In March of 1981 Warner Brothers experimented with selling EPs by some of their new acts that appealed to younger buyers. DEV-O Live is made up of six songs recorded live at the band's 1980 concert in San Francisco, including their US#14 hit "Whip It". American FM radio ignored the EP.
The Pretenders : Porcelain
The Pretenders' Extended Play was another Warner Bros/Sire extended play release that sold well at its discount price, peaking at US#27. It certainly seemed like a good deal to me at the time to get "Talk of the Town", "Cuban Slide" and "Message of Love" for $5.99, while we waited to hear Pretenders II, not out until August. In a way it backfired too, because we had already purchased the best songs on the album.
Romeo Void : White Sweater
415 Records has released the Romeo Void debut It's A Condition. The Bay Area band is fronted by Debora Iyall, who speaks/sings observations on empty love. The critics went nuts. Creem reviewer Iman Labadedi wrote that" if you tore Romeo Void's debut LP down to its essence , what you'd get wouldn't be a million miles away from a collection of torch songs. The type Billie Holliday once did so magnificently...it's easily one of the best albums I've heard all year". The album finished #17 on The Village Voice Pazz and Jop poll
The Greg Kihn Band : The Breakup Song
The Bay Area cult band breaks out with the hook-filled US#15 hit "The Breakup Song(They Don't Write 'Em)" from his mostly bland power pop album Rockihnroll. Greg Kihn, one of the original Beserkley label acts, would hit it big again in 1983 with his US#5 hit "Jeopardy".
The Producers : What's He Got
The Producers, a new wave quartet out of Atlanta, get some buzz from their debut album thanks to the ear worm "What's He Got".
Robert Plant and Rockpile : Little Sister
The line-up alone got record buyers excited about the double album, Concerts For The People of Kampuchea. Recorded in late 1979 as a fundraiser to benefit the starving refugees of Cambodia, the album featured British rock royalty highlighted by The Rockestra supergroup, featuring Wings, John Paul Jones and John Bonham of Led Zeppelin, David Gilmour from Pink Floyd, Ronnie Lane of the Faces, Kenney Jones and Pete Townshend of the Who, and Hank Marvin of the Shadows. But it was Robert Plant's cover of Elvis Presley's "Little Sister" that got my bandmates excited enough to do a cover at our final high school concert.
John Cale : Dead Or Alive
Much of John Cale's Honi Soit was written spontaneously in the studio. Critics acclaimed the album which reached #154 on the charts, the highest the former Velvet Underground member has yet to achieve. Cale toured the album beginning in April of the year.
On August 6, 1980 Devo released their most successful single, the US#14/UK#51 "Whip It". While the title might suggest masturbation or S+M, Jerry Casale says he wrote the lyrics as a Dale Carnegie style pep talk for President Jimmy Carter. Casale tells Evie Nagy, author of the 331/3 series book on Devo's Freedom of Choice:
We were afraid the Republicans were going to get in there [in 1980], and they sounded very nasty all the time.They were running this guy, Ronald Reagan, that seemed like a total--he seemed like he didn't even had 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 interview 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 jokey, and he's 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."
When it came time to do the video, Devo went full board on the S+M theme. Warners provided $15,000. Set on a dude ranch, Mark Mothersbaugh whips a hat, cigarette and finally the clothes off a striking woman as cowboys and girls cheer. The woman, Shaylah Spitz-Kalmus was a 20 year old dancer who worked as a cashier at a bakery in Venice, California. She is still recognized as the woman in "Whip It".
The non LP B-side, "Turnaround" achieved fame ten years after the single's release when Nirvana covered in on John Peel's BBC radio show.
On May 14 1980, Devo released its third album, Freedom of Choice, which featured their biggest hit, at US#14, "Whip It". The album marks Devo's transformation into a nearly all electronic outfit, with the help of co-producer Robert Margouleff, famous for his synthesizer work in Tonto's Expanding Head Band and with Stevie Wonder.
The band also introduced a new look featuring its red plastic energy domes, which are apparently making a comeback during the pandemic as is the notion of freedom of choice. As Mark Mothersbaugh recalls:
"We were influenced both by German Bauhaus movement and geometric fashion, and Aztec temples. We just liked the look. It looked good, and it didn't look like any other bands out there. We weren't interested in wearing groovy hats or groovy clothing. We kind of looked like Lego toys or something by the time we got those on our heads, and that was a positive thing."
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Some critics seemed to appreciate the music more than on he sophomore album New Traditionalists Here's Robert Christgau of the Village Voice, who graded the album a B+ :
Hey now, don't blame me--I insulted them every chance I got back when your roommate still thought they might be Important. But now that that's taken care of itself we can all afford to giggle. Robot satire indeed--if they ever teach a rhythm box to get funky, a Mothersbaugh will be there to plug it in.
