*Features audio / multimedia*

Five of them sat around the table – Mark Mothersbaugh, Michael Jackson, Andy Warhol, Warhol’s young male protege and a woman whose breasts Mothersbaugh had seen on cable TV.  The noise was blinding in Studio 54 as disco’s faithful pounded the dance floor.  The next thing Mothersbaugh knew, Michael Jackson was passing him a joint filled with angel dust.

This is the first thing that must be digested before any of Mothersbaugh’s other stories can be believed.  The Devo frontman has indeed lived through uncommon times, including a bad angel-dust trip with the King of Pop and the King of Pop Art.  He was present at the Kent State shootings in 1970 (Devo co-founder, Gerald Casale, was standing a few feet away from one of the victims).  He wrote the theme song and all other music for the greatest children’s TV show of all time, “Pee Wee’s Playhouse.”  He has also scored a literal score of movies, including all of Wes Anderson’s films (”The Royal Tenenbaums,” “The Life Acquatic with Steve Zissou,” etc.).

But, one thing he hasn’t done in 20 years is make a new Devo album.  That silence will soon break, as the band nears completion of a new album.  Mothersbaugh recently talked to Thriller about the as-yet untitled album and his illustrious past.  His answers are long, but well worth the time.

Right now, you’re working on the first new Devo album in 20 years.  How did that come about?

Devo, for the last fourteen or fifteen years maybe, we’ve been going out and doing shows.  It started off we just did a few of them fifteen years ago, and then we did some Lollapaloozas, and that was kind of interesting.  It was kind of fun to play again after being apart for quite a while – still working together because we were writing music for films and TV and things, but just not appearing as Devo.  So, we started playing again and really enjoyed it, and then kind of upped it every year a little bit to, like, a week, then two weeks a year, then three weeks a year.  Somewhere along the line – I have a company over here and we license a lot of Devo tracks and the Wes Anderson score for commercials.  We write new music, but we also just license a lot of things.  Somewhere along the line about two years ago, an agency called us and they were doing a Dell spot and they said, “We want to license a Devo song.”  And we just said, “Would you be interested in a new one that nobody’s ever heard?”  And they went, “Those things exist?”  And we said, “They could easily.”  Because we had just been playing some shows, and while we were at sound check we were just screwing around writing some things and had like three or four things that we had put together, and sent them to them – just these kind of sketches, we sent a couple different ones that we thought were both possible.  And they said they’d love to hear us finish that song because they thought that could be perfect for their spot, so we did the song and it came out really nice.  I thought, “OK, that’s the end of it.  We did a song.  They licensed it for a commercial and now we have a Devo song, but who wants to do a record anymore?”  The business was hard enough back when you used to be able to sell a couple million records, and now it’s like it seemed impossible and it didn’t seem that interesting.

When we did the song – it was called “Watch Us Work It” [check it out on The Playlist]– through it, we met these guys who had a band called the Teddybears.  They were kind of Devo fans from Sweden and they were like, “You should do a record.”  I was kind of like, “I don’t really know what the motivation is to do a record.  How do you not just lose money?”  They said, “Well, we just put out a record last year, and we sold 30,000 copies and we’re unknown.”  And I’m like, “I sold that many singles out of our apartment in Akron, Ohio just about.”  I’m thinking that’s a terrible number, but he said, “We licensed the record for $5 million.”  So I thought, “OK, that’s it.  It really is a new time where it takes a new business model to survive.”  You don’t survive off of record sales anymore the way you used to.  What we had already even kind of learned is that record sales and live performances, in the minds of fans, had kind of exchanged places.  Where thirty years ago, we would play the Forum and sell it out – we were selling it out at $6 a ticket.  That wasn’t really any money for the band to take home at the end of a tour.  You’d play all these shows and you’d be getting less than what a schoolteacher makes.  But now it’s different.  Now, tickets are more expensive.  So, although kids who don’t really see a value in music that they can download for free off the Internet, they don’t have the same connection to it as I did. *CLICK TO LISTEN* A piece of vinyl was like this icon when I was a kid.  It was like this iconographic clue about the world and how it worked, and you collected those things, and the ones you collected were the pieces of information about the world that were important to you, and it said something about you, and it said something about how you were preparing yourself for the real world even, you know, like when you’re a kid and you’re collecting music.  So, although kids nowadays lost seeing a value in music – they can download albums and albums and albums, a thousand songs for free today, if they want to . . .

