Devo Return to Provide Entertainment for the Ongoing De-evolution

It's been 19 years since Devo, who scored multiple hits in the early days of New Wave with 'Whip It,' 'Girl U Want,' 'Freedom of Choice' and 'Working in a Coalmine,' last released a new studio album. But the band famed as much for its flowerpot-reminiscent "energy domes" and yellow hazmat jumpsuits as its smart, eccentric pop tunes are coming back this fall with new music.

When Spinner visited with the group's founding members Gerald Casale and Mark Mothersbaugh at the West Hollywood offices where Mothersbaugh has done much of his film scoring work, ranging from Wes Anderson movies including 'The Royal Tennebaums' to childrens fare such as 'Rugrats in Paris: The Movie,' the pair talked about the world then and now, and where Devo fit in today. They also talked about being scolded by Neil Young and praised by David Bowie, their founding concept of de-evolution and the difference between quirky and neurotic.

Take us back to the early days of Devo.

Mark Mothersbaugh: When we first signed with Warner Bros., they had no idea what they were getting involved in and they did anything they could to lessen anything we were talking about that might've made sense. They did their best to sabotage anything that they saw happening with us, and their best method was to refer to Devo as quirky. That was one of their big words: quirky.

Gerald Casale: I'd have to say, in all fairness, if you watched us back then and you see the evidence, the clips, listen to the first records, you could say at least we were neurotic [laughs]. It trivializes what you're doing, which is what media is designed to do. And compared to then they have it down to an art, trivializing everything into a ridiculous sound bite. It's all like 'Entertainment Tonight' now. Everything is tabloid and reduced to sound bites. Content has meaning, meaning is dangerous to corporate society. Should be meaningless, everything should be like fast food, it seems. They have decided that.

Did the sociological and cultural climates influence the decision to make a new album after 19 years?

GC: We're right back where we started from, like during the Reagan-era, Devo had the right-wing evangelicals to rail against and to protect the population from as much as possible, and what's changed? It's even more of the same, more devolved than ever, but the same problem and we wanted to do something before we went into assisted living. So it was now or never.

In the last year, so much has changed in the cultural climate. How has that affected the new music?

GC: You know, so much has supposedly changed, but I don't believe it has.

MM: Yeah, I think Devo is still on message from even 30-some years ago. What we were about are the same issues we're addressing now. It's about the human mind.

GC: But if you're referring to the fact that there's been a happy face put on the change of administration as if all the woes and issues of culture that were kind of pushed by the Bush administration have suddenly just dissolved and floated away, that's a lie. These posters where Obama's looking up towards the heavens and it says "Hope" really remind anybody with any sense of political history of communist Russia -- it's like Lenin and Stalin [laughing]. So I don't think we're watching a return to democracy and the burgeoning of the Bill of Rights and civil liberties at all. I think we're watching a happy face being put on the New World Order as we all go down. Devo's just the house band on the Titanic; we're here to entertain you until the last moment.

And you still feel like we're getting there?

MM: It's only exponentially getting more acute. What we said a long time ago was obviously just a pose or an art joke, it was a good art joke. Ironically, Devo was kind of optimistic. All we had to do was talk about things and people would say, "Wait a minute. Let's do the math here, it's not gonna work." And then the humans would wanna change things.

GC: But what we were joking about and that we didn't really wanna see happen happened. Nobody thinks the idea of de-evolution is far out anymore. If you think about it, the crystal ball, if somebody would've showed you today in 1978, would you have really believed it was possible? I don't think so. Just look at the decimation of the air, land and water, and the crisis with the food supply on a global level, and the fact that people are still playing politics, wanting the other guys to fail, rather than rowing the boat in the same direction. That's the darkest side of human nature you can have, when everybody is going down and they just wanna be right. They'll go down just to be right; it's unreal. Rush Limbaugh to me is a great example of de-evolution, exactly what we were sickened by, the kind of human being we talked about back then, that was it. He's a bad spud.

Is there still optimism then today?

GC: I think what Mark was saying is there is a bit of romantic optimism in being upset or criticizing, pointing something out, because you feel that things are fundamentally OK and it's a warning, "Hey, quit looking around; look out the windshield, because otherwise you're gonna take the boat into the rocks." And now, personally, I don't feel that things are fundamentally OK and we just have to correct the course a little bit.

MM: Now we're much closer to the rocks than we were before. They were way out there when people were talking about it in the Sixties and they were saying, "You know what, do the math: There's only so much space on the planet and there's so many people. If you want everybody to come out of the starvation situation, you have to have some overview of the whole thing of how many people you're gonna let be on this planet and how many people you can support." And it's way beyond that now. There's still nobody even considering that an important issue to put out there. It's like everybody is arguing for procreation as fast as they can and as much as they can.

GC: Octomom.

MM: She's probably started a new trend. You know, right now there are people all across this country going, "Wow, honey, I know you can have more than eight. I know you could do a litter of 10. You could do a litter of 12. Let's show them."

