In 1960s Akron, Ohio’s most famous export was the car tyre. Known as the “rubber capital of the world”, the city’s towering smokestacks would pump out the stench of burning rubber, which made the streets smell like rotten eggs.
“It was a depressing landscape,” recalls Gerald Casale. “But that’s often where innovative creativity is born. If you’re a creative person in this oppressive environment with no future you either give up or you rise up.”
Casale chose the latter. His band Devo have now arguably overtaken rubber as Akron’s most famous export. Fifty years on from their formation, they are in the middle of a triumphant farewell tour that just saw them headline at the Green Man festival, in the stunning rolling Welsh countryside – a stark contrast to the rust-belt landscape from which they came.
Speaking over Zoom in front of a custom backdrop featuring a map of the world overlaid with the word “De-Evolution”, the 75-year-old Casale says it’s “mind-boggling” that they have hit half a century. So why call it a day on touring? “Are you married?” asks Devo co-founder Mark Mothersbaugh, 73, over the phone. I confirm I am. “Imagine you had four wives and you worked together. It’s tricky being in a band.”
Devo will leave behind a legacy that is beloved by cult eccentrics and mainstream pop provocateurs. David Bowie and Iggy Pop once heralded them as the future of music, while Mick Jagger gleefully danced to their twisted cover of one of the Rolling Stones’ biggest hits. Mothersbaugh claims to have even ended up accidentally smoking angel dust on a night out with Andy Warhol and Michael Jackson.
Being nominated for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame three times feels fitting for Devo – always in reach of mainstream acceptance, yet perhaps too unusual to ever truly be welcomed in. But they remain special for many. “Devo saved me,” says acclaimed songwriter John Grant. “Listening to them was a completely different world from the one that I grew up in – which was a hymn-saturated Christian world. They’re pioneers and I get emotional talking about them, they really live in my heart.”
Devo’s own singular world was formed at Ohio’s Kent State University, where Casale and Mothersbaugh studied. They became fast friends and kindred creative spirits, with a taste for the weird. They were young, idealistic, almost hippy-leaning, but on 4 May 1970 their idealism was suddenly shattered. That day two of Casale’s friends at Kent State, Jeffrey Miller and Allison Krause, were killed along with two other students by the Ohio National Guard during a peace rally condemning the Vietnam war’s expansion into Cambodia. Casale was there and saw his friends lying dead. “It completely and utterly changed my life,” he says.
Casale came up with a theory to explain the horror they had witnessed: De-Evolution, the idea that the human race was no longer advancing. Casale and Mothersbaugh found themselves asking: “What would the musical application of De-Evolution be? What would that sound like?”
And so Devo was born in 1973 with Mothersbaugh describing the early incarnation as like “Captain Beefheart meets an Italian sci-fi movie from the 60s”. That description is backed up by grainy footage from the band’s debut gig, with Mothersbaugh in a monkey mask laying down futuristic synth noises over chugging blues guitar. Quickly, the band began to create a mutant hybrid of industrial, electronica and proto-new wave to soundtrack their tales of the devolving human species.
“I wanted the sounds you’d hear in the background while a reporter was telling you the US air force was dropping bombs on a jungle in Vietnam,” Mothersbaugh says. “I was looking for what our version of those sounds would be.”
Operating in the years before punk broke, and based far away from the US’s hip and arty metropolitan cities, Devo faced brutal opposition. “Talk about being hated,” laughs Casale. “We were either laughed at, people felt sorry for us or they wanted to kill us. It would really piss people off. We were physically attacked on stage, forced to stop playing, promoters would unplug us. One of our biggest triumphs in the early days was being paid $50 to quit.” During one gig they played their track Jocko Homo – with its call-and-response refrain of “Are we not men? We are Devo!” – for such a prolonged period, close to half an hour, that Mothersbaugh once recalled “even the most peace-loving hippy wanted to throw fists”.
But they settled into a groove, albeit their own distinctly warped one, with the band locking in a more permanent lineup, adding Casale and Mothersbaugh’s brothers, Bob and Bob (on keys and guitar), and Alan Myers on drums. Complete with a uniform look of yellow hazmat suits and, later, their custom bright-red “energy dome” hats (“designed according to ancient ziggurat mound proportions used in votive worship,” claims their website), plus music that sounded truly like nothing else, they found that, slowly, the zeitgeist was catching up with them.
In 1977 they self-released Mongoloid/Jocko Homo, followed by a brilliantly deconstructed version of the Rolling Stones’ (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction. Disjointed and wonky, with the iconic guitar riff nowhere to be heard, it sounds as if the record has been put through a blender, glued back together, then played at the wrong speed. Having to get the Stones’ permission, Devo played it to Mick Jagger, who sat stony-faced and silent with a glass of red wine. They thought they were in trouble until, 30 seconds in, Jagger stood up and started strutting around, proclaiming: “I like it, I like it.”