Yeah, it’s like we’re leaving a tactile age and entering one where everything exists in the air.

Yeah, it’s an idea.  But, on the other hand, they’ve attached meaning to the live performance because that’s a moment in time, and you’re all exchanging oxygen and nitrogen with each other.  Everybody’s breathing, you’re all changing molecules there in real space and real time.  So, that was kind of like the first clue that it is a different world.  It kind of made us think, “This is the world that we were looking for back in 1976 when we put our first single out.”  We never thought of Devo as a band, even.  We thought of Devo as an idea and more like an agitprop group.  We thought that at our best, Devo would be like Andy Warhol’s Factory.  You know, like thirty years before Blue Man Group, we wanted to send out four or five Devos out to tour, and we’d never have to leave the warehouse where we were creating all this stuff.  We would just be back there, and we would be writing things, and making graphics, and writing songs and putting together live shows and then sending out people that would go be Devo on the road.  We didn’t think of Devo as being five guys.  We thought of Devo as being an idea.

Has that idea changed over the years?

Well, yes and no.  I mean, we were kids.  We were little kids back then, you know?  Now we’re like damaged old men [laughs].  You know, we fought with the record industry, and the entertainment industry and with life in general for quite a few years – since 1976.  So, things are definitely different, but at the same time, the interesting thing is I think our perception of what Devo was and what Devo was about is fairly intact.  I think Devo is still, you know, we were pro zero-population-growth back in the ’70s, and we’re still kind of in that place now.  It’s kind of like simple math to me, and it was even back then – that three billion people can kind of fit on the planet fairly comfortably at the same time, and there are enough resources for it to work; nine billion people are too many.  I’m not anti humans.  Because, nine billion people . . . go humans, go!  Nine billion people are great, just you don’t need them all at the same time.  You don’t need them in the same century.  You don’t need nine billion people in the year 2020.

You adopted, right?

I adopted, and quite honestly, when my wife backed me into a corner about having kids, and I was like, “It’s antithetical to my personal beliefs,” and she suggested adoption, and I went through it and realized what an incredible, wonderful experience it is to have children, I became much more empathetic and sympathetic with people who feel the need to breed.

That’s got a nice ring to it, “The need to breed.”  Could be a song title.

[laughs]  Adoption is such a great solution to a lot of problems – I mean, even now, Haiti is going to be supplying us with a lot of children that are lost and need to be cared for.  Adoption is great, because, among other things, you never have to recycle again.  You end up reducing the carbon footprint by a number that you could recycle every piece of paper you ever touched in your life, and it wouldn’t have the same impact.  So, I don’t recycle anymore [laughs].  I’m kidding.

You’re going to be 60 years old this year, right?

Yeah, shocking as that sounds.

I’m always interested in artists who started with such a strong, gutsy point-of-view, like Devo did, and seeing if that point-of-view mellows or changes as you get older.

I still believe in the same tenets we believed in.  We always kind of felt like humans needed to protect themselves from being led by imperfect leaders and being exploited by cruel money-grubbers and power-seekers.  In spite of recognizing de-evolution and calling it what it is, which is maybe the missing link between creationism and Darwinism, we also just see it as something that, in your own way, being aware of it gives you the ability to counteract it.  And, as much as in some ways it seems like Devo is a pessimistic band, we were actually, I think, extremely optimistic, because we always felt like the human mind had the ability to reverse itself and reverse the trend that [sighs] it hasn’t reversed so far.  On a global level, it hasn’t happened.  It’s like we’re still trying to fulfill the Mayan calendar, I think.

Would you say the new music is an evolution (pardon the word choice) from old Devo?

We kind of did some bold things with this record.  You talk about what’s changed in Devo over the last 30 years – I think something that’s changed is a somewhat more sophisticated approach to music and different tools that allow us to voice ourselves in ways that we didn’t do back in the day.  That had a lot to do with being early pioneers in electronic music, and things that we didn’t know what we were doing, honestly.  We were experimenting, as much as anything else.  And, to get that same kind of experimentation now, we’ve gone to a place where I’m sure we’re going to have our fair share of Devo fans that are shocked by the record.  But, we’re also hoping that we’re going to connect with people that wouldn’t already be the choir, you know?  Those that it might not have ever occurred to them that there was something called Devo ever, or it wouldn’t even matter because they’re listening to something that is fresh and that is, hopefully, entertaining in a way that they’re not familiar with.  We’ll see what happens with the record.  It’s an experiment for us.  There were easier ways to do it, and in some ways, I had this strong desire to make 12 songs that sounded totally interchangeable with our first or second album.  But then, after we started writing things, and that’s like the first place that they went to, we were kind of like, “Well, let’s think this out more,” and they became more modern.  We decided, if we were really true to Devo, and Devo just started today, we wouldn’t be doing music that was historical

Something I find very interesting about your life and what Devo ended up being is that you were present at the Kent State shootings in 1970, right?

