DEVO

DEVO

DEVO

As art rock antagonists DEVO hit the studio to record their first album in nearly 20 years, Tim Noakes talks to co-founders Mark Mothersbaugh and Gerald Casale about their impact on pop culture

It seems like growing old gracefully is out of the question for art punk antagonists Devo. Since 1973, Mark Mothersbaugh, Gerald Casale, and their brothers Bob 1 and Bob 2, have preached the gospel of de-evolution to disaffected spuds across the planet, arguing that mankind isn’t progressing – it’s regressing. Looking at the sad state of the modern world, it’s easy to see why they’ve been pissed off for over three decades. The idiots are still winning.
Angered by the massacre of four fellow students at an anti-Vietnam protest at Ohio’s Kent University in 1970, Devo set out to satirise American popular culture and politics in a way that had never been done before. Dressed in industrial yellow radiation suits and red flower pot hats (which they christened “energy domes”), the band blended together punk riffs and robotic synth pop with warped art concepts and anarchic lyrics that ripped apart the sheep mentality of the masses.
In their bible belt hometown of Akron, audiences attacked them and promoters paid them not to play. Unbowed, Devo left Ohio and rapidly became the toast of America’s New Wave underground thanks to genre defining songs like “Jocko Homo”, “Gut Feeling” and “Mongoloid”. Turning their exaggerated vision of modern life into warped music videos, in 1980 they broke de-evolution into the mainstream with their single “Whip It!” selling over a million copies.
Even though the likes of David Bowie and Neil Young regarded them as geniuses, as the 80s drew to a close Devo found themselves being written off as an unfunny art school in-joke. Releasing their last album in 1990, Gerald concentrated on directing adverts and music videos, whilst Mark took the two Bobs and formed production house Mutato Muzika, writing TV and film scores for Pee Wee Herman, The Rug Rats, and, most notably, Wes Anderson.
However, as a new generation of outsiders and bedroom musicians feel the economic fallout of America’s obsession with materialism, Devo have once again found themselves as role models to a young global audience who are sympathetic to the ways of de-evolution. Returning to the studio on the 150th anniversary of Darwin’s The Origin of the Species to record the first Devo album of the new millennium, Tim Noakes digs deep into Akron folkore with co-founders Mark Mothersbaugh and Jerry Casale, and talks to this generation’s hottest new bands about Devo’s trailblazing music and style.
Devo have always antagonized corporate society, why?

Jerry Casale: Devo came about at a time when really no one was doing music that was also a spring board to a worldview, a manifesto, a visual aesthetic, and our own political ideas. We created a certain kind of cracked mythology on purpose that was an alternative to a straight worldview.
Mark Mothersbaugh: There's a pamphlet from the 30's called Jocko Homo (below), that was a prayer card from when I first met Jerry. One of the first things he did, was to make a prayer card with himself wearing this leather mask as a Patron Saint.
J.C: It's kind of like when you get a text book as a teenager, and they have these ludicrous picture of some idealistic propaganda and you have to correct them-if your an artist, start putting captions on them, and you know fixing the faces, it's the same idea. We citied our references and the visuals and the quack pamphlets like Jocko Homo, things that inspired us, the pieces that came together for this holistic cracked view of the world that actually turned out to be more true than we wanted it to be.

Did the band start off as an art project which turned into a band in order to subvert a bigger audience?

J.C: Yeah, that’s kind of true. Devo was an art movement first and then we thought, ‘How do we really show Devo to people, how can they hear Devo in reality?’
M.M: People had such a violent reaction to our music when we first started playing that we knew we were doing something right.
J.C: We really enjoyed pissing these people off because they were horrible people.
M.M: Well, yeah we were pretty angry at them.
Some people see you as a pop band but I’ve always regarded you as intelligent punks
J.C: It was very punk but not nihilistic punk, it was like smart punk. It wasn't anti-intellectual, its wasn't nihilistic, it was more informative than that. We were trying to brainwash people in a good way, wash their brains, you know like reprogram them to make them think differently. That was the atmosphere we were growing up in, there was that horrible arena rock that had become totally stale with people that were just completely egotistical and narcissistic, with meaningless topics, really tight spandex pants with socks stuffed in their cocks, platform shoes and big hair going 'look at me, look at me, look at me' and we just hated it all.

How much of your anger was due to growing up in Akron, Ohio?

