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The brothers loved all kinds of music growing up (their father made them watch The Beatles on "The Ed Sullivan Show," and each brother said they picked the instruments they wanted to play as they watched that historic broadcast). It was after The Who played Detroit that it became clear to them the sort of band they wanted to be. They loved Alice Cooper and Queen. Death's stuff was loud, fast, and powerful. David's lyrics were evocative, political, and eerily prophetic. But in Motown-dominated Detroit, three African-American brothers playing screaming rock 'n roll (or, as their brother Earl, laughingly called it, "white boy music") was against the grain in every which way. "We were the loudest thing they'd ever seen," says Bobby. Nobody quite knew what to do with them. Radio stations hesitated to play their songs. David was okay with that, saying to his brothers, "Pure rock 'n roll is what they don't play on the radio." This was before the Sex Pistols. This was before punk rock. As Mike Rubin wrote in his 2009 New York Times article about the unknown band from 35 years ago, "Death was punk before punk was punk."

There was also the little problem of the name of the band, a huge turnoff to record executives, producers, and pretty much everyone else. Arista Records offered them a deal, but only if they changed the name. David turned Arista down. Bobby and Dannis were furious; they both were willing to change the name, but David refused, and that was pretty much the end of Death. 

The rejection got to Bobby and Dannis: they were rejected for the name of the band, rejected for the fact that they were black boys playing "white boy music", rejected for the sound of the music itself which didn't "fit" at the time. For 35 years, the master tapes made by United Sound (the Detroit studio which recorded them) sat in an attic collecting dust. Bobby and Dannis moved to Burlington, Vermont, forming a reggae band which had some success, and David stayed in Detroit, writing songs, and drinking too much. One of his brothers says, "He was one of those genius types. The demons get to you." Langston Hughes' poem comes to mind:

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

"A Band Called Death" is a story of the burgeoning punk rock scene, of the exploding DIY energy in the 1970s, but it is also a sweet and touching family story. The filmmakers keep it simple, using floating black-and-white photos of the brothers jamming with their instruments, or, hauntingly, walking through a covered bridge in Vermont. Home movies of the boys playing in an upstairs room at their parents' house shiver with the excitement of their raw energy and self-belief. 

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