Devo: Are We Not Ready?
Looking at this interview nearly thirty years later reminds me that it was not a pleasant experience. Conny Plank’s Studio was right out in the countryside near Koln: it was miles from anywhere and, in February, bitterly cold. West Germany was suffused with an air of paranoia, with the prominently displayed Baader/ Meinhof posters an ever-present reminder of a country under siege.
And the band, all five of them, were really sarcastic and defensive when I sat down to do the interview. Which taught me to do one-on-ones from then on. Some of this difficulty must have been due t0 all the attention Devo were getting at that time: when I arrived at the studio, they were conducting an interview with Ian Birch at the Melody Maker.
It was early 1978 and the primal energy of Punk was burning itself out. It was time for something new, and the ideologues on the music press were slugging it out – to the point of physical violence. Several movements vied from prominence, week to week: New Wave, Power Pop, Rock Against Racism.
As one of the signatories to “Sounds” New Musick issues in November 1977, I firmly believed that electronics were the way to go: the path had been shown by Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love”, Space’s “Magic Fly”, Pere Ubu’s “Street Waves”, Kraftwerk’s “Trans Europe Express” and David Bowie’s two albums with Brian Eno, “Low” and “Heroes”.
Devo had come to light after two independently released 45’s and several incandescent shows on America’s West Coast: one of these – at San Francisco’s Mabuhay Gardens – had been recorded by Greg Shaw and made its way to London. It sounded like nothing you’d ever heard: punk/psych electronica beamed in from another planet. The future had arrived.
With endorsements from Bowie and Iggy, there was ecstatic press followed by record company bidding war. And now here they were recording their first album for Warners in the US and Virgin in the UK, with Brian Eno producing. After working for years in Ohio semi-obscurity, they must have found all the interest somewhat overwhelming. So they closed up like a clam.
However it was not all grim. Brian Eno was very kind, as was producer Conny Plank. The band leader, Jerry Casale, saw my distress and gave me a more thoughtful interview the next day. Plus they showed me “The Truth About Devolution”, the short film that they used to open their shows. It was fantastic, what pop video should have become.
That was the thing about Devo. They really were futuristic in early 1978. The music was hysterical: pop, weird, and super tight – thanks to a dynamic rhythm section. Mark Mothersbaugh was a compelling front man with a strongly developed, almost infantile aesthetic, that went with Jerry Casale’s genetic concepts of Devolution – which would now be called dumbing down.
So they had the material, they had the ideas, and they had the presentation: not only the film, but in Mark Mothersbaugh’s extraordinary montaged postcards and a strongly unified look that fused medical wear with space age costumes. When they finally played the UK later that year, their discipline and focus blew almost everyone else away. They were extraordinary.
In the first half of 1978, the promise of New Musick began to come true, with great electronic singles from the Normal, Throbbing Gristle, and Pere Ubu’s classic album, “The Modern Dance”. Later that year, these ideas would enter the mainstream, with Blondie’s disco-throb classic, “Heart of Glass” and Sylvester’s unbeatable “(You Make Me Feel) Mighty Real”.
Devo themselves profited from this open climate during 1979, when “Whip It”, with its classic accompanying video, made the US top 20. Although they never bettered their first impact in the UK, they remain a touchstone for a generation of American fans: they bridged the gap between rock and electronics and offered a pop alternative that gave hope to weird kids everywhere.
Original piece printed in Sounds, May 1978 and intro in Mojo/ Q New Wave Special early 2009
[Sounds, May 1978]
THE FIRST THING you notice on arrival at Koln airport is the modernity and organization. No baggage queues. No pre-fab ramshackle buildings. Instead you get sweeping architecture and (by comparison) lavish decoration: glass walls, marble straight lines, expensive consumer items in glass display cages. If you’re bored, you can find a chair with a small TV set on one arm: just insert pfennigs and watch awhiles. Immediate impressions indicate a clean dream…
Koln itself was largely flattened by Allied bombing in WW II: we thoughtfully left the central cathedral intact. The reconstruction of the town around it results in grey, bland uniformity. Not depressing, just hardly there. Not dissimilar to Britain, except Germany seems further on down the Affluence road: “A fake chandelier in every living room!” The shops parade the usual, perhaps more blatantly, more confidently. Furniture, cameras, wiener fish bars, pastries, all the excess baggage of a country richer than us and which is in some respects five/ten yards on in time.
