Gerald V. Casale and Josh Freese in “I’m Gonna Pay U Back,” directed by Davy Force
With the human species seemingly hurtling toward the center of a body-pulping, dream-pulverizing vortex, Dangerous Minds sent one of its bubble-eyed dog boys from the recombo DNA labs in the Valley for a briefing from Jerry Casale. DEVO’s chief strategist, film director, songwriter, singer, and bassist shed light on our dire predicament as few others could. He also discussed his new solo music video, “I’m Gonna Pay U Back,” and revealed his plans for its upcoming 3D sequel, “The Invisible Man,” news that is balm for our awful hurt. A lightly edited transcript follows.
How was the tour, from your point of view? One of the high points of my year for sure was seeing DEVO again.
Where did you see it?
At the YouTube Theater at SoFi Stadium in LA.
You know, that’s an amazing amphitheater. It’s kind of a replacement for the wonderful amphitheater we had that we used to love playing at, that was ripped apart for Harry Potter rides?
The Universal Amphitheatre.
Up in Universal City. So this one kind of approximates that in architectural style, in the stage, in the sound, so, yeah, good venue. They don’t have their management together, that’s for sure. It’s overbearing; in these COVID times, they had so much security going on, it was like warring kind of TSA factions or something. But I thought the show went pretty well.
Well, for a guy like me, Jerry, I guess it’s the closest thing I have to a religious ceremony in my life, that Booji Boy, no matter how many times he dies, keeps coming back to sing “Beautiful World.”
[Laughs] It was hardly a tour, however. It was three measly shows. So, yeah.
I know. I wish there had been more—
Me too.
—but I’m grateful for what I get.
Well, if it were up to me, there would be a lot more.
Is that across the board, in terms of recording and touring and all that stuff?
Of course, of course. I mean, obviously, I founded the band, and I remain as excited and true to the concepts and principles of the collaboration and the experimentation as I was in 1977.
DEVO in the lab, 1979 (via DEVO-OBSESSO)
Dean Stockwell just died, and I know he was an early champion of the band, so I wanted to ask about your relationship with him. But I also wanted to ask about this weird phenomenon that DEVO seems always to have been, like, one degree of separation from the Black Mountain poets, and I think of Dean Stockwell as being part of that too, since he was friends with Robert Duncan. So if you could talk about that a little bit.
Yeah. Where do we start there? First of all, with Dean Stockwell, he was part of a group of kind of the outsider artist, [Topanga] Canyon people. I mean, he had been with Toni Basil, they were close friends with Neil Young, Dennis Hopper—there was a whole little universe of people there, actors, musicians. So when Toni Basil came to see us play at the Starwood in the summer of 1977 in Los Angeles, and converted, flipped out, she turned Dean and Neil Young on to us. And they, in turn, became very excited and became advocates, and, you know, insisted that we appear in Neil’s movie.
Neil was in the process of that movie [Human Highway] that kept morphing in terms of what it was, and what the message was, and who would act in it, and what the plot was, and we were involved in scenes in that movie early on, and many of the scenes that were shot were then jettisoned, because the whole idea of the movie changed, and it went on for another two years. And that culminated with us doing this vignette inside the movie of being disgruntled nuclear waste workers in Linear Valley, which was a fictitious valley in the film, and we were singing “It Takes a Worried Man” while we loaded leaky barrels of nuclear waste onto the truck and took them to the dumpsite. And that was an idea I’d thrown out that Neil liked, and he gave me his crew, basically, he let me direct that sequence. He gave me the funds in the budget to do a loading dock set, and used his truck—he actually owned that truck—and he made us the uniforms and the custom helmets with the breather packs that went into our noses.
So it was fantastic shooting 35 millimeter film, doing this whole thing that I thought was going to appear intact inside the movie. But of course, no; it was then decided upon some kind of editing whim to chop it up and make it a through line, and keep coming back to it throughout the movie, so it really made no sense [laughs]. But the movie made no sense. It’s an amazing piece. Certainly had a lot of talent behind it and a lot of budget behind it.
