Still Whipped

Sometimes it seems like Devo has always been with us. No music channel’s ’80s flashback show seems complete without the surreal video for the Ohio band’s 1980 hit “Whip It,” featuring members prancing about with what appear to be flowerpots on their heads on a deliberately low-budget Wild West set. Devo’s music pops up on movies (like Tank Girl and Supercop); video games (including Skate and Rock Band); and TV commercials (notably for Dell computers in 2007). McDonald’s even released a decidedly Devo-esque Happy Meal toy (“New Wave Nigel”) in 2008.

Yet in fact Devo’s latest album, Something for Everybody, released last year, is its first new full-length in 20 years.

Satirical Art Collective

“Devo was a complete collaboration and cooperative, collective effort,” explains founding bassist/vocalist/synth player Gerald Casale. “It was being driven by the songwriting of Mark [Mothersbaugh, lead vocalist] and myself. Almost everything was co-written . . . [so] once you don’t have the team, you don’t have Devo. And so when Mark was not interested in collaborating, Devo was basically put on ice.”

“That was never my choice. I really thought that we were creatively viable and had plenty of ideas and plenty of things to say . . . I always wanted to just keep going, I suppose kind of like the Rolling Stones or U2.”

Devo evolved from a casual, satirical art collective dubbed “Art Devo” (as the concept of mankind’s “de-evolution” was one of the abiding themes of Devo’s creations) at Kent State University in Ohio in the late 1960s. By the mid-1970s it had solidified as a band consisting of Casale, Mothersbaugh and their respective guitarist brothers, both called Bob, plus drummer Alan Myers. Their theatrical and confrontational live shows gradually earned them considerable notoriety and famous fans like David Bowie and Iggy Pop, who helped them snag a deal with Warner Bros. But it was “Whip It,” from 1980’s Freedom of Choice, that really put Devo on the map. The single peaked at No. 14 on the Billboard chart that year after its video went into heavy rotation on the fledgling MTV.

Though Devo was popular in a number of countries for much of the 1980s, its sales gradually wilted. In 1991, after a couple of commercially unsuccessful albums and a European tour truncated due to poor ticket sales, the group split up. They would reconvene for occasional festival appearances (including Lollapalooza in 1996 and ’97), tours and to record one-off songs here and there, but a true reunion didn’t happen until 2008, when they began recording what would become Something for Everybody.

“Be Who You Are”

“To finally do a record was nothing short of a miracle,” says Casale, speaking from his home in Santa Monica. “It happened simply because Mark said ‘yes’ to collaboration, and that was mostly due to [the] song called ‘Watch Us Work It’ for the Dell XPS laptop commercial in 2007, and it was so well received and got so much play that everybody started calling Devo up.”

“Managers, labels, A&R men, promoters, producers [called] . . . going, ‘Hey, that’s really good—you should put out a record!’ I think Mark finally responded because so many people were calling.”

With so many years of pent-up songwriting and ideas, recording Something for Everybody almost felt like recording a debut album all over again, according to Casale.

“And it’s kind of tough, because you can’t reinvent yourself to the point where you don’t even sound like you—nobody would even be interested in that—and you’re not going to try to sound like somebody else that’s happening now—that’s always sad and foolish,” he says. “So you can only be who you are.”

In an apparent effort to reconcile the old and new Devo—and with a tongue-in-cheek sense of irony so typical of the band—Casale and Co. recruited a “CEO of Devo Inc.” (Greg Scholl, an NBC Universal executive and former Orchard CEO) and hired media agency Mother LA to help shape and market Something for Everybody. The idea was to use social media to make one huge focus group out of Devo’s fanbase, which would then provide input into everything from which songs would make it onto the appropriately-named album to what color the band members’ iconic “dome” hats (those aforementioned “flowerpots”) should be while promoting it. All this was announced at a brilliantly choreographed press conference at last year’s South by Southwest conference/festival in Austin which —just like Devo itself—walked a delicate line between progressive reality, wry spoof and a joke’s-on-you publicity stunt.

A Complex Thing

“What we were trying to do is just be us—to be the best us we could be,” Casale explains. “That’s why we used so much social media and worked with an ad agency. Trying to involve the fans and the public to help our decision-making and get a gauge out there of what’s going on.”

In fact, Casale would have liked the concept to go much deeper than it did, with fans even being able to influence the album’s songwriting, instrumentation and production, but financial, practical and political realities reined this in.

