(a quick post about a band I love)

I don’t know the first time I heard Devo.

Growing up, my parents loved classic rock and Motown and Broadway, but they had become set in their ways well before me and my sister came around. Years later, looking at their record collection (stored away in a North Carolina attic), one of the few artists they had from the 1980s was Bonnie Tyler (RIP).

But at the same time, I’m pretty sure I had heard “Whip It!” at some point. It was used on soundtracks and as a joke novelty song. Maybe there was a VH1 Pop-Up Video for “One-Hit Wonders” that played it. But I didn’t really start paying attention to pop music until the late 90s, when their influence was at its nadir among mainstream music. If you want to say Nirvana had covered “Turnaround” a few years prior, you should understand, teen Robby was not yet digging into Nirvana deep cuts.

The first time I probably became conscious of Devo as a band was probably in 1999. I was a huge Weird Al fan who devoured his songs and his videos, and in his “Behind the Music” (which I must have watched a dozen times), he talks about a band called Devo (*cue clip of “Whip It”*) and how he did a style parody of them called “Dare to be Stupid” and they seemed to like it. The video then cuts to Mark Mothersbaugh, stonefaced, saying it was the best Devo song ever made. The fact that here was a musician on Weird Al’s Behind the Music, being almost as funny as Weird Al got my attention.

In late 2000, two things happened that would devolve me:

1. I got my learner’s permit and could finally drive to the local Borders.

2. Rhino released the Devo anthology “Pioneers Who Got Scalped” and Borders put it on one of their listening stations.

I was finally starting to branch out into punk rock and the basic histories available in libraries and the nascent music community online would mention Devo in passing as part of that jumbled up new wave/post-punk/art-rock/punk scene.

I listened to the tracks on the listening station over and over again, not quite understanding what I heard. Some of the songs seemed like (what I understood) punk to be, some of them sounded like the new wave stuff that played on 80s stations, and some of them sounded weird. I wasn’t sure how I felt about them, but the lenticular cover and the weird design choices mixed with the song titles intrigued me.

I bought it and listened to it over and over again.

See, the thing about that anthology is that it came with a booklet with a nice introduction to Devo’s philosophy, history and connections to read while I listened. And the tracks selected were very well curated, pulling from early self-produced stuff, their big hits and their later albums in an intriguing way.

For someone who barely knew who the Rolling Stones were, the Devo cover of “Satisfaction” was less bizarre than their take on “Head Like a Hole”, which I did know. Similarly, while the highlights from their first three albums were well chosen, “It Doesn’t Matter to Me”, a live cut from “Now It Can Be Told” (which is not available on streaming) where they pretend to be a Christian folk act called Dove put home their capabilities. If this band had wanted to do CSNY riffs, they could have made a career of it.

That CD became my lodestar as I journeyed out from mainstream rock and pop stations. They had recorded songs for the Stiff label in England. Well, I guess now I should add that label to my list. Who’s Wreckless Eric?

This weird band… Fu Manchu… is covering “Freedom of Choice”? Maybe I’ll try that CD out.

They did a film with Neil Young? Maybe he’s not just an old fogey folkie.

Mark Mothersbaugh does soundtrack work? For some of my favorite cartoons and this… Wes Anderson guy? Huh, maybe I’ll see one of his movies.

I can’t say that Devo was the sole thing that moved me out of the doldrums of Matchbox 20 or Deep Blue Something, but it helped.

In 2010, they played at Grant Park for Lollapalooza. Somehow I had missed that they had a new album out, but I had three day passes and figured, I’ll check them out. Who knows when I’ll see them again? And they were great. They didn’t seem like they were going through the motions, they filled the stage with energy, and the 20 and 30 somethings in the crowd loved them.

Unlike the normal aging rock star or pop star, who is pretending to be as youthful and cool as they were a decade or two ago at the height of their popularity, they had always been dorky and weird. They sang about how they were “Through Being Cool”. Music (and Lollapalooza and music journalism and good taste) is a machine, and they were part of and they didn’t pretend otherwise.

Through multiple moves across country and purges of physical media, I’ve held onto “Pioneers Who Got Scalped” and I keep coming back to it. Especially since no prior or subsequent hits collection actually equals it. “Theme from Doctor Detroit” charted, even if people like to pretend it didn’t!

Now that I’ve got a fixed address (at least as long as the mortgage gets paid), I’ve even picked up listening copies of “Freedom of Choice” and “Duty Now For the Future” and “Now It Can Be Told” for my record player. I even picked up Toni Basil’s album where she basically does a mini-EP of Devo songs with them backing her (Yes, it’s the one with “Mickey”, it’s not expensive).

I still haven’t seen the Netflix documentary, but I’m glad to see the resurgence again. Their ideas of devolution keep coming back. The old forms decay and become a simulacrum and we keep trying to whip them into shape. It’s a scary thing (we have a senile showbiz president who wants it be 40 years ago, just like 40 years before), but they speak to the moment again without being sloganeers.

I’m seeing them again on Sunday, opening for Billy Idol. I honestly have moved enough past my indie cred days to say I think I’ll enjoy Billy Idol, but I’m going for Devo.

“It’s a wonderful time to be here/so nice to be alive/Wonderful people everywhere/the way they come their hair/makes me want to say/It’s a wonderful place”