What’s funny is, although this never happens, the subsequent re-editing, re-editing, re-editing, new director’s cut, new director’s cut—the last thing that Neil ever did to it was actually the most cohesive and the best, and worked the best. And he also collapsed the movie so it wasn’t some sprawling, two-hour bit, you know, it was concise. And it just suddenly made more sense [laughs], believe it or not, which never happens when people go back and rework something over and over, they keep going down a rabbit hole. But I actually liked it, and I got to speak at a couple of these screenings he had where there were Q&A from the audience about the making of it. So yeah, it was great.
DEVO shine as nuclear waste workers in Neil Young’s ‘Human Highway’ (via IMDb)
Back to the Black Mountain thing. It started with a poet, Ed Dorn, who had come to the Black Mountain school, he was a poet that liaised with all those poets that were famous at that time, from City Lights—
Ferlinghetti?
You know, like what was his name, somebody Giorno…
John Giorno.
John Giorno; of course, Allen Ginsberg; all these poets. And they had been part of this cadre of people of like-minded sensibilities that started as Beats, basically, in the Sixties. And Ed Dorn became a professor of poetry, English lit, at the University of Boulder, and he had gotten a, whatever it’s called, a guest professorship at Kent State University on the heels of the killings at Kent State. So he came in the following fall on a visiting professorship, set up in a house off-campus.
And immediately, you know, all the academics and hipoisie intelligentsia that were outsider people at Kent State—‘cause it was a tight-knit group of people who didn’t fit into the MBA, fraternity scene, right? We were the artists, we were pursuing fine art programs, pursuing MFAs in English literature and so on—we, of course, gravitated to Ed Dorn, he was a great guy. And Bob Lewis and I, who was an early colleague and, pre-DEVO the band, had, with me, created these DEVO concepts of de-evolution, and I had been applying it to visual art and he had been applying it to poetry, we hung out with Ed in 1971, ’72, and we were spewing all these theories to Ed, and Ed found us completely entertaining, you know, like, these strident kids think they reinvented the wheel. The ideas weren’t foreign to him at all. So he would say, “Oh, if you think that, here, read this!” and “Oh, well by the way, so and so said this!” And he just egged us on.
So he gave us the ammunition. And then Eric Mottram came in that following year from Kings College in England, and he had been friends with all these people, and he had been teaching their works at Kings College in England, and he was a quote “lefty” intellectual. And he brought in people like Jeff Nuttall, who had written Bomb Culture.
So it was just this big lovefest of wonderful ideas and concepts, where you’d been thinking things, other people across the world had been thinking things, and there was this beautiful synchronicity, right? Who knew this could happen at Kent State University? And half of the reason it happened is ‘cause of the killings, and the reaction to the killings, and people banding together, like as a survival tactic, against this pending fascism and Nixonianism. So there’s a long, convoluted answer to your short, concise question.
DEVO and ‘Pink Flamingos’ double bill at Kent State, 1975 (via DEVO Live Guide)
There’s a great bookstore in the Bay Area called Moe’s. I often look at their website to see what’s new, and they have something I’d never seen before in all my years of looking at DEVO stuff: the 1974 Kent State Creative Arts Festival broadsides, those beautifully printed broadsides.
Yeah!
And so Ed Dorn’s in there, DEVO’s in there, but Samuel Fuller is also in there! Did you study with him at all at Kent State?
No, no, we didn’t, no. But, of course, the people we were studying with, that was part of their canon, and so they would give us that stuff to look at. We had this amazing guy Richard Myers, a one-man film department, who was way ahead of his time. He had won an award for a short film called Akran, he was friends with the Kuchar brothers in New York, he knew the scene in Berkeley—all the underground filmmakers, he was conversant with all of them, interacting with all of them. He created a Kent State University film festival, and he would bring these films in, and the filmmakers in, and people to talk. I mean, he brought in Harlan Ellison to talk about A Boy and His Dog, right? He showed us Pink Flamingos. He showed us Babo 73, with… I think it was directed by Robert Downey, Robert Downey Jr.’s father.
Senior.
The same guy that made my favorite film, Putney Swope. And in it, the president of the United States is a putz, he accidentally starts World War III, but he goes to the evangelicals to save his butt, and they tell him to pray at the base of the obelisk, and he does, and all the missiles return to their silos magically. It’s hilarious, it’s a black comedy.
