* JOHN TAYLOR, Duran Duran: I remember that. They were amazing. That was before they made a record. I felt ABC were better than us. I mean, The Lexicon of Love is a perfect record, as is “Poison Arrow.” But they couldn’t keep it together—that was their problem. But when I saw ABC at Holy City, I thought, Holy fuck! They played so well. They were a great band.
“Tears Are Not Enough,” the first single we brought out as ABC, was great, but it was really angular. It was successful—it got into the Top 20—but we had greater ambitions. We were our own worst critics.
We spent the whole of the eighties being unsatisfied with everything we did. We wanted to make a record that was like “Good Times,” and “Tears” wasn’t as fluid, and it wasn’t as funky. That’s why we contacted Trevor Horn. He’d just done “Hand Held in Black and White” by Dollar, and it had this panoramic, widescreen sound. That’s what we wanted to sound like. We didn’t want to be Dollar—they were cheesy. People said, “You had a Top 20 hit. That’s an achievement. Why are you changing it around?” But we hadn’t got to number one—that’s how foolishly ambitious we were. That was definitely the spirit of the times. It wasn’t really about any wealth that would follow from it. It was a competition. It was a game.
STYLE COUNCIL
“I really like Jerry Lewis in The Nutty Professor,” Fry says. “He undergoes this transformation and becomes Buddy Love in the Purple Pit. I always thought that was very Lexicon of Love. I was this gawky, adolescent, invisible kind of guy, but in the gold lamé suit everybody was paying me attention.”
“Everybody had their manifesto, and everybody had a big mouth back then. I used to tell people we were going to conquer the world.”
Trevor got it straight away. He was amused by a lot of the stuff we were talking about, how we were going to take on the whole music industry and change it. He was really inspiring because he’d been a musician—he was a Buggle. He said, “If you make a record, it lasts forever, so you might as well make it as good as you possibly can.”
Not to sound like Eminem, but you’ve got one shot. You’ve got to hit the bull’s-eye. There is a big difference between “Tears Are Not Enough” and “Poison Arrow.” The idea was to make “Poison Arrow” as un-rock ’n’ roll as possible. It was a million miles away from the Pistols and the Clash. We didn’t want to sound like anyone else. It was almost like a song from the 1940s but with bass parts from Chic and the drums… the idea was to have them as big as possible. They don’t sound that big now, but at the time, it was operatic in the sense that it doesn’t fade out; it builds to a climax. Lyrically, “Who broke my heart” is almost like a matinee idol singing. I’m looking at the sleeve—it’s all tuxedos. In the middle of the song there’s this bit where I go, “I thought I loved you, but it seems you don’t care.” And then Karen Clayton, the receptionist in [Trevor Horn’s studio] Sarm East, she did the “I care enough to know I can never love you” part. It was an attempt to be like Clark Gable rather than Johnny Rotten.
As a singer, looking back, I was completely inexperienced. I’d done a few gigs but I wasn’t developing. In “Poison Arrow,” the idea of the vocal was to be histrionic. It wasn’t just describing the emotions; it was reliving them. And it rhymed. This whole idea of making a song that rhymed was against the grain to a lot of the young bands that were writing songs back then.
“Poison Arrow” is a very emotional song, really. It’s that feeling you get when somebody doesn’t want to know you and you want to know them. It’s that gut-wrenching kick in the teeth when someone walks away from you. That’s the core of it, and I think that’s why it’s been successful over the years, because a lot of people have had that emotion. And another thing: “Poison Arrow” unlocked the door for the rest of the songs on The Lexicon of Love. The idea of writing something very emotional and not about toothpaste or electric pylons or the brutality of living in a high-rise block. Our songs were about heart and love and trying to make sense of that but, because we were very self-conscious, in an un-cheesy way.
I liked to write very bright, audacious, hyper-real love songs. But when I look back, I think I was hiding more than I was showing. Today’s writers are very vulnerable and very specific about how they feel, but “Poison Arrow,” “The Look of Love,” “All of My Heart,” they’re kind of brash and larger than life. I wanted it to be art. I didn’t mind the idea of being pretentious. What did Adam Ant say? “Ridicule is nothing to be scared of.”