“It’s a complex thing: working with an ad agency; working with a label, and the clash between the culture of the record industry and the culture of an ad agency. A lot of things were held down or truncated—people perceived things as too risky and stuff.

“That’s why we put out different versions of things. Because originally we were just going to have the fans decide which tracks made the grade and in what order they would be in and so on . . . Basically we had to put out the focus group version —the fan version—and then the ‘corporate’ version of our songs. And then there were a lot of songs that we wrote, at least another 15 or 16, that didn’t ever see the light of day, because they were rejected right up front by the label.”

The result is an album of bombastic, kitschy electronica and deadpan refrains that can not only go toe-to-toe with Devo’s heyday material, but also doesn’t sound at all out of place in the Lady Gaga era. Not too shabby for a band whose median age is around 60 (Myers left Devo in 1987 and his role is now filled on stage by touring drummer Josh Freese).

“Everybody Wants to See Devo”

Like all veteran acts that are so firmly associated with a signature sound and even a single song (i.e. “Whip It”), Devo faces the perpetual dilemma of how to marry what fans expect from them with sincere, contemporary artistic expression. Yet Casale—who’s also an acclaimed video director for everyone from The Cars to Foo Fighters—says there’s really no such thing as his stepping in and out of a Devo “character” or having to pander to preconceptions about his band.

“We’ve never been clever enough to be anything but us—we can’t be anything but Devo. We sound the way we sound and we write the way we write because of who we are and who we always were. And I think you can’t reinvent yourself beyond a point.”

“We’re no longer that never-before-heard-and-seen band that pissed people off and polarized people . . . We’re like the house band on the Titanic—since de-evolution is real and it’s all going down, and we’re there to just entertain you with familiar stuff so that we can all go down together!”

Yet Devo’s carefully defined and instantly recognizable image serves them well in a post-Napster music business where bands make money more by marketing themselves as brands than by selling their latest music, as was once the case.

“That’s why we’ve lucked-out,” says Casale. “While we used to make money, along with the record companies, from album sales, it was never a lot of money and we would throw it all back into out tours. Because back then we’d lose money because we did elaborate shows . . . theatrical shows with lots of technical aspects and stage set pieces and new kinds of lighting and video elements. And that’s when people were spending $7 to see you live!”

“Now it’s the opposite. We can make money by going on stage, because everybody wants to see Devo—probably because they can’t believe we’re still alive!”

“It’s a case in point about de-evolution in action—it’s proof of it,” Casale adds. “The business imploded; everything turned upside down; and there was no new model—that is, a model that was revenue-creating to replace the old model that crashed. So [bands] get paid to play live because people want to see you. Somebody thinks you’re hip and they feature your music in a video game. You go on a TV commercial like we did. And this is how you monetize creativity.”

The Tip of the Iceberg

Casale insists that Devo’s current tour will only bolster the band’s rep for cutting-edge stage productions.

“We can’t disappoint people. They’re going to see our new video elements on a new video wall. It’s in sync with our playing—something we did a long time ago using caveman technology, but now it’s easy. You’re going to see several costumes and set pieces on stage . . . They get the old and the new and everything in between.”

Devo doesn’t even try to re-create its complex recordings on stage, sound-for-sound and beat-for-beat, but instead view the studio and the stage as two very different mediums.

“A lot of people actually like the way we sound live a lot more than the recordings,” says Casale. “We try to make it more stripped down and more powerful, and people are always amazed that we actually can rock and play rock ‘n’ roll—and we always did. It just somehow got lost in the translation.”

And, yes, they’ll be playing “Whip It”—and Casale doesn’t mind one little bit.

“You’ve got to be heartened or grateful that any piece of your aesthetic ever gets embraced and not go around bemoaning it—it’s bad form I think. Since we only wrote songs we liked and we only put things on the records that we liked, it’s never a punishment to have to play ‘Whip It.’ I liked it when we wrote it and I like playing it.

“But it is the tip of the iceberg. I like it when people come to see us and they get into things like ‘Uncontrollable Urge’ or ‘Smart Patrol’ and they go, ‘Shit, these guys are nasty—almost like heavy metal!”