That same year Neil Young asked Devo to be involved in his experimental film Human Highway (ultimately released in 1982). They collaborated on a bonkers yet thrilling version of Hey Hey, My My with Devo playing nuclear garbagemen. “I never would have expected it,” laughs Casale. “We thought: Neil Young? That’s the grandfather of granola rock. But he was very cool and excited; he was really into Devo, even though stylistically we were planets apart.”
Bowie and Pop were fans, too. In 1977 at Max’s Kansas City in New York, Bowie introduced them on stage as “the band of the future”, saying he would be producing them in Tokyo soon. “We were sleeping in a van in front of the club that night,” recalls Mothersbaugh. “So it was like, yeah, we’ll gladly go to Japan.”
Bowie in Tokyo never came to be, but they ended up working with Brian Eno in Germany at Conny Plank’s studio, with Bowie present for some of the recordings. Casale missed his flight and was a day late, and a mind-boggling supergroup formed in his absence. “Eno, Bowie, Dieter Moebius [of krautrock band Cluster] and Holger Czukay [of Can] all jammed on Devo songs with us,” Mothersbaugh recalls. “Somewhere there’s a tape of that.”
Devo had gone from dealing with indifferent or violent audiences to being hot property and being chased by every label going. Richard Branson even flew them out to Jamaica to suggest John Lydon as a new member. Mothersbaugh was extra-confused due to the extreme potency of the local weed they had been smoking. “Branson was smiling a big ear-to-ear grin,” he recalls. “I just remember thinking: his teeth protrude like a brain-eating ape.” Devo said no to the ape and the former Sex Pistols man, who it later turned out knew nothing about Branson’s plans.
After their debut album Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo! grazed the Top 10 in the UK, but did less well in the US, the band moved away from what Mothersbaugh calls their “pure art” phase. They embraced synthesisers more, ditching their discordant edge for a more pristine – albeit still fairly peculiar – pop sound.
Devo began exploring themes around mass market commercialisation, adopting a subversive yet accessible approach. By 1980’s Freedom of Choice, the band had cemented a sound and look that would puncture the mainstream consciousness of America. Whip It, a Thomas Pynchon-inspired satire on meaningless capitalist slogans laced with an infectious pop hook, became an unexpected Top 20 hit, lapped up by the viewers of a then-fledgling MTV. All further proof for the band of humanity’s De-Evolution, of course.
Devo adeptly walked the tightrope between oddball outliers and pop agitators. William Friedkin and David Lynch both expressed an interest in working with them. Casale was “crestfallen” when the former project collapsed, with the Exorcist director’s agent intervening to stop Friedkin wasting his time. Many thought of Devo as a joke, unable to accept they could be funny and sincere. The label didn’t know what to do with them. “We came out fully formed,” says Casale. “People want to grab you when you’re malleable and change you, but they couldn’t do that to Devo because the armour was too strong.”
Being so fully formed – with a perfect concept, aesthetic and choreography in place from the off – caused creative friction in the band over time. “You’ve got a body of work informed by a whole manifesto and philosophy,” says Casale. “Do you let go and move on to the next thing? You want change, otherwise you’re stale, but you don’t want to be contrived.”
By the release of 1984’s very synth-pop album, Shout, the band had bought a Fairlight and were experimenting with sampling. By 1984’s very synth-pop album, Shout, the band were using a state-of-the-art digital sampler. “I wasn’t on board,” Casale reflects. “Devo was about humans being so tight they sounded like a machine, but by then it really was machines, so the soul was gone.”
In 1991, with ever-decreasing returns on records, and tensions flaring, the band broke up. However, just as they were hanging up their hazmat suits and preparing to fall into historical obscurity, their legacy was kept alive by the most unlikely of eras: grunge. “Of all the bands who came from the underground and made it in the mainstream, Devo were the most challenging and subversive of all,” declared Kurt Cobain. Nirvana covered the band, as did Pearl Jam, the Flaming Lips, Moby and Rage Against the Machine.
Devo reformed in 1996 and toured on several occasions, releasing just one more album – 2010’s Something for Everybody. In 2013, Myers died of stomach cancer, while Bob Casale died a year later of heart failure.
And while Devo may be saying farewell to touring, it’s not entirely the end. A new box set of rarities, Art Devo 1973-1977, is coming in September along with a documentary in production by Tiger King director Chris Smith. However, there’s no sloppy sentiment about retiring from performing from Mothersbaugh. “I’m looking forward to 2073,” he jokes. “We’ll play 100th anniversary Devo shows and then maybe retire.”
Casale, however, is more mournful. “I’m in denial,” he says softly. “Because I love performing and I’ll hate to see it go. It was part of Devo’s DNA. But we did as well as we could, for as long as we could.”
Devo play Hammersmith Apollo, London, 19 August; Art Devo 1973-1977 is released on 8 September.