Anyway, Richard Myers brought in all those people. He brought in Norman Mailer to talk about the film that Norman Mailer appears in where he plays a hard-nosed right-wing detective, prosecutor. I can’t remember what the name of this film was, it’s a black and white New York film [probably Beyond the Law], again, dark comedy, crime drama. Norman Mailer’s great in it, he’s scary good in it, like he knows exactly what to do. And it was the same year that Titicut Follies came out, which was the hideous indictment of the, I think it was, Boston-area-based mental institution where they exposed this long history of torture and abuse of the patients.
It sounds like a broken record, right? Some things never change. I mean, the atmosphere we grew up in was just like now. A plethora of horror stories that are too numerous to even sort out, of injustice, of corruption, of inhumanity to man, of cruelty that just seems to be rampant, running free, with impunity, off the charts.
And now you’re seeing it again just today, folks. Rittenhouse gets off scot-free. So, if you’re a white supremacist vigilante with an AR-15, you can stalk people, and when they don’t like it, you can just kill ‘em with impunity! Shoot first, ask questions later, let God sort out the details. It’s right out of Dr. Strangelove. And now that we have courts packed with right-wing judges that were carefully ensconced by Trump and his henchmen, hey! If you’re a right-wing white supremacist, you’re allowed to commit murder.
Imagine had it been turned around and some “person of color” who was questioning the system had an AR-15 walking around at night, and felt “threatened” by some mob of white supremacist kids and killed a few of them. What do you think would be happening right now? It’s just an amazing double standard. The hypocrisy puts you in the quicksand up to your nose. The stench is amazing. It’s palpable evil everywhere. It’s fascist America now.
But so was it then, so was it then! 1970, ’71, ’72, Nixon… had Watergate not happened, I fear for where we would have gone then. There was a course correction. And there were two parties then that actually both at least gave lip service to the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and Nixon went too far for the Republicans. But today, there aren’t two parties, and nobody can go too far for the Republicans. They’re reading the 1933 Nazi playbook, right out of the Reichstag.
Jihad Jerry settles the score in ‘I’m Gonna Pay U Back’
Yeah, I was thinking about that just this morning as I was driving my car. It really would have sounded ridiculous ten or twenty years ago when I was talking to my friends about authoritarianism coming to the United States, I sounded like a kind of streetcorner ranter. Now, that’s the New York Times—
Exactly.
—talking about, you know, it’s an open question whether we’ll live in a democracy a year from now.
I noticed that. Once corporate press and 24/7 news cycles start pushing articles where it says, “Is democracy done in America?” It’s like—it’s a rhetorical question! They goddamn know it is! All they’re trying to do is kind of like massage people to get ready for what they know is going to happen and sell advertising at the same time. They’re not doing anything about it; there’s no outrage. They’re just preaching to the converted in, you know, informed language about how it’s gonna go down and why it’s gonna go down, but there’s not a wider viewpoint on this.
You know, this is a war! And people that still would like to see democratic rule of law or the Constitution upheld are bringing slingshots to a war fought with AR-15s. That’s what’s going on. And the outcome is a foregone conclusion. So these articles are like primers, you know what I mean? You can say that Brave New World, Animal Farm, and 1984, in a sense, they weren’t warnings, they were primers, they were textbooks to get you ready for the future! [Laughs]
This is not a very good segue, but I wanted to ask you about Protar and Gorj before we leave the Seventies.
I’ve always been into alter egos, and, you know, third-person characters that populate a slightly sci-fi world.
I know I see the Chinaman and I’m pretty sure I see Gorj on the monitors in the background on the deck of the ship in the new video.
In “I’m Gonna Pay U Back,” yeah. And there are so many people that need to be paid back, let me tell you!
And Gorj was a damaged, flawed human that became an avenger. I created a holy card for Gorj, which you probably saw in the DEVO books. There was a prayer on the back to Gorj. Once again, about shameless gaslighting and hypocrisy on the part of those who sling accusations while being perpetrators themselves.
Protar was, imagine if Spock, the original Star Trek Spock of the Sixties—a great character, Spock, by the way, at a time when people needed to be reminded of the side of human nature that wasn’t malign—but imagine Spock, instead of being infinitely almost Jesus-like in his calm and resolve and his lack of revenge, he was Buddhist-like, right? Imagine if he had a disintegrator gun, and at a certain point, he did get pissed off. Imagine if he would be done trying to reason with somebody who was unreasonable, who was a fascist and an authoritarian, and Spock said: “I tried to reason with you, I tried to explain why you shouldn’t want to do what you want to do, and now, I’m going to prevent you from doing it. And nothing you tell me is going to stop me now from eliminating you. I’m gonna disappear you. And before I do, I would like to hear anything you’d have to say, ‘cause I’m going to explain quite logically why I’m going to do this to you.” That was Protar: Spock with a disintegrator ray.