J.C: A lot of it.
M.M: Yeah, it left a heavy imprint.
J.C: The same thing that made it horrible to be there is probably what let Devo not get killed in its infancy. Even if there were guys living in New York City that wanted to do something like us, the press and the frenzy would have descended on them the first year that they were in the basement eaten it up, labeled it, dispensed with it, and they would have gone on to do nothing or something else. But nobody gave a shit about us except us. We would spend three years in basements and garages and build it up to were it really could survive on its own.

Did that get depressing trying to get your vision out there?

M.M: Yeah there was a certain amount of depression, but on the other hand when we finally did leave Ohio and went to New York and California we felt invincible. We went to these clubs where there were bands who were kind of wishy washy who had just started 2/3 months ago and we already had a vocabulary and a solid knowledge of what we were doing and why we were doing it. And I think it really struck people, I think we looked really different, we seemed really different and people picked up that it wasn't just a weekend prank or something that there was something substantial there.
J.C: Yeah it was intense. Being depressed in Akron fuelled the songs but once we sped them up there weren't depressing. We were reacting to the hideous culture around us.

Did religion play a big part in Devo’s music?

M.M: There were a number of things going on in that part of the country at that time including the fact that we had the two biggest televangelists in the world both broadcasting from Akron – Rex Humbard (left) and Ernest Angley (below). One of them invented instant replay of the miracles he would perform every week. He would talk to his dead wife by a telephone – she had a mausoleum out in the front yard with a phone line going into it. They had a direct line that was always open, he could run to his office, and have a conversation with her. He was pure theatre dressed in a three-piece polyester suit and fake-sprayed hair do.
J.C: He was really slick. We were more inspired by Angley in terms of performance and theatre.
M.M: So, there was that going on in Akron, we were interested in all things de-evolution because we had decided that was what we had seen going on around us and so once we locked on to de-evolution we found all these pieces of source material. Even things like Jehovah witnesses who were anti-evolution supplied us with lots of anti evolutionary stuff.
J.C: You know how it is once you’re interested in something you start finding it everywhere, and then it starts manifesting itself. We were never trying to be trendy, we were just trying to give it some kind of classical universal truth for young people to pick up on.

Why do you think your popularity has really exploded with young audiences the last few years?

J.C: Because de-evolution is real and kids know it because they live in that world. Imagine if somebody had shown you a crystal ball when you were a child of 2009 and said ‘here's the way its going to be’, would you have believed it?
M.M: In an abstract way, the energy that let Obama get voted in is kind of anti-stupidic, it’s kind of pro-devo in a way. People are saying it really is fucked up, lets see if we can try and do something to fix it. It is a time to be scared. I mean, we're never gonna be good looking and stupid, that’s our problem if we were we'd probably make a lot more money, so we’ve got to stay with what we got.

Why do young people still care about Devo?

J.C: Kids just wanna see old guys that can still act really intensely scary. I remember going to see Bluesmen when I was in college and see Howlin Wolf and John Lee Hooker and they were already like 50 and it was scary but great and you couldn't take your eyes off them cos they were so good at what they did.
M.M: Yeah, its like if nothing else, we see it as a lifetime being dedicated to an idea, which in our case is pro-information and anti-stupidity.

You played a big show last year for Obama back in Akron. How did you feel at that point in time, in terms of what you had achieved and what he was trying to achieve?

J.C: Well a lot more people liked us in Akron that night than ever liked us before. We were not exactly their favourite sons.
M.M: Yeah we didn't exactly leave town with any kind of fans there, nobody missed us. It interesting to go back there, because the actual location of the show was just a few miles away from where we wrote a good chunk of the songs that we played that night.
J.C: We were a mile away from where the first two songs were written. It made us glad that we were there on purpose and we were gonna leave again, that we weren't stuck there.
M.M: When we first played live in Akron we actually had people jump on stage and get in fights with us and pay us to leave. They would threaten us if we didn't stop playing. We were attacked on many occasions, in fact one of the most famous attacks came from Cheetah Chrome from The Dead Boys. He attacked us when we played The Crypt. He took Jocko Homo personally. He thought we were calling him a monkey. It was a science experiment. We had electrodes that we could put out there, and by the time we got to Jocko Homo that was kind of it for us.
J.C: It was definitely the litmus test. It was not so much a song as a manifesto and a rant that either you got off on it or you got pissed off, it was cut and dry polarizing.
M.M: We were obviously looking to get a rise out of people.
J.C: When they paid us to quit at this little bar, we took the money and went and had dinner. We had just the best night laughing, we were so proud of ourselves that we got paid to quit and had a nice dinner for our troubles.

