After their 1978 triumphs—two hugely acclaimed albums, two tours of the U.K. and one each in Europe and America—Pere Ubu reached a crossroads. Thomas recalls their big-time rock manager advising the group to effectively formularize their sound, then beat the public over the head with it. Remake
Dub Housing
two or three more times, he said, and they’d be stars. “I said, ‘What if we
can’t
repeat it? What if we don’t know what we did? What if we don’t
want to
repeat it?’” recalls Thomas. The manager told Ubu they’d always get signed to deals and be able to release records, but they’d never transcend cult status. It was meant to be a dire warning, but, laughs Thomas, “our eyes lit up—‘That sounds pretty good!’”
The Modern Dance
and
Dub Housing
both contained absurdist sound collages and exercises in pure Dada like “The Book Is on the Table” and “Thriller.” These now became the blueprint for Ubu’s third album,
New Picnic Time
. “Our problem is that we never wanted to repeat
Dub Housing,
” Thomas once said. “That desire to never repeat became as much of a trap as trying to repeat formulas the way some bands do.” Although he likes to argue that “all adventurous art is done by middle-class people” because they always have other career options and don’t need to worry about making money, the corollary is that bourgeois bohemians don’t possess that vital hunger to make it that drives people from less privileged backgrounds. “We were on the edge of being popular but we were fundamentally incapable of being popular,” Thomas admits, “because we were fundamentally perverse.”
“DEVO, IT’S LIKE THE TITANIC
going down or something,” Allen Ravenstine once said of Pere Ubu’s Akron allies, who often played on the same bill as the Cleveland band early on. “The impression I’ve got from their songs and from talking with them is that they’re really much more into making a mockery of everything, not really giving a damn.”
Actually, Devo’s cynicism was born of having once cared
too much
. Unlike Ubu, Devo had been hippies, of a sort. Gerald V. Casale and Mark Mothersbaugh, the group’s conceptual core, were among the antiwar students protesting at Ohio’s Kent State University that fateful May morning in 1970 when the National Guard opened fire. Two of the four slaughtered students—Allison Krause and Jeffrey Miller—were friends of Casale’s. “They were just really smart liberal kids, eighteen and nineteen, doing what we all did back then,” he says. “They weren’t crazy sociopaths.” He recalls the dazed, slow-motion sensation when the guns started firing, “like being in a car accident,” the blood streaming down the sidewalk, the eerie sound of moaning from the crowd, “like a kennel of hurt puppies.” At first, “even the National Guard was frozen, freaked out. Then they marched us off campus and the university was shut down for three months.”
May 4, 1970, is one of several contenders for the day the sixties died. “For me it was the turning point,” says Casale bitterly. “Suddenly I saw it all clearly: All these kids with their idealism, it was very naïve.” Participants in SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) such as Casale reached a crossroads. “After Kent, it seemed like you could either join a guerrilla group like the Weather Underground, actually try assassinating some of these evil people—the way
they
had murdered anybody in the sixties who’d tried to make a difference—or you could just make some kind of wacked-out creative Dada art response. Which is what Devo did.”
Devo was born in the three months Kent was closed down. “Gerry would come ’round to my house and we started writing music,” says Mothersbaugh. He’d first noticed Casale because of a prankster performance art stunt he’d pull during fine-arts faculty shows. “I’d be this character Gorge who wore a enema bag bandolero,” says Casale. “My sidekick, Poot Man, dressed in black wrestling shorts and a black full-face mask like those Mexican wrestlers. He walked around like a monkey, knuckles trailing on the ground. The art was always bad, derivative stuff—endless mindless landscapes and still lifes. I’d point at a picture and go, ‘Poot Man!’ and he’d rub his ass on the artwork, or hold his nose like it stunk. Every time Poot Man took a pretend shit on the art, I’d reward him with milk, which he’d suck through the enema tube. People would be disgusted and move out of the way, and somebody would get security. After a few of these events, they’d be waiting for us.” Says Mothersbaugh, “I saw him do the Poot Man thing, and I was like, ‘Who’s this guy?’ Everybody hated Gerry so I
knew
I was going to like him.” Casale, meanwhile, had already admiringly noted Mothersbaugh’s artwork—decals of puking heads in profile.