It seems like they’re both enforcers of justice.
They are. They are.
There’s a kind of wish for justice—like, one of my favorite DEVO songs, one of the songs I think is most underrated in the DEVO catalog, is “Jimmy,” [laughter] which is a song about justice too. [I should also have mentioned “Cameo.”]
Yeah. That got into the ambiguity about good and evil.
Jerry DEVO gets bamboozled in ‘I’m Gonna Pay U Back’
Well, maybe you could talk about the scenario for the “I’m Gonna Pay U Back” video a little bit, because as I understand it, it seems to be a struggle between Jihad Jerry and DEVO Jerry.
That’s true. Ultimately, what happens is, if you’re conversant with Carl Jung, who described the duality of human nature at our basis, and I think people back to Plato described that same duality, and certainly some of the best poets of the early 20th century got into that same duality; Ezra Pound, who himself was a conflicted character and quite a fascist on some level—but they recognized our capacity for good and evil. Like, these same people who can do amazing things and conceive of things and create things are capable of immense cruelty and darkness and barbarity, and kill each other intraspecies, with impunity, like no other living thing on the planet. So this duality, with the dark side, Jekyll and Hyde, the shadow side of human nature, driven by fear and self-interest, and then the idealistic part of human nature, able to think beyond themselves and their own self-interest to the greater good, that’s universal, that’s huge. There’s nothing bigger, and of course, that’s what Jerry DEVO and Jihad Jerry represent in “I’m Gonna Pay U Back.”
Because ultimately, since there are two sides to us, no matter what anybody’s doing to you, no matter how much you’ve been victimized by some malign narcissist, by some authoritarian guy who’s done something completely unjustifiable, you are left with yourself to deal with that, like, how you’re gonna respond. Do you accept this gaslighting? Did you ask for it? Do you believe them that you asked for it? What part of you allowed it to happen? Do you deserve it at all? Do you accept those arguments? I always hated those arguments. I mean, I would hear people make arguments about the Holocaust, going “Well, they brought it on themselves.” It’s like, are you kidding me? Give me a break here. There is a power imbalance that’s so grotesque that that is not true!
So “I’m Gonna Pay You Back,” me as an artist, there’s plenty of rage left, plenty of rage to go around, where it’s just ratcheted up in the last ten years in this society, where the insults to intelligence, the tyrannical imposition on people who mind their own business, you know, “live and let live,” and it’s like, Nope! We’re not gonna let you live and let live. No, we’re gonna cross the property line, come over and tell you what to do. It isn’t good enough that we want to do something; we’re gonna make you do it too. I’ve been, even on a personal level, in real life, have been accosted like that, from within and without.
So while “I’m Gonna Pay U Back” was certainly inspired by individuals in my real life, and people like Trump who I don’t know personally but feel like I do—I’ve gotten enough of a dose of who that guy is—I just took those real things, and then I extracted that and pushed it onto the kinda meta-realm of sci-fi, creating a Marvel comic universe with that video. Because again, in the beginning, what was DEVO? DEVO was an experimental art collective, multimedia. Video and imagery was as much a part of the DEVO idea from the beginning as was music, and it was always a fusion. So I just went back to that. When DEVO was free of genre, of confines and “Oh, is this gonna sell?” You know, we were just making art, right?
And I had no illusion that, as a senior citizen in a silly Sam the Sham turban, that I was ever going to get beyond the gatekeepers. I wasn’t gonna get forty-six million views like Drake or Lil Nas X; I’d be lucky to get a few hundred thousand views, because it was gonna be kept in this ghetto of media where it doesn’t get to the bigger audience. But I still wanted to just make pure art. And that’s what we were doing with our early music videos. There was no MTV, there was no word “music video,” there was no word “performance art.” We were just making a piece, a music video piece.