Why has it taken this long to put out new material, is it because you’re not those angry young men anymore?

M.M: Life takes you on different paths, there was a point where it was really difficult to stay together, keep playing as a band, we had a drummer that said 'When I was a boy I was Devo now I'm a man I'm babushka, I'll see you later.' And then he went off and kept being babushka. You know, we had record companies that didn't understand what we were doing all along and then when they weren't hearing the new “Whip It” that they were looking for, they weren't interested

Did you get dissatisfied with the whole process of making music and art?

M.M: When cassettes came out I asked the president of Warner Bros, ‘If you say it’s cheaper to make a cassette than it is to make an album, why do you charge us more for the cost of making a cassette back to the band than making an album?’ And he just kind of smiled and said 'cos that’s the way it is.' The business was so corrupt and foul that it was really difficult to wanna keep making product and going up against it every time.
J.C: It was like very business except more crude and transparent, it had more of a Mafia feel to it. But it was fronted with a grin.
M.M: And also, just look at the last couple of decades – stupidity has been winning, and winning big.

Didn’t being signed to a major label fly in the face of your message?

M.M: What excited us was figuring out how to transmit the message, we wanted to get to a big public, we weren't trying to be obscure. We didn't feel like what made Devo great was that nobody understood or that nobody got to hear it. We talked about being Ohio's version of The Residents but we thought what we were doing was bigger and stronger than that, so we decided to give it the acid test, which is to put it out there in the public and see how far we could take it.
J.C: It’s easy to be artsy and obscure and tedious, and its easy to be gutless and poppy, but it’s very hard to have a valid aesthetic and be popular. We saw Bowie do it up through Diamond Dogs as well as Roxy Music and Kraftwerk. We respected those people because they had a great fine line between art and pop commerce. But you have to give a pound of flesh to Caesar, because if you can't find a stylistic mode that connects with people then you’re not in that game anymore.
M.M: We were trying to figure out what part of the Devo message people could embrace, because we knew it was there. We did as good as we could do. Our problem was we didn't have an infrastructure, it was all Devo. Jerry directed our videos, we went out and hunted for the props and I wrote down the storyboards for our films.

What do you think your legacy is?

J.C: I think we introduced a worldview, an aesthetic that had a kernel of validity in it, luckily. I don't know how other people will distill it down to some trivial sound bite but they will. Yeah, there's something beyond the funny outfits.
M.M: I mean, for us it was ironic that we could hold a press conference with 30 reporters sitting there in blue jeans asking us why we were sitting there wearing uniforms.
J.C: At least we thought about ours, we didn't just blindly go and do what you saw everybody else doing. But come on, its all for a bit of fun, we could dress like anchormen and come out on some cable news program, which would be really cool...

Do you ever feel self conscious getting dressed up in your yellow suits and energy domes?

J.C: No, you're going to work. And the plastic yellow suits were made for people spraying chemicals in warehouses and laboratories simply to protect them, and we feel when we go on stage that’s what we’re doing. When we first played England the punks would spit all over us, we'd have to play through a mesh screen between us and the audience, like we were in a cage, we just thought it was so fucking ominous and weird, and sure enough like freaky animals they would start thrusting at us and screaming at us and spitting on us as hard as they could, and we were so glad we had those suits on.
M.M: In our own little Akron, Ohio scrawny way it was kind of like our superman outfit too, we became superheroes.
J.C: Super nerds

Would you classify yourselves as nerds, as the kings of the nerds?

J.C: Yeah we were nerds.
M.M: But I don't think we were the popular nerds, we were just the nerds that were irritating. We were the smart-ass nerds.

Back to the question about your new stuff, do you still have that anger that you had back then? You don't seem that angry to me and on stage you seem more energetic than angry.

M.M: Well, we’re smarter now too, the one thing that being older brings you is definite knowledge, its like a lot of things we believed in have been proved but how that pays off is kind of ironic too, there's something to the aging process.
J.C: People are on our side now, because we’re not ahead, we’re not threatening them, we’re not far out, we’re with them.
M.M: If at one time, even our own record company thought of us as some sort of a carcinogen because they didn't understand what we were. Now they realise that we were trying to infect the whole planet with the idea of being anti-stupidity.

© TIM NOAKES 2009

The Cracked World of DEVO