Devo's Freedom of Choice 9781623563448, 9781501308734, 9781623563172

Table of contents :
Cover page
Praise
Series page
Title page
Copyright page
Dedication
Contents
Track Listing
Foreword by Fred Armisen
Introduction
Girl U Want
It’s Not Right
Whip It
Snowball
Ton O’ Luv
Freedom of Choice
Gates of Steel
Cold War
Don’t You Know
That’s Pep!
Mr. B’s Ballroom
Planet Earth
Acknowledgments
Notes
Also available in the series

Citation preview

FREEDOM OF CHOICE Praise for the series: It was only a matter of time before a clever publisher realized that there is an audience for whom Exile on Main Street or Electric Ladyland are as significant and worthy of study as The Catcher in the Rye or Middlemarch . . . The series . . . is freewheeling and eclectic, ranging from minute rock-geek analysis to idiosyncratic personal celebration — The New York Times Book Review Ideal for the rock geek who thinks liner notes just aren’t enough — Rolling Stone One of the coolest publishing imprints on the planet — Bookslut These are for the insane collectors out there who appreciate fantastic design, wellexecuted thinking, and things that make your house look cool. Each volume in this series takes a seminal album and breaks it down in startling minutiae. We love these. We are huge nerds — Vice A brilliant series . . . each one a work of real love — NME (UK) Passionate, obsessive, and smart — Nylon Religious tracts for the rock ’n’ roll faithful — Boldtype [A] consistently excellent series — Uncut (UK) We . . . aren’t naive enough to think that we’re your only source for reading about music (but if we had our way . . . watch out). For those of you who really like to know everything there is to know about an album, you’d do well to check out Bloomsbury’s ‘33‒’ series of books — Pitchfork For reviews of individual titles in the series, please visit our blog at 333sound.com and our website at http://www.bloomsbury.com/musicandsoundstudies Follow us on Twitter: @333books Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/33.3books For a complete list of books in this series, see the back of this book

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Forthcoming in the series: Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables by Mike Foley Super Mario Bros. by Andrew Schartmann Workingman’s Dead by Puzz Poole Beat Happening by Bryan C. Parker Metallica by David Masciotra A Live One by Walter Holland Bitches Brew by George Grella The Geto Boys by Rolf Potts Psychocandy by Paula Mejia Hi, How Are You by Benjamin Shapiro Dig Me Out by Jovana Babović Hangin’ Tough by Rebecca Wallwork Donny Hathaway Live by Emily Lordi The Raincoats by Jenn Pelly Parallel Lines by Kembrew McLeod and many more. . .

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Freedom of Choice

Evie Nagy

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc

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Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2015 © Evie Nagy, 2015 Lyrics from Freedom of Choice and New Traditionalists used by permission from BMG Platinum Songs (BMI)/BMG VM Music Ltd/ Devo Music administered by BMG Rights Management (US) LLC. All Rights Reserved. Lyrics from “I Need A Chick”used by permission from BMG Bumblebee (BMI)/BVG Music/White Trash for Cash administered by BMG Rights Management (US) LLC. All Rights Reserved. Excerpt from “Devo Take A Stand” reprinted with permission from Robert Christgau. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN:

PB: ePDF: ePub:

978–1–62356–344–8 978–1–62356–317–2 978–1–62356–651–7

Series: 33–13 Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk

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For Aaron, May and Elaine

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Contents

Foreword by Fred Armisen

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Introduction

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Girl U Want Look at you with your mouth waterin’, look at you with your mind spinnin’. Why don’t we just admit it’s all over?

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It’s Not Right I sit around in a trance all day and think about you all the time.

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Whip It Go forward, move ahead, try to detect it, It’s not too late.

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Snowball Started up again. Started up again. Started up again. Started up again.

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CONTENTS

Ton O’ Luv Take your turn, now make your move. Crush that doubt with a ton o’ love.

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Freedom of Choice Freedom of choice is what you got, freedom from choice is what you want.

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Gates of Steel Half a goon and half a god, a man’s not made of steel.

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Cold War I owe you absolutely nothing.

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Don’t You Know I got a rocket in my pocket, but I don’t know what to do.

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That’s Pep! Vigor, vim, vitality and punch.

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Mr. B’s Ballroom Yellin’, laughin’ tryin’ hard to act smart, we put ’em under pressure and you watch them fall apart.

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Planet Earth Planet Earth, it’s a place to live your life.

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Acknowledgments Notes

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Track Listing

Side 1 1. “Girl U Want” (3:04) 2. “It’s Not Right” (2:30) 3. “Whip It” (2:47) 4. “Snowball” (2:34) 5. “Ton O’ Luv” (2:37) 6. “Freedom of Choice” (3:34)

Side 2 7. “Gates of Steel” (3:35) 8. “Cold War” (2:38) 9. “Don’t You Know” (2:24) 10. “That’s Pep!” (2:23) 11. “Mr. B’s Ballroom” (2:55) 12. “Planet Earth” (2:57)

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Foreword by Fred Armisen

To me, the front cover of Freedom of Choice is an image in repeated motion. It moves, naturally, to the songs inside (on) the album. I don’t know how they designed the energy domes, but I picture them being worn by the band live, moving in the way that they do. You know how I mean that. Kind of instructional/presentational, but with conviction. I love Devo’s equal and careful treatment of music, videos, and graphics. It was my first lesson about great art: It all matters. Also, about the energy domes. Would this be considered the first time a band introduced hats as part of their outfit? Yes, right? I really can’t think of any others before them. And what a perfect design. I am going to go ahead and read too much into it, but I can see the music in the hat. The steps up to the top are, to me, the angular aspects to their songwriting. The circles, seeing it from above, represent the rolling forward style of Alan Myers’ drumming. The way he plays on “Gates of Steel” . . . I can listen to that song forever. I wonder how he came up with that beat. Imagine the song without drums, as if they haven’t finished writing it yet. Mark’s arpeggiated keyboard part in the intro. What did Alan x

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hear in that arrangement that made him come up with that opening tom-heavy drum beat? Just brilliant. My favorite song on the album is “Girl U Want.” It is everything that I love about Devo. I like that even though the drive of the song is aggressively mechanical, the lyrics are so much about being a human being. This album continues to be a huge inspiration to me. Thank you Mark thank you Gerald thank you Bob 1 thank you Bob 2 thank you Alan. Fred Armisen

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Introduction Finally, after all that waiting, The Future arrived in 1980. It had been sending heralds for a while—a television here, a manned space flight there, a personal computer that cost a mere $1,300 for 4KB of memory—but the ’80s were going to bring the real thing, man, a world where there was nothing that couldn’t be achieved with enough confidence and synthetic material. Ohio art-rockers Devo had plainly prepared with their 1979 second LP Duty Now for the Future, and now it was go time. Propelled by the new decade’s hightech, free-market, pre-AIDS promise, 1980’s Freedom of Choice would rocket what Devo co-founder Gerald (known to many as Jerry) Casale calls his “alternate universe, hermetically sealed, alien band”i both into the arms of the Earthlings and back to their home planet in one scenic trip. Of course, for a band founded on and named for the explicit premise of de-evolutionii—the idea that rather than i

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Unless another publication or instance is noted, all quotes come from interviews conducted between 2012 and 2014 with primary sources specifically for this book. Sometimes written as devolution; the band uses both terms in official materials.

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continue to evolve, mankind is regressing to a primitive herd mentality—The Future also meant doom, a long march back to the ant hill. With Freedom of Choice, Devo were motivated by burgeoning new waveiii creative inspiration and optimism, but also by a dread of America’s rightward political shift and increasing homogeny. The message of the title song is that people willingly hand over their freedoms for the comfort of not having to choose anything at all. At the same time, Devo welcomed the chance to use the very system they hated to get the message across. “We always thought what we were doing was being up front, letting the audience in on exactly what we were doing,” says Jerry. “If you thought rock and roll was rebellion, you were naïve. Rebellion was just a style, a leather jacket and jeans. But you were totally a corporate-owned entity. People wanted the act to have teeth, but not in some retro-crusade way of pretending to be juvenile delinquents. We were playing, it was more subversive. And yes we were doing it at the same time we were making fun of it.” After the critical and commercial failure of Duty Now for the Future as compared to the 1978 debut Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!, the band had one more chance to impart what co-founder Mark Mothersbaugh calls Devo’s “pro-information, anti-stupidity” agenda to the masses. “The initial, pure ‘art punk’ energy and kind of theatrical ‘hatchet-pop’ performance art that certainly put us on the iii

The term “new wave” in this book refers to the group of late-1970s to mid-1980s musical styles that grew out of punk but incorporated more pop sensibility; in addition to Devo, early new wave acts included Blondie, Talking Heads, and Duran Duran, among many others; see Chapter 3.

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map and got everyone to pay attention, had clearly run its course,” says Jerry. “We just had to concentrate on what we wanted to do musically, and Devo had always proceeded from ideas. So this was a make or break idea, and the idea was that we’d consider ourselves the ‘white robot James Brown.’ ” And for one extraordinary moment, everything fell into place. No strangers to internal tension, the band was creatively in sync and working together like never before; always insistent on maximum artistic control, they found a studio team and producer who gave them just what they needed but no more than they wanted; the new wave aesthetic and nerd revolution were uniquely receptive to the Devo concept; a bizarre, unpromoted, but brilliantly constructed track called “Whip It” struck exactly the right chord with exactly the right people. Freedom of Choice was Devo’s long-awaited weapon of mass mutation. *

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Work on this book began not with a 33‒ proposal, but with a phone call in early 2010 from a Warner Brothers publicist. At the time I was an associate editor at Billboard, and the upshot was an offer to interview Mark Mothersbaugh about the fact that new wave legends Devo would be performing at the opening ceremonies of the upcoming Winter Olympics in Vancouver, their first televised performance in two decades, where they would debut a new song and reveal a new, crowdsourced version of their iconic “energy dome” hats. For weeks, I’d been receiving a series of emails about Devo’s upcoming album on original label Warner Brothers, their first full-length studio release since 1990’s Smooth 3

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Noodle Maps. But the emails weren’t standard press releases— they were grey-toned, HTML-formatted “corporate communiques,” styled like the friendly but formal electronic letters you might get from your bank’s customer service department requesting feedback about your experience with a recent phone transaction. They came from “Devo, Inc.,” signed by a “Chief Operating Officer” with a generic, WASP-y name. The communiques served to report the status and/or results of marketing surveys and focus groups conducted around a new product from the corporation’s musical division. Even the songs were literally focus-group approved. The most advanced communications science guaranteed your enjoyment. I was born two years before Devo’s 1978 debut album, meaning that the early-’80s images and sounds to which they contributed so prominently formed many of my ideas of what images and sounds should be like. An early student of absurd irony, I was drawn to Devo like few other bands. While they had largely dropped out of the pop culture zeitgeist before I started high school, I’d always known that they were more than a band from my childhood; they were a subversive force, using humor and art to push against the prevailing political philosophies of what was, in many ways, a terrifying era. While Devo had never truly broken up, the band hadn’t attempted anything like the 2010 ultra-corporate assault in three decades. This wasn’t a cash-in by a nostalgia act with nothing better to do. The individual members had plenty else to do—that was part of the reason this new effort had taken so long to get off the ground. Mark in particular was making 4

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more money than he’d ever need composing music for what seemed like every other movie and TV show in production— his hundreds of scoring credits include everything from children’s fare like Pee-wee’s Playhouse, Rugrats and The Lego Movie to the HBO series Enlightened and most of Wes Anderson’s films. This was Devo seizing a moment to prove that the de-evolution the band had always predicted had come to pass, we are all Devo, let’s write our new corporate anthem together. Or at least, that’s what it felt like. The excitement in the press and social media around Devo’s return was real. Musically, 2010 was the most un-Devo year of Lady Antebellum and Train—and Ke$ha, who is more Devo than she gets credit for. There was a reason that in the two years between their first and third albums, Devo had gone from those art-rockers who stunned Saturday Night Live to million-selling icons, and it wasn’t just the airwave ubiquity of “Whip It.” It was that the world, however briefly, realized it needed to hear what the band had to say. Whether or not they could accomplish that success again was unknown; never losing their status as revered inspiration for two generations of musicians, they’d been fighting—against the world, the industry, and each other—for their cultural relevance ever since. But before Devo’s internal and external conflicts propelled a rapid artistic and commercial decline in the mid–1980s, Freedom of Choice made them curious, insurgent superstars. Their only platinum album represented the best of their unreplicable code: dead-serious tricksters, embracing conformity in order to destroy it with bullet-proof pop sensibility. At this peak of success, Devo’s hermetic seal 5

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cracked open to let in mainstream attention, a legion of new Devotees, lots of cocaine and the occasional violent Italian dwarf. “Freedom of Choice was the end of Devo innocence— it turned out to be the high point before the shitstorm of a total cultural move to the right, the advent of AIDS, and the press starting to figure Devo out and think they had our number,” says Jerry. “It’s where everything changes.”

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Girl U Want

Look at you with your mouth waterin’, look at you with your mind spinnin’. Why don’t we just admit it’s all over? The opening track to Devo’s 1980 album Freedom of Choice got its title, as any Midwestern new wave ode to sexual frustration should, from a Scottish religious pamphlet. “It had a cartoonish painting of a little girl with a bluebird sitting on her finger, and it said ‘Just the Girl You Want,’ ” says Devo co-founder Mark Mothersbaugh, who found the pamphlet while wandering around some city on a UK tour in 1978. “There was a story inside, which has nothing to do with the song, about somebody advertising for a ‘boy wanted’ to work in a grocery store or something. And this girl came in and got the gig.” Whether they’re meant to be or not, the first eight measures of “Girl U Want” are an almost literal musical translation of the transition from past to future. The first sixteen beats of one of rock’s most perfectly memorable riffs are a sole electric guitar, timed with military precision but also raw and distorted; in the fifth measure, an abrupt, metallic, ultramodern synthesizer joins the guitar in assertive 7

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unison, like a robot army brought in to set the pace for determined but all-too-human soldiers. It’s a tension that characterized not only the ’80s, but Devo itself, and the song’s theme of unobtainable desire defines a band that for all its iconic status never really got what it wanted. As Freedom of Choice’s first single, “Girl U Want” was supposed to be the breakout hit of Devo’s third album, the track that would finally warm the band to radio, an anthem that reminded record executives just enough of the Knack’s hit “My Sharona,” but with the frustrated, subversive vibe that had exploded the cult of Devo two years earlier. But it didn’t get there, and until “Whip It” became the band’s utterly unintentional smash, “Girl U Want” represented Devo’s best and last hope for real success. In the music video, Devo perform the song on an Ed Sullivan-type television stage to a crowd of young girls who seem just a little too happy to be there, an ironic juxtaposition with a song about not getting any that exposes the whole thing as a fantasy. Even the recording itself was held to idealized standards, as the band were devoted to the song’s initial, single-take four-track demo that didn’t meet technical radio standards and needed to be redone. “That was the one we were in love with, and kept going back to and comparing, and had a feel that we didn’t hear in any of the new recordings,” says Devo co-founder Gerald (Jerry) Casale. “It was the law of diminishing returns. We were chasing our tails.” *

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“Where did these guys come from?” would be an understandable reaction to first seeing Devo’s alien robot act, 8

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but there’s never been any doubt about where they really came from. Postwar Akron, Ohio, was a rubbermaking hub, struggling, working class, and not generally teeming with subversive artistic philosophies. The band’s early lore includes stories of hostile encounters at Ohio clubs with other acts and their fans; as Paul Ramball wrote in NME in 1978, “Cleveland and Akron are situated in Ohio, part of the American Midwest, which as a whole sports an unsavory reputation for being grunge rock territory.i Nugent, Aerosmith and other purveyors of guitar hellfire have the stranglehold.”1 When Creem writer Richard Riegel asked Jerry Casale in 1979 what Akron was into if not Devo, Jerry answered, “Oh, vans. That’s it, vans and quaaludes.”2 Jerry says that Devo came together not because they were alienated, but because “we felt more like aliens; that’s how we felt. Like aliens. We just couldn’t believe the things we would see and the things that would happen to us, from teachers and parents, to our peer group and the media. We were all having those experiences individually, and then of course when you get together and start talking, you realize that you had the same disbelief over the same things. You had the same disgust over stupidity in exactly the same way. What you would experience is that good ideas didn’t win.” The theory of de-evolution on which Devo was initially formed predicted humanity’s regression to primitive i

Interestingly, most accounts of the origin of the term “grunge rock” as we know it attribute its first use to Mark Arm of Green River and Mudhoney in 1981, but evidently there was at least some British tendency to use it earlier to describe mainstream guitar rock.

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automatons, and was for Jerry Casale and Mark Mothersbaughii a reaction to what they saw around them as rampant conformity and blind acceptance of authority. It was part social commentary, part performance art, and part winking absurdist satire—delivered with, among other things, a deep understanding of rock and roll. And as genuinely funny as it could be, it was also dead serious protest, after the May 4, 1970 shootings at Kent State University, where they were students—Jerry watched in horror as members of the Ohio National Guard killed four unarmed students, including two of his friends, and the idea for Devo as a collective force began to form in earnest. “It was a life-changing event,” says Jerry. “It completely transformed me from a more or less laissez-faire, live-and-let-live hippie to a righteously angered activist, and a person who really, really had it in for illegitimate authority.” In a 2000 interview, Jerry also explained how seeing a dead student’s exit wound “snapped me—how brute force and power control the planet, ii

Many accounts of Devo’s history name Kent State friend and collaborator Bob Lewis as a co-founder of the band and its version of the theory of de-evolution. Lewis himself has publicly claimed credit for the theory, and settled a lawsuit with the band in the late ’70s for alleged theft of intellectual property. Jerry Casale is vehement that Lewis’s claims are false, and that Lewis was merely an early participant in the band and its adaptation of existing theories. Investigating or speculating on Lewis’s claims is not within the scope of this book, which focuses on the context around and creation of Freedom of Choice, written by Jerry Casale and Mark Mothersbaugh nearly a decade after the band’s creation; for this discussion they are considered the band and its philosophy’s co-founders and principals.

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control information, control spin. It’s like primates playing king of the heap, whether in business or politically or with weapons.”3 But this book isn’t focused on Devo’s days in the pamphletwielding underground—it’s about their third Warner Brothers album and platinum-certified blockbuster Freedom of Choice, released in May 1980 and a twist in the trajectory of a band whose founding ideas were unlikely ever to be associated with major label superstars. As with many fringe acts that suddenly find themselves with mainstream success, their refusal to entirely get with the program was a huge part of their appeal as well as one of their ultimate challenges. For starters, they were a fake band—or at least, the rock band Devo was initially a performance within a much larger performance, becoming a somewhat unintentional focal point after appearing in Devo’s ten-minute film The Truth About De-Evolution that won first prize at the 1977 Ann Arbor Film Festival. The music was something for the image to do, and the predominant image was that of identical, robotic cogs representing teamwork, precision, and the obliteration of individuality. “In the beginning, we were not thinking of ourselves as a rock and roll band,” says Mark. “We were conceptual artists. We were paying very close attention to art movements, to the Ant Farm, to Andy Warhol’s Factory. To people around the world who had become organizations that solved artistic problems. Even like George Lucas. I have a notebook that I put together back in ’73, ’74, where at the time Jerry and I had seen holograms—you know, laser holograms, the really powerful ones where you could put like a seven-foot-long 11

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shark floating in the air, and walk up to it and look underneath it and look at its mouth and jump up in the air and look at its back, and it was fully articulated, but it was a ghost. And I just remember thinking ‘this is great. Holographic animation has to be right around the corner. I want to make that the art form I work in.’ I remember thinking that Devo was going to make these films that would be full of three-dimensional imaged art that would fill an auditorium. And if there was a band performing, they would just be musicians that we hired that would be Devo. Not entirely unlike Blue Man Group. It was all fantastic. We were idealistic and thought technology was going to do a lot more sooner than it did, and we also thought that people were going to be a lot more receptive to our ideas and help us.” And while record companies could never get their heads around a multimedia art collective, people did help Devo, at least on the rock and roll front—important people like David Bowie and Iggy Pop, who championed the band and eventually helped them sign with Warner Brothers after they reportedly had a pretty girl slip Bowie a demo tape while he played with Iggy in Cleveland. Neil Young was a fan, asking Devo to star in his film Human Highway as “nuclear garbage persons.” As Mark told The Stranger in 2009, when Devo were able to escape Ohio to play at New York clubs like CBGB and Max’s Kansas City, “we kind of became the band to see, overnight. We’d play, get paid $100, and sleep in a van, but on our guest list we’d have all of the Rolling Stones, Brian Eno, Jack Nicholson, all these actors.”4 Eno produced Devo’s 1978 Warner Brothers debut Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!, and the band blew young minds nationwide when they appeared on Saturday Night Live 12

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on October 14, 1978, playing their first single B-side “Jocko Homo” and their startling, ingeniously frustrated cover of the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction”—only one week after the Stones themselves had appeared on the show. The Akron outcasts—at this point Jerry, Mark, their brothers Bob “Bob 1” Mothersbaugh and Bob “Bob 2” Casale, and drummer Alan Myers—were the coolest thing going. But hipness didn’t translate into radio play, which was critical to album sales. “We never wrote radio songs,” says Mark. “There was always something about it that programmers could sniff out, that they were like, ‘this is a little bit different. This is weird. Or this is something that’s maybe making fun of us, or something I don’t get.’ On the other hand, the record companies did their best to dull all that. They referred to us as ‘quirky’ and ‘wacky.’ And those terms, they mean that we don’t take it seriously.” And while Q: Are We Not Men? drew a hardcore following of fans sometimes known as “Devotees”—or “spuds,” as has become Devo fans’ ironic term for devolved conformists and therefore themselves—many in the media, particularly the British press who spewed a great deal of ink over the Devo conundrum, refused to let themselves fall for what they did in fact perceive as at least partly a cynical joke. In an ironic inversion of Devo’s ideal to be more than a band, Sounds’ Jon Savage called Devo “a media phenomenon, a gimmick almost, rather than a band.”5 NME’s Andy Gill was more savage than Savage, writing, “The pro-Devo lobby cite musical ingenuity and forward-thinking; masterly grasp of the fundamentals of image; humorous anti-rationalism and snook-cocking at seriousness and pedantry. The more naive 13