These eyes hunt hard for any cracks in the prosperous facade – Baader-Meinhof traces especially (Savage’s naive terrorist chic – Eno’s ‘RAF’ runs through his head) – but it takes them two days to find any.
Conny’s Studio turns out at the end of the taxi-ride to be a converted Victorian farm on the outskirts of Wolperath, a small village 30km ESE of Koln. High up and snow-bound: as a greeting, the weather turns and remains coldest for many winters. The studio itself is a converted stable, its unpretentious facade hiding what could be one of the best computerized desks in the world.
Conny – Conrad Plank – has worked since the late 1960s producing such as Kraftwerk, in their earlier days, Neu, Cluster (with and without Eno), La Dusseldorf, Harmonia (Michael Rother and Cluster), Fritz Muller…his knowledge abut this end of German music is virtually encyclopaedic. Here Eno mixed down four tracks of Before and After Science last summer: both are now working on Devo’s first album.
Devo themselves are, to say the least, in an interesting position. No record contract, no production contract (as everyone is at pains to emphasize), no manager – Jerry Casale handles all that – and apparently little finance, yet they’re in the middle of recording an album in an excellently equipped German studio with Brian Eno producing and David Bowie expected to appear.
Meanwhile in England Stiff picks up the rights to two older singles, an astute and badly needed prestigious move, and promotes them heavily with ads that heighten mystique. The media guns are trained: word-of-mouth and oblique (admittedly) articles by such as yours truly have already started to spread the word. Information aplenty but still little insight: the mystique remains. This piece also, by devoting three pages to them, indicates an importance placed upon them that, in concrete terms, they could be considered to have done little to earn. Thus far, in the UK at any rate, Devo amount to two hard-to-find import 45s – ‘Satisfaction’/'Mongoloid’, the latter now released by Stiff – occasional adulatory press and a hefty cult. As for now, a media phenomenon, a gimmick almost, rather than a band.
Remember Magazine? Sometimes too much (uncritical) press can be counterproductive.
These guys are well ready for it, all the same. Jerry Casale and Mark Mothersbaugh have been working together for about five years, while the group as it is now – Jim Mothersbaugh/guitar, Bob Casale/guitar, and Alan Myers/drums – have been together for about 18 months, Hardly overnight sensations.
But there’s a lot of pressure all at once. The pressures of moving out from Akron and Cleveland, Ohio, playing other American cities, emerging into the global spotlight as Bowie takes them under his wing. And apart from the simple acclimatization from the USA – this being their first time outside – they’re here working what amounts to 12 hours a day in freezing conditions. While the UK media gets the hots, record companies continue to buzz round the band like wasps round a good fat honey-pot. Most of this devolves to one person, Jerry, but the rest must feel it. Hardly the most relaxed situation. Be stiff…
Into which I blithely fly.
But who are these people, what do they eat for breakfast, what’s their favourite colour, etc? Devo, learning fast about media manipulation, aren’t exactly going to let it all out. This fits in with their chosen image: a corporate unit – Devo – with the individual members and their history unimportant: for instance, no pictures were to be taken of them without their Devo suits. It made sense: the main strength of Devo as a phenomenon so far has been their consistent, brilliant presentation of the group as a total package – music, visuals, image, ideology, language, films, each referring to itself and each other, and solidifying the circular links. . .
Although I tend to feel like the fly in the ointment rather than the fly on the wall (my paranoia), it’s enjoyable enough. Most communication is with Jerry and Mark, the others being friendly but low profile. Jerry is the principal organizational force – he’s taken on the chores of a manager – while Mark could be the spark at bottom, being, responsible, if nothing else for the pinhead routines and the synthesizer that’s at the root of their sound. It’s one of Mark’s specialities, projecting insanity. Both are creators of the band’s visuals: familiar elements wrenched out of context, or once-used images represented in a different form. They’ve both been in contact, in various degrees of involvement, with the Image Bank, a Canadian art organization who could be superficially described as working in similar areas. The bands are very American, clever, and a paradoxical (but calculated) mixture of sophistication and naivety.
