David Hackney in 2000 which is doubly tragic because he never got to see the next phase in the Death legacy. In 2008 Bobby Hackney's son heard the Death single at a party in San Francisco and recognized his father's voice.  Googling the group he was shocked to see that his father and uncles had been in a proto-punk band and that the single was fetching upwards of $800 on e-bay.  The master tapes from the original 1974 Death sessions were dug up in an attic where they'd been sitting for thirty years and in 2009 ...For The Whole World To See was finally released.

After the record came out, Bobby and Dannis Hackney reformed Death with Bobbie Duncan, the guitarist of their Burlington, Vermont reggae band Lambsbread.  This version of Death has toured extensively, sharing David Hackney's music and vision with audiences around the world.

Death 2.0

This is the story of A Band Called Death and it is definitely worth hearing- thank you Netflix!

Click the link below to stream this show or to download, right click and "Save Link As:"
ALL KINDSA GIRLS #112