For key members of a band that later defined New Wave music, Casale’s and Mothersbaugh’s roots were unpromising. “Mark was playing in a band that did Yes and ELP covers,” chuckles Casale. “He had long hair down to his waist and a stack of keyboards.” An accomplished bassist, Casale had played in numerous blues bands and was steeped in everything from the original Delta blues to the electric Chicago sound. Prog and blues collided in a mutual passion for Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band. But everything that was earthy and primal about Beefheart’s cubist R&B became deliberately sterile and stilted in Devo’s hands. Their quest, says Casale, was to discover “what devolved music would sound like. We wanted to make outer-space caveman music.”
Devo’s other big inspiration was the glam grotesquerie of early Roxy Music. You can hear Bryan Ferry’s android vibrato in Mothersbaugh’s edge-of-hysteria bleat, while his approach to playing synth owed a lot to Eno. “I loved his asymmetric, atonal synth solos in Roxy. He brought a whole new way to think about the instrument, as opposed to Rick Wakeman and Keith Emerson, who just sounded like glorified organists. I used to write synth parts I could play with a fist instead of fingers. We were looking for sounds like V-2 rockets and mortar blasts, things that weren’t on the settings when you bought a synth.” Rather than a keyboard, Devo treated the synth as a noise generator. “The more technology you have, the more primitive you can be,” Mothersbaugh told one interviewer. “You can express guttural sounds, bird noises, brain waves, blood flow.”
In Devo’s earliest days, the group experimented with machine rhythm. “Our first drummer was my youngest brother Jim, who left to be an inventor,” says Mark. “He created a homemade electronic drum kit using acoustic drums with guitar pickups attached to their heads, which he’d feed into wah-wah pedals, fuzztones, and Echoplexes. It sounded really amazing, like a walking, broken-down robot.” Ultimately, Devo found Alan Myers, “this incredible metronomic drummer,” and the group started to explore disconcertingly disjointed time signatures like
7
?
8
and
11
?
8
. “Those kind of timings make you feel rigid right away,” says Casale.
In the early to midseventies, with punk barely a glimmer on the horizon, Devo defined themselves against the ruling American mainstream rock of the day, characterized by chugging feel-good boogie and slick, slack country rock. Inspired by Beefheart’s jagged avant-blues, Devo broke up the flow with a deliberately ungroovy, stop-start approach that would eventually become a hallmark of New Wave. Just as Devo intellectually rejected all those “flabby leftover ideas from the sixties” (Casale) that had degenerated into self-absorbed, complacent hedonism by the early seventies, likewise their music’s twitchy angularity was the antithesis of FM radio’s soft rock. As expressed in the anthem “Be Stiff,” Devo’s proudly neurotic, uptight attitude was a revolt against the take-it-easy baby boomers. “We were anything but hippies—loose, natural,” Casale recalled years later.
Back in 1974, though, Devo’s herky-jerky rhythms—midway between spasm and stricture—were as appealing to Akron audiences as a cup of cold puke. Because no one wanted to hear original music, Devo pretended to be a cover band to get gigs. “We’d say, ‘Here’s another one by Foghat’ and then play one of our tunes like ‘Mongoloid,’” chuckles Mothersbaugh. “Angry hippie factory workers charged the stage trying to stop us. Often we’d get paid to quit. Sometimes the police would be called.”
Devo’s first two singles, “Satisfaction” and “Jocko Homo”—self-released on the group’s own Booji Boy label—were relatively torpid compared with their later frantic sound. This was partly because “Jocko Homo” and its B-side, “Mongoloid,” were recorded in a garage with no heating during a freezing winter, with the band wearing gloves. After five years of languishing in obscurity in Akron, playing only a handful of gigs and funding the band through a series of grim jobs (Casale’s résumé included projectionist in a porno theater, methadone clinic counselor, and graphic artist at a janitorial supply firm), the singles were Devo’s calling card to the wider world. “No one will ever know the effort it took for us to get out of Akron,” says Casale. “Driving down to Cincinnati with just enough cash to get two thousand copies pressed at Queen City Records. Mark and me sitting up endless nights gluing the covers that we’d printed together. Akron was like boot camp. We practiced day and night, and on weekends too—when other people were out getting loaded and getting laid—over and over until we got good.”