So that’s what I went back to, “sound and vision.” So with “I’m Gonna Pay U Back,” that video and its look is as important to the song as the song is to the video, as the lyrics, the words, the meaning, the message. And I intend to do more. I created a world on purpose that’s not the real world so I can keep revisiting that world and do more. So the next thing I’m gonna do is a song called “The Invisible Man,” [chuckling] and wait ‘til you see him when he appears!
DEVO’s Gerald V. Casale at 4D Studios with Aaron Marshall Cohen and Jeff Winner
Yeah, I thought I saw a picture of you standing in front of a green screen on your Instagram, so I’m looking forward to more stuff. So that means there’s a new song, too.
Yes, there’s a new song, and I was visiting that facility—that’s a groundbreaking facility where they can do a much more complete and technologically sound version of what I tried to do in 2010 with “What We Do,” where we shot something in the round with a nine-camera system that is computer synced, and then you stitch the images together into a seamless loop where the user can use his cursor to navigate that space without an edit. And that’s what these people at 4D Productions where I visited are doing now, but with 32 cameras, and the user can use Oculus headsets and go in there in 3D. So you’re in that reality in 3D, going wherever you want, as close to Jihad Jerry and the characters as you want or as far back, or around behind them, it doesn’t matter: you put yourself in the world. And while that will be limited to people with this technology, there’ll be a version where you can just navigate around with a cursor, a less immersive, less interactive version.
But that’s what I want to do. It’ll just be taking what I did with Davy Force, the CGI artist that was working in programs that were generated by artificial intelligence, like deep learning—that’s what you saw in “I’m Gonna Pay U Back,” where we applied that technology to a live-action, 30 frames-per-second video, and now he’ll be able to do that to the 30 frames-per-second video shot 3D. So the new thing with Davy’s CGI composites in that round green-screen room will be a 3D version of what you saw in “I’m Gonna Pay U Back.”
Cool! So there will be a consumer version for people with Oculus headsets?
Yeah, that’s what we plan, yeah.
Any idea when that will materialize?
You know, to be honest, I know what it’s gonna take and… next spring, before you see it. And in the meantime, I’m making wine.
Jerry DEVO makes things right in ‘I’m Gonna Pay U Back’
I’m not much of a wine consumer, but I really enjoyed the bottle of your Pinot noir I bought.
You know, when I knew nothing about wine, and somebody would give me a good wine, I knew it was good. Because you don’t have to talk yourself into that, right? It’s like good sex; you don’t have to ask yourself, Was that good? [Laughter]
You know it was good. We know, if you eat a piece of fresh fish, you know it’s good (or not). Same with wine. Well-made wine is good! When there’s a balance of fruit and acid and it was not screwed up in the wine-making process, as long as you start with nice grapes and you don’t screw it up, I don’t know, it’s like taking a beautiful 28-day dry-aged steak and grilling it medium rare, and that’s it! Maybe having a grilled vegetable on the side. You don’t screw it up.
The way I make wine is more in the French philosophy of as little intervention as possible. Bring out what nature grew. Whatever the soil was, whatever the nature of the grape was, bring that out in the wine. Let it be that. Don’t put too much oak on it, don’t do too much of this, no additives, no extracting things to make it more concentrated. So my wine approaches a more natural version of winemaking, and that’s why it tastes fresh, medium-bodied. That’s why it’s balanced, not a lot of bite, not a lot of tannin, smooth. Goes with food, folks! I like wine and food. Wine’s supposed to enhance your dining experience. It’s like, we have to eat every day, so make sure what you’re eating isn’t junk, right? Life’s too short for one bad meal. And if you want to make the meal even better, find a wine that takes it up to the next level by the combination, the fusion of the wine flavor and the food you’re chewing takes it somewhere that you couldn’t get with just either one alone. That’s what it’s about.
So anything you learn—forget all these snobs and all the wine jargon and stuff. That’s designed to cut people out and make it feel like there’s some special religious cult going on with wine. There isn’t. It’s meant for the masses. And the more you learn, the better off you’ll be in a restaurant, because some waiter can’t go “But sir, we have this rosé that’s five years old! It’s older!” And you think, “Oh, older wine is good!” It’s like, no. You’ll find out with rosé, get it as young as you can. So you can avoid all these mistakes, and getting ripped off, ‘cause they’re always trying foist off on you wines they can’t sell. Like, “Here’s a dummy, here’s a rube! We’ll make him spend a lot of money he didn’t wanna spend.”