In all this, the music is easily forgotten and shouldn’t be. Conny’s Studio is the first time where the band have been let loose in a 24-track studio. The two singles were recorded on a four-track, ‘Mongoloid’ in particular on a Revox in their garage in December 1976. No heating: the weather was so cold that Mark played with his gloves on. It could be why it sounds slow. The 45s are being re-recorded for the album – and even in their unmixed state, the versions are very different, ‘Mongoloid’ for instance featuring a drum snap/slap nowhere to be found on the original, where the drums are buried in the mix. The album will probably contain 12 tracks, including stage favourites ‘Uncontrollable Urge’, ‘Too Much Paranoia’ and maybe ‘Gut Feeling’. Studio time is booked until early March: the group plan to come to Britain to play at least one date, probably the Roundhouse on 11 March. The album is scheduled for release in May or June.
The studio process in itself is simply unglamorous and very hard work. The group had gone through the first flush of getting most of the basic tracks down, and were in the middle period of getting the tiny elements right, adding overdubs, before the final remixing could begin. The picky bits. Remake/remodel, sift and sort, match and mismatch. This involves constant listening and relistening, constant decisions as to the prominence the various elements are to take in the mix, quite apart from the choice of the elements themselves.
It’s a fickle business; some tracks seem to lag behind. Eno’s role as producer is that of intermediary between man and tape, an interpreter almost; with 24 tacks also, organization is all-important. It’s a difficult task, to balance the almost scientific quality of running through a tape for the hundredth time with the (gut) feeling that must remain. So far, the results were impressive…
The interview took place in between breakfast and lunch in the studio. It was the hardest I’ve ever done. Barring Jerry, the group didn’t (doesn’t) want to talk in an interview situation, and the atmosphere of unwillingness and suspicion was strong.
Can we start with why you came out to Germany to record?
Jerry Casale (JC): We were told to. We didn’t know what we wanted. It was just as easy to be told where to come. It was through the Bowie connection, but we could go further than him, right now, if you know what I mean.
Can we talk about the production on the singles?
JC: It would seem fairly obvious what the production was…
Not really.
JC: It was – a combination of our degree of organization and the amount of money we had with what was available. So it represented really a random point in time. ‘Mongoloid’ was recorded in December 1976, and ‘Satisfaction’ in August/September 1977.
I was puzzled by the cover art of ‘Satisfaction’, which was no doubt the idea. . .
JC: Yes. It was a parody of slickness. Those glasses were 3D glasses. Just Hollywood. A parody of sexuality – plastic tits…
So what’s the situation now with your record contract?
JC: Mmmm. We don’t want to go too far into it, but don’t be surprised if you see a big WB on the album jacket.
There’s that whole argument that runs that when you enter the business you get sucked in by it. . .
JC: 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 … I really think that’s up to us. That’s what becomes the creative process at that point – the creative process then is so inexorably connected with business that it’s impossible to separate them.
Can you explain the idea of Devolution?
JC: Devolution’s a big idea about the way things are. Everyone has a big idea about the way things are whether they admit it or not: a lot of peoples ideas masquerade themselves as non-ideas, which we find the most dishonest. Devo just has the biggest, best and most interesting idea about reality (!) that allows people to discover things, which is exactly what other ideas don’t allow. Other ideas begin by ignoring what’s there so their idea doesn’t account for the whole picture. It’s like when people thought that the earth was at the centre of the universe but the movement of certain planets didn’t really match up to that idea – they couldn’t make it match because their idea of what was happening was at basis wrong. And when the premise is wrong, everything else that follows is sick.
Do you feel that our culture is accelerating; accelerating almost to the point of implosion?
JC: Implosion, right. Critical mass. Who knows how long it will take. In the meantime we’re just providing the wake, a big party. . .
Mark Mothersbaugh (MM): Read-outs. . .
JC: In other words, rather than being uptight about it, we’re just like bringing the good news. The quicker is it happens the more we’ll like it, personally.
Normally you’re conditioned to view the unknown with tear.
JC: Right. We got over that because we lived in Akron, Ohio. That area, that experience of living in America, made it easy to overcome that, because if we didn’t, we wouldn’t have merely imploded, we’d be invisible now, we wouldn’t exist as far as you were concerned.
