Skatepunk

Why am I the only person laughing? The show's finally brought to a close by Mark Mothersbaugh in Booji Boy guise singing an unbelievably dreary opus called 'The Words Get Stuck In My Throat' in squeaky castrato, a sore thumb seemingly unconnected with the clenched-fist power of all that preceded it. Still, it stops 'em asking for more.

Now, let’s put all this in perspective: Only a fanatic with seriously-impaired hearing facilities would say that the Devo album was anything other than weak, insubstantial and insipid; and I'm no exception. Like an almost-finished bowl of cornflakes, all it contained was a few soggy bits of indeterminate something sinking in milk-dregs. Not the best breakfast for a new career.
Surely, there was something more? Too many sentient and tasteful folk had raved about the band for this to be the sum total of their capabilities.

Right. 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 punch-lines only hit you two jokes later. Who mentioned The Firesign Theatre?

Be that as it may, I still have reservations about their musical importance. They're not, for sure, doing anything as radically now as their supporters claim. It's still formalist rock'n'roll, given a gloss of "newness" by its presentations.

That they're often lumped together with Pere Ubu shows only that the accentuation of a publicity "angle" – in this case, geographical location – can ride roughshod over obvious musical differences. In fact, the two represent, to some extent, opposite poles, the one impressionist and the other expressionist: there exist, in Devo's music, impressions of events and states, as in the majority or rock music. Ubu's music, on the other hand, seems composed of expressions of interior states of consciousness.

And if you reckon that's pretentious, what has jazz been doing for years? Ubu's importance lies in their transposition of the form to a (truly) rock'n'roll context. Devo, of course, would say that I was being too serious and analytical, which, judging by their attention to detail and overall seriousness of approach to what they do, is like the pot calling the kettle black.
I put it to the band that, to all intents and purposes, they're still putting on a large show such as could be classed with large bands of the past decade, bands they claim to be a reaction against. "We're still using guitars and drums, a P. A..." "And we're still playing in front of people, and we still have albums out – in that sense, yes, those are what bind you together with the past, for sure."

So they'd say it would be the content that sets them apart? "Yes. Our lifestyle. Our motivation. Our content."

Certainly, the stiff, minimalist choreography of the Devo show does seem to go right against the traditional live rock'n'roll attitude of "letting go", of band and audience lost in some (often fake) ecstatic release...

"Yeah," agrees Jerry Casale. "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 organised 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. It'd be, like, straight out of our cerebrum, straight into their bodies!"

After the show, we stroll round the corner to an Indian restuarant to get food straight off the plate, straight into our bodies. A signature-scavenging fan in a white lab-coat asks me for my autograph, presumably mistaking me for a Devo.

Am I not a man? Jerry, the most articulate (and, from appearances, the oldest) Devo, relates how he got fired from teaching graphics at college when a student girl stole a book of Mark's drawings from him and had a rather traumatic experience perusing pictures of Mark, in surgeon's outfit, happily dismembering female bodies. Hmmm. A new breakthrough in crime prevention...

The next day is an absolute disaster. What had seemed, on leaving Newcastle, to be a picturesque spot of mist gets thicker and thicker the further south we travel, till eventually it's pointless looking out the coach windows. The deceptively waif-like Allan Myers drums perpetually on his knees with steel and nylon sticks, and Bob Mothersbaugh and Jerry doodle-duet on stylopone and toy reed-instrument.

The lurching stop-start of the coach makes reading impossible without experiencing violent nausea. The A1's closed by pile-ups, cops re-routing everyone God knows where. What should have been a three-hour trip to Sheffield becomes six enervating hours of sensory deprivation in a stuffy box somewhere in Yorkshire.

But the worst is yet to come. On arrival in Sheffield, the band learn that the truck carrying their equipment has been in a collision – probably one of those pile-ups on the A1. To make matters worse, the crash fouled up the hatch, and oxy-acetylene gear had to be hired to cut open the truck before their equipment could be transferred to a replacement van. It eventually arrives at the gig around ten o'clock, by which time everything's cancelled. As if that wasn't enough, the keyboards are found to have been damaged in the collision.