THAT WAS THEN
BUT THIS IS NOW
ABC made a classic eighties attempt to blow up the formula that made them successful by following The Lexicon of Love with 1983’s austere, unglossy Beauty Stab, which was shunned by the mass record-buying audience who had previously embraced the group. (FYI: The title of this little recurring feature takes its name from Beauty Stab’s famously alienating first single, “That Was Then But This Is Now.”) Subsequently, they turned themselves into cartoon characters for the great How to Be a Zillionaire! (1985); countered the confusion caused by the previous two albums with Alphabet City (1987), a semi-successful attempt to rekindle the ABC that had won widespread acceptance; and tried their hands at a British house record that worked hard to sound jubilant and celebratory with Up (1989). It was their last album of original material to make any chart appearance.
FRY: In 1997 I started playing live again. I still play gigs with people like Belinda Carlisle and Heaven 17, and there’s an element of competitiveness even now amongst the veterans doing their victory laps.
The audiences we’re playing to, those songs meant a lot to them. That really illuminated things for me. Up to then, playing old hits was a millstone around my neck. I was like, “I want to leave the past behind, what’s next?” But it was fantastic to stand in front of an audience and feel the reaction, to read an audience and learn some stagecraft again. You sense all of that when you’re standing in the spotlight. I still take pleasure in singing “Who broke my heart—you did!” and pointing the finger, and all those fingers point back at me and sing along. Thirty years on.
“WHIP IT”
For Akron, Ohio, natives and fellow art students Mark Mothersbaugh and Gerald Casale, and their various siblings and co-conspirators, the combination of multinational corporations, religion, government, and TV pointed them toward an inescapable conclusion: The world wasn’t just getting dumber; it was actively devolving into a state of passive, drooling idiocy where any kind of atrocity was acceptable as long as it was wrapped in a bright package. Devo began life as an expression of outrage and disgust at the inevitability of a future where the world has mutated into unblinking blobs capable only of obedient consumerism. But that was a lot less fun than actually getting down in the dirt and wallowing inside the same corrupt, desensitizing system that was enslaving the nation. Devo should have been KISS’s evil twin, a merchandisable monster that plastered its logo over every moment of our mindless existence. They were too weird to succeed. But with “Whip It,” Devo collided with mainstream pop and allowed a momentary glimpse of what the world would have looked like if it danced in time to their tunes. It would have looked a lot like it does now.
JB: Getting older has its drawbacks. You pay doctors to fumble their way around your prostate. Also, you will probably never again listen to a piece of music and think, “I have never heard anything like that before!” Such was my reaction the first time John Peel played “Jocko Homo” sometime in 1978. It blew my teenage mind. If the tastemaking late-night BBC DJ had announced he’d just played a record made by aliens, I would have believed him. “Jocko Homo” sounded like a national anthem of a country I never wanted to visit. Devo’s problem was their timing. If a group like that, with their visual aesthetic, their brand awareness, and their dud-free early repertoire, emerged now, when nerds rule the world, they would be ubiquitous and instantly accepted. Instead, they had to settle for being the house band of the outcast, the socially awkward, the overexcitable, and the conspiracist. My kind of people.
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sp; LM: Devo scared the hell out of me. The “Jocko Homo” video seemed like a trailer for some freaky, sci-fihorror flick, and to my innocent, preteen eyes, the “Whip It” video might as well have been pornography. Mothersbaugh whipping the clothes off the black woman. The cross-eyed Asian girl with the gun. The guy who forces himself on the Asian girl while his white girlfriend cheers him on: “Ride ’em cowboy!” I’d yet to learn about S&M or rape or masturbation, but I knew enough to run to the TV set to turn the dial if “Whip It” was on and my mother was coming down the hall. Years later, I’m impressed by Devo’s brilliance and the obscure literary references and subversiveness they sank into their songs. Hard to believe that MTV, now a playground for reality-TV smut, was once the home of such edgy cultural commentary. But in the early eighties, those plastic-helmeted Devo dudes were as nightmarish—and as compellingly watchable—as Freddy or Jason.