But others didn't care for the smug joke that Devo had been telling for so many years:
Rolling Stone's Laura Fissinger said the band was "creepy" and "uncomfortable":
And we’re supposed to take this stuff straight? C’mon! The adenoidal lead vocals sound like they’re being delivered while held at arm’s length, as Devo’s mechanically pitched rhythms click in coldly all around them. When the band heats up or the singer sounds like someone’s actually inhabiting his vocal chords or a thick, loud guitar forces its way to the forefront, there’s a momentary ring of truth. It just doesn’t happen often enough to eradicate the record’s suspicious emptiness.
Doesn’t everyone feel dumb enough about love without encouragement from a bunch of guys with red flowerpots on their heads?
On May 23, Devo performed two songs on ABC's Fridays, "Gates of Steel" and "Girl U Want", which was the first single from the album. Revisiting the album and Devo websites have led me to my favorite of the face masks so far,:
In April of 1980 Devo released their new single, "Girl U Want". Because of its herky jerky sound that might remind some of "My Sharona", the record company thought this would be a bigger hit from the upcoming Freedom of Choice than "Whip It". The song didn't chart.
The reviewer for Smash Hits wrote
"The usual fidgety disco sound, the usual stops, starts and detours, the usual clownish, mildly inquisitive vocals, the usual vaguely sinister playground music. Would you believe a love song? Well, sort of".
Here's Mark Mothersbaugh, wearing a red terraced Energy dome hat and singing"Girl U Want" into an ice cream cone on French television.
The official video:
Remarkably, the song was covered by Robert Palmer in 1994:
In June of 1979 Devo released the first single from their new, forthcoming album Duty Now For the Future."My Baby Gave Me a Surprize" tampers down the eccentric side of the band's sound as they transitioned to the more electronic stylings of Freedom of Choice and "Whip It". That's Alex Mothersbaugh, the daughter of guitarist Bob Mothersbaugh, having a miserable time in the promotional video. Devo was way ahead of the game when it came to music videos. Alas, the single did not chart.
The B-side, "Penetration In The Centerfold", is a Brian Eno produced track from the Q: Are We Not Men? sessions, about porno magazines : "There's a girl in the middle with a finger in her gash /There's a boy there in the middle with a reamer up her ass ".
Raised on comic books and science fiction flicks, I was one of those teenagers who, upon hearing Devo's cover version of "Satisfaction", had to buy the debut album by the Akron quintet. I've already written about the band's interactions with producer Brian Eno.
It occurs to me today that the album is perfectly sequenced. Select "shuffle" and the entire thing sounds nerve racking jumble, anxious to a fault.
But playing it loud in my dorm room in 1978 and 79 gave me "the ability to torment".
Released when synthesizers were instruments reserved for disco and albums were reserved for thoughtful and emotional sharing by Californians, Q: Are We Not Men? confounded the critics below.
From Tom Carson, writing for Rolling Stone : What's most impressive about Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo! is its authority: Devo presents their dissociated, chillingly cerebral music as a definitive restatement of rock and roll's aims and boundaries in the Seventies. The band's cover version of "Satisfaction," for instance, with its melody line almost completely erased and the lyrics delivered in a yelping, droogy chant to mechanical rhythms, at first comes across as an intentional travesty, a typical New Wave rejection of the old-fart generation. But what Devo is really doing is reshaping the old message into their own terminology -- claiming one of the greatest anthems of the Sixties, with all its wealth of emotional associations, for their own time. It's a startling gesture, yet a surprisingly convincing one.
The same could be said for the whole album. The primitive guitar work and pulsing beat suggest a gamut of early Sixties borrowings, but the group is also reminiscent (the vocals especially) of some of the artier New Wave bands such as Wire or the B-52s. Yet all of these influences are flattened into an arid, deliberately fragmented science-fiction landscape. There's not an ounce of feeling anywhere, and the only commitment is to the distancing aesthetic of the put-on.
I suspect, though, that in adopting this style, Devo would argue that they're simply being good journalists -- that the futuristic deadpan comedy of their stance reflects the current pop-culture reality. "Too Much Paranoias," for example, starts out as a mocking, jarring little ode to dread that's genuinely frightening, then turns into an overt joke in which the chief villain is apparently a McDonald's hamburger ("Hold the pickles hold the lettuce," in a spasmodic shriek), but the joke is equally scary. And the group's attitude remains poker-faced throughout. In the lobotomized anthems that end side one, "Mongoloid" (a sort of bastard cousin to the Ramones' "Pinhead," with a great, stuttering guitar line) and "Jocko Homo," it's impossible to tell whether these guys are satirizing robotlike regimentation or glorifying it. The answer seems to be that there isn't any difference. Brian Eno's production is the perfect complement to Devo's music. Eno thickens the band's stop-and-go rhythms with crisp, sharp layers of percussive sound, full of jagged edges and eerie effects that whip in and out of phase at dizzying speeds. On every cut, Devo seems to know exactly what they want and how to achieve it almost effortlessly. Such apparently random strategies as "What Goes On"-style organ in "Mongoloid" or the near-Byrds-like guitar intro to "Gut Feeling" coalesce into a barbed, dislocated texture that draws you in even while it sets your nerves on edge.