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proponents of this argument may even try deciphering a coherent ‘philosophy’ from the fragments of de-evolutionist double-talk uncovered in interviews. A good many members of this lobby will be convinced of Devo’s validity by the patronage of Bowie and Eno (but then, there’s always a good few million twerps willing to have their standards, opinions and tastes set by their idols, aren’t there, Johnny?).”6 Even some of the more optimistic home-country press preferred to see Devo’s undeniable ability to make enjoyable pop music as some kind of untrustworthy manipulation. As Ira Robbins wrote in Trouser Press in January 1979, “Not unlike the Kasenetz-Katz bubblegum bands of the ’60s, Devo is providing crassly commercial insubstantial pap for the teen generation; fortunately they possess the same ability to please that made songs like ‘1–2–3 Red Light’ so unavoidably charming. While walking a fine line between conventional chromatics and unlistenable anarcho garbage, Devo uses both subtle and blatant means to produce music that both stimulates and satisfies . . . Maybe they’ll pull it off in the long run if they don’t choke on their own nonsense.”7 The first symptoms of that asphyxiation came later in 1979 when the second album Duty Now For the Future failed to meet anyone’s hopes. According to Jerry, second-guessing, band tensions, and the wrong producer doomed what should have been a coherent follow up to Q: Are We Not Men? “We had so many songs that we wanted, that we divided them up back in 1978 when we were recording in Germany with Brian Eno, and decided okay, here’s the first record, and here’s the second. The first record was our first record, just as we laid it out. When it came time to do the second, suddenly that 14

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cohesion among the band about ‘this is going to be our second record’ broke down, because Mark Mothersbaugh wanted to throw away half the stuff and just start over. And again, that’s fair enough if you’re on to something so brilliant and new that it’s going to be better, but great songs were dumped, and things like ‘Swelling Itching Brain’ had to be lived through over and over and over, where it took an inordinate amount of time in the studio to record it over and over and over. I didn’t like working with Ken Scott (another Bowie producer who had also worked with the Beatles). I don’t think most of the band liked working with Ken Scott. He kind of sidled up to Mark. That was his technique: ‘let’s see, find the guy . . . oh, here’s the lead singer. Goose his ego.’ But the result . . . I care about the ideas. I care about, like, a good movie. I don’t care if an actor does some real funny performance but the movie sucks. I care about the group and the idea. And what I saw is that that album was going south. The sound of the album disgusted me. The straw that broke the camel’s back was the way he recorded ‘Smart Patrol.’ I hated it; it destroyed the song; it, like, neutered it. It was like somebody de-balled it; it was a eunuch. It was a mistake; Devo and Ken Scott were not a good fit.” Guitarist “Bob 1” Mothersbaugh agrees, at least about the producer. “Who was that guy, Ken Scott? He would make us leave when he was going to do a mix. We did not like that. We’d come in and make changes afterwards. I don’t know how it ended up that the drums were so loud on that album. They were really loud.” Warners wasn’t happy either, and issued an ultimatum about Devo’s promised but as-yet-unwritten third album. 15

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“Basically Warner Brothers told Elliot Roberts, our manager, ‘listen, if these guys don’t do something great, we don’t care about our seven-record deal, this is the last record. That’s it. We’re dumping ’em,’ ” says Jerry. “And Elliot’s assistant came in and told us that, and it was a horrible feeling, a disgusting, horrible feeling, and I said something like ‘well, Mark, I guess you’re going to get what you wanted’—in other words, go onto whatever, his own thing, quit collaborating. And he tossed something nasty at me and left the room.” This is a good point to acknowledge an important theme in the four-decade story of Devo: that Mark Mothersbaugh’s creative drive has regularly pulled him away from the band— primarily to writing music for movies and television, but also to visual art and other projects—and that Jerry, who sees Devo as his life’s most important work but impossible without his collaborator, is deeply disappointed by this. They both talk openly about this tension, and recognize that there are things about which they will never, ever have the same perspective, even as they continue to come together to tour (at least as of 2014) and have successfully maintained a consistency in Devo’s message and cultural importance. Mark doesn’t remember wanting to throw in the towel after Duty Now, but he does acknowledge a growing disillusionment with the record business—“We came into it paranoid, and all of our paranoias were justified”—and the distractions of the rock and roll lifestyle. “Here’s my view. I loved writing music. And I just saw that everybody else, they loved all of the things that came along with it much more than they did the music part of it, and it almost became a thing where, okay, I guess we have to go do this again.” 16

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But along with Bob 1—the third surviving member of Devo’s classic lineup after the sad deaths of Alan Myers and Bob Casale in 2013 and 2014, respectively—what Mark and Jerry do agree on is that after cooler heads prevailed, and the band started writing and getting excited about a new musical direction, the days in 1980 spent creating and touring around Freedom of Choice were the good days.

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It’s Not Right

I sit around in a trance all day and think about you all the time. “It’s Not Right” started out as a “very strange, esoteric, little piece of hillbilly art,” with nonsensical lyrics, says Jerry. “I mean, pretty limited appeal.” Jerry reworked the bassline, and “had Alan work on the drums so that it was stranger; it wasn’t hillbilly anymore.” The song is a tug of war between two rapid synth lines and drum triplets; guitars are entirely absent, and the volley is occasionally layered with the signature new wave keyboard swell of a rocket engine accelerating before liftoff. Mark’s vocals are more subdued than on “Girl U Want”; the ends of syllables melt away. While “It’s Not Right” is one of four Freedom of Choice tracks credited solely to Mark Mothersbaugh as songwriter, both Mark and Jerry say that the final lyrics were a mashup of lyrics they had both written. Somehow, this resulted in a song that, while not musically conventional, carries a twisted take on one of pop’s most classic, straightforward themes—the entreaty of a sad, dumped, hurting lover. From the original hillbilly art, the song evolved to a more metaphorical demo 19

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called “Red Shark,” and eventually became “It’s Not Right,” which leads with the song’s familiar pleading “Baby, baby.” The girl is no longer idealized and unattainable; she’s been attained, and, without the courtesy of a definitive farewell, left the boy shellshocked on his ass, pleading for her to come back with words like “unfair” and “cryin’ shame.” It’s disoriented and fitful, but it’s also Smokey Robinson’s “The Tears of a Clown,” Marvin Gaye’s “I Heard it Through the Grapevine,” Aretha Franklin’s “Until You Come Back To Me” (written by Stevie Wonder), thrown into Devo’s whirring modern machines. *

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When tensions eased post-Duty Now and Devo started talking about what to do for their crucial third album, the Midwestern white boys kept coming back to R&B. “Bob Mothersbaugh and I had listened consistently to R&B growing up,” says Jerry. “We loved a lot of Motown and early roots music. And we loved Prince, and Stevie Wonder.” They also liked the sound of the Moog bass, which Wonder was heavily using at the time, and which captured the imagination of Mark, who had told the NME only months earlier that he hoped to use no guitars at all on Devo’s third album (“Anything having to do with technology,” says Jerry. “He never saw a piece of equipment he didn’t like”). They agreed that Jerry would ditch the bass guitar for the Moog, and that they would write songs inflected with Devo robotic R&B as a concept. “That got everyone excited,” says Jerry. “There was a whole idea to it, that this would be an incessant, danceoriented energy, but with Devo messages in the lyrics.” In other words, using recombo DNA, as Devo would call genetic 20

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hybridization, to put a white alien robot’s head on Charlie Wilson’s body. In the case of relationship songs like “It’s Not Right,” the “Devo messages” were more ominous than wistful or romantic. “Love in our songs was always very neurotic and psychotic and like a warning,” says Mark. “It could be something bad for all of us. We might be tarantulas or praying mantises or something and not know it.” A lot of the rejection of standard love songs, says Mark, came from his fear about what settling down would do to his career as an artist. “I knew I was going to be an artist, pretty early, and I said, ‘I’m not going to let anything get in the way.’ I had friends that I was in bands with, and I just remember the gestation period between ‘I got Sarah pregnant’ to ‘Hey, I can’t come to rehearsal. I’ve got to babysit tonight.’ Then you knew that’s it for him. Gary’s not going to be in a band. He’s going to stay in Akron and be a rubber worker or factory guy. I felt like there were so many artists that I really admired that weren’t married. Or at least, they seemed not to be married. Mick Jagger, okay, he did some weird marriage. But it was weird. Mostly he was just seen with groupies, and it didn’t bode well for the Beatles when they got married.” Jerry says that a lot of the relationship angst in Devo’s songs also came from a history of straight-up failure to score. “Growing up as spuds in Ohio, we had our share of hard knocks from women,” he says. “Plenty of rejection since none of us looked like football players, or worked at a bank, which is what girls respected in Ohio. Certainly not artists.” (By 1980, both Bobs and Alan were married or were soon to be, but romantic cynicism in Devo’s songs prevailed.) 21

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In 2009, Mark told The Stranger, “it’s ridiculous to think about, but we thought Freedom of Choice was our funk album. That’s as funky as Devo gets, I guess.”1 But in some ways it wasn’t as much of a stretch as it seems. Devo’s choreographed uniformity already had a connection to the tightly coordinated R&B groups of the ’50s and ’60s; in 1979, Ira Robbins had written that Devo’s live shows had “precision spastic robotics that are as much fun to watch as Little Anthony and the Imperials were back in the days when they wore fluorescent gloves and ties in the dark.”2 And however Mark feels about Devo’s ultimate ascension to soulfulness, he agrees that once the direction was set, the band was motivated and of one mind in a new way. For one thing, there was a freshness to the setting—the songs on Freedom of Choice were the first not written in Akron, but instead in Los Angeles, where the band had moved in 1978. “We were at a place somewhere around Wilcox and Sunset, I think maybe where Amoeba Music is now (at 6400 Sunset Boulevard),” says Mark. “There was a big grocery store or department store that had closed down, and then there was a row of storefronts that still just had their glass windows, like they could have been barber shops or shoe repair places back in the ’60s, but now their windows were painted and they were rehearsal locations. I remember Pink Floyd had the big place.” Even with the new setting and musical direction, Mark says the band was in the same “one man, one instrument” mindset they’d had for the first two records. “You played one line on your guitar and you made it essential,” says Mark. “We 22

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sat in a room and we played the songs over and over again, and honed the parts that we were working on in one room— we could play Freedom of Choice with two guitarists, one keyboard player, one drummer, one bass player. Or sometimes two keyboard players and one guitar player. Bob Casale was a swing man, he would play either instrument depending on what the song needed.” This, says Mark, was a strength of Devo’s first three albums that changed after Freedom of Choice. “We would keep rehearsing them until we got a guitar part that was definitive from the beginning to the end of the song,” he says. “But that meant if there was a solo, the song had to be strong enough to keep playing through the solo without the guitar playing over it, or just one guitar, or whatever, because we only had five guys.” For the fourth album, New Traditionalists, and beyond, when technology made overdubs easier and near lossless, “we started doing something called additive synthesis. And we didn’t even think of it that way, but it became a process where both Jerry and I were allowed to bypass things that were irritating us in a song, like we didn’t really like the sound of that guitar, we didn’t like the sound of that synthesizer by itself. But when you added another one, another layer, then we started liking it better. It changed the way we wrote. But I think it made our songs less strong.” Freedom of Choice, says Mark, was “the last album where there was really a lot of a concerted effort where everybody got together every day, and talked about stuff, and wrote things together.” With the new shared vision for Freedom of Choice, Jerry says, “we were getting results, and the results were really 23

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pleasing and exciting . . . and then of course the label really felt we needed a producer, but after that experience with Ken Scott, I was really, really reticent, and felt we could do it better ourselves.” But then someone suggested talking to Robert Margouleff, the chief engineer at The Record Plant and producer responsible for much of the synthesizer programming on Stevie Wonder albums of the ’70s, including Music of My Mind, Innervisions, and Talking Book. Margouleff and collaborator Malcolm Cecil had been in pioneering electronic duo Tonto’s Exploding Head Band in the early ’70s; the duo had created the enormous polyphonic analog synthesizer TONTO (The Original New Timbral Orchestra) that Wonder later embraced, and which two decades later lived for years in the basement of Mark Mothersbaugh’s Mutato Muzika headquarters in L.A. It was the end of 1979, and Devo were working with Neil Young on the film Human Highway. “We were nuclear-waste workers who didn’t like our jobs,” says Jerry. “We worked in Linear Valley, and then we did our parody of the Kingston Trio’s ‘It Takes a Worried Man’ in the context of a world that’s full of nuclear pollution. We were in these costumes every day, and our noses were bleeding because we had these hats that the prop department had made for me, with clear tubes coming out of a box from the hat going straight up our noses. Very uncomfortable. And we had theatrical dirt on our faces, and grease, because we were workers. We had these black work jumpsuits on and we had to stay in the costumes because it took too long to get out of them and clean up and put ’em back on for this film production schedule. So, we go 24

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meet Bob Margouleff at the Record Plant on our lunch break from Raleigh Studios, about fifteen minutes away. We walk in to meet Bob Margouleff in these outfits. That was a really fine Devo moment.” Margouleff remembers it vividly. “You know, John Lennon was walking in and out of the room, there’s America in the other room, and then there’s Marvin Gaye or somebody like that in Studio C, and everybody’s hanging out in the lounge. The pinball machines are flying around. Nobody takes notice of anybody famous. You’re not supposed to be a groupie when you’re in the studio. There’s this little entrance hall, and an office there in front, with sliding doors off of the parking lot, and we were all sitting out there, and this Volkswagen rolls up—a black Volkswagen with tinted windows. The boys proceeded to get out of that thing and they were all wearing these hick calf boots, black jumpsuits, hard hats with a little tank stuck on the side of the hard hat with a clear plastic hose running out of that little tank and up one nostril. They had dirt on their faces. They had apparently been on some stage, shooting something. I don’t know what. Everyone pretended not to notice. But it was absolutely a stunning entrance.” “[Margouleff ] acted nonplussed and made a couple funny jokes,” says Jerry. “He had a dog underneath the SSL board named Taco, and he had an assistant named Howard who said a couple nice things about our first record, and we had a nice conversation, and we agreed that we’d produce the record together, so that it wasn’t some authoritarian thing. And we just made an agreement right there and then that we would do it.” 25

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“R&B was my meat and potatoes,” says Margouleff. “I found that the roots of Devo’s music were at least sort of related to rhythm and blues in a lot of ways. So I felt right at home, and of course they knew my shenanigans with the synthesizer. We hit it off, and we started working together . . . I had just left Stevie’s employ and my former partner Malcolm behind—well, his name’s not Malcolm Behind, it’s Malcolm Cecil—but I left him behind, we went our separate ways. And I jumped into [Devo] with both feet, because I saw strange, striking similarities. Stevie was a very political songwriter, like ‘Living For the City,’ and he had a very close touch to the political condition in our country. I found that Devo had this similar awareness, and they were really the first environmentalist band . . . that’s the reason for the funny suits and all the costumes they wear, it’s all about technology alienating us from the environment. That to me was at the time—and still is—a very, very heavy message. The awareness of that really attracted me to the band and made me want to work with them.” The connection between the songs on Freedom of Choice and classic R&B resides largely in “consciousness of the bottom end,” says Margouleff, versus rock and roll where the consciousness lived in the guitars. “We utilized the bottom end of rhythm and blues, pumping drums, and a very present, very fat bass sound.” Margouleff says he didn’t see his role as imposing an R&B style on Devo, but rather using the band’s own unique shape of inspiration from the genre to guide his studio instincts. “For me, it was not a conscious thing, ‘oh now I’m going to be a doctor and these are my patients, and I’m looking at this from the outside and I’m going to fool them into doing this or that or the other.’ I was locked inside 26

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of it as much as they were. You stop listening to the sound of your own wheels, and you just act.” As he had with Stevie Wonder, Margouleff favored a dry recording with a minimum of reverb. “I don’t like reverb that much—it connotes distance,” says Margouleff. “I wanted Devo to be in your face, not down the hallway or at the bottom end of a long tunnel, or some kind of reverberous space. I wanted to make people really be able to touch them and have some kind of intimate contact with the band.” Such intimacy seems counterintuitive to Devo’s mechanical vibe, but these automatons were the ultimate fate of humanity after all, closely related to every last spud. And a lot of the work to roboticize the sound was done not just by the synthesizers, but the drums. Assistant engineer Karat Faye, who was introduced to Devo on their first day in the studio with Margouleff and who continued to work with the band through 1981’s New Traditionalists, says that he and engineer Howard Siegal spent a lot of time talking about and configuring Alan Myers’s drums for the perfect balance between hard rock and R&B. “We didn’t key any electronics to the drums, but we tightened them a lot tighter than normal; we tuned them up, so they were more in the upper range of a keyboard for the tom-toms,” says Faye. “We tried to make them live. We put gobos (cubicles) around them, and we had guys in the shop take the foam off of the one side so we had hard surfaces, and then we gated things.” The gating, which had not yet become as popular as it would later in the ’80s (Phil Collins was a big fan), gave Siegal and Faye a great deal of control over the length of time a drum would reverberate. They created extra 27

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channels on the sound board so that the gating wouldn’t be there if they didn’t want it. “We could add this stuff, so the drum sound shut down real hard, which made it even more robotic.” Despite Devo’s reluctance to share control with another producer, Margouleff and his team turned out to be exactly what the band needed. “He got us to do things we’d never done before, things we’d never thought about,” says Mark. “We only had five people in the band, so you didn’t need a lot of tracks, but he would do this thing where he’d run the bass synthesizer into two different kinds of amps out in different rooms and mic them, and then we’d run it into a direct line at the board. So you could pick and choose between the three tones. He made us aware of something that we’d never really considered in our playing before, and in our recording. It might have been what ended up luring us into the world of too many tracks on a song. But he made it balance out really nice; he treated synthesizers like they were guitars, and that’s one of the things I really liked about him, because he made the synthesizer sound pretty good.” And Margouleff ’s effect on the working atmosphere and ethic of the studio may have been at least as valuable to the band at a do or die moment. “When we were in the studio, we were invincible, and nothing from the outside came inside,” says Margouleff. “It was a hermetically sealed space, and soundproofed from the outside world. We weren’t in the Warner Brothers offices, with a bunch of half-crazed, drugaddled executives and all that kind of stuff . . . Because when you take people into the studio, they have to feel not vulnerable—it’s about protecting the creative act in the 28

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studio. And the thing is, it’s like sex—when you’re having sex, you’re not thinking about what you’re doing. You’re not looking at it from the outside, ‘oh no, we’re going to do it like this, let’s do that.’ ” The result was an egalitarian environment that was the polar opposite of Devo’s experience with Ken Scott, and extended the positive experience the band had been having while writing the new material. “We had hundreds of hours of goofy jams on tape and we’d have hours and hours of each song going through an evolution, and it was just a lot of fun,” says Bob 1. “With Bob Margouleff, it was a real collaborative effort. We had all our demos of everything, and he liked what he was hearing, and he was just trying to get that sound.” Margouleff experimented broadly in setting up the studio to capture the greatest range of sounds. “I was at a stage in my career where I could make unreasonable demands of The Record Plant, because I was such a superstar at the time, and I took full advantage of that,” he says. “For me, there is no glass between the studio and the control room, it’s all one big creative space.” Margouleff recorded some Freedom of Choice vocals by mounting live monitors in the control room so that the singer could really hear himself as in a live performance. “We’d played the songs for months until we really had them down, and then Bob Margouleff set up the studio so we could play the songs live, which was really cool,” says Bob 1. “The rehearsal space we had in Hollywood, we had this cheap bass amp, and we ended up just renting that and using the exact same amp to record. Everybody but the drummer sat in the control room and played. We pretty much played them 29

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live, which I will always say is probably the coolest thing about Freedom of Choice.” There was also a complementary work ethic in the studio that pushed everyone forward at the right pace. “Devo always had a plan, and they tried to live to it every day,” says Karat Faye. “Robert also had a plan. He only allows you to work for eight to twelve hours. You can’t work any longer, because he feels that once you pass that twelve-hour spot, you’re just going to start spinning your wheels and get tired. You’re not going to really produce. Over all the years that we’ve both been doing this, he’s right.” Faye and the band also worked well with engineer Howard Siegal, who passed away from AIDS in the ’90s after working with Margouleff for years. “Howard was one of those guys that you could just talk to about anything, whether you knew him or not,” says Faye. “Somebody you grew up with, that kind of thing. He had a good approach to recording, he made sure it was ready to go on tape. When it was time to push the button, everything was ready.” Margouleff says the Freedom of Choice atmosphere was “familial,” which was of course literally true as well as figuratively. Even Jim Mothersbaugh, Mark and Bob 1’s brother, who had once been the band’s drummer, played an important role, inventing eclectic noisemakers as well as devices to help equipment from different manufacturers work together before there were such machines and software readily available. He also designed a keyboard that allowed Jerry to play two off-stage Minimoogs at the same time on the Freedom of Choice tour, to replicate the studio recordings, where Margouleff had shown the band how much better two 30

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at once could sound than one. “Devo had a lot of different gear, and the manufacturers of electric keyboards at that time were insane,” says Faye. “They didn’t want to get left out of the business, so they each devised their own output codes. You had to convert one language into another to make them all work together, so you needed a brother with a brain.” Jim later went on to work at Roland, helping to develop MIDI technology. Plenty of brilliant music gets made amidst strife, but there’s no question that Freedom of Choice benefited enormously from Devo’s uniquely unified vision and effort that fell into place at just the right time. But then of course came the wholly unexpected hit.