Fine dining with DEVO (via Club DEVO Facebook)
Can you recommend, for people who want to learn more about wine, is there a good source? Like a good book?
You know, with what’s happened with internet information, what you used to have to go to wine classes for you can just pick off the internet. You can just go, “What vintages of American Pinot noir are the best now?” Right? What should you drink now? And they’ll break it down in price range and in years, like, “Don’t drink this one, it was a terrible year, but drink these three,” or “Wait on this one, it’s not ready.” It’s great. Or if you’re in a restaurant, what you do is, when some guy recommends a bottle, you stick it into your phone and see what, like, the Wine Spectator has to say about it or James Suckling has to say about it. It’s easy. If you don’t see at least a ninety-some score, don’t buy it.
How are the environmental factors affecting you all?
Terrible. Terrible. Terrible. Drought is real, and drought is destroying the wine business in Napa and Sonoma. There are winemakers that have natural aquifers on their land, and wells, and they’re still doing well, but those are threatening to dry up, okay? And irrigation’s totally expensive, and environmentally terrible, too, that has consequences. And then the heat. So the varietals that grew great in Northern California are starting not to grow so great because they were used to a climate that was real, why they grew up [there], you know? And now, the climate means, “Oh, you’d better replant grapes that grow in Sicily, maybe, or grow in Australia closer to Brisbane,” ‘cause we’re being fried out here.
I mean, in 2020, I lost my vintage. I couldn’t produce any Pinot noir, because smoke from fires thirty miles away, that were serious, big fires, blew over the valley, sat over the grapes for three days, right when they were about a week from picking, which is when they’re most plump and porous. So all that smoke, all those chemicals, go right into your grape, and they affect the juice. And that ain’t the right kind of smoke when people go, “ooh, this is smoky,” no, they’re not talking about something created from an environmental disaster, they’re talking about careful winemaking processes in the barrel that gives it the “smoky” thing. No, this was terrible. This was destroyed juice you couldn’t make wine from.
Nightmare.
Yeah. Well, that’s it. That’s my rant.
This is a different topic, but I imagine that DEVO has had a lot of projects over the years that it would have done if resources had been available, or if things had been slightly different—
Oh, of course. What you saw from DEVO was the tip of the iceberg. If you look at what the ideas were, and what the intent was, it makes me very depressed, because I feel like compared to the potential of DEVO, when you look at the brain trust and the talents involved, we failed. Because there was no DEVO movie, there was no DEVO musical, there was no DEVO series of comics, or whatever. I mean, all of those things almost were demanded by DEVO’s promise. And it isn’t for want of trying on my part. It just always never quite got there. It would always get to the altar and then not make it over the edge.
Is there a script somewhere for a DEVO feature film?
Of course! Of course. But at some point, it was: I’m the only one within DEVO that was even spending energy and time on it. And that’s not the way DEVO succeeds. DEVO succeeds as a unit. Three musketeers, right? Rowing the same direction. And that’s a thing of the past. Yeah. Sad.
Will those unrealized projects ever see the light of day in any way?
It would take some outside creative force who had access to a group of people with funding, who saw the validity and the potential in it, who believed in it, to jump-start it. Then it could probably happen. I can’t possibly do it on my own.
DEVO with the Aristocats at Space Mountain, 1980 (via DEVO-OBSESSO)
I believe the Residents are finally coming out with a movie.
Yeah, I heard that.
I think it was going to be called Double Trouble, and now it’s going to be called Triple Trouble.
[Laughs] Right, ‘cause the trouble only gets ratcheted up exponentially. Trouble3 is what they should call it.
It’s geometric, yeah! I was also trying to imagine what DEVO 3.0 would be, if there was a concept for DEVO 3.0.
[Laughs] Well, I know what it would be for me, is if you took that idea that ended up being kind of half-baked because of the constraints we were facing with Disney, where they wanted like a middle school version of DEVO that was palatable to all of their demographic, and all the censorship involved with that and everything. Instead, if you just started with people we could cast from a group of real musicians with real singing, dancing talent who got into the DEVO idea, and we would cast a group, and we would make a DEVO that was as vital and energetic and fun to watch as DEVO was in 1978. And then we would create a stage show with a narrative that’s kind of like a hybrid of a concert and a musical, with these guys, who would be fantastically talented, playing our music in a way that was not jive, that would be 3.0 to me. And if that worked, then you could do like the Blue Man Group where you have more than one of them, and you could do it multiple places. And it would all be obviously directed and written by me, us. So what you were seeing them do has been blessed by the DEVO grandfathers.