Though the group's abstract-expressionistic patterns of sound are closely related to Eno's own brand of experimentation (not to mention the recent work of David Bowie, who one once slated to produce this LP) and to a host of other art rockers, Devo lacks most of Eno's warmth and much of Bowie's flair for mechanized melodrama. For all its idiosyncrasies, the music here is utterly impersonal. This Ohio band either treats humanity as just another junky, mass-cult artifact to be summarily disposed of, or else ignores it completely. Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo! is a brittle, small masterpiece of Seventies pop irony, but its shriveling, ice-cold absurdism might not define the Seventies as much as jump the gun on the Eighties.
From Robert Christgau's B+ graded review:
If this isn't Kiss for college kids, then it's Meat Loaf for college kids who are too sophisticated to like Meat Loaf. Aside from music per se, the Kiss connection is in their cartoonishness--Devo's robot moves create distance, a margin of safety, the way Kiss's makeup does. But the Meat Loaf connection is deeper, because this is real midnight-movie stuff--the antihumanist sci-fi silliness, the reveling in decay, the thrill of being in a cult that could attract millions and still seem like a cult, since 200 million others will never even get curious. (It's no surprise to be told that a lot of their ideas come from Eraserhead, but who wants to go see Eraserhead to make sure?) What makes this group worthy of attention at all--and now we're back with Kiss, though at a more complex level--is the catchy, comical, herky-jerky rock and roll they've devised out of the same old basic materials. In small doses it's as good as novelty music ever gets, and there isn't a really bad cut on this album. But it leads nowhere.
In February of 1978 what sounded like a dream pairing of new wave art rockers Devo with producer Brian Eno was turning into a nightmare for the latter. Eno would later describe Devo as "anal", neutering almost every attempt to do anything other than replicate the demos. Eno described the situation to Andy Gill of Mojo :
‘They were a terrifying group of people to work with because they were so unable to experiment . . . I’d be sitting there at the desk, and there are EQs, echo sends, all those kinds of things, and my hand would sort of sneak up to put a bit of a treatment on something, and I could feel Jerry Casale bristling behind me. It was awful! He would stand behind me all the time, then lean over and say, “Why are you doing that?” ’
You have to listen closely for Eno-isms on Q: Are We Not Men? A: We are Devo!. The pinging sounds at the beginning of "Shrivel Up" and some of the effects on "Space Junk" made it past Casale and Mark Mothersbaugh, who later admitted :
"In retrospect we were overly resistant to Eno’s ideas . . . I’d kind of like to hear what the album would have sounded like if we’d been more open to Eno’s suggestions. But in those days we thought we knew everything.’
For more on the sessions at Conny Plank studios in snowbound Germany, there's the following article, written by Jon Savage for Sounds Magazine.
ARE WE NOT READY?
Devo: the phenomenon and where they're coming from.
The first thing you notice on arrival at Cologne Airport is the modernity and organisation. No baggage queues. No prefab ramshackle buildings. Instead you get sweeping architecture and 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 to watch.
Cologne itself was largely flattened by Allied bombing in WWII. 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!"
Conny's Studio is a converted Victorian farm on the outskirts of Wolperath, a small village thirty kilometres east-south-east of Cologne. It's high up and snow-bound: as a greeting, the weather turns and remains its coldest for many winters. The studio itself is a converted stable, its unpretentious façade hiding what would be one of the best computerised desks in the world.
Conny - Konrad Plank - has worked since the late '60s producing bands such as kraftwerk in their earlier days, Neu!, Cluster (with and without Eno), La Düsseldorf and Harmonia (Michael Rother and Cluster). His knowledge about this end of German music is virtually encyclopaedic. It was here that 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 emphasise), 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.
Thus far, in the UK at any rate, Devo amounts to two 45s, occasional adulatory press, and a hefty cult. As for now, they're a media phenomenon, a gimmick almost, rather than a band. Sometimes too much press can be counterproductive, but these guys are totally ready for it, all the same. Jerry Casale (bass) and Mark Motherbaugh (synthesizer) have been working together for about five years, while the group as it is now - with Jim Mothersbaugh (guitar), Bob Casale (guitar) and Alan Myers (drums) - have been together for about eighteen 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 acclimatisation from the USA - this being their first time in Europe - they're here working what amounts to twelve hours a day in freezing conditions. It's hardly the most relaxed situation.
So who are these people? Devo aren't exactly going to let it all out. This fits in with their chosen image: a corporate unit, 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 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.
