Showing posts with label a band called death. Show all posts
Showing posts with label a band called death. Show all posts

September 28, 2013

I NEED YOUR HELP! Fund The Brattle and Send Me To The 2013 Watch-A-Thon!


Hey there friend-o!

Two weeks from today the Brattle is staging their Watch-A-Thon, a two day marathon of 24 cult and classic movies, as a fundraiser to keep this wonderful theater up and running and showing all kinds of totally awesome flicks well into the future.  I really want to attend and watch as many movies as possible, but in order to do that, I'm gonna need your help.

As you're no doubt aware, I'm currently a little more than halfway through my year-long effort to watch a movie I've never seen each and every day.  Suffice it to say that I've spent quite a bit of time (and money) at different theaters all over Boston in my daily cinematic quest and it's given me a great new appreciation for the Brattle specifically.  They've given me the opportunity to not only catch some stellar indie and underground films like Cheap Thrills, I Declare War and A Band Called Death, but also to see some fantastic classics like Enter The Dragon, 12 Angry Men and Foxy Brown the way they were always meant to be seen.  And let's not forget about all the cool events they've held like the Boston Underground Film Festival or the recent Cornetto Trilogy Triple Feature Pub Crawl with Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost in attendance.  I absolutely live for this stuff and I'm constantly grateful that I live in a place with a moviehouse that goes above and beyond to deliver the best cinematic experience possible.

The Brattle has been very kind to me these past seven months and I'd love to return the favor.  In order to participate I need to raise $240, which really isn't a crazy amount.  I'm hoping to surpass that goal, especially because there are prizes for the biggest fundraisers.  But I don't have a lot of time left, so I'm trying to really get this thing into gear before it's too late.  You can either donate flat amount or you can pledge per each film that I watch.  (I can tell you that I plan to attend both days but probably won't watch every movie, just most of them.)  And hey, the list of films screening is right here, so if any of them strike your fancy then there are individual tickets available.  Come along and I'll save you a seat!

Please click here to donate to my campaign.  Even if it's just a small amount, (I think the lowest possible donation is $10) it'll all add up in the end and every little bit helps.  And pass it on!


PS - I'm planning on having a big final screening/birthday party at the end of February and I'm really hoping I'll be able to hold it at the Brattle.  Raising them a bunch of money certainly can't hurt my chances.  So for those of you in Boston, think of this as an investment in an awesome future party.
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August 13, 2013

A BAND CALLED DEATH Will Rock Your Face Off


"Your pure rock 'n roll, that's what doesn't get played on the radio."
We're now firmly entrenched in mid-August, which means that while parents rejoice and students lament the impending return of  fall classes, there are some folks out there engaged in a feverish debate over what to classify as "the song of the summer."  Well, it kind of depends on who you ask.  Stephen Colbert has certainly made his choice, whereas my wife has spent her vacation in the throes of a newfound love of One Direction.*  For me, there's no debate.  The music of my summer can be summed up in a single word:

DEATH!

A Band Called Death is the story of David, Dannis and Bobby Hackney, three black brothers from Detroit who started a band in their bedroom in 1973.  While most of their peers were gravitating towards Motown and disco, the Hackney brothers instead fell in love with the likes of Alice Cooper and Pete Townshend. After the sudden and altruistic death of the boys' father, David (the group's John Lennon) settled on a controversial name and for the band: Death.  Their style was like none other - a little bit of The Who, a little bit of Led Zeppelin, and a whole lot of The Ramones and The Sex Pistols, which is impressive when you consider that the latter two bands didn't actually exist in 1973.  Those guys may have ushered in the punk movement, but the Hackney brothers definitely got there first - there just wasn't a name for it at the time.  I guess that means that we can now chalk up punk on the list of musical styles innovated by black folk and popularized by white people.  (Bad Brains would probably agree.)