Smoking With Warhol

While the unashamedly nerdy Devo might not be synonymous with classic rock ‘n’ roll debauchery, it shouldn’t be forgotten that they once rubbed shoulders with the biggest names in the business and had a lifestyle to match. Casale recalls smoking pot with Andy Warhol and Michael Jackson at Manhattan’s legendary Studio 54 nightclub (while on a date with a porn star) and, while he barely partakes today, he’s all about marijuana’s legalization.

“It so should be legal . . . it’s so much less dangerous than booze or cigarettes,” he sighs.

“What’s great is that the marijuana I smoked in college bears no relationship to the great, highly-designed hydroponic stuff of today that’s so much not your father’s marijuana and is amazing stuff,” he adds. “You can design what you want to do: you want a mellow into-the-night high where you can just go to sleep; you want something that feels like Red Bull and vodka; you want a creative, visionary high—you can kind of decide, with all these blends, which thing you want.”

Though Casale’s own relationship with pot has changed over time, he credits it, albeit indirectly, with having influenced Devo’s early work.

“When Devo was just kind of a smart-ass college art movement—when it was ‘Art Devo’—I would say that marijuana fueled evening conversations with my cohorts and myself,” he reveals. “It did help lay a lot of the groundwork for the Devo manifesto and some of the Devo ideas that then were inspirations to actually writing songs that embodied that aesthetic.”

www.clubdevo.com.

Going Through Changes

It’s been quite a few decades since Devo’s medicated with Andy Warhol .  . . and the way Devo’s used cannabis has evolved to, according to band co-founder Gerald Casale. “Like anything, I think over time it mutates what it does to you—the effects are different. [At one point it] was merely like taking 10 milligrams of Valium or something,” he says. “Or I would find myself just catatonically sitting there with my heart racing! So I don’t touch it much today.”

The Evolution of Devo

1970

Gerald Casale and Bob Lewis meet Mark Mothersbaugh, who introduces them to the concept of “de-evolution,” hence the band’s eventual name.

1973

“Sextext Devo” forms to perform at the Kent State Performing Arts Festival, with Bob Sasale, Fred Weber and Rod Reisman joining the group.

1976

Music video The Complete Truth About De-Evolution is released, featuring songs “Secret Agent Man” and “Jocko Homo.” It wins first place at the Ann Arbor Film Festival the following year.

1976

Devo releases its first single (“Mongoloid”) with record label Booji Boy.

1978

The band releases the Be Stiff EP, its first extended playlist. After that, Warner Bros. sponsors the band and helps it release Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!

1978

Bob Lewis demands compensation for being the sole creator of the band. The issue ends up in U.S. District Court and a settlement is made. Hello, David Ruffin.

1979

A step towards fame, Devo releases Duty Now for the Future and the band’s second full-length remains on the Billboard 200 for 10 weeks.

1980

Supported by a cacophony of crazy electronic sounds, hit song Whip It drops. The single is from the group’s third album, Freedom of Choice, which hits No. 8 on the Pop Hit Singles chart.

1981

Still obsessed with its de-evolution message, the band reminds fans of Devo’s seriousness with fourth album New Traditionalists, which hits No. 23 on the Billboard charts. Bandmembers’ outfits look like Star Trek knock-offs.

1982

Fifth album Oh, No! It’s Devo is released, officially making the group synthpop rather than new wave. The album alienates some fans because of the lack of guitars.

1984

Warner Bros. drops Devo for the commercial failure of Shout, the band’s sixth album. Alan Myers leaves the band.

1988

David Kendricks joins the band and helps release Total Devo, the band’s seventh album. Whatevs.

1990

Eighth album Smooth Noodle Maps is released, the last release for the next 20 years. This should give you a clue as to how it was received.

1991

Devo breaks up . . . for the time being.

1996

Devo reunites for a concert at the Sundance Film Festival, and also performs at Lollapalooza.

2005

“Whip It” is used in a Swiffer commercial. Devo regrets the licensing move.

2006

Devo 2.0, an album created by a quintet of children (whose vocals are dubbed over Devo classics) working with Devo and Disney. Yikes.

2007

“Watch Us Work It,” the band’s first single in 20 years is released. Dell uses it for a computer commercial. Way cooler than Swiffer.

2009

Devo performs at SXSW as well as All Tomorrow’s Parties, bringing back all the old hits.

2010

Something for Everybody is released. The band is also awarded the first ever Moog Innovator Award for being a pioneer in electronic music.

2011

Casale announces a work-in-progress Devo musical.

(Compiled by Andy Cheng)