But if Devo started off with a sort of romantic optimism, doesn't a new album suggest there may still be some hope?

GC: I think we better get Shepard Fairey [designer of the Obama "Hope" poster] to do our record cover. [Laughs]

MM: A lot of the things that we hoped for 35 years ago there's no chance for now. There are too many people for everyone to eat; they aren't all gonna get to eat. And it's not gonna be through educated decisions that we decide how to thin the flock; the flock is going to take care of itself through means that are going to be ugly, brutal -- and we're in for a dark period, I think. But it's gonna get nastier because at least in the West you could ignore it, you could watch your TV shows and ignore what was going on in the rest of the world. Now you're gonna see it 'cause it's coming to us.

What is the role of music today, then, in dealing with all this nastiness?

MM: If you look at what most bands are about or what most pop music is about, music's gone through a long period of conspicuous consumption.

GC: And wallowing in the darkest side of human nature; just excess, violence, rough sex, consumption -- that's certainly the message put out by most mainstream hit music and hip hop. It's certainly not trying to turn anybody on to anything new or lift them out of their daily reality by some imaginative musical means, it's wallowing in the mud and celebrating stupidity. So in that sense, Devo is not doing that; what we tried to do is lift people out, make them think and entertain them at the same time. That's certainly what we're still doing.

Given the dearth of what you see as intelligent pop music, does it give you hope to see how much interest there still is in Devo and this new album?

GC: Yeah, that is heartening, really, no cynicism inherent. I mean the fact that anybody even wants to give us an opportunity now, when the economy is in the toilet and the musical landscape is overrun with tons of songs that nobody can even find half of and bands basically living and dying 24 hours a day to get a break. And somebody wanted to talk to Devo and give us an opportunity that's heartening because we must've done something right to even be remembered.

You guys were very involved in the business side well before a time where that was acceptable. How was that perceived?

GC: That was the problem: That's why we said we were pioneers who got scalped, because we were met with negative attitudes for being creative. Especially when it came to marketing and packaging; that was supposedly anti-rock 'n' roll. And they would say as much: "That's not rock 'n' roll."

MM: I remember people like Neil Young scolding us: "Why did you have a merchandise catalog inside your record sleeve?" "Well, it's kind of like the back page of a comic book." I was really trying to explain it to him, why we were doing it.

Was there anybody then on the other end who was really supportive?

GC: Certainly the fact that David Bowie and Brian Eno really liked our music ...

MM: They were very supportive and Brian was our producer of record on the first album, and they liked what we did, they saw what we did and they got it. It gave you a boost of confidence that you're doing the right thing, and that's hard to even put quantifiable value on. It's huge to an artist, somebody you respect says, "This is great; you should keep doing that."

What are some of the songs that either stand up best for you or you're looking forward to revisiting?

GC: For me, they're actually the ones that everybody likes. I like what people like. I really do. 'Uncontrollable Urge' -- every time we play the song I like what I'm doing. Even things like 'Peekaboo,' I love it every time we do it.

What was the moment where you decided you would do a new album?

MM: There was a slow build to it 'cause we talked about it for years and then when we really decided was we got asked to do music for a Dell commercial and they were going to just license -- we license our songs all the time -- and they wanted 'Whip It.' And Gerry is friends with the creatives on the project. He worked with them on something before and he said, "Hey, would you be interested in a new song from Devo?" Instead of going, "No, no, we want the same thing as everything else," they were like, "There is such a thing?" And we said, "Well, there could be." We had sketches and things, and Gerry played some stuff for them and we finished one of the songs off because of the commercial. And we got paid for doing something new and it kind of eliminated the need to have to sell it later on.

Does finally having new material to mix into the set give the older songs a new sense of life as well?

MM: The first six songs we play, three are new and they fit in pretty well. That's the good thing; they don't sound like they come from another time period. And I think that has a lot to do with the way Gerry and I and the band write music. The things that concern us now are still the things that concerned us then. So I read Gerry's lyrics; he has lyrics he writes that could be on an early album. I write lyrics and I try to make them that way, too. I try to make them so they sound like they came from that time period, and sometimes we even borrow stuff we never finished back then.

GC: There was something about Devo that wasn't trendy. There was nothing trendy about our yellow plastic-covered paper suits that everybody laughed at or the red hats. It wasn't like you could say, "Oh, yeah, it looks like a baseball cap." It was one step removed from reality, and so were we. In other words, we were never just about being famous or being young or "look at me in leather pants." In some ways, Devo is timeless. There's no reason to change being yourself. As much as Neil Young is himself, we are ourselves. What makes us ourselves is that it was always conceptually generated. So it was never just about what was going on in 1980, had nothing to do with it. And we just lucked out in the sense that you intersect with the culture, it's like aliens happen to drop down, but they just happen to look right for that moment so the people at the party aren't afraid of them.