If you watched "Saturday Night Live" on Oct. 14, 1978, you would remember the musical guest — the new wave band, Devo. Give guys in matching yellow hazmat suits herky-jerkying on stage like robots whose batteries are running out as they performed their deconstruction of the Rolling Stones’ hit, "I Can’t Get No Satisfaction."
Unlike most bands, Devo has a fascinating philosophy. They believe in de-evolution — the idea that humanity is actually regressing instead of progressing. And unfortunately, they are absolutely right. The world is getting worse, just like Devo warned us.
The band is currently touring to celebrate its 50th anniversary.
Wisconsin Public Radio's "BETA" spoke to Devo's co-founder Mark Mothersbaugh backstage in Green Bay. Thanks to our friends at "To The Best of Our Knowledge" for allowing us to air this conversation, which originally aired in 2006.
On de-evolution philosophy
Jerry Casale and Mark Mothersbaugh met as students at Kent State in Ohio at the end of the 1960s. They were there when the Ohio National Guardsmen killed four students protesting the Vietnam War in May 1970. Casale was 15 feet away from one of the students who was killed. Mark Mothersbaugh says that the Kent State riots had a direct effect on Devo's worldview of de-evolution. Devo's philosophy is summed up best in their song, "Jocko Homo."
"I had a pamphlet called 'Mark Mothersbaugh Heavenbound.' It talked about evolution being impossible. And Darwin went against all the tenets of religion. And so, we were able to appropriate a lot of information from people like the Jehovah's Witnesses that would come around, and they would constantly rail against evolution."
"We were just trying to come up with some sense to what was going on around us. We saw technology manifesting itself as nuclear reactor problems, people getting poisoned by pesticides and just all the chemicals that we were dumping into the atmosphere. It just seemed to us with everything that was happening, the economy in our hometown (Akron, Ohio), frankly, we just saw everything adding up to de-evolution, making more sense than evolution."
"Somebody recently told me that they have video footage of us playing at a biker club where the bikers started tearing up the club when we were playing 'Jocko Homo' and they were going, 'You calling us an ape?' And they're basically behaving like apes. Yeah, actually, living up to the song or down to it. But just being a lightning rod for hostility with people that were that wrong, I felt like we had to be doing something right. And so it was inspiring in a way."
"That was 25, 30 years ago now. On stage tonight, Jerry (Casale) is going to go, 'Who out there believes de-evolution is real? 'And you'll hear the whole crowd roar because now, people, they see it all around them. They see it everywhere from the White House on down to all the doublethink and all the parallels to '1984' that exist in the world we live in."
"Unfortunately. Our intention wasn't to be correct. We would have liked to have been proven wrong."
On 'I Can't Get No Satisfaction'
One of Devo's greatest songs is actually a cover version (quite possibly the best cover version in the history of music). Mothersbaugh explains what led to the band's robotic reinterpretation of the Rolling Stones hit, "I Can't Get No Satisfaction."
"We were rehearsing back in '75 or '76 in Ohio, and we had some friends who had a car wash. Of course, in the winter, it's too cold to use a car wash. So this guy had a place where he stored the chemicals out behind it and he let us rehearse in this room. It was just a cinder block room with no heat. So we were all in there and it was below freezing. You know, there's a lot of snow. We had to drive through the snowy car wash to get to this place, and we're staying there. And, you know, we have gloves and coats on and we're playing. And Bob Casale (Jerry's brother) started playing that kind of like Persian goose-stepping guitar part that starts it off. And everybody just kind of started filling in parts with frozen limbs. And somehow the lyrics all of a sudden made more sense to me than they ever did. And then I just started singing those lyrics over top of it and it made everybody laugh."
On 'Whip It'
Devo's biggest hit in the U.S. was their 1980 song "Whip It."
"You know what I think it was? I think it's just because of all our songs, it was the one that disc jockeys misconstrued as being about sex in some way," Mothersbaugh speculates. "We'd be sitting in a radio station waiting to go and talk to the deejays in the next room, and they go, 'Well, I got Devo here, and I got to say, I whipped it just this morning.' And they're all in there laughing. Nobody really knew it was actually about Jimmy Carter."
"When we wrote it, we'd just come back from tours where people were b----ing about Jimmy Carter all over the U.S. and even Europe. They were saying his foreign policy's sucky. He's always fluctuating in that he doesn't take a strong stand on things, and he's not a good leader. We wrote a song which is kind of like a Dale Carnegie, 'you can do it' kind of thing."
"But on one level, that song was our dumbest song because everybody got into it as a disco song. People would say, 'It's such a great dance song.' They'd all dance to it. And most of the people that we're listening to 'Whip It,' they didn't even know about 'Jocko Homo' or other things we were writing before that were even on the same album."
On the band's legacy
"I think our attempt was to permeate the culture on a number of levels, and that was a conscious goal on our part. And in that sense, 'Whip It' accomplished some of the things we were trying to do that we didn't accomplish with other songs in the U.S."
"We wanted to set ourselves apart from pop music, but yet at the same time kind of move into that territory. We wanted to occupy that territory, but yet give people something new to think about and something new to listen to. And we purposely chose uniforms that were not the uniform of the day."
"Even now, I still meet people that go, 'Yeah, I got my ass kicked because of you guys when I was in high school.' And I hear that so much, it became a pejorative term even — Devo. Whether we had anything to do with it or not. They'd say, 'You're a Devo' to the person that was slightly different at school, and then they'd get their ass kicked by the jocks and the in crowd. And so we did become kind of what we wanted to be, which was like a thinking man's Kiss. At our best."
"We were just saying, 'Use your brain. You're capable of so much more than just mindlessly buying the rap and letting someone else tell you how to live your life. Question everybody, especially authority, and choose your mutations carefully."