Death played a few local shows and even managed to record a seven song album at a local studio, but they couldn't get a major label to pick them up.  They actually got an offer from Arista records, but only on the condition that they change the name of the band.  Needless to say, they weren't having it and they walked away from the table.  They self-produced a few hundred copies of a 7" single and eventually pursued other endeavors.  The three brothers moved to Burlington, VT and became a Christian rock group called The 4th Movement for a few years.  David eventually returned to Detroit while Dannis and Bobby went from afros to dreadlocks and became a reasonably successful reggae band called Lambsbread.  The brothers married and had kids while the original Death master tapes collected dust in a Detroit attic.  David eventually died of lung cancer, but not before he made sure to give the Death tapes to his brother Bobby, telling him, "The world is gonna come looking for these."

Those words would soon become prophetic.  You see, while the remaining Hackney brothers were playing jam-band festivals in New England, their proto-punk demo had become an underground sensation.  A handful of their original 7" records were still floating around indie record stores and private collections, and as the years passed the legend of Death grew stronger.  Original pressings started showing up on Ebay for hundreds of dollars as MP3's spread virally into the hands of DJs who played Death at underground clubs.  The whole thing came full circle when Bobby's son Julian was turned onto the original single by a college roommate and instantly recognized his father's voice coming through the speakers.  The family dug out the old master tapes and, after working with a private collector, eventually reissued their original album, ...For The Whole World To See, under Drag City Records.  Not only that, Death has even gone out on tour, playing live along with their kids band Rough Francis and recording new music for the first time in over 30 years.

It's an incredible story that espouses the importance of family ("Back up your brother" is a popular refrain) and it's fairly impossible to watch the film without falling in love with the entire Hackney family.  But what really puts it over the top is that the music is almost preposterously great.  The name "Death" instantly brings forth images of cacophonous metal bands or gothed out depressives, but David's entire concept for the band was meant to be positive and even transformative - death wasn't something to fear or to worship, it was just another part of living.  Not only is their music in no way depressing, it's straight up catchy as all hell.  When I played it for my friend Billman, he was absolutely blown away that no one was willing to sign them back in the day.  It is, quite simply, some of the most brilliant music I've ever heard.  It instantly transports me back to my high school and college days as a teenage punk rocker, with a drawer full of band t-shirts and a box full of ticket stubs from bands like Flogging Molly, No Use For A Name, Mad Caddies, The Bouncing Souls, Dropkick Murphys, Anti-Flag, AFI and Lagwagon, all of whom would come to town and tear up the tiny clubs that once lined Landsdowne Street right across from Fenway Park.

I downloaded Death's album the moment I walked out of the theater and listened to it the whole way home. I've basically listened to almost nothing else since, it's that fucking good.

Don't believe me?  Check it out for yourself.  The movie is still making a theatrical tour around the country and it's been available for download and VOD for a few weeks now, but today it hits DVD and Blu-ray.  I'll be ordering this Collector's Edition set with the vintage t-shirt, and the only reason I'm not ordering Freakin' Out Edition with the repressing of the original 7" is that I don't own a record player.  I should probably fix that.

While my favorite song on the album is definitely Freakin' Out, the "best" song is probably the last one, Politicians In My Eyes, which I'll leave you with now.


Now that's a fucking song.  And there's plenty more where that came from.





*For those of you who may be scratching your heads, just know that Jamie's favorite band of all time is Hanson, and not just for the one song that the rest of us will be able to hum to our graves.  While my and Jamie's taste in movies has a lot of overlap, our taste in music generally does not.  But I certainly can't claim I didn't know what I was getting into.


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Title: A Band Called Death
Director: Jeff Howlett, Mark Christopher Covino
Starring: Bobby Hackney, David Hackney, Dannis Hackney
Year Of Release: 2013
Viewing Method: Theatrical - Brattle Theater





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July 11, 2013

Giant Monster Live-Tweet Part 1: GOJIRA (1954) Is A Nuclear Nightmare


"There is no difference between Godzilla and the H-bomb."
You guys, I am really excited about Pacific Rim.  Like, REEEEAAAALLLYY excited.