Why Akron?
JC: It’s in the centre of the most highly industrialized part of the United States. It’s hilly, grey, like culturally stripped. There’s one thing different about Akron though, and that’s that it’s safe. It made it really easy to just watch everything happening that was going on everywhere else but not really to be in it, but be aware of it. It wasn’t so isolated that we didn’t know what was happening.
Are certain people Devo?
JC: What do you think of the guy holding a potato? Would you say he’s Devo?
Umm. About 100 per cent.
JC: Devo means everything good and bad at once. High and low Devo. When Booji Boy says it in the movie ‘We’re all Devo’, he means it. But some people don’t know it and are uptight about it – some people don’t know it at all, like the guy holding the potato, and just act it.
I couldn’t believe that image, thought you’d made it up
JC: Right. We don’t need to make anything up. We just point things out. We select things and recognize them, and use them. Selection is probably the only artistic process – originality is a corny idea in the 1980s.
With Devolution, what you’re saying is that we’ve reached any limit of expansion?
JC: Right. The consumer attitude can only go so far. When you’ve eaten everything on the plate, what’s next? Goo. Yeah. – Evo/Devo, consume/shrivel up. The idea that people have of themselves and their purpose on the planet has got to change.
Devo to me is an example of a strong undercurrent, a wish to express 1978 disorientation, to break down the way we think. . .
JC: The breaking down musically has occurred – punk – and Devo are here to mutate. Devo’s just the clean-up squad of the 1980s, the Smart Patrol.
It occurs to me that people will be able to take the album on several levels: it’s accessible enough for people to cut out the parts that threaten them. Many people are going to be threatened by what you’re saying.
JC: I don’t know about you, but I’ve always liked being pleasantly threatened.
But you have to accept the fact that some don’t.
JC: The people that need it most always hate it, but they come around.
How are you finding working with Eno? Are you getting what you want?
MM: I think so. We weren’t really looking for a producer.
JC: So we’re getting what we want. He’s sensitive to us, OK. I think it’d be hard for anyone here, unless they got some idea that I don’t know about, to say that there’d be anybody who’d be any better. He gets good drum sounds, doesn’t he, Alan?
Alan Myers (AM): Yes.
JC: It’s exactly what he was playing in his head, but that’s very hard to transfer. I mean, to sound real, it can’t be real. Eno understands that. It’s just like a total movie set, recording and mixing. Making all your props look in credibly real so the finished scene transfers the illusion that it’s happening.
The comparison with the released singles works in your favour.
JC: Right. If people can like that, we can certainly surpass it. Because those were like black and white sketches. (Pause.) If we could add odour to our records.
The Raspberries did.
JC: Oh no, oh please!
Bob Casale (BC): Put scratch ‘n’ sniff round, right on the vinyl, and let the needle do the work.
JC: Yeah. You have video disc and the odours come out different for every song.
How would ‘Mongoloid’ smell?
JC: Pabulum and bacon frying. Hospitals.
‘Jocko Homo’?
JC: Is there any question? The zoo!
‘Too Much Paranoias’?
JC: I think that’d have to be a chemical smell. Something to ring the alarm bells in our system.
When did you start playing outside Akron and Cleveland?
JC: When they wouldn’t let us play any more. April 1977. We went to CBGB’s New York.
What was that like ?
JC: Perfect. We got on stage at two o’clock in the morning.
MM: Got into a fight with the Dead Boys.
JC: The crowd loved it. It had nothing to do with music – it was the aliens against the spuds. The Dead Boys attacked us on stage during ‘Jocko Homo’. . .
You must have really got to them?
JC: Sure. They took it personally. If the spud fits, wear it. And the crowd loved it … we continued to play all through the fight and ended up looking good. Mark offered himself up first, being in the front line.
What about the latex bags?
JC: They’re in the movie, during ‘Jocko Homo’. It’s everything, like maggots, paramecium, foetal things.
Disgusting but comfortable.
JC: Yes. That’s the nature of research or birth or discovery. It’s pretty disgusting.
Another thing that strikes me about Devo is that there’s a whole area of American life, the kitsch, that we just don’t know about, and that you draw from.
