We wanted our songs in commercials. People like Neil Young were like, “I would never let that happen to one of my songs.” We thought, We want kids to hear those songs. “Freedom of Choice” is in a Target commercial. They go, “What is that song?” Then they go listen to the record, and they go, “Wait a minute. It says, ‘Freedom of choice is what you got / Freedom from choice is what you want.’ What does that mean?” We wanted kids to get sucked into our music, so we took advantage every time we got offered to license our stuff to commercials. That’s how we’ll affect people and change them. It would be kind of like letting evil Big Brother serve you up and Big Brother didn’t even know he was doing it. These are the exact people who needed to hear our music and would never have heard it in a million years if it wasn’t for one stupid song that fit into a dance club format. Some people came to our shows, and they’re doing their stupid white-people dances to our song, and they’re singing “Whip it good!” And then they buy the album, and they take it home, and they get served up a whole load of Devo.
CASALE: We were constantly trying to explain ourselves and present ideas, and they would get ignored or shot down. It was like the old TV series The Prisoner—you can’t get out of the village. That was the irony, and that was exactly what Devo had been telling everyone: All this fake rebellion rock ’n’ roll was just posing, and corporations were selling it. It had all been totally co-opted. We were elevating the whole idea of cooption as satire. When we said, “We’re all Devo,” we meant it.
THAT WAS THEN
BUT THIS IS NOW
Devo split in 1991. Mothersbaugh went on to a successful career scoring movies and TV shows. Casale has directed commercials and music videos. “Whip It” lives on in many commercials for household products, including Swiffer. In 2006, Disney attempted to launch Devo 2.0, a group of child actors performing songs from the Devo catalog aimed at the preteen market. The project was not a success. Devo 1.0, meanwhile, having re-formed in 1995, continues to release new music and tour.
“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.”
CASALE: Disney said, “We’d really like to do something with kids and Devo songs.” They wanted the songs skewed for four-to seven-year-olds. I said, “What if we cast around for a kids band that can actually play, and we’ll record them, and I’ll shoot videos for the songs, and we’ll make the kids into personalities and take them on tour for a year?” Disney loved it.
I spent a good part of a year getting the band together and ready to go out on a tour of middle schools. We were practically done, and the top brass at the Disney label wanted to see some of the video cuts. Suddenly, we were being asked to send over the lyrics to every Devo song that we’d shot. We get the big call: “You’re gonna have to redo the lyrics.” They were like, “‘That’s Good,’ the whole third verse: ‘Life’s a bee without a buzz / It’s only great till you get stung.’ We know what you’re saying. It means life’s a bitch unless you’re getting high, and life’s only great until the cops pop you!” I was like, Wow, here’s some suits that were raised on a breakfast, lunch, and dinner of hip-hop mentality, because those words were written in 1982, and it didn’t mean any of that. We might as well be in Red China. The best was “Uncontrollable Urge.” They said, “We know what an uncontrollable urge is!” We never said what the uncontrollable urge was. They said, “Exactly! It’s the lack of definition. Those kids are going to think it means sex. Make it about junk food.” This was going to play on the Disney channel in the afternoon. And what do they advertise: junk food and sugary cereals. I changed the lyrics. I wrote, “Before dinner and after lunch / I get so out of control I know I gotta munch,” and our lead singer in Devo 2.0 is a 13-year-old girl, Nicole, and so they show it to their top brass, and they go, “We love it!” It sounded so filthy!
MOTHERSBAUGH: The Swiffer commercial was maybe the most pervertedly like a Devo video. Like, we would have found that footage and gone, “Let’s use that!” ’Cause it was such hideous, moronic footage of a housewife dancing around her kitchen with a wooden floor mopping up with this stupid miracle mop. But by that point, “Whip It” had already been “Flip It,” “Chip It,” “Dip It.” It’s like they’re injecting people with their stupid messages; they’re the host mechanism for our virus. What did I just get? It wasn’t “Snip It.” Maybe it was “Clip It”? They did this commercial where they have factory workers singing “Rip It” for packaging things on pallets that are going to be shipped overseas. They have all these workers singing in this video that’s one step above homemade. I really like it.
