DEVO’s Duty Now for the Future: Mutate, Don’t Stagnate (Part 3 of 4)

Continued from Part Two…

Are you pleased with how DEVO is portrayed in the 2024 documentary?

Mark Mothersbaugh: Yeah. It’s not the documentary I would have made if I was making one. Thank God I didn’t make it, and thank God Jerry didn’t. Because he’s one of those people that creates legends in his mind and then he believes them. I love him. He’s so smart, and he was such a great guy to team up with to put this band together.

But we were lucky that Chris [Smith] saw that coming in. He held us all at arm’s length the whole time. He had official sit-down discussions with us, but he kept us out of the editing rooms, away from all that stuff. And I think the film is so much stronger because of that.

DEVO has always made intelligent use of multimedia; you’ve been doing so long before that term was even part of the popular lexicon. From where did that interest and emphasis originate?

Before we were a band, we used to try to think of what were going to be. And since we were in love with Bauhaus and Dada and surrealism, we thought, “Instead of being like a band, what if we had a Club DEVO, a place people came to, and we just did shows every night?” We thought about trying to not be a rock band, to be more of like a performance art group.

And so we were already interested in multimedia when Chuck Statler [director of 1976’s The Truth About De-Evolution] showed up in ‘74 or ‘75 with a Popular Science magazine that said, “Laserdiscs: everyone will have them by Christmas time!” We saw them: laserdiscs were the same exact size as an album, but they had not only music, they had visuals. Jerry and I met in the art department at Kent State; we were both visual artists. And we thought, “That’s it! Sound and vision, that’s the future. Rock and roll’s dead now, because it’s turning into something else. Artists are going to take over.”

We really thought pop art was going to be something maybe a little different than MTV. They did the lowest common denominator possible, which was to make three minute ads for record companies and their bands. There was a high quotient of insipid-ity or whatever the word is. So that was a little disappointing, but it worked; it helped us. Because by the time MTV came out, we had already made all these films of our songs. We didn’t invent that; they were doing that in the ‘40s and ‘50s.

And there were Scopitones in the ‘60s…

Yeah, Scopitones! I never saw one back in the day, but I was over at Jack White’s house – it was a while ago now, maybe 10, 15 years ago – and he had one in his living room. He had a machine that was actually working. It’s so cool to think that those were actually in existence in bars, although they were probably delicate and drunks probably destroyed them.

So people were already thinking like that [before us]. But we added concepts and stories to the videos that were a little more than just the band standing on a stage with a megaphone or something, and then the horn section stands up and then sits down.

But [multimedia] was part of our live show from the very beginning. We were from Akron, Ohio, which was an industrial city. At the time we were there, it was just about to lose its credentials as the rubber capital of the world. They’d figured out that they shouldn’t be shipping the raw latex to Akron, making the tires and shipping them up to Detroit. It’d be smarter just to make them in Vietnam and Malaysia, places where they can hire people for $12 a month instead of $12 an hour. So capitalism didn’t need Akron anymore.

But we were in that factory town. I was a maintenance man at an apartment building, and one of Jerry’s side jobs was as a graphic artist for a janitorial supply place. We were always looking, and we found different things in the janitorial supply. That’s where we found the yellow suits; they were hazmat cleanup suits. And at the time, they were like four bucks a piece. You could wear it, you could even rip them apart, and then you’d have another one for the next night at four bucks. We just stenciled our name in the corner of them.

We were thinking of the movie Metropolis. Because that’s what we thought of Goodyear and Goodrich and Firestone: when you walked in there, to us, it looked like Metropolis. And we were always very interested in mixing technology. The pop and conceptual artists were people like Andy Warhol. He made films. He was a photographer. He was a painter. He was a screen printer. He produced the Velvet Underground. With him, the idea came first and then the techniques [came later]: “I’ll just use whatever technique.” And we liked that.

To me, the time we’re in now is even more friendly to that idea where you can be an idea person and don’t have to worry about, “I’m missing one string on my guitar. I’m going to have to go to Guitar Center today and buy another set of strings.” You just get it when you get it.

Click to continue to the conclusion…