May 4, 1970, is one of several contenders for the day the sixties died. “For me it was the turning point,” says Casale bitterly. “Suddenly I saw it all clearly: All these kids with their idealism, it was very naïve.” Participants in SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) such as Casale reached a crossroads. “After Kent, it seemed like you could either join a guerrilla group like the Weather Underground, actually try assassinating some of these evil people—the way they had murdered anybody in the sixties who’d tried to make a difference—or you could just make some kind of wacked-out creative Dada art response. Which is what Devo did.”
Devo was born in the three months Kent was closed down. “Gerry would come ’round to my house and we started writing music,” says Mothersbaugh. He’d first noticed Casale because of a prankster performance art stunt he’d pull during fine-arts faculty shows. “I’d be this character Gorge who wore a enema bag bandolero,” says Casale. “My sidekick, Poot Man, dressed in black wrestling shorts and a black full-face mask like those Mexican wrestlers. He walked around like a monkey, knuckles trailing on the ground. The art was always bad, derivative stuff—endless mindless landscapes and still lifes. I’d point at a picture and go, ‘Poot Man!’ and he’d rub his ass on the artwork, or hold his nose like it stunk. Every time Poot Man took a pretend shit on the art, I’d reward him with milk, which he’d suck through the enema tube. People would be disgusted and move out of the way, and somebody would get security. After a few of these events, they’d be waiting for us.” Says Mothersbaugh, “I saw him do the Poot Man thing, and I was like, ‘Who’s this guy?’ Everybody hated Gerry so I knew I was going to like him.” Casale, meanwhile, had already admiringly noted Mothersbaugh’s artwork—decals of puking heads in profile.
For key members of a band that later defined New Wave music, Casale’s and Mothersbaugh’s roots were unpromising. “Mark was playing in a band that did Yes and ELP covers,” chuckles Casale. “He had long hair down to his waist and a stack of keyboards.” An accomplished bassist, Casale had played in numerous blues bands and was steeped in everything from the original Delta blues to the electric Chicago sound. Prog and blues collided in a mutual passion for Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band. But everything that was earthy and primal about Beefheart’s cubist R&B became deliberately sterile and stilted in Devo’s hands. Their quest, says Casale, was to discover “what devolved music would sound like. We wanted to make outer-space caveman music.”
Devo’s other big inspiration was the glam grotesquerie of early Roxy Music. You can hear Bryan Ferry’s android vibrato in Mothersbaugh’s edge-of-hysteria bleat, while his approach to playing synth owed a lot to Eno. “I loved his asymmetric, atonal synth solos in Roxy. He brought a whole new way to think about the instrument, as opposed to Rick Wakeman and Keith Emerson, who just sounded like glorified organists. I used to write synth parts I could play with a fist instead of fingers. We were looking for sounds like V-2 rockets and mortar blasts, things that weren’t on the settings when you bought a synth.” Rather than a keyboard, Devo treated the synth as a noise generator. “The more technology you have, the more primitive you can be,” Mothersbaugh told one interviewer. “You can express guttural sounds, bird noises, brain waves, blood flow.”
In Devo’s earliest days, the group experimented with machine rhythm. “Our first drummer was my youngest brother Jim, who left to be an inventor,” says Mark. “He created a homemade electronic drum kit using acoustic drums with guitar pickups attached to their heads, which he’d feed into wah-wah pedals, fuzztones, and Echoplexes. It sounded really amazing, like a walking, broken-down robot.” Ultimately, Devo found Alan Myers, “this incredible metronomic drummer,” and the group started to explore disconcertingly disjointed time signatures like 7?8 and 11?8. “Those kind of timings make you feel rigid right away,” says Casale.
In the early to midseventies, with punk barely a glimmer on the horizon, Devo defined themselves against the ruling American mainstream rock of the day, characterized by chugging feel-good boogie and slick, slack country rock. Inspired by Beefheart’s jagged avant-blues, Devo broke up the flow with a deliberately ungroovy, stop-start approach that would eventually become a hallmark of New Wave. Just as Devo intellectually rejected all those “flabby leftover ideas from the sixties” (Casale) that had degenerated into self-absorbed, complacent hedonism by the early seventies, likewise their music’s twitchy angularity was the antithesis of FM radio’s soft rock. As expressed in the anthem “Be Stiff,” Devo’s proudly neurotic, uptight attitude was a revolt against the take-it-easy baby boomers. “We were anything but hippies—loose, natural,” Casale recalled years later.