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Whip It

Go forward, move ahead, try to detect it, it’s not too late. Let’s get one thing clear about Devo’s biggest hit of all time: “Whip It” is not a song about masturbation, or S&M. At least that’s the story that everyone involved is sticking to, and it seems unlikely that a band who in 1974 had recorded a demo with the lyrics “I need a chick to suck my dick” (later released on Hardcore Devo: Volume 2) would demure on this point. According to Jerry, who wrote the lyrics, “Whip It” is a tongue-in-cheek pep talk satirizing hollow American optimism. “I had been reading Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, and he had these limericks and poems in there that really made me laugh, where he was making fun of all the American, capitalist, can-do clichés—Horatio Alger—‘there’s nobody else like you,’ ‘you’re number one,’ ‘you can do it.’ And I was just trying my hand at it.” While it would certainly be consistent with Devo’s methods to include a knowing double entendre, they are adamantly ambivalent about the common misunderstanding, which both goosed the song’s popularity and made it ever more clear that the masses would never quite get what the 33

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band were trying to do. “We wrote it as a ‘you can do it, Dale Carnegie’ pep talk for President Carter,” says Mark. “We were afraid that Republicans were going to get in there [in 1980], and they sounded very nasty at the time. They were running this guy, Ronald Reagan, that seemed like a total—he seemed like he didn’t even have a brain. We were like, ‘How could that be our president? That’s impossible, that they choose him to run for president.’ So we were writing this music that was like, ‘You can do it, Mr. President.’ And then, of course, we were doing lots of interviews back then, and we’d have to get up at seven so we could go be on a morning talk show while people are driving to work. And we’d be sitting in the other room waiting to go in and talk to the disc jockey, and he’d be on the air, going, ‘You know, I whipped it just the other day, haw haw haw haw,’ and we’re like, ‘What an asshole.’ We felt very misunderstood. And then it just gave us more reasons to be crabby.” But when it came time to make the song’s nowlegendary music video, Devo ran with the S&M theme to absurd extremes. If you know nothing else about Devo, you know “Whip It,” the band’s only gold-certified single, which reached No.  14 on the Billboard Hot 100 and became a defining anthem of new wave’s rise. The song’s drumbeat and primary guitar and keyboard lines are each so distinctive that they could likely be identified, even in isolation, by anyone who’d heard the song a few times. That each part stands so well on its own is probably because Jerry says he assembled “Whip It” from two separate sketches—the famous five-note climb and the slower, three-note descent—that Mark brought to the group on cassette tape from his at-home writing sessions. “I asked 34

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him when he did that ‘doon-doon-doon-doom-dong’ riff, and he goes ‘well, I’ve had that for about six months,’ ” says Jerry. “I said ‘Really?’ and he goes ‘yeah, it’s just “Oh, Pretty Woman” cut in half.’ ” Mark had been living with his brother at the house of Bob’s girlfriend’s mother, who rented him a small bedroom for sleeping while not on tour and writing music. “I had been listening to Roy Orbison, and I really liked the song ‘Oh, Pretty Woman,’ ” says Mark. “And then I started thinking about how you take things apart, and reductive synthesis, so I just took part of the riff, and I wrote another ending. I just took some basic, generic thing and put an ending on it that was a different sound and from a different place.” The motorik drumbeat grew out of another collaboration, with Captain Beefheart’s drummer Robert Williams, who shared a house not far from Mark with Go-Go’s drummer Gina Schock. “I didn’t really have a good set of drum loops or drum machines or anything, so what I used to do is lug my tape recorder with me over to my friend Robert Williams’s house,” says Mark. “The Go-Go’s would rehearse there. Captain Beefheart would rehearse there. I would take my tape recorder and play a drum beat, and get Robert to play it for, like, four minutes on a tape so I could write music to it. And so, he was the first person who played the ‘Whip It’ drum beat, and he played it without any music.” Alan Myers then added fills and made the quick, relentless rhythm his own; it’s one of the best examples of Alan’s ability to be, as Jerry called him after his death in 2013, a “human metronome and then some.” The song absolutely relies on the beat’s consistency and drive. 35

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For the all-important whipping sounds, Devo and Robert Margouleff used an EML ElectroComp 500 synthesizer, Neumann KM 84 and U 87 condenser mics, and a lot of space. “There was a long hallway at The Record Plant that was actually outdoors between two buildings, but only about three and a half feet wide,” says Margouleff. “We used that hallway to go from Studio A to Studio B and then back into the back of the building. It was very reverberant, and that’s where we recorded that whip crack.” There’s also a whippingback-and-forth quality to the vocals, which Mark and Jerry decided to trade off. “It was a call and response,” says Jerry. “Kind of like white boys rapping.” Unlike artists who grow to hate their biggest hit (see Robert Plant vs. “Stairway To Heaven”), Devo don’t begrudge “Whip It” its iconic status, though they would have liked more of their songs to achieve it. “I’m glad it was ‘Whip It,’ because it’s certainly twisted and original,” says Jerry. “Those are the hallmarks of Devo, that you expect something different or witty or twisted, a little off. It has all that. And it came from a good place; it came from a pure, creative, open collaboration, and that’s to me when all the best stuff comes.” *

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In retrospect, the commercial appeal of “Whip It” feels obvious, but its rise and the resulting explosion of Devo’s popularity was neither expected nor part of the plan. The musical direction of Freedom of Choice was certainly more commercial than Devo’s previous albums, and the band was under label pressure to have a breakout, but Mark rejects the 36

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idea that any of the album’s songs were overtly constructed to that end. “In hindsight, you can create stories [about what drove the new direction], but we were doing what we had done all along,” says Mark. “I remember at the time, reading this article about Sting. And he said, ‘you know, I can wake up in the morning and have breakfast and by the time it’s lunchtime, I’ve got a top-ten radio hit written.’ And I just remember thinking, ‘how do you even think about music like that? How do you think that that’s what you want to do?’ For me it was always a foreign concept to write like that.” Mark says he hoped and expected that Devo would get popular, but by much more idealistic means. “We always thought that if the world just understood what we were about, they would just quit listening to all this other stuff, and they would just listen to Devo. That’s how we felt about it. We were the biggest, most devoted fans of Devo in the world.” In any case, any calculated effort was focused on “Girl U Want,” which, musically and thematically, was indeed the more obvious bet for commercial success. “The label thought ‘Girl U Want’ was going to be a hit,” says Jerry. “And of course, being us, we were like ‘Okay, if that’s what you think.’ We liked all the songs we put on the record, we couldn’t pick something out. So they ran with it, as much as Warners ran with anything we did. Maybe it isn’t like they spent independent promo money on us, or greased [record promoter and alleged payola titan] Joe Isgro’s palm, but they really put their publicity and marketing behind it, and it just . . . summarily tanked. We were just, like, dumbfounded. And they didn’t really have any 37

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follow-up plan. They had blown their wad as far as they were concerned.” But Devo still wanted to tour with Freedom of Choice, so they got on the road in the summer of 1980 without a hit single. “I think we were in Atlanta, about a quarter of the way through the tour, and Bill Gerber, [manager] Elliot Roberts’s guy assigned just to Devo, flew out all excited,” says Jerry. Kal Rudman, a Florida radio programmer whose Friday Morning Quarterback tip sheet had widespread industry influence, had embraced “Whip It” on his own, and the song had spread to stations throughout the Southeast. “He was flogging ‘Whip It,’ so it was getting airplay, and then it jumped up to New York City. Within about four or five days, we had to stop the tour and rebook bigger places, because the little places were selling out too fast.” Of course it wasn’t just tickets that started selling faster, but albums, and other weird fortuitous factors turned up to keep the momentum going. “There was this crazy thing happening,” says Mark. “When we got back from the Japan leg of the tour, there were these billboards all over Southern California that said ‘Freedom of Choice: Carl’s Jr.’ They showed four burgers that all looked pretty much the same, except you could tell one had cheese and one had ketchup and one had two patties. I remember seeing that on the ride back from the airport and thinking ‘Oh my god, they’re doing our advertising for us.’ Ironically, Carl’s Jr. turned out to be run by this ultra-right-wing conservative guy.” Bob 1 also remembers Elliot Roberts mentioning a particular groundswell of “Whip It” support just as it was starting to pick up airplay. “We were out promoting the 38

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album and the manager goes, ‘You know, those gay discos in Miami are crazy for “Whip It”!’ We were like ‘huh—maybe we ought to start looking more gay.’ ” Because Devo were so committed to the visual art and film aspect of their act, the band had been smart enough to convince Warners to let them use non-recoupable promotion money, usually spent on things like in-store displays, on production of music videos—despite the fact that MTV wouldn’t launch for another year, and the record companies couldn’t conceive of what their point was. Devo had already made the “Girl U Want” and “Freedom of Choice” videos, because those were the presumed first two singles, and filming them at the same time with Jerry as director was much cheaper, about $20,000 for both. But when “Whip It” took off, Warners actually requested a video for it, which Jerry estimates cost $15,000. Jerry says that when Devo visited morning radio shows and explained to the DJs that “Whip It” was not, in fact, about whipping it, “their smiles would drop and their eyes would go sideways. They were so bummed. I thought, you know what— and it took me way too long in my life to learn any of this— but shut up. Let ’em think what they want. And that’s when I decided to make a video that just reinforced what they thought.” The “Whip It” video is an all-time classic, both because it got heavy rotation on early MTV for being one of the only videos MTV could scrounge up, and because it’s so over the top on every taboo front. The video is set on a dude ranch, where beer-swilling cowboys and girls gleefully watch as Mark literally whips the clothes off of a tall, striking woman 39

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smoking a cigarette in a holder. In the ranch house windows, a cross-eyed Asian woman wields a gun and an old lady makes whipped cream, while the band, all in sleeveless black turtlenecks and red energy dome hats, play the song from the cattle corral. Jerry got the idea from a story in a ’60s’ men’s magazine he found at a vintage store, which was about a stuntman who had left Hollywood, married a stripper and moved to Arizona to start a dude ranch. “Every day, in the corral, for the guests, he’d whip his wife’s clothes down to her underwear,” says Jerry. “They had a picture spread of him doing it with all the guests surrounding the corral, all smiling. That’s the kind of stuff that fed us creatively. It was just so stupid and so low, and yet so great.” Shaylah Spitz-Kalmus was a twenty-year-old musician and ex-dancer working as a cashier at the Buttery bakery in Venice, CA, when Mark and Roberts walked past her and then backed up, and just stood there. “They told me who they were, and I’m like ‘duh, yeah I know who you are,’ ” says SpitzKalmus. “They thought that I was very striking, they loved my cheekbones, and said that they were doing this video for ‘Whip It’ and asked me to do it.” After she’d agreed, Jerry took her around to different stores to get the outfit, including Nasty’s Lingerie for the corset she would ultimately reveal. “I thought he was just a really cool guy. They were all really cool. I thought they were very, very smart, like ‘Whoa, engineers,’ you know? But the taping of it took for-freaking-ever.” At one point, she says, after the filming went late into the night, she realized she hadn’t eaten all day. “I said, ‘God, I’m hungry,’ and they said ‘Oh, you can just go on in the back.’ So I go back there, and there’s nothing but coke lines. I said ‘no 40

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no, I mean like, food.’ So someone went and got McDonald’s. I just thought it was funny as hell.” All of the pieces of Spitz-Kalmus’ clothes were tied with invisible fishing line, which would pull the piece away when Mark cracked the whip. “But the cigarette that comes out of my mouth, where the whip comes so close to my face—that was really whipped out.” Spitz-Kalmus says she was paid $200 for the unforgettable role. She never pursued a further acting career, but says that at fifty-five she still gets recognized as the woman from the “Whip It” video, and from current Facebook photos it’s easy to see why. “I’m sorry,” she laughs, “I still have it.” When the “Whip It” video was produced, it was seen by limited audiences on the very few late-night shows that featured music videos, but it was the birth of MTV in August 1981 that blew it up. And while Devo was already preparing for the imminent release of fourth album New Traditionalists at that point, the new exposure extended the life of both “Whip It” and Freedom of Choice. It also, for a short time at least, vindicated Devo’s once-dismissed original vision that the future of music would combine both sounds and imagery. But before Devo’s videos aligned with the birth of music television, songs like “Whip It” were helping define the rise of new wave and the promise of a shiny new, and yes commercial, universe known as the 1980s. “Punk had given way to a marketing plow called new wave,” says Jerry, “where basically all kinds of music was being marketed by the same kind of graphic art style and fashion even though, if you listen to it, there was great diversity, which I appreciated.” 41

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And outside of an occasionally correct reference to more synthesizers, it is in fact nearly impossible to define new wave by any single musical description—it’s more accurate to think of it as a cultural moment. As Theo Cateforis explains in his book Are We Not New Wave? Modern Pop at the Turn of the 1980s—named after Devo’s debut album, and featuring the band on the cover—“Radio stations that began featuring new wave artists heavily in their rotations labeled their programming as ‘modern music’ to distinguish themselves from the routine rock sounds of the day.”1 The modernity in question was defined by “the impending approach of a computerized society at the turn of the 1980s,” says Cateforis, and “promised a better life just as it encouraged critiques of societal dehumanization.”2 The bands most closely associated with early new wave, like Talking Heads, Blondie, Devo, and Elvis Costello and the Attractions, “shared punk’s energy but tempered its vitriol with more accessible and novel songwriting sprinkled with liberal doses of humor, irreverence and irony,”3 and were “trapped between the idealized rebellious purity of punk and the compromised artifice of pop.”4 Come 1980, many critics who had been following the band since its debut underestimated not only Devo’s appeal at that particular time, but the new atmosphere that would enable it. While the New York Times tentatively thought “things were looking up” for the band since the disappointment of Duty Now, the Washington Post’s review of Freedom of Choice predicted that “most listeners may think that the computer writing the group’s material could use a new chip,” and that “Devo’s joke may have run its course with this 42

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album.”5 In Sounds, Betty Page wrote that compared to the group’s earlier albums, Freedom of Choice had “an overwhelming loss of character, bite and power,” with songs that amounted to “nothing but an ineffectual, forgettable whole” that signaled “the sound of Devo falling apart.”6 But Devo had been referring to themselves as an “Eighties industrial band”7 in interviews as early as 1978; they knew they were a product of the future before it came. “It was the future, high tech, all this stuff that was out there in the culture with this great amount of optimism,” says Jerry. “It was pre-AIDS, and it was just a party, a big party.”

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Snowball

Started up again. Started up again. Started up again. Started up again. Just as “Whip It” isn’t about sex, “Snowball” isn’t about cocaine—although lyrics like “two tracks in the snow” made people think it was, and by 1980 the drug was central to the music industry as well as to Devo’s experience in the big, accelerating party of The Future. “It was a lot slower in the beginning,” says Jerry of “Snowball,” which Mark wrote but features them both in a pure lead duet, singing a forlorn, mechanized hymn to a spun-out relationship. “The whole song was slow and kind of sappy, and of course we kept energizing it, and speeding it up. Then we came up with that off-kilter beat [a synthesized riff that could double as a breaking news stinger], laughing about how it was like those strange, Irish folk dancers that hop on one foot and then change on the offbeat. So we all started doing that in the studio, and that’s when everyone started enjoying it, and we pumped it up. I don’t know how to even characterize the idea of the lyrics, it’s like a silly, adult fairytale. A fable. But it wasn’t a veiled drug reference.” 45

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Mark remembers “watching a TV special with a dung beetle rolling the ball of dung up a hill, and somehow that was making us laugh, because they were showing these beetles doing it repeatedly. And we were like, ‘that’s kind of heavy in a way.’ You just imagine replacing the beetles with humans, and I thought there was a song there.” His favorite part of the song was not even the song itself, but the aforementioned choreography, which Jerry had conceived. “We did it on stage, this thing where you hop on one foot and clap your hands over your head in rhythm to the music. And the music was actually kind of written to match that watusi move.” As a song defined by its performance as much as its music, “Snowball” had several interesting live versions, including one gone awry at an appearance on The Merv Griffin Show. “We had these two muscle guys we found at Gold’s Gym, who were holding swords or trumpets or something, standing behind us for no reason whatsoever,” says Mark. “I had a big bass drum from a marching band, and a whole bag of tennis balls. So imagine there are like 300 people—they’d go to like, Farmers Market (a famous L.A. attraction) to find tourists who’d go ‘I can watch them make TV on The Merv Griffin Show!’—people who are willing to sit there for too long as they make the show, but they’re all excited because they’d never done it before. They get a lot of old people. Anyhow, I had these tennis balls, and in the song, there’s the three times where it goes ‘And it rolled back down,’ with three big booms in a row. I had enough tennis balls so that on every one of those booms, I could throw a tennis ball onto this bass drum, and it would bounce out into the audience. I remember some 46

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seventy-year-old man looking straight ahead while it was happening, and he caught two tennis balls on his forehead. I’m sure Merv Griffin was so happy when the song was over, because they had to go buy that guy an ice cream cone or something.” *

*

*

In 2009, Devo took Freedom of Choice on tour, playing the album through live, along with Q: Are We Not Men?; the same year, Warner Brothers released a deluxe remastered edition of Freedom of Choice that included live versions of “Whip It,” “Girl U Want,” “Gates of Steel,” “Planet Earth,” and “Freedom of Choice Theme Song,” an instrumental variation of the title track. At the time, Mark told The Stranger that he overcame resistance to what was essentially a nostalgia tour because, “I realize that the third album is a better live album than it is a recorded album. I knew that ‘Freedom of Choice’ and ‘Girl U Want’ sound much better live than on tape; that’s not uncommon for us. We always have more success onstage than in the recording studio.”1 Of course it’s not just the sound that gives Devo whatever advantage they have onstage—as a fundamentally visual band, Devo put extraordinary effort into what people would see in the live setting. Beyond the pre-show films and choreography and other elaborate visuals that define Devo’s live shows, it’s hard to think of another act more associated with a single image than Devo is with their red flower pot “energy dome” hats, an icon that was introduced on the cover of Freedom of Choice, as photographed by Jules Bates, and on the album’s tour. 47

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According to Mark, when Freedom of Choice came out, the band always attributed the inspiration for the hats to the tiered construction of Aztec temples. “The real thing is, it came from a Little Lulu comic where there was a space alien who had a cancellator helmet—he had the exact same helmet, but with little ear flaps,” says Mark. “We were always looking for clothing and for things to wear that were the antithesis of rock and roll. When we found the yellow suits [that Devo started wearing in the late ’70s], we were over the moon. We loved that look, and we loved the idea that it was confounding to people to come expecting to see a band in hip-hugger jeans with big bellbottoms or something. They’d expect some derivation of rock and roll, and they’d come in and we’d look like hazardous waste removal people. And we ripped those off and had little, black, uncool shorts and black t-shirts and black knee socks, so we looked like we were on a high school basketball team in the fifties. So what we liked about the red hats was, after all this kind of freeform-y yellow plastic bag stuff, the hats looked more like Bauhaus or like some of those geometric outfits in ‘Ballet Mécanique.’ Jerry and I were art students who were very fascinated with the art movements during that period of time between World War I and World War II in Europe.” The album’s iconic cover—with all five members in energy domes standing like fireplace pokers in a line, looking straight ahead, flanked by two American flags—was not the first cover concept. It was designed by Artrouble, an L.A. art and photography collective founded by Jules Bates and designer David Allen, who was also a graphic designer for L.A. scene zine Slash (“It was sort of like the internet for Los Angeles 48

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punk rock,” says Allen). Initially, Devo came to Artrouble with a notion that the third album would be called The Girl You Want, and Allen mocked up a photo-free graphic cover that emphasized the band’s name and a crude but stylized image of an arrow entering a box. “They thought it was hilarious,” says Allen. “The idea of sex being reduced to an arrow going into a box.” The proposal got Artrouble the job, but the working title soon changed to Time For Devo, and Allen and Bates moved to ideas for photographic covers. The image they liked the best was a black and white photo of the band sitting on folding chairs with their energy-domed heads tilted up, against a backdrop of a curtain that was tiled with square clocks floating among sperm. The curtain itself was painstakingly designed by

Initial cover concept for “The Girl You Want,” an early working title for Freedom of Choice, by Artrouble. Courtesy David Allen, Artrouble.

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Initial cover photo for “Time For Devo,” an early working title for Freedom of Choice, by Artrouble. Photo by Jules Bates, curtain design by Phyllis Cohen, Courtesy David Allen, Artrouble.

Phyllis Cohen, an illustrator that Artrouble also used as a makeup artist. Jerry says that both of the initial working titles were “uninspired” and never had much of a chance of being the 50

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final concept, although “Time For Devo did get its fifteen minutes up the flagpole.” According to Allen, after the Freedom of Choice title and cover were finalized, Devo used the discarded Time For Devo sperm curtain photograph as part of a promotional poster at concerts, without paying for it or asking permission. “At that point I was like ‘oh well, what are you going to do?’ ,” says Allen, who has remained in occasional contact with Devo, including providing them with a striking black and white photo of Bob 2 from the Freedom of Choice artwork that the band used throughout 2014 for tributes to the guitarist after his death. “But Jules was incensed. From that point on, Jules would have nothing to do with them.” Bates was tragically killed in a hit-and-run accident three years later, just as his star as a fashion photographer was rising. Bates took a number of photos for the Freedom of Choice concept, and he and Allen preferred some of the black and white photos with more dynamic poses. But the band wanted the straight-staring color image. “I guess we were fine with it,” says Allen. “We were a bit disappointed that they didn’t go with some of the other stuff, which we thought was a little bit further out there. But it turns out, I’ve been told subsequently by many people that that record cover really jumped out at people at the time. There just wasn’t anything else like it. Which is the trick to doing a record cover in the first place. It’s to create something absolutely unique, that can brand and identify the band.” And there’s no doubt that the cover accomplished this. In fact, the static stare-down strangely supports the intensity of Devo’s stage energy, which was otherworldly from the 51

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start. In his NME review of a 1978 Devo concert in Newcastle, Andy Gill described the band’s choreography for “Uncontrollable Urge” as “90-degree turns on the spot like lunatic compass-needles sent every which way by rogue magnetism . . . simple but effective, more so than the excessive organized routines of the Tubes, and far funnier.”2 Gill felt the recorded songs on Q: Are We Not Men? were “weak, insubstantial and insipid,” but that “live, they invest those same songs with the power and dynamism they desperately lack on record, and set them in the short, sharp, humorous context they require. Writing about their performance is almost impossible; look down to scribble a note and you’ve missed something else, like a high-speed comic whose punchlines only hit you two jokes later.”3 Backstage at the same show, Jerry explained to Gill the nature of Devo’s stage energy. “I’ve seen films of the Beatles and all they did was wag their heads, and they created more insanity and energy in the crowd than all kinds of masochistic, whack-off antics, ending with Iggy Pop, ever could. It’s what energy gets created and transmitted, not how much kinetic energy the band puts on stage. By our organized energy, we create release. Ideally, what we’d really like to be able to do is stand absolutely still and produce such amazing music that the crowd would go crazy.”4 On the Freedom of Choice tour, Devo’s focused energy apparently transcended even that achievement. In a September 1980 review of a Los Angeles show for Sounds, Sylvie Simmons reported that “they don’t even need to appear,” because for the half hour before the show, “the audience is dancing and singing and chanting and causing 52

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general delirium to an empty stage. The possibilities are overwhelming. Devo concerts simultaneously the world over without them shifting a buttock from the side of their Hollywood pools. Clever, huh?”5 One of Jerry’s most vivid memories of the Freedom of Choice tour is closely linked to cocaine, which he’d first tried in 1977 thanks to the daughter of an Akron millionaire rubber baron. He didn’t think about it again until the night Devo played Saturday Night Live in 1978, and he bought his first vial—only to have it snorted in full by John Belushi at the afterparty. But by the time Devo went on tour in 1980, says Jerry, “everybody was doing coke as if it were cocktails, and I mean record company executives, managers, everyone. Of course, we didn’t have any when we went to Europe, but we were on the typical insane schedules, what they do to young bands to make the money work, where you’re just constantly traveling, sometimes overnight to the next gig.” In Zurich, the tour manager had decided the band would take a train through the Alps down into Italy and the first tour stop in Milan. “To make the load lighter, since we were traveling by train, they would collect all the suitcases early in the morning and put them on the truck with the equipment so that we would just have some carry-on bag and move more easily through the whole process,” says Jerry. “So we get on this train, and it’s absolutely amazing. The view, the experience, the food and the dining cars. We get to the border of Italy and these Italians with Uzis and dogs enter the train, it’s a bizarre experience for Ohio boys. Not only because it’s the way they treat their borders but because this was during the height of the Red Guard in Italy, the radical communist 53