They’d have to be in good shape. I’d be sucking wind if I tried to do your ’78 set.
Yeah! I can’t even do exactly what I used to do in DEVO, in terms of the precision, the speed, and the longevity of a performance, right? I can get close, but not really. I want to see it the way it was. Because we were all doing it. That’s what made it amazing: you were watching a drill team unit. Everybody was right there, everybody was at a hundred percent, on the same caliber, running the same race.
Well, yeah! I just watched the 1980 Target Video performance. Obviously, the band is in great shape and playing really well together, but the speed of “Satisfaction”—
Yeah!
The tempo that you play “Satisfaction” at is just amazing.
I know. I know! Well, it’s like when I watch Saturday Night Live, that famous performance in October of 1978, and I remember critics all writing about it the next week, saying “Why did Saturday Night Live decide to speed up the footage?” Like, why did they manipulate the video, how did you get them to do that? They didn’t even believe what they were seeing was real.
I mean, we were so naturally high that night from the anxiety and adrenaline of going on Saturday Night Live, where you’d only played to maybe three hundred people at a time before, and now you’re playing to maybe fifteen million people. And the audience is right on top of you. It’s not obvious with what cameras do to optics, to the audience at home. It’s like a football field in a football game. You go to a real football game and you go, “Wait a minute, those guys are only running that far? It looks so much better on TV.”
Yeah, it’s a tiny room.
They’re right there on top of you, they’re like maybe, I don’t know, fifteen feet away, starting at about six feet high, in a kind of a raked amphitheater setting, kind of like bleacher seats, looking right down at you. And they’re lit up! And so when you’re playing, the pressure’s on.
And of course, Lorne Michaels comes over when you’re in the dark, ‘cause each set goes dark until it’s time for that set to light up. And Don Pardo announces you as you come out of commercials, and you hear his voice, but you don’t see anything—you’re standing in pitch blackness. And Lorne Michaels comes over, and his assistant has a big flashlight that he flashes under Michaels’ face, so we can see him. And so he looks like a clichéd spooky guy, you know—
The Crypt Keeper.
Yeah, that you would do on a cheesy TV show. And he goes, “All right, guys, when you hear Don Pardo say your name, you just start playing. And I don’t care if the lights don’t come on or if an amp doesn’t work, you just play, do whatever you got to do. And don’t screw it up, because there’s fifteen million people watching live.” And then the light goes on, and he walks away, and you hear, “Ladies and gentlemen, DEEEEEE-VOOOOOO!” And you’re just shitting your pants. So I think we played extra tight and extra fast when I watch our movements and our playing. He pumped us up.
DEVO protects the children in the ‘New Traditionalists’ poster (available from Club DEVO)
That would be terrifying. I wanted to ask you about “Big Mess,” because that’s one of my favorite DEVO songs. I always wondered—I know they’re based on those letters, the Cowboy Kim letters. From what I’ve seen of those letters, they seem crazy but not threatening. But it in the DEVO song, it seems like Kim is an assassin.
That’s right.
Was that something that you all brought to the story?
Well, yeah. I mean, we used to get thousands of letters. Pre-internet, people would write letters to DEVO. I mean, fan mail would come in… you might as well have been Elvis Presley, right? That’s the way things worked then. And foolishly, I would look at those letters, and once in a while, something would be very interesting or inspired, and that stuff was so crazy that it inspired me to extract it and condense it into song lyrics that paid off. So yes, I did exaggerate that this guy—‘cause I always see that in people, there’s something frightening about people that are clearly on that spectrum where they could be psychotic. Reason isn’t driving their thought processes.
That always scares me, ‘cause people like that could just decide in an instant that—they look at you and they decide you’re the devil, or that you’re going to hurt them. Like, they’re paranoid, right? You’re gonna hurt them. Like, “I was afraid for my life,” which you hear all the time, right?
Kyle Rittenhouse!
Like, was he doing anything to make you afraid for your life?
“Well, no.”
But isn’t it you that had the gun, and he didn’t have any?
“Well, yeah.”
“I was very afraid.”