We were lucky enough to be at school that day.

I find it interesting because I think that moment was the death of the American dream, the death of the sense that the government was here to protect us, and the birth of a sort of modern American cynicism.  Do you think that experience had an effect on the music you ended up making with Devo?

In a lot of ways, it was a major component for creating Devo.  Jerry and I and then my brothers and his brother, we were all musicians at that time.  Jerry and I had met in the art department – we were both visual artists, and we were in bands after school to help pay for our schooling.  I was more into experimental music – John Cage, and synth stuff, you know, Walter Carlos and things like that – and he was more into the blues.  Our school closed down that Spring in May, so that we didn’t get to finish out the Spring semester. All summer it was closed and you couldn’t really go on campus, so it didn’t really open again until September.  So, between May and September, Jerry was coming over to my place, and we were trying to figure out what was going on, and what we were living through and what we were seeing going on in the world.  And we decided that we were observing de-evolution rather than evolution.  And we started writing music at that time, and he came from a background of the blues.  I felt like he was like the caveman counterpart to, I was kind of like the spaceman side of it, looking for sounds that had nothing to do with what other synthesizer players or keyboard players were doing at the time.  I didn’t really have any interest in Keith Emerson, or Rick Wakeman, or Emerson Lake and Palmer, or Yes or things like that.  *CLICK TO LISTEN* The prog rock stuff wasn’t really my cup of tea, but I liked that a synthesizer made noises like a dirty vat of burning oil, or V-2 rockets, or mortar blasts or a fluorescent light tube fizzling out.  I liked that I could get those kinds of sounds out of it.  And, so it was kind of like Jerry Flintstone and Mark Jetson were writing music using both of those influences at the time.  That was the sonic portion of Devo, how it started.

We ended up recruiting our little brothers to play in the band with us because nobody else in Ohio – at the time, it wasn’t popular to write music.  Bands did cover songs.  Pretty much all through the first half of the ’70s, if you went to hear a live band in Akron, Ohio, you weren’t going to hear somebody play original music; you were going to hear somebody play cover tunes.  So you’d hear the stuff that was on the radio.  You’d hear one song by the Box Tops, and one song by Eric Burdon and the Animals, and so there wasn’t really any support for us to be writing music at the time – especially weird music that was very strange sounding.  Probably the closest thing you could compare early Devo music to was sort of a semi-electronic version of Captain Beefheart.

You talked about being a visual arts student.  That’s interesting because Devo was and is still such a visual band.  Were visual arts important to you in your concept of what you wanted Devo to be?

Absolutely.  When we really knew how important it was going to be that we were visual artists was, in 1974, a friend of ours who had gone to school with us at Kent State, he had moved to Minneapolis to work on commercials, but he came back at Christmas time, and he walked into where we were rehearsing – *CLICK TO LISTEN* my brother and Jerry had an apartment in Akron, and we used to rehearse in the basement there, write songs in the basement – and this guy Chuck came over and he held up a Popular Science magazine, and on the cover it was like some young middle-American couple.  I think the guy had on like a V-neck sweater over a yellow shirt, kind of thing, and penny loafers, and she was a typical housewife looking woman.  And they’re smiling, and they’re holding up this disc the same size as an album, a 12-inch LP, which is how you bought your music back then, but it was shiny, metallic and it was called a laser disc.  And in the article, it said, “Laser discs: By Christmas, everyone will have them.”  And we were like, “They’re the same size as an LP, but instead of just music, it’s music and pictures?”  We went, “That’s it.  It’s the death of rock ‘n’ roll.  It’s starting right here, right now.  Rock ‘n’ roll is dead.  Sound and vision is the art form of the future, and that’s us!  That’s where we belong.”  And so, we started making music, Devo music, in 1974 – we decided we were making music for laser discs [laughs].

Is it true that you are legally blind without your glasses?