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groups that had been basically ripping things up and starting fires. Their tactics were always to disrupt the public, including rock concerts. Anyway, they get on the train and ask for our passports. And that’s when I discover my passport had been left in my large suitcase that is now on the truck. “We don’t have any guide with us that speaks Italian. We were supposed to pass through the border and then meet our promoters in Milan. Of course we’re trying to explain to them what happened, they don’t care. So for the length of the train stop, we’re trying desperately to get hold of anybody from the promoter’s office with the numbers we have. And of course that doesn’t happen, so they throw me off the train. All I have is a tour schedule and a piece of paper with a name and number for the promoter, Francesco Sanavio. So I’m thrown into a cell right there at the station. I’m in a room with this weird hippie vagrant, but it turns out he’s affiliated with the Red Guard and he got thrown off the train because they had his name on a list. He speaks fluent English and Italian and he knows who Devo is. Needless to say he is hated by these border guys, but he manages to get their attention, and he talks one of the guys into calling this number. They get Francesco Sanavio on the phone and it turns out he’s infamous in Italy. He’s one of two promoters that runs the whole show, and he’s got a lot of underworld connections. “He personally drives up in a great big Seven Series BMW, and because he is who he is, he gets me out of jail and signs something that they will produce evidence of my passport while I’m in Milan. Of course he’s this wild-looking Italian guy that looks like he would be one of the Gypsy Kings or something. And he’s got this sidekick with him, who’s a dwarf 54

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named Tony. Tony speaks better English than Francesco. They grab me, and they go ‘we don’t have much time, not playing is not an option.’ So they throw me in this BMW, and he drives like a maniac. Sometimes we’re going the equivalent of like 100 miles an hour. Tony opens the glove compartment, pulls out a travel mirror, and reaches into his pocket and pulls out a huge vial of coke. He goes ‘hey Devo, you like the cocaine?’ I had just started warming up to it the year before. Kind of just like recreational use, nothing else. But this seemed like a good idea. So suddenly I’m flying with these guys down to try to make the concert, and they’re feeding me lines of coke. I’m in the back seat snorting this coke, and it’s really better than any coke I’ve ever had. And I get super high. I am so fucking high. Suddenly like too high. “We get back into Milan literally only about fifteen minutes late for sound check. And I go through sound check, high as a kite. I start telling the guys on stage what the hell is going on, and they find it hard to believe, but of course Bob Mothersbaugh, he wants in on it. So I go ask Tony. Tony explains he’s out, but he’ll get us some more. And the sound check goes very badly. And there’s all kinds of problems with the power and our equipment vs. the cycle of electricity over there. They get in a generator and transformer. Now the crowds are forming outside. You know, all the drama, just like a bad movie. They’re holding the doors, and then the Red Guard shows up, and they demand to be let in free. They started lighting cars on fire in the parking lot. We don’t see it because we’re inside but we smell smoke, and we hear sirens. We’re into about the third song, and the place is only half full, and it looks like a disaster, and we feel we failed. And suddenly 55

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at the end of the third song people start streaming in—they let them in, they make them miss some songs. Now in order to deal with this problem they let them all in. So thousands of people start streaming in, and suddenly we’re playing to like four and a half thousand people by the end of the next song. “In between songs all the lights go off and there are only these little work lights on. You know, everything is choreographed and rehearsed and planned. Our American tour manager peeks out from behind a pallet, and yells out Bob Mothersbaugh’s name because Tony had brought the coke. The smell of smoke is everywhere from these car fires, and now we’re playing for these Italians and we’re about forty minutes into the concert, everybody in Devo is totally high except for Alan, who doesn’t have time to get up between songs. So we finish the show. It’s a bizarre, surreal, almost clichéd rock and roll experience.” While Mark partook occasionally, he found that he really wasn’t cut out for these rock and roll experiences. As Richard Riegel reported in Creem, “As I’m passing out of the Holiday Inn, I spot Mark Mothersbaugh engaged in one of those wanton acts of destruction today’s decadent rockstars are so inclined to indulge in within in the walls of these shameless hostelries; he’s purchasing a coil of U.S. postage stamps from a vending machine in the hallway.”6 “Everybody gave you drugs back then, even the record company,” says Mark. “They would show up at a meeting and empty a thirty-five-millimeter film canister into the middle of the table, because this is civilization. This is how civilized people conduct a meeting. If you were doing coke, you had 56

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a leg up on everybody else. You knew something they didn’t know, and you were more success-bound than they were. And I tried it. But I just couldn’t do it. It made me feel like I had drunk a pot of coffee, just one line.” Designer David Allen’s favorite Devo anecdote, in fact, is that when he attended Warner Brothers’ Freedom of Choice listening party, Mark poured lines of sugar onto the table where label executives were about to convene. “When the executives came into the room, and they see this pile of what they think is cocaine sitting there . . . that was a funny moment,” says Allen. Mark says if a fan offered him drugs and he said he wasn’t interested, “they’d look at you, hurt. To them, peyote, mushrooms, LSD, marijuana, acid, heroin, it was all really important to their life and to their lifestyle, and they did it while they were listening to your music, and they wanted you to join their perception of things. And so early on, you learned to go, either, ‘I’ll take it,’ and then put it in your nose or your vein or your mouth, or you said, ‘Thank you so much,’ and you waited until you got to where the roadies were and dropped the pile of shit there.”

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Ton O’ Luv

Take your turn, now make your move. Crush that doubt with a ton o’ love. “Since we were flirting with mutant R&B as our kind of driving manifesto for this record, ‘Ton O’ Luv’ was another point-counterpoint riff that started as a jam,” says Jerry, who wrote and sang the song. “Statement and answer, statement and answer. Like good old R&B with a bit of Elvis thrown in—think of songs like ‘Burning Love’ and that era of music, we were just messing around with a mutant version of Devo doing that kind of stuff. I almost imagine Elvis singing it.” “Ton O’ Luv” has an appropriately heavy gait, led by lowend bass stomps and cymbal crashes, punctuated by a brassier, sneering synth slide. And just as Elvis’s burning hunk is a fairly absurd and unromantic unit of measurement for love, so is 2,000 pounds of it rolling through to obliterate your previous romantic troubles. “It’s tongue-in-cheek,” says Jerry. “Of course it’s supposed to sound optimistic—you can ‘crush that doubt with a ton o’ love!’ ” The song is one of several tracks on Freedom of Choice that embrace optimism in order to criticize it, just as Devo 59

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had always modeled authoritarian precision and mindless conformity in order to ridicule its truth. But now that Devo were legitimate superstars and working directly to drive a corporate machine, the satirical element became more murky. Were they hypocrites, or knowingly proving their own point? *

*

*

When Devo went to Japan on the Freedom of Choice tour, a friend of Mark’s in Japanese new wave group the Plastics explained that because there was no literal translation for “freedom of choice,” the album in Japan was called Psychology of Desire. “We loved that so much, that Jerry and I later wrote a song called ‘Psychology of Desire’ [a demo that became ‘The Super Thing’ on Devo’s next record but was included in its original form in a reissue],” says Mark. “On that same tour, we were at a sushi bar. It was a weird night—it was after a show, and Bob Mothersbaugh got challenged by these drunk Japanese businessmen to eat some fugu [pufferfish], and I think he almost died right there at the sushi bar. But the two guys, one of them had on this tie clasp and it was a hand holding an ink pen, and it said ‘New Traditionalists.’ Jerry and I were looking at this going, ‘that’s kind of a great, weird contradiction,’ and we really liked the term, so we decided to name the next album New Traditionalists. So we get back to Japan a year later [on the New Traditionalists tour], and I tell that same friend, ‘we named a song “Psychology of Desire.’ ” And then I told him the story about the two drunk guys and the tie clasp and asked him what he thought of the name of 60

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the new album. And he goes, ‘Well, it’s not so good.’ I asked him why, and he goes ‘Well, in Japanese, “new traditionalists” translates to “yuppie.” Fourth Devo album in Japan titled Yuppie.’ ” While it was unintentional, and maybe because of that fact, it’s hard to imagine an irony more perfectly Devo—that the title of one of their albums should reflect the materialism that they both abhorred and consciously appropriated. The commercial success of Freedom of Choice was Devo’s ultimate achievement precisely because it was their ultimate conflict— putting them right where they wanted to be in front of the masses while undermining the fundamental “proinformation, anti-stupidity” philosophy that both rejected corporate tyranny and accepted it as inevitable. “Devo’s point was that it was all a sham, that there was no such thing in corporate society as rebellion,” says Jerry. “Rebellion was purely a marketing tool. We were all in it together. We were all Devo! We included ourselves in it, so our message wasn’t quite punk, like ‘we’re going to bring down the system.’ We just thought we could subvert from within by having original content that actually meant something.” It was this ultimate consciousness that made Devotee Kurt Cobain declare to The Advocate in 1993 that “Out of all the bands who came from the underground and actually made it in the mainstream, Devo is the most subversive and challenging of all.”1 The music press made itself dizzy trying to distill Devo’s central tension and figure out how it felt about it. The prevailing tone tended to combine smug exposé with grudging respect. “Their business acumen and ability to 61

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present a unified, albeit fraudulent, persona-cum-theory make them a dangerous outfit to mess with, as compared with your run-of-the-mill idealistic dumbos playing in bars, praying for their big break,” wrote Ira Robbins in Trouser Press. “[Devo] didn’t casually form a band to carry their creative philosophy into new arenas, nor are they unaware of having a gimmick.”2 In his epic 1979 NME meditation on the band—itself dripping with knowing paradox—Paul Morley described the invisible barrier between Devo’s satire and their reality: “In the city with no heart, the band with no heart. That’s perfect! Spineless and immaculate Devo Inc. reside in Los Angeles, wallowing in the absurdity, the appalling artificiality, simulating the role of disturbing rock ‘n’ roll superstar wrecks, parodying the place of pop stars in contemporary culture, quite idiotically balancing negativity against a futile conscientiousness about what they do. Beat that.” When Morley asks Jerry “Are you still committed to Devo like in those early days? The pressure of big business must be crushing freshness,” and Jerry answers “Yes,” the writer respectfully admits defeat.3 But it’s not like Devo hadn’t always been perfectly honest— what many journalists labeled as cryptic shenanigans were actually completely transparent statements that told the bare truth about art and commerce. When Sounds’ Jon Savage asked Jerry in 1978 if he was worried about being sucked in by the business, Jerry answered, “I don’t even think that’s a question: you get sucked in. But then if the choice is between being sucked in or not being sucked in, I’d rather be sucked . . . that’s what becomes the creative process at that point—the 62

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creative process is so inexorably connected with business that it’s impossible to separate them.”4 He likewise told Melody Maker’s Ian Birch that, “We are a corporate image, we are entertainment for the corporate state of the world in the Eighties . . . Since pop music is definitely a vulgar art form connected with consumerism, the position of any artist is, in pop entertainment, really self-contempt. Hate what you like, like what you hate. It’s a totally schizophrenic position, but that in itself is a principle that most people both in the business and outside it don’t understand. Therefore, if they don’t understand that very idea, they don’t even know what they’re dealing with. Devo understands its selfcontradiction and uses it as the basis of its creativity. We make fun of ourselves. You have to. People forget that.”5 Of course those naive, exploited artists who didn’t understand their role in the system mirrored the rubber workers of Akron whose post-war industrial promise was in rapid decay. In his 2010 book Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class, Jefferson Cowie devotes a substantial discussion to Devo’s roots and their fearless march “into the oblivion of repetition, commodification, and vacant fun”6 as a form of cultural takedown. “The references to ‘spuds’—as an epithet for themselves and others—placed them in a category with basic earthdwelling humanity, but the band, like much of new wave, was fundamentally elitist in many ways,” writes Cowie. “While simultaneously rejecting rebellion and detesting the way ordinary people lived . . . they left themselves a space to be part and parcel of the system they were as much entwined in as critical of. Rather than advancing into the promise of 63

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modernity, according to Devo, the nation and its workers were turning into a bunch of idiotic, infantile, backward sliding stooges, and all the band could do was buckle in for the ride.”7 A common story, recounted by Peter Silverton in Sounds in 1978, was that when Warners signed Devo, an exec explained to them that, “For every million seller we sign, we like to have an art band to balance them out.” Devo’s reported reply was “Oh yeah? Who you gonna balance us out with?”8 Two years later, with Devo’s sales skyrocketing, this story lost most of its quaint humor. By the time Freedom of Choice exploded, Devo had found the perfect level of confidence that they were both better than, and no better than, the system they lived in.

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Freedom of Choice

Freedom of choice is what you got, freedom from choice is what you want. While “Freedom of Choice” never approached the success of “Whip It” (“I’ll never understand why ‘Freedom of Choice’ wasn’t a hit,” says Jerry), it is in many ways the perfect Devo song, and absolutely appropriate as the title track of Devo’s most successful album. The title comes from an illustration that Mark found in the early ’70s in a religious pamphlet that shows a confused man trying to decide between two floating ghosts that are related to love and attraction and lust, over the words “Freedom of Choice?” He included the image in a book he wrote at Kent State called My Struggle: The Spiritual Rubberization of a Spudboy from the Tire Town. “It was just kind of a rant,” says Mark. “It was about de-evolution, basically, and things falling apart. We went to that book for imagery for Are We Not Men, but that illustration is where the sentiments from Freedom of Choice come from.” As soon as the song was written, says Jerry, there was no question that it would be the album’s title. 65

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“Freedom of Choice?” illustration from My Struggle: The Spiritual Rubberization of a Spudboy from the Tire Town. Courtesy Mark Mothersbaugh.

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Musically, “Freedom of Choice” is a masterpiece of anthemic rock and roll: driving, infinitely repeatable, and worthy of a loud mob singalong. “We have these weird complicated things on the album like ‘Don’t You Know’ or ‘Ton O’ Luv’ where people go, ‘okay, that was interesting one time,” ’ says Mark. “But ‘Freedom of Choice’ is one of the songs that you can go back to, and they’re great.” The song opens with eight full measures of marching industrial piston sounds, made with an EML 500 analog synthesizer that Mark says was “impossible to rely on on stage for anything tonal” and therefore was “unusable for anything other than noise—which in some ways made it great, because it made me think about V–2 rockets and mortar blasts and explosions and whip cracks and industrial noises.” The extended intro makes the entry of the keyboard and guitar—themselves a perfect balance of sleek machinery and raw grind—an even more powerful payoff. “Freedom of Choice” is rally music—unlike the more winking fables that suggested de-evolution from an angle, or ironically embraced the capitalist authority they inherently opposed, the song is the Battle Hymn of the Spuds, clearly admonishing those who take democratic freedom for granted and won’t even know what hit them when it’s gone. “We really were onto something there, we felt, that was taking Devo forward,” says Jerry. “Musically and lyrically we were laying it on the line very clearly with people. It doesn’t get more didactic than ‘Freedom of choice is what you got / Freedom from choice is what you want.’ ” The song’s clarity also made the band’s weird method of protest more accessible. Someone could love “Whip It” 67

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without having any idea what Devo was about, or they could hear “Jocko Homo” from Q: Are We Not Men and know there was something going on that they couldn’t quite get their head around, but “Freedom of Choice” was just subversive enough that people could sign on without confusion. To fans for whom Devo’s ambiguity made spudhood a more special code to crack, “Freedom of Choice” is perhaps too straightforward. But if Devo’s mission was to speak to as many people as possible, as they consistently claim it was, then this was the song to do it with. Arguably more powerful, though more opaque, than the primary “Freedom of Choice” mantra is the B chorus limerick that appears twice and is the song’s most screamable refrain: “In ancient Rome / there was a poem / about a dog / who found two bones / he picked at one / he licked the other / he went in circles / he dropped dead.” “It was almost like a private joke,” says Jerry, who wrote it. “When you’re in high school, kids go around singing these dirty limericks like ‘There was a young woman from Wheeling / who had a particular feeling / She laid on her back / and pissed upon the ceiling.’ I was just doing a G-rated one, conjuring up ancient Rome, which has been around forever. Of course there is no such poem, but a dog and his bone are very, very primal. Very universal kinds of words and images that everyone understands, they’ve seen dogs do this, not being able to choose, or going in a circle. And then of course, add in the Devo darkness; he goes in circles ’til he drops dead.” The limerick also presumably has roots in the parable of Buridan’s Ass and the paradox of free will, named after the 68

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fourteenth-century French philosopher Jean Buridan. In the hypothetical situation, a donkey that is equally hungry and thirsty, and situated equidistant from a stack of hay and a pail of water, will die of hunger and thirst because it can’t make a rational choice between the two. The message being that failing to use your free will ends in your and/or the principle’s demise. The “Freedom of Choice” video starts with the freewheeling antics of some of the era’s top skateboarders, and ends with a variety of very different people using their power of consumer choice to buy the same identical drab jumpsuits and march down the street in lockstep. The illustration of de-evolution coming to pass could not be clearer. *

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Embracing new technology to record Freedom of Choice, “felt like the future, felt like you could break free from the past,” says Jerry. But that future included an ever more concrete vision of de-evolution, particularly in terms of a growing socioeconomic chasm. If Devo represented both the promise of the technological future and the dissolution of democratic society—robots were the result of both, after all—it’s no wonder they found their moment in 1980. Devo’s rejection of the marketable concept of punk rebellion didn’t mean they weren’t absolutely political; if part of their message was that they couldn’t stop the rise of authoritarianism and mindless capitalism, they certainly didn’t think it was okay, and songs like “Freedom of Choice” made that increasingly clear. “We were aware that there was a conservative train coming through, and the rise of the religious right,” says 69

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Jerry. “And the preppy thing that seemed so . . . fraternity like. We really sniffed [Wall Street villain] Gordon Gekko coming.” Before Freedom of Choice, the band were more ambiguous about any specific political bent; they were chronicling what they saw as the decline of society, which was its own forceful commentary, leading to declarations like Paul Ramball’s in the NME in 1978 that Devo “aren’t so much a rock band, more a fully fledged conceptual assault on the consciousness of slumbering nations.”1 “We point lots of things out,” Bob 2 told NME’s Paul Morley in 1979. “We’re not just reporters. We are reporting what we see but I’m sure there’s always a certain slant on it. It’s never in one direction. It can be any particular direction at all. We couldn’t be considered liberals or conservatives in our viewpoint. We think beyond that as far as those kind of labels go.”2 But as the decade turned and the Reagan era approached, a more overt political message developed. Touring internationally had also given the members of Devo a new perspective on American politics. “It was interesting to find out how things worked in the world, and what it meant to be an American,” says Mark. “To go to Europe, and people would say, ‘We love your culture, we love your art, we love a lot of things about America, but we hate your foreign policy and your president’s incompetent.’ ” At that point, these external criticisms were directed at Jimmy Carter, but even that helped define Devo’s views on what was coming. “I thought Jimmy Carter was a pretty good president, but apparently nobody outside of Los Angeles thought so,” says Mark. “And Reagan sounded stupid. And he sounded mean. There were people that were saying, ‘Oh, he’s 70

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like a grandfatherly figure,’ but we thought of him as being malevolent. He started the evisceration of the middle class. He should feel proud in his grave that he helped do that. He set us off down the road that we’re pretty deep into now.” Of course, being Devo, efforts to make their political point more explicit were still susceptible to misinterpretation. “We designed these black pompadours to wear on the cover of [New Traditionalists] and on tour, because we were thinking of them as, like, JFK hairdos,” says Mark. “We were like, ‘Ahhh, bring back JFK, bring back the golden years.’ And ironically, because we had to make them one size fit all, and Jerry and I were trying to get the right measurements for everything, when they finally did get made, people started asking us, ‘Why are you guys wearing Ronald Reagan haircuts?’ ” Reagan’s popularity, particularly among the working class, is to many progressives emblematic of a tendency for people to vote against their own best interests—which aligns with Devo’s representations of de-evolution as something that people would happily, mindlessly accept. “It’s like Invasion of the Bodysnatchers,” Jerry told Morley in 1979. “They don’t seem particularly uptight about it . . . it’s like being happy being pods, the mutation’s complete. They’re happy.” In the real world, he suggested, the confusion of materialism and capitalism with happiness was accelerating the process. “People’s quest for happiness when they don’t have any idea what it is, it’s like some psychotic thing. Like out here [in L.A.] it’s most apparent, you’ll notice the number of products, the number of things that are supposed to make you happy, buy them then you keep having to buy them.”3 71

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Even Bob 1, who says he was “just making music” and “was not the political person in the band,” wasn’t immune to the 1980s’ signature trends of pursuing happiness. “I was a vegetarian briefly, when we were recording Freedom of Choice,” he says. “People were taking vitamin C, and I think vitamin E was a big one. There wasn’t a lot of stuff back then, but people were starting to experiment with trying to have a healthier lifestyle. It didn’t last long, though. I remember putting a lot of cheese on broccoli to try and make it taste good.” While Devo objected to the excessive corporate greed that led to unacceptable levels of inequality, they of course were not opposed to making money, particularly as the commercial success of Freedom of Choice was finally enabling them to do so. They had always, in fact, created their populist art with a strong entrepreneurial spirit and belief in creators’ rights, incorporating the band early and insisting on retaining rights to as much as possible, particularly their visuals and films. Devo have repeatedly licensed “Whip It” and other songs for commercial use, and Jerry says that through current Devo drummer and former Guns N’ Roses drummer Josh Freese, he campaigned throughout the ’90s for Axl Rose to include a cover of “Freedom of Choice” on his band’s elusive sixth album so that the song would “finally make some money” (Chinese Democracy was finally released in 2008, with no Devo cover). And then there’s the merch, which from the beginning let spuds adorn themselves in the Devo aesthetic, from yellow jumpsuits to buttons to 3D glasses to energy domes. This was of course in itself a parody of cheap capitalist culture; the 72

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Club Devo catalogs and order forms that shipped with LPs were modeled after ’50s’ and ’60s’ “futuristic” product ads that attempted to give advanced scientific legitimacy to a bunch of disposable crap. But it would be too easy to say that Devo were simply ironically making a buck off of something they despised. The parody also came partially from a place of genuine nostalgia for that optimistic, if deluded, post-war period before everything so clearly started to devolve. “We were into comic books,” says Mark. “There was always this thing in boys’ comic books, trying to recruit kids to be salesmen for a newspaper called Grit. That meant you had to go out and find people and say, ‘Can I deliver Grit to your house seven days a week?’ And they’d be like, ‘What the hell’s that? We get the Akron Beacon Journal; why would we want Grit?’ But if you did that, and delivered it every day, they had all these prizes, like if you got 50 points you could get a ball mitt, if you got 100 points you could get a BB gun, or 200 points and you could get a Schwinn bicycle. And you’d see maybe fifty things on the page that every kid wanted. And I just used to love that. So, when we did our albums, we always sold merchandise on the inner sleeve as our version of that. I remember after our first record, being admonished by Neil Young, who said ‘That’s not cool.’ I was like ‘What do you mean? That’s the coolest part of our whole album.’ ”

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Freedom of Choice release event, Tower Records San Diego, 1980. All photos by Grant Brittain. 74

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Freedom of Choice release event, Tower Records San Diego, 1980. All photos by Grant Brittain.