MARK MOTHERSBAUGH: Our goal wasn’t to piss people off, but we were in a part of the world where there were a lot of things that were frustrating and crazy. Like people my age would sign up to go to Vietnam and defend democracy, and they’d come back and capitalism and democracy had decided that the reason why we were blasting away at people over in Asia was so it would be easier to set up factories over there so that our jobs in Akron could go over to Malaysia. It was a crazy time, and we decided that what we were observing was not evolution; it was more like de-evolution.
We were around for all the upheaval at Kent State. We were there for the shootings, and we saw all these people who had high ideals and wanted to change the world. Once people started shooting at them, they were like, “This is too heavy. I need to go back to being a student and not stick my head up and get shot at.” We ended up looking around and saying, “How do you change things in this country?” It’s not by rebellion. Rebellion gets hit over the head with a club and stopped very successfully. We were looking at who did change things and how they did it, and I remember feeing that the people who changed the culture the most were all on Madison Avenue. They were talking people into buying that new car they didn’t need. They were convincing people there were germs in their sink even though they couldn’t see them, but they could possibly be dangerous so you have to buy this special miracle blue cleaner. And yes, there is a cure for balding: It’s called brown spray paint. You just spray it on the top of your head. They were selling all these insane products and doing it in an artistic way, and we thought that was subversive. We thought, If we’re going to effect any change, the way to do it is you go into the belly of the beast.
GERALD CASALE: We became a performance art group, and a lot of it was based on aesthetic confrontation that wound up in verbal and physical confrontation. The more that happened, the more excited we became. The kind of crowds we were able to get in front of irritated us. The feeling was, If these people hate us, we’re on the right track because we don’t respect them either. We wore black plastic trash bags, poked holes in them for our legs to come out, taped them up around our necks so they wouldn’t fall down, and we’d be naked [underneath]. And we wore clear plastic masks; they were creepy, they had lips and eyebrows. We would play local bars, and it would get really nasty. A guy would scream, “You guys are assholes!” And I’d scream back, “No, you’re the asshole.” Then he’d go, “I’m gonna smack your fucking head in!” And the club owner would come over with a couple of roadies, and we’d be forced to leave the stage. A guy gave us $75 once to stop playing. We really enjoyed that.
At the end of 1976, we were in a basement in a house in Akron practicing many nights a week for many weeks over and over and over. We were getting excited by the fact that we could really play together, and the excitement of live performance sped up our music. We saw the Ramones when we were in New York, and we were suddenly becoming part of something.
[A&R man] Kip Cohen called from A&M out on the West Coast. We were invited out to L.A. to showcase. He famously rejected us and hated us when he saw us. But we weren’t going to take no for an answer. At our first performance, I had met Toni Basil, and she was friends with Iggy Pop, and she had dated Dean Stockwell. They had been hanging out with Neil Young. Pretty soon, we had four or five gigs lined up. It snowballed when unscrupulous managers and entertainment lawyers and record company A&R men started attending those shows, and pretty soon we had a bidding war.
We thought about Devo from the beginning as a multimedia band. Mark and I were visualists. We were art students. We thought we were going to put out video discs. We were reading all this stuff about video disc technology, and we thought, This is the future. We’ll be like the musical version of the Three Stooges. We’ll do short films that will feature a song we wrote. The productions will be music-driven, and we’ll do enough of them to make an hour program, and we’ll put one out every year. Oddly enough, that’s not the way it worked out.
MOTHERSBAUGH: The first thing Warner Bros. said to us was “Why are you wasting your time making these movies?” We said, “That’s part of our art—we’re visually oriented artists. We’re not just writing songs; we’re making pictures to go with them.” It took a number of years before MTV showed up and record companies noticed and went, “Oh, that’s what you tricky bastards were doing.” For the most part, they would use terms like “wacky” and “quirky.” “Quirky” was a term to take anything we talked about that was serious and marginalize it.