Yeah, it’s not that uncommon.  It just means that I have a really bad astigmatism and extreme myopia.

Does that have anything to do with why you became a visual artist?

Well, it does.  Even in kind of the most by-chance way.  There are five kids in my family, and this is not atypical either.  Kids often-times get overlooked, and you can’t tell they can’t see anything until you compare them to other kids that are reading or doing real life things, because a kid that can’t see doesn’t know it.  If you can see just enough light and dark to make it around a room and run around and play, and kids are throwing a ball, and it may hit you in the head, but you’re happy, and you keep running around because you don’t know that it’s any different for anybody else.  You think everybody’s seeing the same thing.  They just kind of laugh because you run into the tree and they don’t [laughs].  It wasn’t until I was almost all the way through second grade that I got tested – finally, the teachers thought, “We’re making him stand in the corner every single day, and we’re spanking him once a week because we say, ‘Mark, what are the numbers on the board,’ and he says, ‘What’s a board?’”  So, they tested me, and they said, “Oh my God, he can’t see the big ‘E’ on an eye chart from 12 inches away.  So, I got glasses when I was seven years old.  *CLICK TO LISTEN* I got glasses right before my eighth birthday, and I got in a car and my dad drove me home, and I remember seeing clouds and trees – I mean, not the part I run into, the bark part – I saw the top of a tree.  I had never seen what the top of a tree looked like.  I had never seen a roof of a house, I had never seen smoke, I had never seen a bird fly, I had never seen the sun or clouds.  And I came over a hill, and I was stunned.  I was so excited.  And the next day, I was drawing pictures.  And I just remember the teacher who had been cuffing me on the side of the head, and totally frustrated with me, and disciplining me every day, and writing letters to my parents about how I was a total asshole – she said, “Mark, you draw trees better than me.”  That was the first time a teacher had ever said anything nice.  I was struck by it, just the fact that she said something positive to me, because I had never had a teacher say anything positive to me in my life.  They were just people that hated me, once they knew me [laughs].  And I remember that that night, I went home and had a dream that I was going to be an artist.

I became obsessed with drawing.  Unfortunately, the vision thing had fucked me up to the point where I was already irretrievably a daydreamer.  And I never got over that.  I just got sent a bunch of stuff from my parents’ garage, and I saw that even in college – I remember I would make a promise to myself at the beginning of the semester.  I would say, “OK, this semester, I’m going to pay attention.  I’m going to do what they want me to do.  I’m going to be good.”  And I would look at my notebooks from that time period, and I saw that even through college, I would have really excellent notes the first couple of days, but already before the first week of school was over, I would already be starting to draw pictures in the margin [laughs].  And, by the time it got to the end of the notebook, they were all drawings.  You’d maybe see like two words:  “Test on Monday.  I’m fucked,” or something like that, and then there’d just be pictures everywhere else on the page.

I read an interview where you said you once smoked angel dust with Michael Jackson and Andy Warhol at Studio 54.  I have to hear this story.

Oh my God, yeah.  Devo – we didn’t have a record deal in the U.S.  And when we originally signed with Warner Brothers, there was litigation because they felt like we had agreed verbally to sign with them, but while we were in Germany recording an album with Brian Eno and David Bowie, Melody Maker, and Sounds, and New Music Express all had Devo on the cover, because they knew that those guys were with us in Germany and that they’d flown us there.  All these record companies started coming over and invading us on the last day or two before we left, and we had some singles we pressed ourselves in Akron, Ohio that Stiff Records had picked up and were going to distribute in Europe, and wouldn’t you know it, the three singles they picked up, five of the sides all charted.  So, on the cover of Melody Maker, there’s a picture of David Bowie’s face in the corner of the magazine, and then there’s a big picture of Devo in these weird yellow working outfits, and out of David Bowie’s mouth, his quote is, “Devo:  They are the band of the future.”  Then all of a sudden, we get people like Richard Branson, who is the same age as us.  He comes flying over and he managed to talk us into signing with him a record deal for Europe.  And he did because we were Sex Pistols fans.  That was the only reason – we didn’t know what we were doing.  So, we get back to the U.S. and we don’t have a deal yet, and Warner hasn’t gone into a battle with Virgin to get U.S. and most of the world rights for Devo.