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Freedom of Choice release event, Tower Records San Diego, 1980. All photos by Grant Brittain. 78

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Freedom of Choice memorabilia and cassettes, 1980. Courtesy of the Devo-Obsesso.com Archives.

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Freedom of Choice memorabilia and cassettes, 1980. Courtesy of the Devo-Obsesso.com Archives.

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Freedom of Choice memorabilia and cassettes, 1980. Courtesy of the Devo-Obsesso.com Archives.

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Gates of Steel

Half a goon and half a god, a man’s not made of steel. Freedom of Choice was the last Devo album before the band began to introduce drum machines, and therefore the last to take full advantage of drummer Alan Myers’s extraordinary skill and precision on a live kit. Nowhere does this stand out more than on “Gates of Steel,” where the drums, particularly the relentless low tom and bass, seem to be responsible for physically obliterating the song’s title imprisonments. “Alan Myers was able to hit double-time kick pedals with no click track, nothing, just sound like a machine,” says Jerry. “The bass drum’s going doom-doom-doom-doom, doomdoom-doom-doom, like a bass guitar, and then all the fills, everything over the top of that. And he just did it flawlessly. I played with Alan live, and I think we just did one or two takes before all the overdubs went on.” “Gates of Steel” is one of the most triumphantly human songs on the album in other ways: by subduing the synthesizer line under an aggressive guitar, and by making proclamations like “a man is real, not made of steel,” and yet suggesting that the free will imbued in his humanity is capable of destroying 87

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machines and cold, hard metal if he only uses it. Despite Devo’s prevailing message of de-evolution’s inevitability, “Gates of Steel” is, like “Freedom of Choice,” a rallying cry to push against the tide, with even slightly more optimism that the plan has at least a nonzero chance of working. “It was a strong image, of a prison,” says Jerry. “This was, once again, about being trapped by your own vision of reality, that is, by your own intellectual limitation, and we were so tired of the prevailing culture, we were just exhorting people to think different. It could have been an ad campaign for Apple, for ‘Think Different.’ That’s what we were asking people to do; free themselves from their own mental prison, the beliefs that bring them down.” (Almost four years later, Apple would in fact launch the Macintosh computer with “1984,” a groundbreaking and thoroughly Devo-esque television ad in which a female athlete uses a hammer to destroy the totalitarian messages of a Big Brother figure in a conformist, dystopian future.) The song is the only track on the album that is credited not only to Jerry and Mark, but also to Sue Schmidt and Debbie Smith of Akron band The Poor Girls, later of Chi-Pig. “They were just cool, cute girls, and they wore matching houndstooth suits,” says Mark. “I started dating one of them, the bass player [Smith], and she gave me her suit. She had outgrown it, but I was skinny enough, so I used to wear it, and you’ll see Booji Boyi pictures from the early years, where i

Devo’s mascot of sorts, “the spirit of infantile de-evolution,” represented by a child-like mask that Mark would typically wear near the end of concerts.

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you look at it and go ‘What is that?’ It doesn’t look like any fashion at all. It looks totally ridiculous. It was well tailored, but it made no sense on her, let alone on me.” Mark wrote the music with Schmidt and Smith and later brought it to Devo. “We were playing something softer and sweeter when we wrote it,” he says. “Then when I got it with the band, we tried an uptempo version of it, much more aggressive, and it sounded really great.” In the most satisfying Devo fashion, one of the song’s most cryptically intriguing lyrics, “unlock the secret voice,” was originally inspired by something fairly stupid. “I had this novelty item called a Secret Voice that was from the ’40s or ’50s, that was just a block of plastic that was made to look like a transistor radio, but when you pressed the button, it gave you a mild shock,” says Mark. “So I used to carry it around, like when we’d be in New York and there’d be groovy people coming up to us I’d say, ‘Hey, check out the Secret Voice.’ And they’d press it and go [strangulated sound]. And so that’s part of the lyrics.” *

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If, in the coming battle with mechanical corporate authoritarianism, humanity was both a weakness and a strength, Devo were going to leverage as much of that selfdetermination as they could in controlling their creative enterprise, even after signing to Warners. From incorporating in 1977, to insisting on control over their videos, artwork, merchandise, and stage shows, to ultimately rejecting external producers, Devo never lost sight of what they were and weren’t willing to compromise. 89

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This is, curiously, not among the reasons that Devo in the late ’70s and early ’80s were repeatedly compared to, of all bands, Kiss. Gene Simmons’s tenacious control of his band’s property, from Kiss’s trademarked faces to a staggeringly broad merchandizing empire, was much more aggressively in service of amassing personal wealth than Devo’s; but they shared a core philosophy of creating a singular creative identity and legally owning as much of it as possible in a label system. But it was the presentation, not the business model, that prompted the media and even Devo themselves to discuss the two bands in the same breath. In the New York Times in 1979, John Rockwell gave Duty Now For the Future and Kiss’s Dynasty a joint review as two new discs from “highly theatrical concept rock groups.” “Devo has smarts and, so far, no overwhelming commercial success. Kiss has dumbs and lots of commercial success.” Rockwell wrote that Dynasty proved that “success in rock, especially in the young teen market, is only marginally related to music,” and lamented that Duty Now for the Future wasn’t likely to change Devo’s status unless, “Devo gets lucky and has a novelty hit.”1 “Someone once said, derisively, that we were a ‘thinking man’s Kiss,’ ” said Jerry in The Vermont Review in 2005. “I thought if only that were true. If only we were that big and got our message across that well. If we had that many fans and we were the thinking man’s Kiss, that would have been perfect to me. That would have not been a put down.”2 But Devo’s message was fundamentally different, and asked a lot more of their audience. While both Devo and Kiss built tribes around a highly visual as well as musical 90

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communication, Kiss telegraphed a familiar, aspirational “be like us,” while Devo claimed a more existential “you are us, we are you.” “We’re performing a responsible task,” Jerry told NME in 1978. “It’s not like Kiss . . . they’re on stage promoting the silly fantasies of assholes.” Devo were promoting, said Jerry, “the general activity of de-evolution. Which unlike Kiss, we suggest to people is within their domain. It’s like in the movie Pink Flamingos when they all realize they’re God.”3 Even the “Kiss Army”-type Club Devo catalogs that shamelessly but winkingly sold merch to spuds along with the albums communicated their own contradiction and gave a nod to the fact that while destined for mindless de-evolution, fans deserved to make informed and rewarding spending choices. The cover of the 1980 catalog that came with Freedom of Choice depicted the band in their signature yellow protective suits, promoting their sale to help fans “Protect yourself from dangerous human elements and stay cool during meltdowns”—but the photo was additionally captioned with a lengthy disclaimer: “As you can see, Bob #1 isn’t sure he likes the idea of a DEVO Fan Club. Fan Clubs can be a silly rip-off. We at CLUB DEVO pledge not to let this happen to you. Membership entitles each and every Beautiful Mutant inside information on DEVO including: a devoid bio; exclusive photos; stickers; a four-color poster and much more along with an important newsletter from the desk of General Boyii periodically during the year. You also receive ii

Another fictional Devo character, Booji Boy’s father, usually portrayed in films and events by Mark and Bob’s own father, Robert Mothersburgh Sr.

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an entertaining brochure full of DEVO apparel, paraphernalia, and other educational tools that you can order once you are a member. This is only a beginning. In time, CLUB DEVO will offer a members-only magazine featuring your thoughts, your songs and your drawings and photos so that all Devotees can devolve together. Just send $6.00 and see what you get.”4 But while Devo’s tribe would always be somewhat limited to those who would accept this self-determined responsibility, the widespread success of Freedom of Choice was the manifestation of Devo’s message that, as Jon Savage described it in Sounds, “geeks can become superstars as well as macho clods and instrument-worshipping idiots.”5 As Rolling Stone editor Andy Greene says, “a nerd nirvana was happening between like 1978 and 1984,” referring to cultural movements like the Atari boom and Star Wars, “and Devo was the soundtrack of that revolution.” Karat Faye calls Devo “the leaders of the nerd movement,” and likens that element of their rise to the more polite (and far less subversive) form of geek chic that would propel square boys Weezer a decade and a half later. In 2005, MOJO writer and musician John Mendelsohn wrote an illuminating account of the time his band was asked to open for Devo at the Starwood in West Hollywood, sometime between 1978 and 1980. “I knew little about Devo except that they were from somewhere deep in the American outback and were kooky, seemingly for kookiness’s sake,” wrote Mendelsohn. “Thinking of opening for Devo—we with our lovely tight-inthe-crotch bellbottoms and long hair, layered in what you will be faintly amused to know was called the ‘shag’ style, our 92

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64th note triplets and my own occasionally on-key evocations of Boston Bradley Delp’s falsetto—the phrase blow them off the stage came to mind.” We turned up for our soundcheck. A couple of slightly disreputable-looking girls wandered in to watch, leeringly. Life was wonderful. I realized we’d also been joined by a dweebish guy who looked, in glasses of the sort that nobody with any panache had worn since Harry S Truman’s presidency, like a refugee from a high school electronics club. His nondescript features arranged themselves into an expression of mock fascination as Pete’s nimble digits headed inexorably for the top of his fret board and Pete’s mouth dropped open at the sheer wonder of the virtuosity he was about to display. Apparently duly chastened, the dweeb slinked back out into the sunshine and smog. But then a moment later, while Pete was still going diddly-diddly-diddly at a speed guaranteed to fill our dressing room with rapacious nymphets while poor Devo played to the bar staff, here he was anew, brandishing a remarkable joke guitar of his own, with around 48 strings, the ends of none of which he’d bothered to snip off. As Pete bent back at the waist, closed his eyes, and lifted his face to the heavens, fingers ablur, our antagonist—and let us here begin calling a spade a spade: Mark Mothersbaugh—did likewise. Every pose Pete struck, the impudent Ohioan struck as well. I giggled in spite of myself, but thought: Just wait until tonight, pal, when The People, who I’m assured have come to demand guitar heroics, decide.

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Guess again, Johnny. What to my wondering eyes should appear glaring vengefully up at us when we took the stage for our first set but every pimply, misshapen, or otherwise irredeemably dweebish past member of a high school electronics club in LA and his girlfriend, and oh boy, were they in no mood whatever for tightin-the-crotch bellbottoms and evocations of Boston. We finished every song either to deathly silence or gentle hissing. And then Mothersbaugh and his minions came on in their wacky matching jumpsuits, all herkyjerky rhythms, robotic movements, and bleating declamation, all fervently . . . kooky. And the misshapen, pimply, and irredeemably dweebish were in absolute ecstasy.6 Devo’s affinity with outsiders and geeks was a major strength of their appeal that drove the success of Freedom of Choice at a critical moment. But it also put them somewhat at odds with the sleek, sugary coolness that would eventually define new wave. The attention to striking visuals that Devo helped pioneer set the stage for the new wave aesthetic, but was never meant to be the same kind of popular fashion movement. “We were visual artists using music,” Jerry told Uncut in 2000. “We only used that stuff in the first place because it fit the ideas. We weren’t even trying to do what ended up being done, that candified Flock of Seagulls-style electro-pop. At one point we didn’t quite know where to go. It gets ugly. It gets weird. Business does you in.”7

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Club Devo Catalog shipped with Freedom of Choice, 1980. Courtesy of the Devo-Obsesso.com Archives. 95

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Club Devo Catalog shipped with Freedom of Choice, 1980. Courtesy of the Devo-Obsesso.com Archives.

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Club Devo Catalog shipped with Freedom of Choice, 1980. Courtesy of the Devo-Obsesso.com Archives.

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Cold War

I owe you absolutely nothing. Despite its politically timely title, “Cold War” veers from the preceding two socially actionable tracks back to the personal realm. “It’s about the war of the sexes,” says Jerry. “That’s all. The ‘endless tug of war.’ ” Jerry and Bob 1 wrote the “strange little piece of music,” as Jerry calls it, about a year before bringing it to the band for Freedom of Choice consideration, and it was one of the last songs on the album that Jerry wrote lyrics for, which he says he doesn’t remember much about (“Mark never offered up any, I don’t think, on that one”). Grander philosophies aside, troubles with women had always been a core theme of much of Devo’s material, back to their earliest demos and including several of the songs on Freedom of Choice. And “The boy and girl, two separate worlds,” is the song’s stated central conflict. But there’s something about the exasperation in “Cold War” that hints at bigger issues—still interpersonal, but not necessarily entirely romantic. For example, the lyrics “Go go, fight fight, punch your way to happiness / Go go, light light, or you’ll never be a big success” could certainly apply to any number of conflicts 99

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that fed on Devo, from the merciless frustrations of the record business to navigating Jerry and Mark’s ongoing tension, even as their creative cooperation was, overall, at a high point. In addition to its prevailing theme of antagonism, “Cold War” also seems to flip the bird to melodic convention. While the synth-driven beat swings methodically, the vocals stop and start at odd intervals, not really hitting a regular stride until the closest thing the song has to a chorus, which still feels not quite grounded. The sensation is something like having an argument with someone while standing on a constantly shifting funhouse floor; particularly after the determined collective motivation in “Gates of Steel,” “Cold War” is a deliberately uncomfortable song. Persistent contention, even with moments of understanding, is exhausting. *

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MTV launched on August 1, 1981, a year and a few months after the release of Freedom of Choice, and about three weeks before the arrival of New Traditionalists. For Devo, whose films had been central to their work from the beginning and who had fought against their record company’s dismissive attitude towards the videos’ value, music television was the ultimate vindication. “We’d been predicting it for a long time,” says Mark. “ ‘This is going to wipe out pop music as we know it,’ we thought. Guitar rock is all going to sink into the La Brea Tar Pit, and this whole new era of sound and vision is going to rise and take over.” 100

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At first, MTV was Devo’s perfect medium. Because they had produced so many videos, and so few other artists had, Devo’s clips were in heavy rotation in MTV’s early days—and because Freedom of Choice had been so successful overall, the videos from that album, particularly “Whip It,” gave the album an extended profile and Devo renewed momentum as they headed into a new cycle. And MTV had courted Devo early in their quest for content, promising them a revolutionary new platform for their visual work. The wave that Devo was riding from 1980 into 1981 seemingly had a new source of energy. But the honeymoon period didn’t last long. “As soon as MTV went national, they came up with this new Taliban set of rules,” says Jerry. “They hitched their wagon to the FM radio horse, and tied their video playlist to the Top 40 list. They immediately dropped Devo to late at night, and then when we turned in videos, started telling us what to do, or what to take out of them. They refused to put them in rotation because we weren’t high enough on the charts. We were stunned and felt jilted.” “MTV turned out to be totally different from what I could have imagined,” says Mark. “They quickly moved away from playing everything, and playing all the art stuff that was out there, to concentrating on music videos that record companies were basically making as commercials for the albums they were trying to sell. And record companies, they found out, well, the guys in Van Halen or Babyface or any band, they weren’t a visual artist who could write a storyboard and make a film like Devo did. We did everything ourselves; we were like the Little Rascals. We did it first, because the idea of hiring a director or a production company to do our film 101

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sounded absurd. We wouldn’t trust anybody with that. We wanted to make it. It’s our aesthetic. As much as our songs, our videos were important to us. I was crestfallen.” Devo continued to make videos, because “we made them before there was MTV, we weren’t going to quit,” says Jerry. But the disillusionment with the network and its insufficiently brave new visual world was complete within two years. Both Mark and Jerry remember the last straw being MTV’s attempted censorship of the video for “That’s Good,” from Devo’s 1982 album Oh No! It’s Devo. “We got this call from [MTV co-founder] Les Garland,” says Jerry. “He was like, ‘Look, we know what you’re trying to do here.’ I go what do you mean? He goes, ‘Ya know, when that cartoon French fry glides through that cartoon donut and then it’s with the girl looking happy. You can have the French fry, or you can have the donut. But you can’t have the French fry and the donut. Otherwise you can’t cut to the girl.’ And I go, ‘But what about when the French fry hits the donut and breaks in half and she’s sad?’ And he goes ‘Alright you little smart ass.’ It was horrible. ‘What about that Billy Idol video you have and the girls are in skin-tight pants and their asses are full on in the screen and his head is between her legs and then somebody slaps her ass? What about that?’ He goes, ‘we’re talking about you, we’re not talking about them.’ ” Devo eventually relented and made significant cuts to the video, which Jerry regrets—because by then, “the song was going down in the charts, not up.” Of course it wasn’t sexuality that bothered MTV, but a funny, irreverent take on it that was more tongue in cheek than titillating—which could even be interpreted as mocking 102

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the network itself. As Devo considered their videos to be the art itself, and not just promotional tools, substantial compromise was not an option—not that it necessarily would have done any good as MTV further refined their focus. As Andy Greene says, “MTV was not rewarding nerddom.” For a while, Devo still had a place in the late night rotation, “where the cool stuff would be,” says Mark. “MTV was still trying it out, like, should we really have real artists? And then it became obvious to them after a while—no, we’re going to do all videos for all big bands that want to keep propping up their sagging dinosaur music. And so, MTV became the enemy.” The effective loss of a once-promising commercial and creative outlet was both materially damaging to Devo and emotionally demoralizing, and its role in Devo’s postFreedom of Choice decline can’t be underestimated. But it’s also not terribly surprising in retrospect that a profit-driven corporate experiment would fail to deliver on Devo’s artistic hopes. Once again, the band’s absolute commitment to creative control was both a strength of their identity and message, and a significant factor in their external relationships. “There are not too many of us who have worked with them for any length of time,” says Karat Faye, whose affection and admiration for Devo is strong, even as he recognizes the limits placed on his contributions. “If you ever look around, there’s not a lot of names on the records that are the same.” Faye remembers working as the engineer on New Traditionalists, which had no external producer, where “they liked the idea of having an engineer come in, do all the grunt work, all the tracks, all the overdubs, get everything all ready for mix, and then get rid of him, and mix it themselves.” 103

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On Freedom of Choice, says Faye, “they started off sitting far away from the board, but they kept getting closer. Soon, there wasn’t any room for Bob [Margouleff ]. Bob was all of a sudden sitting in the back of the room or having to walk around, because both Mark and Jerry are up there, making sure that this fits and this fits, and put some of that on there. They were cooking away, because they liked to make it their sound.” While Margouleff ’s relatively hands-off approach could tolerate this encroachment, “none of our producers really got a chance to produce,” admitted Mark in 2010, when discussing Devo’s unexpected decision to invite a slew of producers to work on comeback experiment Something For Everybody. “I’m sure they’d tell you the same thing. They would say, ‘Those guys were . . . difficult.’ We really thought we knew what we wanted to sound like, and we thought that nobody else could help us.”1 The result of this insulation was inevitably an amplification of the internal band dynamic that had already threatened the enterprise before the shared creative vision on Freedom of Choice stepped in. On the other hand, it helped the two pairs of brothers in particular develop relatively stable roles. “Mark has always been the researcher of rock ’n’ roll,” Jerry had told Melody Maker in 1978. “I’m the quack professor. Bob Mothersbaugh is rock ’n’ roll. Alan is the robot of rock ’n’ roll. And Bob Casale is the technician of rock ’n’ roll.”2 In practice, this meant that Mark was the prolific musician, Jerry articulated the message in words and visuals, Bob 1 kept the band grounded in rock, Alan drove the music’s momentum, and Bob 2 took on primary responsibility for 104

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engineering. As Mark’s discontentment and creative impulses increasingly put distance between him and Devo, and the band’s technological evolution towards computer-driven music undermined the contributions of Alan and, to some extent, Bob 1, a truly constructive long-term partnership was doomed. There would be casualties. But the essential diplomatic structure would avoid mutually assured destruction for decades.

