Once upon a time, in the magical era of 1975, there was a band called "Death", in a city called "Detroit". And Death was a punk band.

Now obviously, Death didn't look like what many people today think punk rockers looked like; anybody too young to have experienced it as it happened has been taught, by 20 years of 42-minute retrospectives on VH1 which endlessly recycle footage of the Sex Pistols and the Ramones, that punk was the music of angry, fashion-minded, white kids from New York and London. But that's certainly not the whole story. And Death certainly played the music that we now call punk. Take a listen:

Punk, right?

Drag City has just released a CD of Death's 7-song album ...For The Whole World To See. I grabbed a copy out of curiosity, and sadly, it didn't grab me back - frankly, it's just not fantastic stuff. But it is interesting. You can hear bits of Hendrixy-psychedelic guitar, a touch of funk maybe here and there, and lots of that rough, loud proto-punk of the MC5 in the songs. And it's all rough and unpolished and DIY, and it was played by three guys who couldn't look any less the stereotype. Which is pretty cool all by itself.