CASALE: With MTV, we were the pioneers that got scalped. We’d had five videos done before MTV existed. Then MTV was just starting out in 1981, and they came to us and blew smoke up our butts. They told us how we were the future and so were they, and how we had anticipated how things were going and they were going to show the whole world our videos and make us huge. MTV came on in three cities, and, yes, they were playing Devo videos all day long. Then, as soon as they went national, they tied themselves to Top 40 mainstream-radio hits, and they started pulling Devo videos because the songs weren’t on the radio. That was their excuse: “You guys don’t have hits.”
MOTHERSBAUGH: For survival, we needed to have some kind of an income. We were so far ahead of the curve that it really made sense at the time to crawl into the colon of Hollywood and attempt to impart our message through that methodology, to allow ourselves to be on The Dick Clark Show, to be on The David Letterman Show. We said, “How far can we get into this?” We thought the Devo aesthetic was strong enough, we believed in it enough and thought we were different enough that it could survive the acid test of Hollywood, and we had a modicum of success. We finally had a hit.
CASALE: We were still a band that cared about ideas and aesthetics, not sitting around trying to cynically write hits, and we didn’t put something on a record unless we liked it. We didn’t have any sense of “Oh, here’s the hit!” The record company types came into the studio when we were making Freedom of Choice, and they all decided either “Girl U Want” or “Freedom of Choice” were the only viable radio songs. They went with “Girl U Want,” and it promptly stiffed. They didn’t even want to put out “Freedom of Choice.” They were still arguing about spending any more money on us when [legendary radio influencer] Kal Rudman, independent of all that, made “Whip It” a hit. It isn’t like Warner Bros. paid some independent promo man $200,000. They didn’t spend money on Devo.
Lyrically, it was a parody. We were all big fans of Communist and Red Chinese propaganda, because intellectually you can’t help but be drawn to it, and because it’s so funny and the graphics that go with it are so powerful. It was really Thomas Pynchon’s book Gravity’s Rainbow that made me write the lyrics. In Gravity’s Rainbow, he’s writing these poems and lyrics, and they are parodies of Horatio Alger: You’re number one! There’s nobody else like you! You can do it! Americans, pick yourselves up by your bootstraps and you can make it! We thought, This is perfect. This is like the American version of Red Chinese propaganda. Our graphics taste ran toward Russian constructivism and Chinese government propaganda but, obviously, lyrically, we were more American. So I thought,
I’m gonna write a Pynchonesque parody, and “Whip It” was my attempt at that.
Some people assumed it was an S&M song, so we wanted to fulfill their expectations with the video. Others thought it was about jacking off. Every time we’d do a radio interview, typically the DJs would be these leftover seventies hippies. They’d have the satin baseball jackets from the record company and the big pile of coke, and they’d go, “Whip it, dude. Heh heh heh!” and they’d make jerk-off moves. We’d start by telling them what it’s actually about and that would bum them out, so then we realized we should just go along with it—”Right! Whip it! Heh heh heh! Ya know it!”—and then they liked it. We made sure the video reinforced the whipping idea by having Mark literally whip the clothes off the black woman in the ranch corral while the cowboys cheered him on. It was satire of all the horrible right-wing racist values.
Suddenly we were playing 10,000-seat arenas and getting taken a lot more seriously, and that gives you a lot more tools. But then, foolishly, we didn’t change our aesthetic or our message or our disdain for stupid people or fundamentalist religion or power abuses.
“We thought, If we’re going to effect any change, the way to do it is you go into the belly of the beast.”
MOTHERSBAUGH: We were a divisive entity throughout our whole early record career. You would get people who were inspired by it—the future geeks, the people who turned into the Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, and the people who embraced technology and understood ironic humor. But Devo were never Bon Jovi–big. We were always on the outskirts of the culture. When we had a hit, it was a double-edged sword. When the next album came up, the record company, who had ignored us for the last three albums—it was great: They would give us enough money to put out another record, and we got to do what we wanted. By the fourth album, they were like, “Wait a minute. These guys brought in millions of dollars for us. We better keep an eye on them, make sure they don’t fuck up.” So the president of the company was like, “Hey, guys, do anything you want. Just do another ‘Whip It.’” But we’d just done the same thing we’d always done, and “Whip It” just happened to connect with DJs.
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