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I got a rocket in my pocket, but I don’t know what to do. “Every move I make, every rule I break, make me want it more / Every step I take, every new mistake, if you wanna know, keeps me searchin’ for you.” If you’ve never heard or listened carefully to Devo’s song “Don’t You Know,” you might think at first glance that the lyrics above belong to The Police’s 1983 megahit “Every Breath You Take,” often misinterpreted as a romantic ballad even though it is sung from the perspective of a deeply creepy stalker. Whether Sting was influenced by “Don’t You Know,” released three years earlier, is unknown—his publicist declined a request for comment for this book, owing to the singer’s schedule. Sting has, in fact, noted that the tune itself is “generic, an aggregate of hundreds of others.”1 But the obsessive storyline, along with the lyrical phrasing, are incredibly similar to Devo’s sinister ode. Because it’s Devo, though, “Don’t You Know” is unambiguously frustrated, horny, and unhinged (“Sting did the pretty version,” says Mark). The frequent misinterpretation 107

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of Devo’s music rarely applies to the baldly neurotic “love” songs, and it’s hard to mistake the meaning of “a plug without a socket.” “Mark would, once in a while, just rush off a ditty,” says Jerry. “Like on the Hardcore Devo songs from ’74–’77, there’s this song called ‘Goo Goo Itch,’ or ‘The Day My Baby Gave Me A Surprize’ [from Duty Now], and he was able to do stuff like that sometimes, it would be instantaneous. ‘Don’t You Know’ came from that universe. But of course he’s talking about his penis.” The song is a straight-driving guitar rocker that quickly goes a little daft with a stop-and-start vocal flow, as well as a high-pitched synthesizer that juts in like it’s malfunctioning. Later, the title refrain becomes highly distorted by electronic effects, making it almost unintelligible (the effect is similar to the one the Beastie Boys would use eighteen years later on “Intergalactic”). According to Mark, it is also one of the first songs on which Devo began to use rudimentary sequencing. “When Devo addressed sex, it was usually not happy,” says Jerry. “It kind of reflected our upbringing in the Midwest— very repressed, plenty of rejection. Although you’d never know it in L.A., which just seems like the teen candy store porn capital.” If “Don’t You Know” did partially inspire “Every Breath You Take”—and it’s hard to shake the idea that it could have, despite the songs’ substantial sonic differences—then it might be Devo’s greatest infiltration of mainstream culture. The Police’s song was the No.  1 song of 1983, holding at the top of the Hot 100 for eight weeks and winning the Grammy for Song of the Year. And countless young, dreamy 108

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couples, seduced by its warm melody, have used the song as the first dance at their wedding—a fact that has always amused Sting, and could come as some kind of warped consolation to Devo. *

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Devo might be one of the only bands in history that frequently turns up on lists of novelty one-hit wonders while simultaneously being cited as an immensely important influence on artists across genres and decades. Not that lasting commercial success is a prerequisite for importance; many artists are anointed as highly musically influential without a clear mainstream breakthrough. But the term “onehit wonder” heavily connotes a short-lived blip on the U.S. pop radar—possibly a song that endures, but not an ongoing cultural or creative relevance for the act. Yes, technically, “Whip It” is Devo’s only hit; no other single appeared in the Top 40 of the Billboard Hot 100 (1981’s “Working in the Coalmine,” packaged with New Traditionalists and appearing on the Heavy Metal soundtrack, came closest at No. 43). That their period of superstardom around Freedom of Choice was so relatively brief means that for any number of casual American music fans, Devo probably are primarily “the guys with the red hats who sang ‘Whip It’ ”—and if it weren’t for this one visible album, they might not know Devo’s nine-LP discography at all. It’s a bizarre parallel-universe narrative, because Devo’s lasting effect on two-plus generations of musicians—not even counting the rock legends who became fans in the ’70s—is not only real, but is still reflected in the ongoing 109

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music news cycle, whether the band is active or not. The mainstream success of Freedom of Choice and its broad reach provided younger artists an access point for a deeper appreciation of the band’s philosophy and music. For just a few examples of recent tributes, a month before this writing in 2014, rising Brooklyn band the Men recorded and released a video of their supercharged “Gates of Steel” cover; a year earlier, indie veterans the Flaming Lips did the same for their own trancey version. Grunge titans Pearl Jam, longtime vocal Devo admirers, blasted out “Whip It” at their Halloween concert in 2009, and Grammy-winning darlings Arcade Fire performed “Uncontrollable Urge” at theirs in 2013—and then asked Devo to open on three of their summer tour dates in 2014. In 2012, musician/comedians and Portlandia stars Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen visited Rolling Stone’s video studio and performed an impromptu acoustic version of “Beautiful World” from New Traditionalists; Brownstein later suggested using the band’s common imagery of looking sideways together into the distance for the Portlandia Season 3 promotional art. “I can’t stress how much Freedom of Choice means to me,” says Armisen. “People have so many different turning points, like when they’re teenagers listening to certain albums for the first time, and that was definitely the biggest for me.” As a teenager in Long Island in 1980, Armisen couldn’t connect with the ’70s rock that was popular, but saw Devo perform “Girl U Want” on the late-night show Fridays and was transfixed. “It surged forward and had energy; it was powerful and mechanical at the same time—it spoke to me harder than everything ever.” 110

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Armisen joined Club Devo and ordered everything they sold. “I had a button that was a girl holding these two balloons that said D-E-V-O; it was sort of sexual, but in that Devo way. Once I got sent to the school psychologist for a paper I wrote. When I was sitting in the office, I had all these Devo pins, including the one with the balloons, and he started to read into it way too much. He was like, ‘What does that mean?’ It was hard to explain to an adult that it’s trying to be funny, but the type of humor that Devo was isn’t humor, it’s this other thing, which I’m still trying to master now. That thing that’s comedy but not comedy. It’s this tone that doesn’t even have a word, that Devo were masters of.” One of the most extraordinary Devo tributes to capture this thought-provoking non-comedy is “Weird Al” Yankovic’s 1986 song “Dare To Be Stupid,” in which, unlike most of his parodies of particular popular songs, Yankovic constructs a “style parody” that captures both Devo’s musical aesthetic and worldview in an original composition. With a video that cleverly references at least twenty Devo songs, videos, images and inspirations, “Dare To Be Stupid” is an ironic pep talk in the vein of “Whip It,” that then doubles back on the irony using blatantly superficial slogans and cliches as the actions to pursue. As the Onion A.V. Club’s Erik Adams wrote, “ ‘Dare To Be Stupid’ isn’t so much a Devo parody as it is a transmission from the world predicted by the band, one where mashed potatoes can be your friend (Yankovic’s most obvious tip of the energy dome to the spud boys from Akron) and nothing’s more profound than hollow rhetoric.”2 In an interview on VH1’s Behind the Music episode about Weird Al—who also 111

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stood up for and connected deeply with geek culture—Mark said that when he heard the song, “I was in shock. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever heard. He sort of re-sculpted that song into something else, and . . . I hate him for it.”3 “I think Devo managed to bring some real strangeness into mainstream culture and deal with issues like alienation and the falseness of American consumer culture but in a way that wasn’t as scary to the mainstream as ‘punk rock’ was,” says Merge Records co-founder/Superchunk frontman Mac McCaughan, who had recorded “Girl U Want” with Superchunk in 1992 and performed “Uncontrollable Urge” with his high school band in the mid-’80s. “They were funny and dramatic and conceptual about it, so they could sneak some subversive stuff in there. They were cloaking some serious stuff in all this weirdness.” For Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips, who in addition to recording “Gates of Steel” has developed over the years an identity and following based on a highly visual and conceptual performance, Devo modeled how to take creative risks without apology. “It’s hard to go back in time and know what the world— my world, anyway—would have been, if one day, we didn’t fuckin’ turn on the TV and see Devo’s version of ‘Satisfaction,’ ” says Coyne. “You literally just said ‘Fuck. Now, you can do anything you want. Fuckin’ A.’ To me, that’s what Devo was about. It’s about their music and all that sort of stuff, but it was like saying ‘You think that rock ’n’ roll’s about this? Fuck that. We’re going to do our thing.’ And the fact that they picked a song that’s such a vault classic. It’s a song that everybody in the world knows; even if you’ve never wanted 112

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to even listen to music, you’ve heard that song. Its meaning is so etched in the Mount Rushmore of what the fuck rock ’n’ roll’s supposed to be. And then they took it, and it was like ‘Fuck you, it’s a whole new world now.’ That’s why I like them so much, because it says ‘Do your trip, motherfucker. Don’t sit here and water it down this way, maybe more people will understand it or maybe they won’t. Do your trip.’ ” In high school, hardcore icon Henry Rollins declared Q: Are We Not Men? his favorite album on first listen. “I was ready for music to change, or at least the music I was experiencing to change,” he says. “Devo was a monumental part of that. They were different than all the other records I had at the time, like the arena rock or the few punk records I had at the time like the Clash and Ramones. Thinking about it now, perhaps I saw a photo of them first. The yellow radiation suits, that’s a done deal right there. You see that and it’s on. Devo were smart alec aliens from the American Midwest. A bursting with intelligence rejection of the flatness, the stupidity, brutality, ignorance and hypocrisy of things. Absolutely brilliant.” For Rollins, the success of Freedom of Choice was evidence that the world might be salvageable after all. “Their commercial breakthrough was a total blessing. The fact that millions of spuds-to-be were healed by healthy robot rhythms is a good thing. I never thought Devo would break like they did but hey, now and then, my fellow citizens of the Republic get it right.” Kurt Cobain’s deep admiration for Devo and Nirvana’s cover of “Whip It” B-side “Turn Around” are oft-cited facts in the Cobain-curiosity narrative, probably because the bands’ 113

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style and imagery feel so divergent. But as David Stubbs noted in Uncut in 2000, “Devo’s real legacy may have been in grunge rather than electro-pop,”4 owing not only to new wave’s shift away from Devo’s rawer roots, but to the type of kid that Devo’s message most resonated with. As Jerry told Stubbs, “Devo was an alternative to the mainstream rock bands, so we appealed to the disenfranchised kids out there. And those so-called grunge bands were formed by kids from dysfunctional families who were beat up at school the same as we were. So although stylistically they were different, we were kindred spirits.”5 No one understands this better than Michael Pilmer, an artist and musician who has ended up as Devo’s long-time archivist and webmaster essentially from the sheer pull of this appeal. Originally from Stow, Ohio, down the road from Kent State, Pilmer discovered Devo in junior high after he moved to North Carolina and heard “Whip It” on the radio. “They were the first band that spoke to me,” he says. “The lyrics often kind of warned against religion and illegitimate authority, and that was the first band I’d ever heard say anything about religion or government. And that changed my mind on a whole bunch of things, because I was going to Catholic school, so discovering Devo were atheists was like ‘wow, that just frees me up mentally a whole lot.”’ Home from college in 1993, on a bored whim, Pilmer looked in an old Ohio phone book to see if any members of Devo still lived there. He found a Robert Casale, who turned out to be Jerry and Bob 2’s father, and called to ask if he could send his band’s new CD to Devo, as they were such a strong influence. To Pilmer’s surprise, Bob Sr. happily shared Bob 2’s Los 114

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Angeles number, which eventually resulted in a visit and an introduction to Mark. Fast forward to the dot-com fallout, which put Pilmer out of work, when Mark hired him to oversee Devo’s website, merchandise, and whatever else was needed. “To me, it’s like I’m helping the planet, spreading the word, you know, about their whole aesthetic and outlook and lyrics,” he says. “They saved me when I was a kid—totally saved me from a life of, I don’t know what I would have done. I don’t know if I would have been in church somewhere now, crying, but I was freed from all that.” Pilmer believes, though, that what saved him is likely what doomed the band so soon after Freedom of Choice. “It didn’t take long from ’80 to ’83 for everything to sour really quick,” he says. “And it had to be because Devo stuck out like a sore thumb. They wouldn’t play the game. They wouldn’t be cute little robot toys and play music; they wanted to speak their politics and their outlook on the human condition. The same thing that may have been Devo’s death blow for their career, speaking their mind, was the very thing that kids like me and other geeky weirdos who didn’t fit in love about the band. It just spoke to me so much and it really did change my outlook on life so much that I have a different perspective on myself, on life. I just finally felt like other people thought like I did.”

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That’s Pep!

Vigor, vim, vitality and punch. “That’s Pep!” fits pretty solidly in the previously mentioned category of Freedom of Choice songs that Mark describes as “complicated things where people go, ‘okay, that was interesting one time.’ ” Not that it doesn’t lend itself to repeated listening, but, as Jerry says, the song is “so not rock and roll, so outside any of the structure, any of the lexicon of sounds and beats of rock and roll.” The music in the verse is dominated by a languid minor bass arpeggio that alternates with a pert guitar’s (admittedly within-rock-lexicon) Bo Diddley beat, like it’s trying to force a good mood on an ill-fated predicament. Even when the chorus comes in with a more regular stride and promising build, the verse comes sulking back before any real resolution; the overall vibe is the rush-slash-dread of a game of musical chairs. While Mark wrote the music, the lyrics are in fact taken from the poem “Pep” by Grace G. Bostwick, published in The American Magazine in 1919 and reprinted widely in the years following (because the poem was written before 1923, it was not subject to U.S. copyright law when Mark adopted it): 117

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Vigor, Vitality, Vim and Punch — That’s Pep! The courage to act on a sudden hunch — That’s Pep! The nerve to tackle the hardest thing With feet that climb and hands that cling, And a heart that never forgets to sing — That’s Pep! Sand and grit on a concrete base — That’s Pep! Friendly smile on an honest face — That’s Pep! The spirit that helps when another’s down, That knows how to scatter the darkest frown, That loves its neighbor and loves its town — That’s Pep! The source material is earnest motivational rhetoric, and therefore in the hands of Devo is satire by definition. Like “Whip It” and “Ton O’ Luv,” it’s a parody of cloying American optimism that is blind to the industrial realities around it. “It’s like a twisted version of something you’d imagine Robert Preston singing in The Music Man,” says Jerry. “ ‘We got trouble right here in River City!’ ” Indeed—Preston’s lovable shyster Harold Hill was warning his naive marks of a non-existent danger in order to sell them things they didn’t need; with “That’s Pep,” the essence of Devo’s message was, “if you honestly believe what we’re saying right now, you’re fucked.”

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In 1974, Mark and Jerry drove out to L.A. to try to get a demo tape into the hands of labels. Exploiting a Kent State connection, they stayed on soon-to-be Eagle Joe Walsh’s floor, hoping the fellow Ohioan would get what they were about and lend them a hand. “Halfway through the first song on the demo tape, he ran into the other room,” says Mark. “Him and this other guy with really long hair, they’re in the dining room smoking a joint, trying to stifle laughter.” At a loss for what to do, Mark and Jerry were watching TV and stumbled on a local proto-reality show called Help Thy Neighbor. “On one episode,” says Mark, “these two Mexican kids came on, and the host goes, ‘What’s going on with you guys?’ ‘Well, we dropped out of school and we’re thinking about gardening, but it’s so tough right now, because all our friends are joining gangs, and we’re thinking about joining a gang. If we had some tools, we’d start a gardening company instead.’ And the host, he said, ‘Well, you heard it here. Help thy neighbor, people.’ And people started calling in from all over L.A. They got lawnmowers, they got clippers. Before the show was over, they got a pickup truck. So we thought, we’re going to go on—we’re going to say we’re Devo, that we’re ex-Vietnam vets, and we’re going to go on in wheelchairs. We’re going to say we all met at a rehab at Walter Reed, and we’ve all been paralyzed while we were in active service in Vietnam. But we got together in Walter Reed and we wrote all this music, and we’re just happy that we got a chance to sacrifice our mobility for the U.S. of A. Then we were going to play the songs—we actually called up and tried to get on

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the show. We were just trying to get a record deal—we figured at some point we’d start walking, and go ‘Oh my god, it’s like a miracle.’ And we were obsessed with miracles, because Akron, Ohio had televangelists in town that were incredibly transparent charlatans.” Fortunately Devo avoided the shitstorm that would inevitably have befallen them if the plan had worked, but the idea was classic Devo—some number of people would have fallen for the ploy, and they would only have had themselves and de-evolution to blame. The Freedom of Choice press kit included a typed insert titled “Devo Meets the Press,” formatted as twenty frequently asked questions to give journalists a primer on the band. Naturally, it was largely bullshit. The answer to “What is it about Ohio that inspired the formation of Devo?” was “Clean living”; what Devo looked for in a girl was “Defects”; their next upcoming commercial venture was “A TV ad for nuclear energy sponsored by the F.E.C. using H-bomb test footage coupled with a Devo soundtrack.” But other answers were relatively sincere, or at least prescient, such as “Q: If you could name one thing that upsets Devo, what would it be? A: Human behavior,” and “Q: Are the weird electronic effects that are so important to the Devo sound a permanent part of today’s pop music or just a passing fad? A: Yes and yes. Today’s noise is tomorrow’s hootenanny.” The final question, “What is Devo trying to tell us?” was answered with “Just this. Anyone who is really honest will like this stuff!” Even if some people found this kind of double talk irritating, it was very obviously double talk, and the message was clear: nothing we do should be taken at pure face value, 120

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“Devo Meets The Press,” c. 1980. Courtesy of the Devo-Obsesso.com Archives.

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“Devo Meets The Press,” c. 1980. Courtesy of the Devo-Obsesso.com Archives.

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and therefore it should not be that difficult to invert it and extrapolate what we’re about. And even if you’re still a little confused, that’s part of the fun. As Mark said in 2010 when discussing the band’s super-focus-grouped, ultra-corporate approach to developing and marketing Something For Everybody, “Devo at our best is people going, ‘Is that real or not?’ It’s a little bit Andy Kaufman.”1 But as Devo gained more and more exposure, people did take them at face value, or decide that if it was a joke, it was entirely a joke without any serious commentary underneath. “Either they would accuse us of being clowns or Nazis,” says Jerry, explaining that many people somehow took Devo’s unified image and choreography as endorsement of fascist conformity rather than criticism of it. “It happened so often that that’s what made us, in 1982, do Oh No! It’s Devo as Nazi clown music.” In 2000, Jerry lamented that the corporate commercialism that Devo satirized in the ’70s and ’80s was misunderstood as authentically crass—and then later became acceptable business as usual. “We got criticized by the purists as evil for doing everything that everybody does today with no irony,” said Jerry. “We did videos, created our own costumes, stage shows and merchandise—we were seen as blasphemous to rock ’n’ roll, plastic sellouts. Today, if you’re not a plastic sellout, no one even knows about you. It’s a given that you need a video, merchandise, gimmicks, a look. We did that— but we were making fun of it.”2 And for many, the ambiguity of whether Devo were for real or not wasn’t necessarily fun. “A lot of people worry about being tricked by Devo,” said Jerry in the New York 123

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Times in 1979, when asked if he worried about people seeing their act as a gimmick. “They don’t worry about being tricked by Cheap Trick or Kiss. And what about the C.I.A. or the President? That’s too big for them to deal with.”3 For Devo, the humorous, sardonic presentation of serious beliefs was the whole point, and despite the element of pessimism in their predictions of society’s future, they initially gave the media and the masses a bit too much credit for appreciating the value of that coexistence. Therefore, they were endlessly frustrated when it became increasingly clear that people wanted them to pick a side. As NME’s Andy Gill recounted in 1978: “ ‘We’ve got into discussions with people before about whether it’s a joke or whether we take ourselves seriously. The discussions never led to anything,’ says Alan Myers, with a rather curt weariness. ‘You tend to look ridiculously pompous or ludicrous saying you take yourselves very seriously,’ explains [Jerry] Casale, ‘but you also resent the idea that people are trying to insinuate that it’s all a joke, so they can pass it off. Obviously, with our aesthetic, there is an element of humor, but, like, humor is an integral part of creativity—I don’t feel there’s any need to delineate, because anything good, to me, has always had at least the ability to understand the humor in itself.’ ‘There’s a contradiction, too, between seriousness and humor,’ adds Alan, ‘and we allow that to exist without saying, this is a joke and this is serious.’ ”4 Devo’s weariness with constantly having to explain themselves, and the public’s weariness with Devo’s refusal to give it to them straight, began not long after they got their first widespread attention in 1978; when the creative and 124

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cultural stars aligned in 1980 for Freedom of Choice, the band got access to an enormous new audience, many of whom could actually appreciate what they were doing, and some additional number who just really loved the more accessible songs. But within a year, the cycle of confusion started again, and this time with the added cynicism around how these tricksters could have gotten so damn popular. “The only dynamics in this show are the visuals, not the music,” wrote Sylvie Simmons in Sounds in September 1980, adding that, “They’d sold out four nights of this stuff.”5 It’s one of numerous examples of a curious recurring theme in reviews of Devo’s live shows circa 1980–81, which was that the band members were barely competent musicians, hiding behind visual presentation and stage tricks to somehow rope in thousands of screaming fans who were too seduced by the chance to play dress-up to notice the difference. The musical skill and perfectionism that went into the songwriting and recording was lost on a number of critics, as were the underlying serious messages, despite songs like “Freedom of Choice” and “Gates of Steel” attempting to make things more plain. “Limited instrumentalists they may be, showing scarcely more musical range than a reasonably priced alarm clock, but they still managed to come out on top after last night’s concert at [Toronto’s] Massey Hall,” wrote the Globe and Mail’s Liam Lacey in 1981. “Perhaps the best reason for the Ohio quintet’s success is that the band members don’t lean too heavily on their music.” Lacey goes on to note “Devo’s generic links to comic book superhero teams, early sixties twist movies, The Rocky Horror Show, Richard Lester’s films of The Beatles, Ken Russell and lots of late-night movie 125

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harum-scarum about aliens and dangerous cheerleaders.” He ends the review by suggesting that music might not be the best medium for whatever Devo was trying to do, asking derisively, “Surely, somebody is going to give these guys a Saturday morning TV show?”6 Little did Lacey know that the Trojan horse of such a direct commercial media outlet probably would have suited Devo’s purposes perfectly—reaching young spuds in their living rooms with subversive, off-beat videos and parodies of clean-cut, laugh track-fueled idiocy. But come New Traditionalists, Devo reached a certain level of exhaustion with trying to show instead of tell. Not only was the songwriting process more disjointed, as Mark has explained, but in trying to be more direct with the message, the triumphant political anthems of Freedom of Choice were replaced with songs that sounded more like reprimands. This would lose a lot of the fans who had come on board with Freedom of Choice more for its pop attractions than its politics. “We were getting more acerbic and on-point,” says Jerry, “and the culture was getting more and more head-in-thesand and right wing.” The fourth album’s two singles, “Through Being Cool” and “Beautiful World,” don’t leave a lot to the imagination in terms of Devo’s darker state of mind. The former calls on good spuds to “Eliminate the ninnies and the twits, going to bang some heads, going to beat some butts, time to show those evil spuds what’s what.” Over a lovely but melancholy melody, the latter paints a picture of “A beautiful world we live in, a sweet romantic place, beautiful people everywhere, the way they show they care”—fairly obviously irony coming 126

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from Devo, and extremely obviously so given that its video alternates scenes of contentment and frivolity with images of Klan rallies and famine. For many equally angry Devotees, the bluntness was appreciated and championed. But some critics, even those who understood what Devo were about, believed the band had overshot its goals. Criticizing Devo’s abandonment of irony in “Through Being Cool,” and calling “Beautiful World” “hollow, flatulent sarcasm,” NME’s Barney Hoskyns’s review of New Traditionalists calls the album’s melodies bland, uniform, and undercut by the increased reliance on synthesizers, thereby too literally embodying the conformity they’re trying to critique. “Wallowing in the absurdity is one thing—you’ve got to come out to take it apart, and if Devo took the politics of their position as seriously as they should, they’d have done something with their sound as well as their words.”7 In his combined review of New Traditionalists and a 1981 Devo concert at Radio City, long-time Village Voice rock critic Robert Christgau, who actually appreciated Devo’s increased philosophical clarity, probably best illuminates the ambivalence and lingering mistrust that Devo inspired with their fluctuation between sincerity and what he saw as occasionally condescending absurdity. As art-schoolers who make the most of their affliction, Devo came up with the best videos in the music, and the half-hour of shorts screened before their Halloween concert at Radio City dispelled my residual hostility to the band. Not that I suddenly trusted them—videos are