Back in 1974, though, Devo’s herky-jerky rhythms—midway between spasm and stricture—were as appealing to Akron audiences as a cup of cold puke. Because no one wanted to hear original music, Devo pretended to be a cover band to get gigs. “We’d say, ‘Here’s another one by Foghat’ and then play one of our tunes like ‘Mongoloid,’” chuckles Mothersbaugh. “Angry hippie factory workers charged the stage trying to stop us. Often we’d get paid to quit. Sometimes the police would be called.”
Devo’s first two singles, “Satisfaction” and “Jocko Homo”—self-released on the group’s own Booji Boy label—were relatively torpid compared with their later frantic sound. This was partly because “Jocko Homo” and its B-side, “Mongoloid,” were recorded in a garage with no heating during a freezing winter, with the band wearing gloves. After five years of languishing in obscurity in Akron, playing only a handful of gigs and funding the band through a series of grim jobs (Casale’s résumé included projectionist in a porno theater, methadone clinic counselor, and graphic artist at a janitorial supply firm), the singles were Devo’s calling card to the wider world. “No one will ever know the effort it took for us to get out of Akron,” says Casale. “Driving down to Cincinnati with just enough cash to get two thousand copies pressed at Queen City Records. Mark and me sitting up endless nights gluing the covers that we’d printed together. Akron was like boot camp. We practiced day and night, and on weekends too—when other people were out getting loaded and getting laid—over and over until we got good.”
It worked. Devo evolved into a tightly drilled package of sound and visuals, sharing as much with the shock rock theater of Alice Cooper and the Tubes as with the no-frills punk rockers. Whenever feasible, Devo gigs began with The Beginning Was the End: The Truth About De-Evolution, a ten-minute film directed by their friend Chuck Statler, whom they’d originally met in an experimental-art class at Kent State. Statler’s minimovie generated the enduringly famous images of Devo: Mothersbaugh as mad professor in bow tie and white coat giving a student lecture on devolution, the rest of the band wearing plastic sunglasses and colored tights pulled tightly over their heads to squish their features, bank-robber-style. It was Statler who, in 1975, showed Devo a popular science magazine with a feature on laser discs, then on the verge of being introduced to the market. “We read that it was the same size as an LP but had moving pictures on it,” says Mothersbaugh. “And we thought, ‘Oh my God, that’s what we want to do!’” Originally an aspiring film director more than a musician, Casale fantasized about making “an anticapitalist science-fiction movie” and always saw Devo as a visual entity, where “the theatrics and the ideas and the staging were as important as the music.”
Champing at the bit to kick-start the videodisc revolution, Devo were impatient to get to the future. The seventies had been a write-off, merely the sixties sagging into decadence. Devo yearned to be the first band on the block making eighties music. Like Pere Ubu, they went beyond punk before punk even properly existed. Not just musically with their synths and industrial rhythms, but conceptually, too. They shared punk’s never-trust-a-hippie attitude, but, says Mothersbaugh, “We thought the punks never learned from the failure of the hippies. Rebellion always gets co-opted into another marketing device.” Selling out, using the system to spread the virus, seemed like the most insidious strategy for
Devo, who saw themselves as a “postmodernist protest band.” Putting out the Booji Boy singles independently was just a step on the ladder, a way of attracting attention. The game plan was to join rock’s ruling class. “We figured we’d mimic the structure of those who get the greatest rewards out of the upside-down business and become a corporation,” Casale told SoHo Weekly News. “Most rock musicians, they’re no more than clerks or auto mechanics.”
So Devo gigs started with a bombastic synth jingle, the “Devo corporate anthem,” during which the group lined up solemnly to give a salute. Because “individuality and rebellion were obsolete,” Devo “dressed identical so you couldn’t tell who was who,” says Mothersbaugh. “We wanted to look like a machine or an army onstage. We felt that the real mindless uniform was rock’s blue jeans.” Instead, says Casale, the group “dressed like maintenance worker geeks,” wearing outfits he’d acquired during his stint at the janitorial supply company. They built up a mix-and-mismatch wardrobe that blended the regimental (Boy Scouts, servicemen, football teams) and the technocratic (hazardous-waste protection suits, rubber gloves). This they spiced with kitsch grotesquerie, including cheesy alien masks and peculiar plastic helmets styled to look like extremely bad hairpieces. Devo also developed a tautly choreographed repertoire of jerky stage moves inspired, says Casale, by seeing a Russian constructivist ballet. “And then we played this very precise music like James Brown turned into a robot. And it really pissed everybody off!”