CASALE: Devo have been offered a ton of opportunities all the time that Mark scuttles, and I keep trying to see how many of them can survive. I’d be doing a Devo musical and a Devo movie, a Devo store, Devo products. Mark’s the one that puts it into retirement. All he wants to do is composing for TV and films. At this point, I wouldn’t even have the expectation of cooperation, just agreement not to stop it.
MOTHERSBAUGH: He’s not being 100 percent honest. He is, in the sense that I put my attention in other places, but neither one of us can show the other a script they’ve come up with for a Broadway show that anybody wants to sign on to. Whatever the appearance is, my intentions are for the health of the band. If someone has a script that centers around the Devo songs or the band—although that, to me, seems less appealing than something that centers around de-evolution; you could do something very entertaining that talked about de-evolution—I haven’t seen that script. If he knows about a script that I turned down, he should send it to me immediately.
CASALE: I just came to realize that what I think should be any opportunities and potentials that should define Devo are not reality.
MOTHERSBAUGH: I feel like Devo should have done what Kraftwerk did, connecting with the Museum of Modern Art. Maybe I am the source of all the problems, but I don’t really think so. Who knows? Maybe there’s still time for Devo, part 3.
MIXTAPE: 5 More Songs by Bands of Weirdos 1. “Making Plans for Nigel,” XTC 2. “Rock Lobster,” The B-52s 3. “The Number One Song in Heaven,” Sparks 4. “Human Fly,” The Cramps 5. “Once in a Lifetime,” Talking Heads
“THE KILLING MOON”
In London, they preened. In Manchester, they brooded. In Birmingham, they danced. But in Liverpool, the bands of the eighties hallucinated. You didn’t even have to listen to the music; you just had to look at the names—the Teardrop Explodes, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, Dalek I Love You, Pink Military Stand Alone, the Icicle Works, Nightmares in Wax—to know that someone had slipped something particularly potent into the Mersey. The city’s most prominent act at that time, Echo and the Bunnymen, were on a different type of trip, and it wasn’t a joy ride. The opening bars of their debut single, 1979’s “Pictures on My Wall,” are a portent of doom. For the next four years and the subsequent quartet of albums, the Bunnymen made music choking with paranoia, confusion, and despair. Few singers embodied heavy-lidded, drugged-up dread as convincingly as Ian McCulloch. The Bunnymen’s brand of woe-is-me intensity is hard to maintain without collapsing into self-parody, and as the decade progressed, they evolved into a more traditional band. But to this day, those first four albums are like a long, scared shiver in the middle of a dark, lonely night.
JB: I wonder what it must have been like to be Ian McCulloch back at the height of his U.K. fame, to show up for concerts and find himself confronted with crowds of clones, adolescent doppelgängers swamped by their oversize army coats and baggy camouflage pants, attempting to duplicate his graveyard pallor and painstakingly unkempt hairstyle. I imagine he was enough of a narcissist to enjoy the effort and exult in the failure. (It’s possible he gave me a comprehensive account of what it was like while we were chatting, but that Scouse accent: impenetrable.) We live in a time when the words “rock star” are peppered libera
lly and inappropriately across all facets of everyday conversation. Actual living, breathing examples of rock stardom, though? They’re way up there on the endangered species list. In his heyday, Ian McCulloch embodied most of the attributes we want from our rock stars: He was aloof, self-obsessed, arrogant, insecure, and convinced that he was the center of the universe. And with “The Killing Moon,” he presented a cast-iron case that he was correct in that belief.
LM: When I saw Echo and the Bunnymen in concert a few years back, McCulloch introduced “The Killing Moon” by saying, “Some say this is the best song ever written. I happen to agree.” You won’t get an argument from me. Whenever I hear that eerie intro and he starts to sing about taking me up in his arms, it stops me dead in my tracks, whether I’m mid-work-out at the gym or mid-shop at Trader Joe’s. “The Killing Moon” is mood music that never fails to remind me of what it’s like to be young and wistful—not sad, exactly, but brimming with the kind of longing and melancholy that only a restless romantic can truly understand.