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no basis for trust. But the visual aids rendered the three major songs on New Traditionalists a little more explicit, a comfort with a band that’s been almost fetishistically noncommittal. Most videos are neutral at best, and some are so witless they distract from the aural construct they’re supposed to illustrate, but Devo clarify their lyrical intent, underlining nuances you only hoped were there and suggesting wild new possibilities . . . . . . The Devo Philosophy is no less coherent than the Playboy Philosophy, opposing the most commonplace boho-modernist no-nos—conformity, technocracy, etc. And if what they’re for is harder to pin down, isn’t that always the way? In the latest dispatches from their spokesman General Boy, distributed to journalists as well as fan-club members, the call for “devolution” has given way to talk of “positive mutation,” both of which come down to the same vague thing, the underlying theme and chief commercial appeal of post-hippie sci-fi all the way to Doris Lessing— namely that weirdos (just like you kids holed up in your bedrooms reading and listening) will save the world (or at least yourselves). But it’s always been hard to tell whether Devo thought the world (or the weirdos) worth saving; like Frank Zappa, another provincial aesthete who waited too long to go to the big city, they purvey a sour satire in which audience is sometimes indistinguishable from target. This is a band which has always reveled in contradictions . . . . . . Devo are very opportunistic, and in the past I’ve disliked them heartily for it; when they tell interviewers that the only nuclear benefit worth their time would blow up the installations, all I get is a strong whiff of bullshit. But with 128

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last year’s Freedom of Choice I learned to enjoy them as a joke band, and now, with New Traditionalists, I’m beginning to think they could be something more. New Traditionalists isn’t as consistent an album as Freedom of Choice; the three songs I’ve named are their most substantial ever, but the filler is really filler, halfway between the eccentric contrasts of phrasing and register that used to make their music go and the simple rock and roll ditties they’re aspiring toward. And their live presentation lacked the detail and humor of their videos; as showmanship, affectlessness can only go so far, though they do take it most of the way there. But in the wake of Reagan and the Moral Majority (both of whom General Boy takes on, though not by name) they’ve had the good sense to drop some of their arch, antiliberal, antihumanist pose, and I’m impressed. Sung by Phil Ochs with an acoustic guitar, “Beautiful World” would be recognizable as an ironic but unambiguous protest song. They closed the show with it. And the audience—white, collegiate, nondescript except for those in Devo get-ups or Halloween garb—understood what it was about. At least I hope they did, and so do Devo, I think. The only time lead singer Mark Mothersbaugh opened his mouth for anything but lyrics the entire night was during a brief ’tween-encore speech in his General Boy costume. “It’s a long time since we’ve been to New York and we were wondering just what you spuds would be like. And now we know. And we just gotta say, we love you. And it’s a beautiful world.” “We love you, eh?” concludes Christgau. “I still don’t trust them.”8 129

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Yellin’, laughin’ tryin’ hard to act smart, we put ’em under pressure and you watch them fall apart. Among the songs on Freedom of Choice, “Mr. B’s Ballroom” has some of the most overt musical connections to classic funk. A recurring pattern of eight sweeping notes, while clearly synthesized, evokes a choreographed, jewel-toned horn section swinging behind a high-energy dance band; the “woh woh woh, woh-oh-ohs” in the chorus could easily be assigned to the Vandellas. With its robotic keyboard lines and industrial excavation-like noise injections, a science fiction film director in 1965 might imagine the song opening a 2005 episode of American Bandstand. The original demo version of the song, eventually released on the 2000 limited edition Rhino compilation Recombo DNA, was called “Luv & Such” and had entirely different lyrics. “Luv & Such” violated every principle of Devo “love” songs, in that Mark starts with the line “Three cheers I’m in love again,” and goes on to describe his new gal’s glorious penchant for daily boot-knocking. It might be the fantasy resolution of “Girl U Want” that an additional verse would 131

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prove doomed or imaginary, but it was abandoned at some point during the Freedom of Choice sessions and replaced with a very different story. “Mr. B’s Ballroom was a real place out here in L.A., and it was spooky,” says Jerry. “Let’s just say it was an alternative lifestyle club. You know, seedy and nasty. And of course for Midwesterners, who were unable to turn away, it’s like looking at a train wreck—anything transgressive, when you’re a young artist, where most people would run, you just completely become obsessed with dealing with your fears.” The scene in “Mr. B’s Ballroom” is one of unrepentant excess—“Big swingers in double knits tonight / Big babies gonna get in a fight” who “know the limits, ’cause they cross them every night.” It’s a highly danceable ode to unregulated overconfidence—the partiers in the song eventually cross a little too far, as the cops intervene and bring everything to a messy end. *

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Since releasing Freedom of Choice in 1980, despite periods of falling out and hiatus, Devo have put out six more studio albums—four on Warner Brothers and two on Enigma—a number of compilations, EPs, singles and other recordings, and the band has toured on and off for more than three decades. At least as enduring and passionate is the spud army, committed to upholding the relevance of Devo’s music and worldview. The fan community holds near-annual “DEVOtional” conventions in Ohio, and Michael Pilmer’s job of maintaining the band’s archives and merchandizing 132

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operation has been ongoing since the ’90s—the original Club Devo that peddled its wares through album inserts and newsletters lives on at clubdevo.com, one of rock’s earliest fan sites. Pilmer’s extensive archives preserve Devo’s recordings, memorabilia, photos, and other physical artifacts, documented at a site appropriately called Devo-Obsesso, “dedicated to the obsession with collecting items related to the band DEVO,” and “created with similarly afflicted spuds in mind, as I am very aware of our uncontrollable urge to see/ show the fruits of our pointless(?) hoarding.” “What exactly are the items on this site?” reads the homepage of Devo-Obsesso.com. “Religious artifacts? Relics of how one band survived severe Music Industry damage? Proof of Devolution? Whatever the case, this stuff is important, in need of archiving, and someone’s gotta do it.” And Pilmer’s efforts are not a lone crusade—the site includes an area for other collectors to propose trades, as well as links to more than a dozen other fan-operated sites and discussion groups. The first shared archive of Devo bootleg live recordings was started in 1995 by Michael Watters, a genetics professor (really) in Indiana, who initially thought Devo’s music was “stupid,” and then went “from Devo-curious to rabid fan” after seeing the video for “Beautiful World” in 1981. With Mark and Jerry’s permission, Watters collected, organized, and copied fan bootlegs and shared them for the cost of shipping and blank tapes, later digitizing his collection of videos for download. There was no profit in the project, but it was invaluable to Watters as a way to connect with other hardcore fans who found something in Devo’s music and philosophy that was absent from the rest of the pop landscape. 133

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“Devo was clearly a band who didn’t take themselves seriously,” says Watters. “They took their music and their work seriously, just not themselves. Big difference. The vast majority of pop stars are so damned pretentious. They act like what they are doing is the most important activity in the world, that they’re going to make the world a better place and cure all the world’s social ills—all by singing little pop ditties about how much they’d like to bang the girl in the apartment next door. Devo on the other hand had a sense of humor, and the jokes weren’t all puerile garbage either—yeah, some of it was—but mostly it was pretty smart stuff that was meant to appeal to people with an IQ over 60.” Twenty-six-year-old computer tech Samantha Chaney was only eight when she discovered Devo’s Greatest Hits in her local Ohio Walmart and instantly became an obsessive “tomato” (honored as the female spud counterpart in 1979’s “Smart Patrol/Mr. DNA” with “I’m just a Spudboy, looking for a real tomato”). “It was their philosophy of ‘the world isn’t sunshine and lollipops and rainbows,’ ” says Chaney about what resonated even at a young age. “Devo were, I think, the first people in the industry to sock it to you and tell you how it was. They weren’t there to hold your hand—‘Oh, it’ll be okay someday.’ It’s ‘No, this is what’s going on right now, and I guess we’ll be the ones to deliver the happy news.’ ” Chaney is all Devo all the time, both online and in real life (“I only have two bands on my iPod, Devo and Oingo Boingo,” she says). She attended 2014’s DEVOtional in Cleveland, meeting fans she’d been friends with for years online, which she says was “surreal.” Her fan art includes 134

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intricate Devo “prayer cards,” where she replaces the saints on real Catholic prayer cards with members of the band and its imagery—which were such a hit that Mark commissioned a card for each employee at Mutato. Her Facebook timeline is essentially a Devo pinup gallery, with particular focus on Bob 1. “I had a crush on Bob before I even knew what a crush was,” she says. “I will tell you one thing about spudboys—they smell like sex and science. The pheromones are strong with the spudboys.” Women are a minority of vocal Devo fans, but Chaney has never felt like a second-class citizen within the fan community, even though both she and Watters say a small number of male fans occasionally cause community strife by being hellbent on proving themselves Devo-er than thou. “I think women who are Devo fans are like prized possessions,” says Chaney. “It’s almost like, ‘We have got to protect them; they are the future.’ ” And yet, even with this active fan commitment to preserve the band’s legacy, and decades of the band’s own continued if irregular output, Mark calls Freedom of Choice “the end of Devo.” For one thing, after the album’s success, there was a major disconnect between the reality of the band’s purpose and identity, and Warner Brothers’ expectations. “With our next album, our record company went, ‘Hey, who are these guys? What are they doing on our label? How did they sell out the Forum this week? What’s going on?’,” says Mark. “When they showed up around New Traditionalists, their whole thing was, ‘Hey, do anything you want, but just do another “Whip It.”’ But they didn’t even know what another ‘Whip It’ would 135

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be. We did [our cover of Allen Toussaint’s] ‘Working in the Coal Mine’ and said ‘How about this?’ and they said, ‘No, don’t put that on your record, don’t put that on.’ So we thought, okay—we had this request from the movie Heavy Metal for a song because they wanted us to be the weird band in outer space on this space station, so we gave them ‘Working in the Coal Mine,’ and they loved it and it became a hit. It totally freaked out Warners, who were going to release our album a month later.” The last-minute solution was to press up singles and physically stick them onto the New Traditionalists LP. “I think when Devo got that hit with ‘Whip It,’ they became label babies, and the label hoped they would become a hit machine,” says Pilmer. “And that also meant they got more interview requests. Jerry especially loved talking to people in interview situations. He loves talking about politics, religion, and anything else, and they didn’t care that their views were different than others in the American market, and the record labels’. So I think the label got wind of Devo’s politics, how they hated Reagan, all these things, and I think they had a lot of guys from inside the label working against them.” And then again, along with the more direct messages that narrowed Devo’s appeal, the material suffered. As Mark has explained, when working on the next album, the collaborative process that defined Freedom of Choice fell apart as morale dropped and technology allowed. As Jerry recently told Discussions Magazine, “The process predictably went from total openness and democracy to semi-hierarchical and competitive to somewhat guarded and autocratic, much to 136

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the detriment of the music.”1 Devo had once been innovators in introducing the technological future of synthesizers to the snarling guitars of rock and the organic groove of R&B; eventually, the robots won the war. After Freedom of Choice, “We were full of ourselves, and we went away from what worked; we didn’t play the songs live,” says Bob 1. “It was the first time where Mark had this instrument that he could just go home and write the rhythms and synthesizers and he could just keep layering them and putting on more and more synthesizers. Until by the time it’s like ‘here, put your part on this,’ it’s like ‘well, you didn’t really leave much room for a guitar.’ But I don’t want to say too much. I’m his brother.” And that, of course, is critical—at its foundation, Devo is a family band, and its true dissolution might be genetically impossible. For all of Alan Myers’s talents, he didn’t have that biological protection from full disenchantment as his machine-like force was replaced with actual machines. “Alan felt like his dick was snipped,” Jerry told Rolling Stone when the drummer died of stomach cancer in 2013. “He didn’t want to play second fiddle to a machine—it was the final straw.”2 Alan’s last album with Devo was 1984’s Shout, on which drum machines dominated, and he had left the band by 1987. His departure was a further detriment to the band, even as live drums played a diminished role in recording, because of his importance to the energy of live performance. “It would prove fruitless trying to find somebody else that could play like Alan Myers,” says Karat Faye. “There’s just a few people in the world that have that kind of meter.” 137

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Meanwhile, the Mothersbaugh and Casale brothers pushed on, closing themselves off further to external influence. Even during later periods of Devo inactivity, both Bobs worked for Mark at his studio Mutato Muzika, founded in 1989. Devo used an outside producer for only one of the five albums that followed Freedom of Choice—Roy Baker on 1982’s Oh No! It’s Devo—as Bob 2 assumed many of the band’s technical responsibilities. Bob 2 was a gifted engineer, and, as Jerry said when he died suddenly in early 2014, was “Devo’s anchor—even-keeled and very slow to anger.” No doubt this also proved invaluable to the dynamic of a band both founded on insubordination and dissatisfaction, and subject to ongoing frustration. One does have to wonder, however, whether replicating the creative studio environment of Freedom of Choice might have counteracted other setbacks. “To this day, I don’t understand why they didn’t ask me to do the next record,” says Bob Margouleff. “I think they figured they had learned enough from that experience to do it themselves. And I don’t fault them for it, but I think I could have made a much hotter record than the first one. But they chose to do it on their own, and the results speak for themselves. It’s not that I haven’t offered. And I would still love to remix Freedom of Choice in surround. I think it would be extraordinary.” In 1986, Mark got the opportunity to write the music for the new Saturday morning show Pee-wee’s Playhouse starring Paul Reubens, a.k.a. Pee-wee Herman. “The first week, I got sent the film on Monday,” says Mark. “On Tuesday I wrote all the music for it. On Wednesday, I recorded it. On Thursday, it was on a reel-to-reel tape, and I sent it back to New York, and 138

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Friday, they’d cut it into picture, and Saturday, we watched it on TV. And that cycle, for an album’s worth of music, went for one year, where we had three months to write the music, then we spent a couple weeks recording it, then we rehearsed it and made a video, and then we went on tour. And then a year later, I could write twelve more songs. When I did Peewee’s Playhouse, I was every week writing the equivalent of twelve more songs. Every week. And that to me was far superior to this thing where we’d do these twelve songs, take forever to do it, then go do this tour, and the record company would explain to us why they weren’t going to give us any more money than they did. And promoters would say, ‘Well, you see, you’re not really touring to make money; you’re touring to promote your album.’ And the record company would go, ‘Well, you’re not making records to make money; you’re making records to promote your tour.’ It became less fun and it became less art, in a way. And then every day, 20 million people were watching the TV show, and that was kind of powerful, and to me, better than trying to get one of our songs on college radio, and doing a hundred interviews to get that one song played on a few college radio stations.” As Mark’s career writing for TV and movies developed, his time and inclination to sustain Devo diminished. As he told Q in 1995 for a “Where Are They Now?” Q&A with the band, “No matter how obsessed you are, the music business can destroy your spirit. When we last toured Europe, someone put Spinal Tap on the tour bus video, and I started counting the number of similarities between them and us. On reaching 30, I felt it was time to move on.”3 The band’s last studio album before 2010’s Something For Everybody was 1990’s 139

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Smooth Noodle Maps, their only album that failed to chart at all on the Billboard 200. For the next twenty years, Devo were defined by one-off recordings and tours and the radio endurance of “Whip It,” along with the relatively quiet but determined march of spuds across the land. “Devo is still where I came from,” says Mark. “I created that with Jerry and the Bobs when we were kids, and I think most of the things I do that I really like are, in a way, permutations on where we started from with Devo. And I feel like I’ve been pretty true to it. Even when I’m doing things like a ridiculous big band for an unnecessary awards show, I think Devo is me. I think I am Devo as much as Jerry and the Bobs were Devo. I think I’m still Devo.” As does Jerry, which is where a lot of the disappointment lies, even as he has pursued his own career as a prolific video and commercial director and musician. “Devo was always a collaboration on the concepts, the stage shows, the videos, the songwriting,” he said in 2010 when the band finally went back into the studio after twenty years. “When Mark wasn’t interested in collaborating, then it was like only one half of Devo was interested.”4 As Jerry told Uncut in 2000, when Devo was inactive, he believed Mark would never be interested in reforming because “he has a comfy career and our miserable experiences with the business left such scars he’s unwilling to do battle again. Whereas I am. Goddamnit, I did it before, I didn’t make any money, I did it because I loved it. I still like the stuff we did and still listen to it. I wouldn’t have written all those songs if I hadn’t liked them. I don’t see any reason not to like them now. And you, you fucking corporate assholes, are not 140

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going to make me hate what I did and take away the desire to do it.”5 “I think Jerry sees Devo as his life’s work, as what defines him,” says Rolling Stone editor Andy Greene, who has followed Devo for most of his life and interviewed the band members countless times. “Mark has even told me that at the concerts, it’s him pretending that he’s twenty-one again. It’s just role-playing for him, it’s a re-enactment to please the other guys and have some fun for a night, it’s like Johnny Rotten says Sex Pistols reunions are a Civil War reenactment. But it’s not his life.” Still, Devo is a force of nature that hangs on by something much deeper than familiarity or nostalgic opportunism. Bob 1 suffered a serious hand injury that derailed a number of shows in late 2010, but they played a slew of dates in 2011 and 2012, slowing down in 2013 to play only four shows. But in the summer of 2014, partly as a tribute to Bob 2 and a fundraiser for his family, the band did a ten-date Hardcore Devo tour, playing only songs from their 1974 to 1976 prealbum demos. They didn’t diverge once from these parameters—no “Whip It” or “Coal Mine” bones were thrown to more casual fans; the only energy domes were in the audience. The shows, which featured Mark, Jerry, Bob 1, and now-permanent drummer Josh Freese, were raw, dynamic, and satisfying in every way. Two weeks later, Arcade Fire asked Devo to open for three of their tour dates later in the summer, which would put the current version of band in front of all-new audiences. Fan sites buzzed with optimism that the shows foreshadowed more tours to come. A week after the announcement, Mark 141

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canceled the first Arcade Fire date in Mountain View, CA, due to a kayaking injury. Jerry was not happy, and seemed to doubt that any of the shows would go forward. But the band played both scheduled August dates, adding guitarist Josh “Josh 2” Hager to the lineup, and later scheduled a concert at the CBGB festival in New York in October, as well as a festival appearance in Santiago, Chile, in December. “They all stir the pot,” says Chris McClure, who worked as Devo’s manager during their 2010 comeback effort. “They have this crazy, crazy chemistry that burns so hot that when they get it right, it’s why they tour, it’s why they still come together. That’s what pulls Mark out of the studio to do it. Because when they get it right, it’s so right, it’s so good. I mean geez—when you see their live show, you’re not looking at sixty-year-olds. They’re looking really awesome and relevant.” According to McClure, Mark’s success with Mutato has often kept Devo off the road not just because of scheduling conflicts, but because he was able consistently to employ both Bobs and others associated with the band. “Jerry didn’t spend much time there, but every drummer, every sound engineer, and everybody associated with Devo received a paycheck from some sort of film or TV or jingle or something, because Mark built this cottage industry out of his composing,” says McClure. “I think that just stalled the ‘All right, guys, let’s get back on the bus and do it.’ Had the money not been as good, or had Mark not been able to employ everybody else in Devo, making soundtracks, they would have been back on the road figuring it out.”

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Planet Earth, it’s a place to live your life. “Planet Earth” comes in like a party song, all synth and drums and imagined laser lighting. The arrival of rapid guitars kicks it up even further, building chase-scene anticipation. Jerry’s first line, “I heard a girl in a dress say her face was a mess,” conjures Bowie’s “Rebel Rebel,” and we assume we’re in for hard-playin’ bands and hot tramps. And then the chorus comes in over a wistful, four-note keyboard chime: “On planet Earth, I’ll probably stay. On planet Earth, it’s a place to live your life.” In this place, it turns out, people stay out all night because they can’t think of anything better to do, other than complain about the weather and freak out over lost possessions. But where else are they going to go? “It’s a precursor to ‘Beautiful World,’ in a way,” says Jerry. “ ‘Beautiful World’ was firing on all cylinders. This one was alluding to things that were yet to be truly formulated. But it’s just one man’s reportage on what it feels like to be alive. Surrounded by the absurdity that you’re surrounded by, and the ridiculous human behavior that makes an otherwise 143

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beautiful planet turn miserable more often than not, at least for me.” “Planet Earth” is a resigned meditation on what it all means, a step back to look at the de-evolution in which most of the rest of Freedom of Choice is deeply submerged. Anyone really paying attention should not have been surprised at the direction Devo went next. “I think ‘Planet Earth’ might have been my favorite song on the album,” says Karat Faye. “That was kind of a great place to put it, too, at the end. Will there be a planet Earth? Will there be another record, or is this the end of the world as we know it?” *

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On May 18, 2010, Devo, Inc. held a live streaming press conference to announce the results of its months-long “Song Study,” an online survey to rank the public’s preference of sixteen previewed tracks. “As COO of Devo, Inc.,” said a grey-suited executive named Greg Scholl, “it is an honor and a privilege to share this special moment with all of you.” A new camera angle revealed that “all of you” consisted of a photographer, an elderly woman in a tracksuit, a groping couple, and a dude standing at the back with a beach cruiser. Scholl directed their attention to a monitor where “representatives from our musical division”—Jerry and Mark— would analyze “the data that would determine the twelve songs and song order of Devo’s new commercial album.”“The results,” said Mark, “are right here on the back of this stuffed wallaby.” The marketing campaign around Something For Everybody—and even the process of creating it—took the 144

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wry insight and mainstream commercial success of Freedom of Choice to its most parodical corporate extreme. The guiding principle was to make the album appeal to as many people as possible, in the most direct and literal sense. Working with ad agency Mother, Devo tested and focusgrouped everything about the album, from the track list to the imagery to updated energy domes, which Devo turned blue because the color got the most votes in an online survey (the band ultimately tweaked the track list to include three songs they felt were undervalued in the study—Devo understandably couldn’t entirely hand over the reins to the masses). “The big idea behind this campaign is ‘Test to learn,’ ” said Mother art director Bill Moulton just before the album’s June 2010 release. “The band has always had this philosophy of de-evolution, that society is regressing, and this prophecy has pretty much come true in their minds. So now that the world is devolved, let’s just embrace it. Their brief to us was, ‘How do we appeal to as many people as possible?,’ and our instinct was, ‘Let’s just test everything, as you would any other product entering the marketplace, and be unapologetic about it.’ ”1 As Jerry would say many times around the album’s release and afterwards, Devo was now “the house band on the Titanic”— if de-evolution is here and real, there’s no reason not to devolve in all earnest. Perhaps the most on-the-nose element of the release was the fact that twenty-six years after their acrimonious split with the label, Devo re-signed with Warner Brothers for the comeback. Besides the fact that the executives were all new, the label’s incentive for the reunion was not hard to figure 145