Not everybody. In 1977 things got confusing as first Iggy Pop and David Bowie, and then Brian Eno and Robert Fripp, jostled to produce Devo’s debut. Thrilling to the sensations of dislocation and menace their music induced, Eno raved about Devo as “the best live show I have ever seen.” Neil Young, of all people, invited Devo to appear in his feature-length movie Human Highway as a squad of disgruntled and radioactively glowing nuclear-waste workers. Iggy Pop was so enamored that he wanted to record a whole album of Devo cover songs as his next album. At the group’s New York debut show in July 1977, Bowie came onstage to introduce the second set and announced, “This is the band of the future, I’m going to produce them in Tokyo this winter.” Finally it was settled that the record would be produced by Eno at Conny Plank’s studio, a converted farm twenty miles outside of Cologne, with Bowie contributing only on weekends because he was busy making the movie Just a Gigolo. “We didn’t even have a record deal, but Eno said he’d pay for the flights, the studio costs, everything,” says Mothersbaugh. “Eno was just certain we would get a record contract.”
Sure enough, Warner Brothers, Island Records, and Bowie’s production company, Bewlay Brothers, began competing for the group. Devo looked like the next gang of marketable monsters after the Sex Pistols. Then Virgin Records entered the fray. In early 1978, Richard Branson invited Mothersbaugh and Devo guitarist Bob Casale to fly to Jamaica. When the boys had gotten very stoned, he popped the question: What did they think about inviting Johnny Rotten, freshly fired from the Sex Pistols, to become Devo’s singer? “He said, ‘Johnny’s in the next room, there’s journalists from NME and Melody Maker here,’” recalls Mothersbaugh. “‘It’s a perfect time to go down the beach, take some photos together, and announce he’s joined Devo. What do you think?’ I was too stoned to make the correct answer, which was ‘Sure!’ because we could have done the picture session, got the publicity, and then gone back to Akron and just said, ‘No way, forget it.’”
Devo recorded their debut, Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!, in Germany while still embroiled in negotiations with labels (in the end, owing to a dispute over verbal agreements, Virgin and Warner Brothers both got the group, releasing Devo’s records in the U.K. and America, respectively). Released in August 1978, Q: Are We Not Men? is a stone classic, but it does suffer slightly from falling between two extremes, neither capturing the full frenzy of Devo’s live shows nor making a total foray into Eno’s post-Low soundworld. “In retrospect, we were overly resistant to Eno’s ideas,” says Mothersbaugh. “He made up synth parts and really cool sounds for almost every song on the album, but we only used them on three or four songs…like the loop of monkey chanters that’s on ‘Jocko Homo.’ I’d kind of like to hear what the album would have sounded like if we’d been more open to Eno’s suggestions. But in those days we thought we knew everything.”
You can still hear the Eno imprint. Tinted and textured, Casale’s bass glistens wetly. “Shrivel Up” is dank with synth slime, giving the song an abject feel that fits the lyrics about decay and mortality. “Gut Feeling” takes garage punk’s woman-done-me-wrong rage and gives it a perverse twist: “You took your tongs of love and stripped away my garment.” “Uncontrollable Urge” makes rock’s “wild sexuality” seem as absurd and humiliating as an involuntary nervous tic. “Come Back Jonee” likewise turns Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode” inside out. In Devo’s tune, the heartbreaker bad boy “jumps into his Datsun,” the OPEC 1970s low-gas-consumption version of a real rock ’n’ roll automobile like a T-Bird.
While the band toiled away at their debut, Devo mania escalated. Stiff Records licensed the original Booji Boy singles and rereleased them in quick succession. In April 1978, their cover of the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction”—which defiled the iconic sixties classic by reducing it to a desiccated theorem—was a hit in several European countries. Devo’s disco-punk version resembled, in Mothersbaugh’s words, “a stupid perpetual-motion machine clanking around the room.” But by the time Q: Are We Not Men? hit the record stores at the end of August, the hype and marketing overkill was beginning to raise hackles. The U.K. press shifted into premature backlash mode. What were Devo “about” anyway? Devo interviews were full of opaque pseudoscientific jargon and references to a menagerie of bizarre characters like Booji Boy (a grown man with a baby’s face), all of which skeptics found both contrived and silly. It was unclear if the group’s devolution theories represented a critique or a cynical celebration of cultural entropy, corporatized rock, and the recline and fall of the West.