IAN McCULLOCH: “The Killing Moon” came in stages. I had the chords and the verse and melody, then one day I woke up, and it was sunny, and I sat bolt upright—if you can sit bolt upright—with the words to the chorus, which I hadn’t known any of before. I think it was the Lord himself saying, “It would be fantastic if you said these words.” I woke up and there they were. It was the whole thing: “Fate / Up against your will Through the thick and thin He will wait until / You give yourself to him.” That is up there with “To be or not to be.” Whoever Him is, is up to you. For a long time the Him in the chorus was me, and then I realized, it isn’t me at all—it’s Him, the fucking higher power. It’s basically a hymn or a prayer. It’s probably my “How Great Thou Art.” It sounds like a love song, it sounds adult, it sounds European—like it’s got subtitles, and everyone’s got fantastic hair. I’ve said a lot of times that it’s the greatest song ever written, and the reason it is, is that it’s more than a song. It’s way beyond being a song. It’s about everything. It’s not about football or fucking celery, but it’s about most other things.
I loved the Pistols and the Clash, but a lot of the punks were just dodgy Cockneys. It was backwoods music. At [legendary Liverpool club] Eric’s, it was always a mixture. It inspired the likes of me, Holly Johnson, and Ian Broudie. It wasn’t a fashion, leather-studded thing; it was more about listening to pretty obscure records that I’d never heard—everything from reggae to punk to shit like Roogalator. It was a melting pot. It started because of punk, but it wasn’t drenched in that one-dimensional thing that the clubs in Manchester had. They all wore cloth caps with their hair sticking out at the back. And tank tops. [Editor’s note: He doesn’t mean tank top in the American sense of the filmy garment that clings to Kate Upton’s curves. He means it in the grim, British sense of the shapeless, sleeveless, sludge-colored V-neck sweater that strained against many a British belly in the latter part of the previous century.] Liverpool was different. We had the Jobriath look amongst us with Pete Burns and Holly. It was a mad smorgasbord that I never got bored of. It was easy being in the same place as these … not weirdos, but lost souls. We couldn’t play any instruments, but it was only a question of getting a guitar off someone. The Crucial Three [McCulloch’s much-written-about-and-discussed first band with Julian Cope and Pete Wylie] didn’t exist. The other two wanted it more than I did. It lasted for about an hour. We played one horrible song in my mum’s front room. Julian had a silver bass. He’d painted graffiti on it, like “I Am a Punk” or “Get Punkitude.” He was a dickhead extraordinaire. Wylie played some kind of Les Paul the color of fudge. I stood there with a bog roll [toilet paper] and a sponge on my head mumbling some kind of crap. It was an hour of abject bollocks. The other two still believe that we toured.
Then there was another group, A Shallow Madness. We rehearsed in my flat, in my bedroom, but I used to go to my mum’s down the road to have my washing done to avoid being there. I’d go and have egg and chips, processed peas, HP sauce, bread and butter. I’d have eaten fucking rat rather than rehearse with them. They were rubbish. I thought, I’ll never do that show at the Rainbow, that David Bowie show I dreamed about. I’ll never be Ziggy Stardust. I thought at best I was going to be the tambourinist in XTC.
“[The Killing Moon] is up there with ‘To be or not to be.’… It’s probably my ‘How Great Thou Art.’”
But then I bumped into Will [Sergeant, Echo and the Bunnymen guitarist], and it was like, Fucking hell, this fellow has befriended me in one of the least-friendly ways possible. He was taciturn, and he was shy, but also he had an aura that could melt volcanic lava even more than it had already melted. He had a sneer—not even a sneer, just a kind of flick of his lip. I thought, Okay, you’re the cat for me. This fellow, he said, “I hear you’re a pretty good singer.” I said, “Who told you that?” I hadn’t ever sung in my life except when I was 14 in my bedroom to Bowie records. But I look like I’m a great singer. So he said, “Fancy doing some music? Come to my house in Melling.” I was like, “Where the fuck is that? Somewhere near Hadrian’s Wall?” It was not far off. It was a remote subcontinent outside of Liverpool. I took five buses to get there, carrying my Hondo guitar. I wanted all the people on the bus to look at me like I was a musician, but this was just a plank of wood with some strings on it. It wasn’t going to further my stardom.