“I was afraid, I had to do it.” Well, with the judges we have now, it’s case dismissed—you’re free!
So, I just pushed it to make it more interesting. ‘Cause the guy seemed creepy enough that I believe that he might go that direction in his life.
Yeah, and then I suppose in the backing film, it’s the lyrics but also—
The brain.
In the [character’s] brain, there’s the images of John Lennon, and Martin Luther King.
Yes, those were the days. [Laughs]
And now we’re in a situation where the Supreme Court might decide there can be no more gun control laws.
Pretty much.
DEVO in a BOMP! Records ad (via Printed Matter)
So that’ll make life in LA interesting.
It’s shockingly pinheaded. It’s bizarre. Really. And the rationale is so cynical and so twisted, the logic is so twisted, to undo basic gun control laws. If you’re gonna question why people should have a waiting period or get a license to have a gun—you have a lethal weapon, right? You have to go through driver training to drive a car, right? And you have to have a license, because maybe your car will hit somebody and kill them. Well, what’s a gun for? I mean, a gun is for killing, period. And they want to just make it ubiquitous, like, “Anybody should have a gun!” “Oh, my four-year-old kid, he loves my gun—here you go!”
And all these places with concealed carry. You know that there’s gonna be these troublemaker people that start fights on purpose to get you going, and then if you finally have had enough, or you’re pushing back, they’ll pull a gun and shoot you! Because this is what they wanted to do. They manipulated you into that situation so you’d get shot.
It’s so… insane. This country is now psychotic. It’s devolved. It’s beyond what we warned. The culture is devolved.
Given what you’ve lived through in your life, I’m sure you don’t have any illusions about the country. But I have a sense that things are sort of the same as they’ve always been, and yet there’s a kind of extra danger…
Again, I think it’s exponential. Because once you added social media and the internet to the cultural war that this country has never gotten out of since the Civil War, what that did is that took all the people that think that slavery should have never ended and that Robert E. Lee is a hero, and it galvanized them and connected them to each other and empowered them in ways they’ve never been so empowered. There’s a national network that now, they feel really connected and can rise up and make sure there’s a tyranny of the minority. And that’s what you’re seeing: the puzzle pieces being put in place, quickly now, where by 2024, the last screw will be in the coffin of democracy.
So that’s what you’re seeing. You’re right, it’s always been there, there have always been states you didn’t want to drive through if you were a person of color, or if you were a quote “hippie” in the Sixties. But now it’s exponentially more dangerous. And now those people that feel that way have amassed a cache of lethal weapons that is beyond comprehension. They have all the guns. They have all the AR-15s and bazookas and everything else, and they’re ready. Because their worldview is about that. They’ve been pushing for Armageddon and race war, and they’re ready.
Yeah, and like you said earlier, the responses of the Democrats don’t give me a lot of confidence.
Well, they’re sad. They’re like completely limp, you know, toothless. Impotent. Because so many of them are beholden to huge donors just like the Republican Party. Regardless of what they really feel there should be in terms of policy, their hands are tied! Because either somebody’s got dirt on them personally, or through redistricting, gerrymandering, they can just be shoved out of office, so they want to keep their jobs, so they can’t speak up. They’re in bed with huge corporate interests—fossil fuels, whatever it is.
What’s funny is, that doesn’t hog-tie tyrants. That doesn’t bother hypocrites and tyrants. That’s no problem. But if you’re a Democrat, you supposedly represent some kind of ethics or standards, so it is a problem. But it’s great when you’ve never run on policy, ethics, or standards, but merely power for its own sake, you’re fine!
Okay, one more question.
The Futurismo label, has it gone under? I loved the DEVO reissues they were doing.
You know, I don’t have an answer for you. That’s a question for our archivist and internet manager, Michael Pilmer, who goes by DEVO-OBSESSO. [Michael Pilmer reports that Futurismo is “on sabbatical” at the moment—Ed.] He’s in contact with them more than me. It’d be sad to think they went under, since they were doing such cute packages for a small audience, for a boutique audience. But of course, in a culture where the middle class is being decimated and arts programs are being summarily crushed, how can you hope that independent people doing nice artistic things could stay in business? You know, right? Jesus, it’s Amazon and Google that run the world.
Anyway, it was nice talking to you. [Salutes] Duty now for the future.
Duty now, Jerry.
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