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As was the case with many, my first encounter with DEVO was seeing the band on Saturday Night Live<\/i> in October 1978. I didn\u2019t know what<\/i> to think; I was a kid, and I was confused because I had never seen nor heard anything like DEVO until that moment. Over time, I came to understand that the band was about more than music: the intersection of art, culture and politics. From your perspective, was it necessary for people to understand all that to be able to appreciate what DEVO was doing?<\/b><\/p>\n
Mark Mothersbaugh:<\/b> I felt our interest was to talk about humans as the one species out of touch with nature. But we also felt that people could get into DEVO at any<\/i> different level, or not at all. To get what we were talking about across to people, we had decided it wasn\u2019t going to be rebellion. We\u2019d already seen the punks, and we were there for Kent State [shootings by the National Guard]. You\u2019re seeing it happen again now all over the world: when the powers get irritated enough, they smash you and show you that you\u2019re nothing.<\/p>\n
So we were curious: How do you change things? And we realized that elements like advertising \u2013 Madison Avenue \u2013 they<\/i> change things. They got people to eat things they shouldn\u2019t eat, buy things they shouldn\u2019t buy, drive cars they shouldn\u2019t drive, and be happy about it. And we thought, \u201cIt\u2019s their techniques that allow that to happen. So what if we use their<\/i> techniques for our<\/i> purposes?\u201d<\/p>\n
And that\u2019s what made us interested in going from being a very eccentric, far-out, kind of \u201cCaptain Beefheart meets an Italian sci-fi movie meets Sun Ra\u201d kind of band to using some of the techniques of people like the Ramones. Because we saw that they were very succinct, and they had a message. We thought that would attract people to us rather than repel them. We [had been] playing clubs in Ohio where after the first set, people would pay us to leave! We\u2019d be like, \u201cOh, we\u2019ve got two more sets of music for you!\u201d They\u2019d go, \u201cOh, no, that\u2019s okay. We\u2019ve had enough. We\u2019ll pay you the full amount \u2013 all $20 \u2013 if you just leave now.\u201d<\/p>\n
I discovered early \u201870s German bands like Neu!, Harmonia and Cluster years after I first heard DEVO. With the benefit of hindsight, it seems clear that you were investigating some similar musical ideas. Were you aware of those bands when DEVO started, or was some of that creativity simply in the zeitgeist? <\/b><\/p>\n
Oh yeah, Neu!, very much so. And Cluster and Can. We were interested in what was happening in Europe in their experimental music, and even stuff that was more esoteric, like Morton Subotnick here in the U.S., and Walter\/Wendy Carlos, who did maybe one of the all-time greatest soundtracks ever using Moog vocoders.<\/p>\n
It was hard to find that stuff, though. You have to understand: It was not like now; kids have got it so easy. They just go, \u201cOh, what band do I like?\u201d And then they go, \u201cWhat band did they<\/i> like? And what band influenced them<\/i>?\u201d And they [discover that] they like Nirvana, and that Nirvana was influenced by DEVO; they covered DEVO songs.<\/p>\n
They can find things out a lot easier. It was harder back in the \u201860s and \u201870s. You\u2019d go to a record store and have to fight your way through Annette Funicello cutouts and giant Frank Sinatra posters to get to rock. And then you\u2019d have to go find one little cardboard bin where you\u2019d find the interesting music. So Cluster \u2013 or Silver Apples \u2013 was all much more difficult to find in those days.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s funny you mention Neu!, because [guitarist] Michael Rother had just finished doing a solo album at Conny Plank\u2019s Studio right before we got there [to make 1978\u2019s Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!<\/i>]. And so he and Can\u2019s Holger Czukay were still around while we were doing some of our recording.<\/p>\n
The first day we got to Germany, Jerry [Casale, bassist] had missed his flight, so there were four of us. We had all the gear set up, so with Conny and Czukay and [Brian] Eno and [David] Bowie, we just tested everything. But then it turned into a jam, an all day jam session with Dieter Moebius [of Cluster and Harmonia] and Eno and Bowie playing stuff. And you hear Eno talking over the top of the music while we\u2019re playing. There\u2019s a reel of that music somewhere down in the basement here.<\/p>\n
So it was recorded<\/i>…!<\/em><\/b><\/p>\n Yeah, while they were just setting up all the mics. It was an interesting recording studio; it was a farm, a pigsty that had been converted.<\/p>\n Do you think there\u2019s any chance that recording might ever come out? <\/b><\/p>\n Oh, who knows? Everything shows up somewhere. Let\u2019s hope so; probably.<\/p>\n