When I got to Will’s, he had a drum machine and a guitar his dad made. I don’t know how he made it—he had no background in music or making instruments—but it bloody worked. I had my acoustic. We plugged in, put the drum machine on. He said, “What do you think: Bossa Nova or Rock 1?” I said, “Let’s try Rock 1.” The drum machine went boom-cha-cha-boom-cha-cha. I went ching-ching-ching on my acoustic, and he went ding-ding-ding on his guitar. I said to him, “Hang on, we are the best band in the fucking world.” I thought, Fucking hell, it took five bus rides to get here, but there’s something going on. That brittle twanging and some kind of spindly outer-space guitar and me singing something—it sounded interesting already. I thought, This sounds great. All I’ve got to do is recite or half-sing some pretentious crap over the top. And lo and behold, “Pictures on My Wall,” which sounded pretty decent: “People burning, hearts beating …” It was a bit like the apocalypse, Liverpool 11 stylee.
MIXTAPE: 5 More Songs from Liverpool 1. “Reward,” The Teardrop Explodes 2. “Touch,” Lori and the Chameleons 3. “The World,” Dalek I Love You 4. “The Story of the Blues,” The Mighty Wah! 5. “Flaming Sword,” Care
“Liverpool was different….It was a mad smorgasbord that I never got bored of. It was easy being in the same place as these…not weirdos, but lost souls.”
The first time we played Eric’s, we only had the one song. We got up and the drum machine wouldn’t work, and we were wearing headphones, so none of us could really hear anything. I was ready to go with our one song that I didn’t really know, but I had the line, “Talking to you about evolution / All you want to do is swing like a monkey.” I thought the cognoscenti of Liverpool would be digging that, and then after that line I should try and come up with a few more so it would keep going. Will was on his knees, going, “It’s not working! I plugged it into the PA, and it’s not working!” I was like, “It’s my first time, and your drum machine’s fucking crap.” He said, “Do you want to go into the dressing room and wait for me to fix it?” I said, “That’ll look good, won’t it? Leaving you onstage like you’re the sodding electrician. No, I’m going to stand here.” And it was pretty hot. I had this fantastic red polo neck on, the kind David Attenborough would have worn on the telly in the fifties. I was like, “Come on, get them ohms and watts going!” It could have been embarrassing. There were about 70 people. I just stood there and looked at them, and I think they all thought, Fucking hell. I didn’t say much. I coughed, and I did a full-on whistle into the mic, and then finally, after about 10 minutes, the drum machine started and we were off and running. People were spellbound. We were in our f
low. No, honestly, we were. Pete Wylie was like, “Bloody hell, Mac, that was out there. That was avant-garde.” It was better than being in a proper band with a drummer churning out all that new wave bollocks. All those bands wearing school blazers and gray jeans? I mean, what the fuck have you got gray jeans on for?
THAT WAS THEN
BUT THIS IS NOW
Echo had a modicum of modern-rock success with the singles “Lips Like Sugar” and the Doors’ “People Are Strange” from The Lost Boys soundtrack. In 1988 McCulloch split from the Bunnymen and embarked on a solo career. Nine years later the singer reunited with Sergeant and bassist Les Pattinson. The group continues to tour and record. Meanwhile, McCulloch continues to be irritated by Bono (who’s gone on the record as saying he’s an Echo admirer) and the U2 singer’s messiah complex.
McCULLOCH: I heard they played “The Killing Moon” on Dancing with the Stars. That’s the most difficult song to dance to. You can’t even do a funeral march to it.
With my songs, I always like to push things and make them cryptic but also make them easy for moderately intelligent people to get. I always want to push on and make those lyrical delights that can stand alone outside the song. That, to me, is the longevity of it. I know there are people out there who appreciate it and love it. It might not be right for 100,000 people with cowboy hats on singing “Where the Streets Have No Name.” I suggest they get their fucking local sheriff on the case if their streets have no name. Bono—Nobo, that’s his fucking name. What a gibbering, leprechaunish twat. He’s up to no good. He’s more out of his mind than I’ve ever seen anybody, and that includes Mel Gibson on the David Letterman show when his head spun around 360 times. He’s the most banal, buffooneried-up, fucking leprechaun. He’s kissed more Blarney Stones than I’ve had hot dinners. I wish they’d been toxic so he’d fuck off.
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