JC: There is too much. More than you can think of. That’s why Devo would happen in America, because it’s like puking up the hairballs after eating too much. It’s there you can reach the saturation level, the critical mass of consumerism first, because it’s happening at such a rate … I mean, families I will buy eight bags of groceries, and in there will be wiener wraps, cheese I dogs, banana marshmallows, hostess hohos.
MM: Stove-top Stuffing! It’s real surrealistic.
Is there any music you get inspiration from?
MM: I like TV commercials. The musical content. Usually they’re much more creative than anything you hear otherwise, because it’s a free format to work in.
JC: No. I’m not the same. I hate TV commercials, that’s maybe why I watch them at all. Personally I can’t separate the function from the techniques. What’ll happen to me is just like when you’re in a daydreaming state I’ll combine things. I’ll take one thing I hate and another thing I hate with something I like. I don’t ever like anything unless its purpose has been mutated. But there’s no doubt that most of the best things Devo do start as a joke.
(Tape #2, with Jerry Casale the next day. )
What was your involvement with Iggy?
JC: I was probably a superficial involvement, Iggy’s always in a plane slightly obtuse to any kind of tangible relationship. He drifts in and out of focus.
Could you tell me more about the origin of Devo?
JC: Devolution was a combination of a Wonder Woman comic book and the movie lsland of Lost Souls, the original, with Bela Lugosi, Lon Chaney, Charles Laughton. That was various things I’d been thinking about devolution, of going ahead to go back, things falling apart, entropy. It grabbed every piece of information and gave it some kind of cohesive presence- it was a package. Just as our music and our identity exist as technique rather than a style.
There seems to be a new way of approaching rock ‘n’ roll: a few bands are emerging with their own ideology, package.
JC: Yeah. It’s the next logical step. It will ensure the existence of vital rock ‘n’ roll. If rock ‘n’ roll’s going to maintain its position, its purpose, then emphasis has to switch, otherwise it’ll become a vestigial organ, meaningless.
You’re in an interesting position now.
JC: Yes. We’re like stored energy about to become kinetic.
After the interview(s), the movie – The Truth About Devolution – is shown a few times. Pleasantly threatening. Very friendly. Made in spring 1976 by Chuck Statler on location in Akron, it features a four-piece Devo, Jim Mothersbaugh having since been replaced by Alan Myers, and Bob Casale joining later. It runs for about nine minutes. The soundtrack consists of two songs, ‘Secret Agent Man’ and ‘Jocko Homo’, with synthesized siren whoops as fillers. Less of a plot, more of a mood, the visuals muck up your reality in the way that, say, the best Monty Python could: to the extent that, on switching on German TV afterwards, it was impossible to tell whether the movie had ended. Maybe it still hasn’t. It turns media/rock clichés on their head in a dry, alien, cruelly witty manner. A good taster for the band: as such it is used to open their set . . .
In the end, Devo appear sure they have the answer. By casting a loose enough net, they can make adjustments to suit any circumstance which will still fall within their scheme of things. There are still considerable areas of doubt: most importantly, we haven’t yet seen them live. Reports vary. Although much of what they have to say is impressive, and makes good, clear headed sense, they aren’t entirely blameless of being wilfully obscure an clever for the sake of it, of using ten words and an oblique idea when five would do.
Some of what they say when broken down away from their (powerful) presence isn’t so omniscient as it seems, and veers on occasions towards arrogance, and sweeping generalizations. It could be the arrogance of pressure paranoia, or everyone bidding for you on a world scale, or it could be merely to provoke, to polarize, or to screen.
It doesn’t matter now. The album so far signifies that Devo are well putting their actions where their mouth is, and more. Like the film, the album, as it was, was already shaping up as an attractive, yet disorienting mixture of the familiar and the cliché, mixed around and stripped to sound like nothing you’ve heard before, yet … Exactly right in its remoteness. Still the most powerful music to come down the pike since … Time will tell. They could be the transitional band as records give way to video discs – they’re already waiting…
Returning to Britain with its overt decay, rows of crumbling Victorian housing and cramped ribbon development …its overwhelming poverty in comparison, it’s only possible to wonder how Devo, with their neat yet convincing paradoxes of order out of chaos, and chaos out of order, will take us, and how we will take them.