Under the circumstances, an interview might not be the most prudent course of action, I think, but the band acquiesce and we eventually talk in the deserted auditorium to the accompaniment of PA and lights being dismantled. Despite the general air of coitus interruptus pervading the place, Devo hide the gloom and despondency they must obviously be feeling extremely well. Touring, I suggest, must be really getting them down...

"Oh no, we love coming here and finding we can't play!" "Aspects surrounding the performance do, but for the time we go on stage it's alright." "Right. For that one hour-and-a-half, it's okay. Everything else is horrible. The incredible amount of wasted time and energy, and the confusion..."

(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction

What with the general confusion, the fog fiasco and the cock-up over support bands, precious little seems to be proceeding according to Devo's wishes:

"We also hadn't wanted halls with lots of seats in them", adds Jerry. "Wherever possible we wanted people to be able to stand up. And the discipline problem here is particularly aggravating, much more so than in the States – the way people are treated by bouncers and so forth, we couldn't believe it!"

Indeed, Devo seem to have been having their fair share of problems in coming to terms with the reality of being a major marketable proposition. Besides the tour, there was that little business concerning Virgin, Warner Bros, and Devo.

Still, despite their own personal troubles, Devo find much to be happy about concerning recent developments in modern music.

"I think there is a degree of truth in us that is missing in most rock music," Jerry opines. "In other words, is missing in Ted Nugent and Sammy Davis and John Denver, because they're projecting some psychotic illusion. I see bands like The Human League and The Screamers and so on, bands that people call 'weird', as trying to get back to some kind of sanity by admitting to weirdness and crazy tendencies in their culture – obviously, they're not crazy, they're onstage thinking about it. People like to pass bands off as psychos who happen to be allowed up onstage to play music – and bands unfortunately allow it. That's their fault."

One of the most promising things about the current rock scene, to my mind is that bands who've perhaps never played a gig – and never would, if it was left to the usual music industry machinators – are releasing their own self-recorded singles and opening up, for the general public, vast areas of music which, through lack of "commercial potential", wouldn't otherwise be heard. Devo being one of the prime movers in the current crop of independents with the Booji Boy label, it's hardly surprising Casale agrees:

"That's what we had to do, for instance, to get noticed. You're shut off from official channels because you're at a sufficiently early stage of development that none of the people that control things pay any attention to you. I think part of the reason for all the new records is that, once again there's enough energy and enough creativity existing that it's become a natural step, away into something else that everybody agrees is a step, like being a support band and working up to headliners. In a business sense, the admission of self-produced 45s was just a necessary addition to the record business."

It's always been obvious that at least a portion of Devo's future lies in the visual field. Casale is adamant that, were videodiscs a reality today, or had the video-cassette format been standardised (thus opening up a completely new consumer market), Devo would be in there, the biggest phenomenon since – when? Personally, I reckon Travolta-mania (or whatever we get given next) would just be that much greater, but I can see what he means. Surely, though, they have more ambitious intentions that just video shorts?

"We have intentions," affirms Casale. "In order to avoid them being fantasies, we're trying to do it real. We don't like to make too many claims about it, because we know what it takes to really do something, instead of just spout off about it.

"You've seen the film we have made, and they're minor. But they are, with the money, time and film development that we have, the best thing we could have done to show people that we are capable of making a film. So that it's established from the beginning, in an effort to get the proper people interested in letting us do something on a major scale, because in film even more than in records, projects and co-operation with complex and different facets of society and people in positions is necessary. A film is even more of a collective project than a record."
For all their humor, they obviously take themselves pretty seriously... "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 Allan Myers, with a rather curt weariness.

"You tend to look ridiculously pompous or ludicrous saying you take yourselves very seriously," explains 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 humour, but, like, humour 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 honour in itself.

"There's a contradiction, too, between seriousness and humour," adds Allan, "and we allow that to exist without saying, 'this is a joke, and this is serious'."

That Devo double-talk again! Their trouble, I tell them, is that they decry the possibility of rational analysis of what they do – they grasp paradoxes with both hands. "That's all we see," agrees Jerry. "We're a walking, talking paradox!"

Would you say, then, that you just mirror the paradoxes you see around you? "We try to harness it as a creative principle..."

Jerry Casale's favorite Firesign Theatre album is Everything You Know Is Wrong. But of course!

© Andy Gill, 1978

Another cool article: http://www.punk77.co.uk/groups/devo.htm