When I'm this stoked for a movie's release, I'm all about watching other films to get myself in the right frame of mind, whether that means spending all day watching a Marvel movie marathon before the midnight showing of The Avengers or revisiting Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise and Before Sunset in anticipation of a Before Midnight screening.  Thusly, I've decided to spend the remainder of the week* live-tweeting a series of giant monster movies, a genre which I'm sorry to say I've largely neglected over the years.  I want to get a bit of variety in these screenings (I could spend the better part of a month watching nothing but Godzilla movies) but I'll be heavily favoring older fare, as I've already seen a lot of the more recent monster flicks like The Host (this, not this) or Monsters.

It seemed only fitting that I should kick things off with the Elvis of giant monster movies, the original Japanese Gojira from 1954.  (The film was released in America two years later with a bunch of Raymond Burr scenes edited in, but that version really only interests me as a curiosity.)  It immediately reminded me of the first time I watched First Blood.  Growing up in the late 80's/early 90's, Rambo had essentially become punchline.  My only knowledge of the character was the image of an oiled up, muscly super-soldier.  Basically, this:


Man, I love UHF.

So imagine my surprise when I discovered that the movie that started it all is actually a darkly violent tale of post-traumatic stress-fueled rampage induced by abuse at the hands of small-minded yokels.  I was absolutely thunderstruck.  Not only did this not fit in with my understanding of the character, but I was astonished to see just how far the franchise eventually strayed from its roots while simultaneously gaining a choke hold on popular culture.  (Hell, at one point there was a Rambo Saturday morning cartoon.)

Godzilla is much the same.  We all think of it as kind of a campy series featuring guys in rubber suits fighting each other while stomping around tiny model towns, but the first entry is actually a horrifying meditation on the dangers of nuclear proliferation.  Godzilla is a monster baptized by radioactive fallout, the product of both millions of years of evolution and mankind's most devastating invention.  This is a film made less than ten years after America wiped two Japanese cities off the map in the blink of an eye and the cultural reverberations are unmistakable.  In 1954, the Japanese people are still rightfully haunted by the world's first nuclear holocaust, so it's of little surprise that the most expensive Japanese film to date would depict the destruction of Tokyo and the terrorizing of the Japanese people by a gigantic nuclear beast.  It's also little surprise that it would become such a success at the box office.

But it's not all monsters and destruction.  There's also some great human drama that really drives the majority of the film.  (Godzilla himself doesn't even appear on screen until 22 minutes in.)  There's the professor who wants to study Godzilla rather than destroy him.  Not only does he find the creature a fascinating historical specimen, but he believes that Godzilla's resistance to radiation could prove vitally important to humanity's survival.  There's also the scientist who's inadvertently creates a weapon so terrifying that he's willing to die just to keep it from ever being used again.  (More shadows of the mushroom cloud here.)  And on top of all that we get an old fashioned love triangle for good measure.  So there's something for everyone.

Gojira is a truly remarkable film and the fact that Toho Productions shot this at the same time as Seven Samurai is mind-blowing.  (They were both contenders for Japan's Best Picture award that year, with Samurai emerging victorious.)  This was the perfect way to start off my Pacific Rim prep, setting a serious tone before getting into some of the later, sillier monster brawls.

On to the live-tweets!





































































































Next up: Trollhunter...

*I'm taking a break on Saturday to see A Band Called Death at the Brattle, but I'm also planning to revisit something I've already seen just to keep the momentum going, probably The Host since I haven't actually watched it since I first bought it on DVD.  Also hoping to squeeze in Godzilla: Final Wars on Sunday morning.

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Title: Gojira
Director: Ishiro Honda
Starring: Akira Hakarada, Momoko Kochi, Akihiko Hirata, Fuyuki Murakami, Haruo Nakajima
Year Of Release: 1954
Viewing Method: Criterion DVD





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