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out; they owned six albums’ worth of Devo catalog that could get a boost from renewed public interest, and the steep decline in the record industry, particularly for major labels, made investment in an iconic if niche act as good a bet as any. This sense of the label system’s desperation, and Warners’ agreement to Devo’s unorthodox approach, is part of what finally convinced Mark to sign on, after years of refusing to work with a record label ever again. “I kind of wish the meltdown of the record companies had happened when we did Devo the first time around,” he said at the time. “We said ‘if we sign with you, we’re less interested in your marketing ideas than we are in you helping us get on the radio. That’s really what your job is and that’s what you should concentrate on.’ Ad agencies, their agenda is getting people interested in things they might miss. A typical ad agency has to go out and sell one car out of 50 that are coming out that season, and they have to succeed. If you fail, you’re fired and no one else will hire you. Record companies have this whole other trajectory. They release like 200 albums, and they’re shooting all this stuff out and seeing what sticks, and if a big company like Universal or Warner gets one out of a hundred bands successful, they’ll high five each other. For us, we said, this is our only album. So we thought, what could we do to stack the deck in our favor?”2 Even more experimental for Devo, but par for the course in commercial modern pop, was the decision to let not just one external producer, but half a dozen into the studio. Primarily produced by Greg Kurstin (Kelly Clarkson, Lily Allen), the album also included contributions from John Hill and Santi “Santigold” White, and John King of the Dust 146

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Brothers. “When we used to do records, we were very protective and always fearing no one understood what we were trying to do,” said Mark around the album’s release. “Now, we realize, people do have a better idea of what we were talking about—they have references now. And there’s a lot Devo stands to benefit from the added brainpower of people who are better sound mixers than us.”3 And the results, full of bounce and crunch and a rekindling of the guitar-synth balance that had defined Freedom of Choice, ranked with some of Devo’s best work in the minds of many. In The Times, Stephen Dalton called Something For Everybody “classic Devo: sarcastic, neurotic, ironic lyrics, wrapped in shiny-happy sugar-rush synth-pop and sci-fi imagery,” that “fizzes with misinformation and mischief.”4 Rolling Stone called it “wall-to-wall catchy,” noting that the songs combined “the punk-funk fury of Devo’s earliest recordings with synth pop.”5 Even outlets that gave the album more mixed reviews, like the BBC6 and Pitchfork7, acknowledged the strength and appeal of the music, finding most of the fault with a vague or repetitive lyrical message about society’s downfall. The public attention around the new album and campaign, from copious press to hundreds of thousands of social media shares of online survey results, signaled not just ironic curiosity, but real interest and excitement in Devo’s return. Along with Mother, Mark and Jerry were keynote speakers at Billboard’s Music and Advertising conference, and the band gave one of the most talked-about presentations/live focus groups at the South By Southwest Interactive conference in Austin, TX. Pre-album performances included both the 147

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hugely popular Coachella festival in Indio, CA, and at the opening ceremonies of the Vancouver Winter Olympics. The band appeared on the coveted Colbert Report, reaching an ideal new audience of young, satire-savvy spuds. Mark and Jerry both spoke publicly about using the new profile to reinvigorate Devo’s multimedia mission to do television and stage shows, and, as Mark said, reimagine the Devo message in “mediums that haven’t even been invented yet.”8 The people seemed to be ready to embrace their de-evolution. But ultimately, the masses didn’t put their money where their mutations were. The radio play never really materialized, and while Something For Everybody peaked at No. 30 on the Billboard 200, Devo’s highest album chart position since New Traditionalists hit No. 23, that no longer meant much in the new reality of album sales, and the set had only sold 55,000 copies as of 2014.9 The mainstream attention died down, and Devo found themselves back in a somewhat expanded cult status. “Warners fucked it all up,” says Michael Pilmer, who was largely sidelined during the album campaign as the label took over the band’s digital communications. “They’re shady, they would tell me things last minute, they treated me like garbage, like ‘what do we need this guy for?’ The band assured them that ‘this is our guy, you’ve got to tell him everything,’ but they just dicked me over.” The sharp decline in record sales and major label stability since the ’80s also had a significant effect on Devo’s experience with Warners thirty years later—the chaos may have given Devo freer reign to market creatively, but it was evidently a nightmare from a practical standpoint. “We fought them and 148

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they eventually came around to let me post on the website,” says Pilmer, “but the turnover there with people—I would be dealing with one person on the website one week, and the next week, that person had left and I kept having to retrain people.” Chris McClure started working as Devo’s manager in 2009 when the band was deep in their new deal with Warners. “I was at an RCA Records party, trying to get a drink,” he says. “At the time, I was working with Irving Azoff ’s Front Line management, and Ticketmaster and Live Nation were about to merge, and it had all this promise, so I got into a discussion about the music business. There was this older gentleman at the bar, that I figured was a Warners executive, because I was coming at it from the angle that artists don’t need labels as much, and he was very ‘if you don’t have a label’s support, you’re dead, or they’ll kill you.’ We ended up in this screaming match, and I don’t remember how it came out, but he ended up saying ‘I’m Jerry Casale, one of the founders of Devo.’ And I was like ‘you’re an artist?’ and he was like ‘yeah, I’m an artist, and we need someone to help us.”’ According to McClure, “the way Warners had written the deal made it impossible for anybody to make any money, including management, and they wanted to hold the reins on it. It was a sizable deal, and it was getting a lot of attention, but the grief-to-earnings ratio went completely upside down. Devo were suffering on the road, suffering to the point where every time they turned around and wanted to do something with the label, there was friction.” McClure says he got along extremely well with Mark, which included working on some Mutato business; eventually, he says, Jerry saw this as a 149

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conflict of interest, since Mark’s work with Mutato disrupted the touring load that the band was expected to take on and that Jerry was pushing for, and McClure left Devo in 2011. “I still have post-traumatic stress sometimes,” says McClure. “Mark will laugh at me and say ‘God, he really fucked you up, didn’t he?’ And yeah, it was heavy. But a year ago, Jerry texted me on my birthday late at night and had the kindest things to say. He’s the unsung hero of the band. Mark doesn’t talk a lot, but he will say, ‘I never would have made it out of Akron if it weren’t for Jerry.’ Because Jerry wouldn’t take no for an answer, and that’s what it takes.” Mark says the Hardcore Devo shows in 2014 meant a lot to him personally, and that his original idea, before the band and the label and the commercial aspect came into play, was to do the most recent Devo album more in the raw, old-tech style of the Hardcore Devo demos—i.e., Something Hardcore For Everybody. “It would have been totally different,” he says. “Maybe some of the songs would work. Maybe they wouldn’t hold up. But it would be a really extreme, different way to think about them. But I don’t have the luxury of being able to talk people into doing things anymore.” Mark calls Freedom of Choice “the pinnacle” of Devo’s creative cooperation, “but also the beginning of the end.” Devo’s real unification, he says, “didn’t happen before that album, and then it wasn’t really there anymore after that album. But you know what? We did pretty good. Everyone in the band was very creative. Bob Casale, who gets the least amount of air time, he brought a lot of things, some of the most important things—like he started the track that became ‘Satisfaction.’ After something happens, and you’re like, ‘Well 150

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then, what do we do next?,’ everyone has different ideas. So it’s amazing we put out as many records as we did.” For the last quarter century, it’s been more the rule than the exception for Devo to talk about themselves in the past tense, even as they continue on without going the way of so many bands who publicly declare a definitive end and then miraculously reunite. They are Devo. It’s as inevitable for them, after all, as it is for the rest of us—we are all Devo, and it’s where we’ll probably stay.

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Acknowledgments

I owe endless thanks to Devo members Gerald Casale, Mark Mothersbaugh and Bob Mothersbaugh, who not only gave their blessing for this project, but shared a great deal of their time and thoughts about Freedom of Choice and the context around it. Jerry in particular was exceedingly generous in his participation, and I can safely say this book would not exist without his support and accessibility. Michael Pilmer was extremely gracious in sharing stories and artifacts from Devo’s archives, as well as spreading the word about the project early and often. I’m forever grateful to Bloomsbury’s David Barker for having the confidence in my proposal to commission it, and to Ally Jane Grossan for her editing and guidance throughout the process. Thank you to Fred Armisen, whose incredible career as a comedian and musician, largely influenced by his discovery of Devo through Freedom of Choice, itself justifies writing a book about the album. Tremendous gratitude to Robert Margouleff, Karat Faye, Shaylah Spitz-Kalmus, Chris McClure, Andy Greene, Henry Rollins, Mac McCaughan, Wayne Coyne, David Allen, Samantha Chaney, and Michael Watters for their time and thoughtful interviews, and to Nick Ciasullo,

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for welcoming me into the Devo fan community. Helpful to my research were Rob Tannenbaum and Craig Marks, whose transcripts from their book I Want My MTV provided valuable background. Huge thank-yous to Jody Beth Rosen, who spent countless hours typing interview transcripts and annotating them with her own intricate Devo knowledge, and to Joe Gross, whose unmatched enthusiasm for thinking and writing about art inspires mine every day. A million thanks to Erin Schulte and Noah Robischon at Fast Company, who helped make my day job such a joy that I had inspiration and energy to work on this at night. Many friends and colleagues helped me write this book, either with direct support and advice, or generally well-timed back-having: Among many others, love and thanks to Jessica Sedgewick, Courtney Quinn, Virginia Miracle, Sean Howe, Rob Sheffield, Keith Harris, Ann Powers, Jessica Hopper, Bob Christgau, Jeanne Fury, Whitney Pastorek, Laura Hudson, Chris Weingarten, Caryn Ganz, Monica Damashek, Melissa Maerz, Susan Shepard, Joe Levy, Bill Werde, Christina Rentz, Caryn Rose, Devon Maloney, Amy Phillips, Daphne Carr, Jeff Sharlet, John Darnielle, Jesse Bry, Elaine Garza, Whitney Phaneuf, Ayyana Chakravartula, Jennifer Waters, Emily Shirley, Valerie Basile, Kirsten Gavoni, Christy Maver, Lisa Jane Persky, Andy Zax, Ryan Tamras, Lamar Anderson, Katie Hasty, Doree Shafrir, Nona Willis Aronowitz, Jake Bartolone, Jessica Letkemann, Tye Comer, Tara Murtha, Marc Weidenbaum, Josh Flanagan, Nisha Gopalan, Maura Johnston, Jorli Peña, Laurel Ferris, Greg Ferris, Brenna Weatherby, Greta Ott, Stacy Dent. Thank you to Bill, Karen and Abby McQuade for being there when we needed you. 154

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There are not enough words for my mother Susan Nagy, who is not only responsible for pretty much anything I’ve ever achieved, but who was superhuman in strength, time and generosity while I was writing this book and always. Tons and tons o’ love to my daughter May McQuade, who will hopefully forgive and/or forget the nights and weekends spent writing, and ultimately be proud; and to her sister Elaine McQuade, who certainly gave me plenty of characterbuilding challenges in utero while I was writing this book, but who managed to stay put until a few minutes after I filed my first draft. And most of all to Aaron McQuade, an incredible husband, father and musician who gave heroic levels of time, energy and sanity to make sure this book could be a reality. If you want to discover a great new band after reading about a great old one, buy his records at ThisIsYourAventureToo.com.

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156

Notes

1 1

Paul Ramball, “The American Midwest: Akron and Cleveland,” NME, April 1, 1978.

2

Richard Riegel, “Devo: Actual Size,” Creem, March 1979.

3

David Stubbs, “Devo,” Uncut, August 2000.

4

Dave Segal, “Thirty-Plus Years in Yellow Boilersuits and Red Flowerpot Hats,” The Stranger, November 5–11, 2009.

5

Jon Savage, “Devo: Are We Not Ready?,” Sounds, March 4, 1978.

6

Andy Gill, “Devo: Spud Wars,” NME, December 9, 1978.

7

Ira Robbins, “Devo,” Trouser Press, January 1979.

2 1

Dave Segal, “Thirty-Plus Years in Yellow Boilersuits and Red Flowerpot Hats,” The Stranger, November 5–11, 2009.

2

Ira Robbins, “Devo,” Trouser Press, January 1979.

157

NOTES

3 1

Theo Cateforis, Are We Not New Wave? Modern Pop at the Turn of the 1980s (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011), 2–3.

2

Cateforis, Are We Not New Wave?, 4.

3

Cateforis, Are We Not New Wave?, 2.

4

Cateforis, Are We Not New Wave?, 11.

5

Joanne Ostrow, “Tricks of Devo,” Washington Post, July 25, 1980, Weekend section, final edition.

6

Betty Page, “Devo: Freedom of Choice,” Sounds, May 17, 1980.

7

Ian Birch, “We Are Devo. We Are the Next Thing,” Melody Maker, February 25, 1978.

4 1

Dave Segal, “Thirty-Plus Years in Yellow Boilersuits and Red Flowerpot Hats,” The Stranger, November 5–11, 2009.

2

Andy Gill, “Devo: Spud Wars,” NME, December 9, 1978.

3

Gill, “Devo: Spud Wars.”

4

Gill, “Devo: Spud Wars.”

5

Sylvie Simmons, “Devo: Live in Los Angeles,” Sounds, September 20, 1980.

6

Richard Riegel, “Devo: Actual Size,” Creem, March 1979.

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NOTES

5 1

Kevin Allman, “Nirvana’s Frontman Shoots From the Hip,” The Advocate, February 1993.

2

Ira Robbins, “Devo,” Trouser Press, January 1979.

3

Paul Morley, “Devo: In the Terminal Zone,” NME, July 14, 1979.

4

Jon Savage, “Devo: Are We Not Ready?,” Sounds, March 4, 1978.

5

Ian Birch, “We Are Devo. We Are the Next Thing,” Melody Maker, February 25, 1978.

6

Jefferson Cowie, Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (New York: The New Press, 2012), 342.

7

Cowie, Stayin’ Alive, 347–8.

8

Peter Silverton, “Devo: Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo,” Sounds, August 26, 1978.

6 1

Paul Ramball, “Hi! We’re Devo and We’ve Come To Get Your Toilet Ready for the 1980s,” NME, March 18, 1978.

2

Paul Morley, “Devo: In the Terminal Zone,” NME, July 14, 1979.

3

Morley, “Devo: In the Terminal Zone.”

7 1

John Rockwell, “The Pop Life: Lowell George Since Leaving Little Feat,” New York Times, June 22, 1979, C25.

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NOTES

2

Brian L. Knight, “Oh Yes, It’s Devo: An Interview With Jerry Casale,” Vermont Review, c. 2005.

3

Paul Ramball, “Hi! We’re Devo and We’ve Come To Get Your Toilet Ready for the 1980s,” NME, March 18, 1978.

4

Club Devo Catalog, 1980.

5

Jon Savage, “Devo: Are We Not Ready?,” Sounds, March 4, 1978.

6

John Mendelsohn, “We’re The Pits, or Punk Comes To L.A.,” Mojo, Spring 2005.

7

David Stubbs, “Devo,” Uncut, August 2000.

8 1

Unpublished material from Evie Nagy’s interview with Mark Mothersbaugh for Billboard, May 2010.

2

Ian Birch, “We Are Devo. We Are the Next Thing,” Melody Maker, February 25, 1978.

9 1

Hunter Davies, “Interview With Sting,” Independent, May 1993.

2

Erik Adams, “ ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic’s Devo Parody Is More Devo than the Real Thing,” Onion A.V. Club, July 15, 2014 http:// www.avclub.com/article/weird-al-yankovics-devo-parodymore-devo-real-thin–206594.

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NOTES

3

VH1 Behind The Music Remastered: Weird Al, January 9, 2012 http://www.vh1.com/video/behind-the-music-remastered/ full-episodes/behind-the-music-remastered-weird-al/1676947/ playlist.jhtml.

4

David Stubbs, “Devo,” Uncut, August 2000.

5

Stubbs, “Devo.”

10 1

Evie Nagy, “How To Get Ahead With Advertising,” Billboard, June 19, 2010.

2

David Stubbs, “Devo,” Uncut, August 2000.

3

John Rockwell, “The Pop Life: Devo—A Case of Robots vs. Wimps,” New York Times, July 20, 1979, C14.

4

Andy Gill, “Devo: Spud Wars,” NME, December 9, 1978.

5

Sylvie Simmons, “Devo: Live in Los Angeles,” Sounds, September 20, 1980.

6

Liam Lacey, “Devo A Visual Extravaganza,” Globe and Mail, October 27, 1981.

7

Barney Hoskyns, “Devo: New Traditionalists,” NME, 1982.

8

Robert Christgau, “Devo Take A Stand,” Village Voice, 1981.

161

NOTES

11 1

Stephen SPAZ Schnee, “Think Fast: An Exclusive Q&A With Devo’s Gerald Casale,” Discussions, May 14, 2014.

2

Matt Diehl, “Devo Bandmates Remember Late Drummer Alan Myers,” RollingStone.com, June 28, 2013 http://www. rollingstone.com/music/news/devo-bandmates-rememberlate-drummer-alan-myers–20130628.

3

Martin Aston, “Devo: Where Are They Now?,” Q, October 1995.

4

Evie Nagy, “How To Get Ahead With Advertising,” Billboard, June 19, 2010.

5

David Stubbs, “Devo,” Uncut, August 2000.

12 1

Evie Nagy, “How To Get Ahead With Advertising,” Billboard, June 19, 2010.

2

Nagy, “How To Get Ahead.”

3

Nagy, “How To Get Ahead.”

4

Stephen Dalton, “The Return of Devo,” Times, June 2010.

5

Barry Walters, “Devo: Something For Everybody,” Rolling Stone, June 15, 2010.

6

Andy Fyfe, “Devo: Something For Everybody Review,” BBC. co.uk, June 2010 http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/reviews/zhwx.

7

Marc Masters, “Devo: Something For Everybody,” Pitchfork. com, June 17, 2010 http://pitchfork.com/reviews/ albums/14369-something-for-everybody/.

162

NOTES

8

Evie Nagy, “How To Get Ahead With Advertising,” Billboard, June 19, 2010.

9

According to Nielsen Soundscan as of July 2014.

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Also available in the series

1.

Dusty in Memphis by Warren Zanes

13. Live at the Apollo by Douglas Wolk

2.

Forever Changes by Andrew Hultkrans

14. Aqualung by Allan Moore

3.

Harvest by Sam Inglis

16. Let It Be by Colin Meloy

4.

The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society by Andy Miller

17. Led Zeppelin IV by Erik Davis

15. OK Computer by Dai Griffiths

18. Exile on Main Street by Bill Janovitz

5.

Meat Is Murder by Joe Pernice

6.

The Piper at the Gates of Dawn by John Cavanagh

7.

Abba Gold by Elisabeth Vincentelli

21. Armed Forces by Franklin Bruno

8.

Electric Ladyland by John Perry

22. Murmur by J. Niimi

9.

Unknown Pleasures by Chris Ott

24. Endtroducing . . . by Eliot Wilder

19. Pet Sounds by Jim Fusilli 20. Ramones by Nicholas Rombes

23. Grace by Daphne Brooks

10. Sign ‘O’ the Times by Michaelangelo Matos

25. Kick Out the Jams by Don McLeese

11. The Velvet Underground and Nico by Joe Harvard

26. Low by Hugo Wilcken 27. Born in the U.S.A. by Geoffrey Himes

12. Let It Be by Steve Matteo

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A L S O AVA I L A B L E I N T H E SE R I E S

28. Music from Big Pink by John Niven

45. Double Nickels on the Dime by Michael T. Fournier

29. In the Aeroplane Over the Sea by Kim Cooper

46. Aja by Don Breithaupt 47. People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm by Shawn Taylor

30. Paul’s Boutique by Dan LeRoy 31. Doolittle by Ben Sisario

48. Rid of Me by Kate Schatz

32. There’s a Riot Goin’ On by Miles Marshall Lewis

49. Achtung Baby by Stephen Catanzarite

33. The Stone Roses by Alex Green 34. In Utero by Gillian G. Gaar

50. If You’re Feeling Sinister by Scott Plagenhoef

35. Highway 61 Revisited by Mark Polizzotti

51. Pink Moon by Amanda Petrusich

36. Loveless by Mike McGonigal

52. Let’s Talk About Love by Carl Wilson

37. The Who Sell Out by John Dougan

53. Swordfishtrombones by David Smay

38. Bee Thousand by Marc Woodworth

54. 20 Jazz Funk Greats by Drew Daniel

39. Daydream Nation by Matthew Stearns

55. Horses by Philip Shaw 56. Master of Reality by John Darnielle

40. Court and Spark by Sean Nelson

57. Reign in Blood by D. X. Ferris

41. Use Your Illusion Vols 1 and 2 by Eric Weisbard

58. Shoot Out the Lights by Hayden Childs

42. Songs in the Key of Life by Zeth Lundy

59. Gentlemen by Bob Gendron

43. The Notorious Byrd Brothers by Ric Menck

60. Rum, Sodomy & the Lash by Jeffery T. Roesgen

44. Trout Mask Replica by Kevin Courrier

61. The Gilded Palace of Sin by Bob Proehl

166

A L S O AVA I L A B L E I N T H E SE R I E S

62. Pink Flag by Wilson Neate

81. Some Girls by Cyrus Patell

63. XO by Matthew LeMay

82. You’re Living All Over Me by Nick Attfield

64. Illmatic by Matthew Gasteier

83. Marquee Moon by Bryan Waterman

65. Radio City by Bruce Eaton 66. One Step Beyond . . . by Terry Edwards

84. Amazing Grace by Aaron Cohen

67. Another Green World by Geeta Dayal

85. Dummy by R. J. Wheaton 86. Fear of Music by Jonathan Lethem

68. Zaireeka by Mark Richardson 69. 69 Love Songs by L. D. Beghtol

87. Histoire de Melody Nelson by Darran Anderson

70. Facing Future by Dan Kois

88. Flood by S. Alexander Reed and Philip Sandifer

71. It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back by Christopher R. Weingarten

89. I Get Wet by Phillip Crandall 90. Selected Ambient Works Volume II by Marc Weidenbaum

72. Wowee Zowee by Bryan Charles 73. Highway to Hell by Joe Bonomo

91. Entertainment! by Kevin J.H. Dettmar

74. Song Cycle by Richard Henderson

92. Blank Generation by Pete Astor

75. Kid A by Marvin Lin

93. Donuts by Jordan Ferguson

76. Spiderland by Scott Tennent

94. Smile by Luis Sanchez

77. Tusk by Rob Trucks

95. Definitely Maybe by Alex Niven

78. Pretty Hate Machine by Daphne Carr

96. Exile in Guyville by Gina Arnold

79. Chocolate and Cheese by Hank Shteamer

97. My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy by Kirk Walker Graves

80. American Recordings by Tony Tost

167

A L S O AVA I L A B L E I N T H E SE R I E S

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102. Ode to Billie Joe by Tara Murtha

99. () by Ethan Hayden

103. Live Through This by Anwen Crawford

100. Dangerous by Susan Fast 101. Tago Mago by Alan Warner

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