Hatched by Mothersbaugh and Casale in the early days, devolution was a patchwork parody of religion and quack science woven together from motley sources, including the Second Law of Thermodynamics, sociobiology, genetics, the paranoid science fiction of William S. Burroughs and Philip K. Dick, and anthropology. The pair found an especially rich source in all those dodgy nineteenth-century eugenic theories involving notions of degeneration and the decline of civilization (often attributed to race mixing). Virgin’s press release for the album claimed the band “devolved from a long line of brain eating apes, some of which settled in north eastern Ohio.” Casale sampled this absurdist notion from a three-hundred-page treatise by a deranged Bavarian pseudoscientist. The tract argued that humans descended from cannibalistic monkeys whose diet of ape brain had resulted in bizarre mutations and the loss of their ability to live in nature. Devo also pillaged evangelical crank literature and pamphlets from millenarian Christian sects such as the Jehovah’s Witnesses. The album’s most physically galvanizing song, “Praying Hands,” was a stab at imagining a Christian fundamentalist dance craze. “Two of the biggest televangelists, Rex Humbard and the Reverend Ernest Ainsley, broadcast out of Akron,” says Mothersbaugh. “We saw how disgusting and evil these people were, and so we took delight in turning their cosmology upside down.”
In Devo’s music, a puritanical streak of revulsion jostled with an uncontrollable urge to revel in the mire. Talking of American pop culture, Casale describes being “raised in mindless electric filth.” Devo seemed to be starting from the same place—a sense of impotence and suffocation—as those great misanthropes of modernist literature, Louis-Ferdinand Celine and Wyndham Lewis, whose quest for purity in a tarnished world made them sympathetic to Nazism. In the first three decades of the twentieth century, abhorrence of capitalism led almost as many intellectuals to fascism as it did to communism. And some were quick to accuse Devo of being “fascist” themselves, most notably Rolling Stone magazine (who clearly rec
ognized on some level that everything they stood for represented “the enemy” in Devo’s worldview). Actually, it’s more the case that Devo managed to include both abjection and the “fascist” response to it within their art simultaneously in their pantomime of disgust and discipline.
Properly attired, Devo stepped forth as “the clean-up squad” on a mission into the goo-goo muck zone of mainstream American culture. Interviews teemed with imagery of decay, obesity, excretion, flaccidity, infestation, tumors, putrefaction, and bulimia. “Progress” was a belief system that had gone “absolutely rancid.” One sequence during The Truth About De-Evolution saw the group sealed inside latex bags, writhing “like maggots, paramecium, fetal things.” But Devo’s absolute favorite set of metaphors revolved around constipation, with Devo variously figuring as the laxative, the enema nozzle, the enema bag, or “the fluid in the bag.” “Gerry and I both had parents who’d read in Dr. Spock that it was a good idea to give your kids enemas once or twice a month,” says Mothersbaugh. “We lived in fear of the next enema, the warm soapy water. When we were in our twenties we finally said ‘Dad, that’s enough!’”
This icky squeamishness contaminated Devo’s sex songs, from their earliest efforts like “Buttered Beauties” (in which Mothersbaugh imagines female secretions smeared all over him like “glossy tallow”), to the chorus “I think I missed the hole” in the debut album’s “Sloppy (I Saw My Baby Gettin’).” They loved pornography, whether it was Bataille’s avant-garde version or Hustler’s mass-market hardcore. Hustler was the first newsstand porn mag to show gynecologically explicit photographs. “I wrote a song called ‘Penetration in the Centerfold’ about the first Hustler I ever saw,” says Mothersbaugh. “Porn is important to the lower economic levels, simply because you can’t afford real sex.” What emerged from these impulses and inputs were songs that, beneath the quirky Dada surface, were often plain misogynistic in the most conventional sense. On the debut, “Gut Feeling” segues straight into “Slap Your Mammy,” while “Triumph of the Will” on the second album, Duty Now for the Future, reads like a Nietzschean justification for rape: “It was a thing I had to do/It was a message from below…It is a thing females ask for/When they convey the opposite.” Much of Duty sounds like a robotic version of the Knack’s sexually pent-up “My Sharona,” all choppy New Wave guitar and frantically pelvic jack-off rhythms.
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