That said, it's possible to reveal that Devo are in fact human beings. Most communication is with Jerry or Mark, the others being friendly but low profile. Jerry is the principal organisational force - he's taken on the chores of a manager - while Mark could be the spark at the 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 Jerry and Mark are creators of the band's visuals: familiar elements wrenched out of context, or once-used images re-presented in a different form. They've both been in contact, in various degrees, with the Image Bank, a Canadian art organisation which could be superficially described as working in similar areas. The band are very American, clever, and a paradoxical mixture of sophistication and naivety.
In all this, the music is easily forgotten, but shouldn't be. Conny's Studio is the first time the band have been let loose on twenty-four tracks. The two singles were recorded on a four-track, Mongoloid on a Revox in their garage in December 1976. There was 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. The album will probably contain twelve tracks, including stage favourites Uncontrollable Urge, Too Much Paranoias, and maybe Gut Feeling. Studio time is booked until early March, when the group plan to come to Britain to play a date at the Roundhouse on March 11.
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. This involves constant listening and re-listening, constant decisions as to the prominence the various elements are to take in the mix, quite apart from the choice of the elements themselves.
Eno's role as producer is that of intermediary between man and tape, an interpreter almost: with twenty-four tracks also, organisation 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 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. I felt like the fly in the ointment rather than the fly on the wall. Barring Jerry, the group didn't want to talk in an interview situation, and the atmosphere of unwillingness and suspicion was strong. It was insisted that all the group were present, but unless stated, all Devo replies are by Jerry Casale.
Can we start with why you came out to Germany to record?
"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?
"It was a combination of our degree of organisation 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 [The Rolling Stones'] Satisfaction - no doubt the idea...
"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?
"Mmm. 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 when you enter the business you get sucked in by it...
"I don't even think that's a question: you get sucked in. But if the choice is between being sucked in and 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?
"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 people's ideas masquerade themselves as non-ideas, which we find the most dishonest. Devo just has the biggest, best and most interesting ideas about reality that allow 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 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 almost to the point of implosion?
"It's in the centre of the most highly industrialised 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."
With Devolution, what you're saying is we've reached any limit of expansion?
"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...
"The breaking down musically has occurred - punk and Devo are here to mutate. Devo's just the clean-up squad of the '80s, the Smart Patrol."
When did you start playing outside of Akron and Cleveland?
"When they wouldn't let us play anymore. April 1977. We went to CBGB's in New York."
What was that like?
"Perfect. We got on stage at two o'clock in the morning"
Mark: "Got into a fight with The Dead Boys".
"The crowd loved it. It had nothing to do with music - it was the aliens against the spuds. The Dead boys attacked us onstage during Jocko Homo..."
You must have really gotten to them?
"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."
(Tape 2, with Jerry Casale the next day.)
What was involvement with Iggy?
"It 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?
"Devolution was a combination of a Wonder Woman comic book and the movie Island Of Lost Souls, the original, with Bela Lugosi, 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 a 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.
"Yeah. It's the next logical step. It will ensure the existence of vital rock'n'roll. If rock'n'roll is going to maintain its position, its purpose, then the emphasis has to switch, otherwise it'll become a vestigial organ, meaningless."
You're in an interesting position now.
"Yes. We're like stored energy about to become kinetic."
Devo appear sure they have the answer. They are impressive, and make good, clear-headed sense, although some of what they say isn't so omniscient as it seems, and veers on occasions towards sweeping generalisations. 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 polarise. It doesn't matter now.
The album so far signifies that Devo are putting their actions where there mouth is, and more. Like the film, the album is already shaping up as an attractive, yet disorientating mixture of the familiar and the cliché, mixed around and stripped to sound like nothing you've heard before: exactly right in its remoteness. They could be THE transitional band as records give way to video discs - they're already waiting...
In October of 1977, Devo released their B Stiff EP, a collection singles released by the ban on Stiff Records. Four sides would be re-recorded for the Brian Eno produced Q. Are We Not Men? A. We Are Devo. ( Also the cover which show golfer Chi Chi Rodriguez would be re-worked to disguise the model). In fact, it was during this recording that Devo recorded "Be Stiff", a song that would become a sort of an anthem for the label.
Written as a satire about uptight people, the single could spend one week at #71 on the U.K. charts. It was also performed by a variety of artists on the Stiff Tour including Lene Lovich, Mickey Jupp, Wreckless Eric, Rachel Sweet, Jona Lewie and the Be Stiff Ensemble (led by Lene Lovich). At the end of each show, they would all play "Be Stiff" together. In 1982 Toni Basil recorded her own version of the song.
We would soon be hearing a lot more from Devo whose live show had Eno and David Bowie fighting over who would eventually get to produce the debut album. Below , watch what is reportedly the first time Devo performed "Gut Feeling" on stage.