*CLICK TO LISTEN (SERIOUSLY)* So, these people from Columbia Records – this woman, Susan Blonde, who was on a TV show in New York at the time, it was something Screw magazine had on called “The Blue Show,” and she was this pretty, thirty-something year old woman who had been in Andy Warhol movies, and she had this heavy Jewish New York accent, large beautiful breasts, and she would sit there topless on a cable show, and that was like mind-blowing for people back in the day before cable was really around – she called me up and said, “Hey, I want to talk to you about Devo.  You want to go out with me tonight?”  And I said, “OK.”  And she said, “We’re going to go out with Andy Warhol and Michael Jackson.”  And I went, “Sounds good to me.”  So she came over and picked me up at my hotel room.  Andy had some guy with him that was a protégé at the time, some young guy.  So there were just the five of us sitting at Studio 54, and Michael was very quiet, and he was still black back in those days, and he had just finished doing “The Wiz,” so he had like a big apple hat and patchwork suede outfit.  He was very quiet.  I was still from Akron, Ohio, and didn’t even have an apartment or a car or anything back there, so I felt very self-conscious being in blue jeans – no I think I even had a Dickies worker outfit.  I had like a janitor’s outfit because that was kind of what Devo was into at the time.  But I felt really self-conscious in this place because it was all these really groovy people, and they were listening to Donna Summer and stuff.  So, Michael Jackson is sitting next to me, and all I notice is he’s handing me something, and it’s a joint.  So, I’m like, “OK, we don’t have this stuff in Ohio.  I’m going to try this out,” you know, because nobody had any money so we couldn’t afford drugs.  So, I took a big hit, and I went to pass it on to somebody sitting on the other side, and they’re chattering on with somebody else, and the music’s really loud, and I’m trying to hand it to them, and they’re not taking it, so I go, “Well, don’t want it to go out.”  So I took another hit, and I ended up with like two or three big hits of this joint.  Finally, Susan, this woman, she goes, “Come on, let’s go dance.”  I go, “I don’t know how to dance.  I can’t do that.”  So, she’s going, “Come on.”  And she pulls me out, and she makes me stand over next to the dance floor, and she goes out and she’s dancing.  And they have these towers that are light towers that look like at a drag strip where they’ve got like six lights up and down the side, but it’s a three-sided thing.  So there’s like six light bulbs going up and down, like old outside spotlights, you know, like the colored spotlights you can still buy at a hardware store, like the cheapest ones.  And they had like six of those on each side, and these things lowered down – there were nine towers – and they lowered down right above everybody’s heads at the dance floor.  It was all very rudimentary special lighting effects back in those days – like a disco ball, stuff like that.

*CLICK TO LISTEN (SERIOUSLY)* Anyhow, so I’m standing there, and I’m feeling uncomfortable while this woman’s out there dancing, and she’s having a great old time, and I’m like, “I really don’t fit in to this crowd that well.”  All of a sudden, these light fixtures start coming down, you know, they’re bringing them down and they’re twirling in the middle of the floor, but they lower them too far, and they’re not just turning around like augur bits, they’re coming down and they’re swinging like weed-whackers.  And I’m like, “Oh my God, that guy should be careful.”  And they come down and they start clipping people on the back of the head.  And I’m watching people get hit with these things, and there’s blood going everywhere, and I’m like, “Oh my God, what am I looking at?”  And I look over at Susan who’s dancing, and she’s going, “Come on, come on,” and she’s motioning for me to come out and dance with her.  And I’m like, “No, look what’s happening,” and it’s really loud music, and she can’t hear me, and I’m like frozen in place, and she’s going, “Come on, let’s dance,” trying to get me to dance with her.  And these people are getting hit in the head, and she comes over and goes, “What’s going on?”  And I go, “Can’t you see what’s happening to those people?  They’re getting hit in the head with the light fixtures.”  And I turn and look again, and it’s not happening.  And she looked at me, and she goes, “Did you smoke some of that angel dust?”  And I go, “What’s that?”  She goes, “Oh my God.”  Then, we go back over, and she’s dragging me by the collar at this point.  She can’t believe she’s with somebody who’s totally stoned on angel dust, and she goes to Andy and Michael, and she goes, “I gotta take him home.  He’s all screwed up.”  So, she dropped me off at my hotel room, and I sat there and fried for hours in bed by myself that night.  That was my introduction to both Studio 54 and angel dust.

You must get this all the time, but I have to ask it.  Are we not men?

*CLICK TO LISTEN* We are Devo.  Did I answer it right?

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Buy this album now: Q: Are We Not Men?  A: We Are Devo

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