It worked. Devo evolved into a tightly drilled package of sound and visuals, sharing as much with the shock rock theater of Alice Cooper and the Tubes as with the no-frills punk rockers. Whenever feasible, Devo gigs began with
The Beginning Was the End: The Truth About De-Evolution,
a ten-minute film directed by their friend Chuck Statler, whom they’d originally met in an experimental-art class at Kent State. Statler’s minimovie generated the enduringly famous images of Devo: Mothersbaugh as mad professor in bow tie and white coat giving a student lecture on devolution, the rest of the band wearing plastic sunglasses and colored tights pulled tightly over their heads to squish their features, bank-robber-style. It was Statler who, in 1975, showed Devo a popular science magazine with a feature on laser discs, then on the verge of being introduced to the market. “We read that it was the same size as an LP but had moving pictures on it,” says Mothersbaugh. “And we thought, ‘Oh my God, that’s what we want to do!’” Originally an aspiring film director more than a musician, Casale fantasized about making “an anticapitalist science-fiction movie” and always saw Devo as a visual entity, where “the theatrics and the ideas and the staging were as important as the music.”
Champing at the bit to kick-start the videodisc revolution, Devo were impatient to get to the future. The seventies had been a write-off, merely the sixties sagging into decadence. Devo yearned to be the first band on the block making eighties music. Like Pere Ubu, they went beyond punk before punk even properly existed. Not just musically with their synths and industrial rhythms, but conceptually, too. They shared punk’s never-trust-a-hippie attitude, but, says Mothersbaugh, “We thought the punks never learned from the failure of the hippies. Rebellion always gets co-opted into another marketing device.” Selling out, using the system to spread the virus, seemed like the most insidious strategy for Devo, who saw themselves as a “postmodernist protest band.” Putting out the Booji Boy singles independently was just a step on the ladder, a way of attracting attention. The game plan was to join rock’s ruling class. “We figured we’d mimic the structure of those who get the greatest rewards out of the upside-down business and become a corporation,” Casale told
SoHo Weekly News
. “Most rock musicians, they’re no more than clerks or auto mechanics.”
So Devo gigs started with a bombastic synth jingle, the “Devo corporate anthem,” during which the group lined up solemnly to give a salute. Because “individuality and rebellion were obsolete,” Devo “dressed identical so you couldn’t tell who was who,” says Mothersbaugh. “We wanted to look like a machine or an army onstage. We felt that the real mindless uniform was rock’s blue jeans.” Instead, says Casale, the group “dressed like maintenance worker geeks,” wearing outfits he’d acquired during his stint at the janitorial supply company. They built up a mix-and-mismatch wardrobe that blended the regimental (Boy Scouts, servicemen, football teams) and the technocratic (hazardous-waste protection suits, rubber gloves). This they spiced with kitsch grotesquerie, including cheesy alien masks and peculiar plastic helmets styled to look like extremely bad hairpieces. Devo also developed a tautly choreographed repertoire of jerky stage moves inspired, says Casale, by seeing a Russian constructivist ballet. “And then we played this very precise music like James Brown turned into a robot. And it really pissed everybody off!”
Not everybody. In 1977 things got confusing as first Iggy Pop and David Bowie, and then Brian Eno and Robert Fripp, jostled to produce Devo’s debut. Thrilling to the sensations of dislocation and menace their music induced, Eno raved about Devo as “the best live show I have ever seen.” Neil Young, of all people, invited Devo to appear in his feature-length movie
Human Highway
as a squad of disgruntled and radioactively glowing nuclear-waste workers. Iggy Pop was so enamored that he wanted to record a whole album of Devo cover songs as his next album. At the group’s New York debut show in July 1977, Bowie came onstage to introduce the second set and announced, “This is the band of the future, I’m going to produce them in Tokyo this winter.” Finally it was settled that the record would be produced by Eno at Conny Plank’s studio, a converted farm twenty miles outside of Cologne, with Bowie contributing only on weekends because he was busy making the movie
Just a Gigolo
. “We didn’t even have a record deal, but Eno said he’d pay for the flights, the studio costs, everything,” says Mothersbaugh. “Eno was just certain we would get a record contract.”