The full story of my vertiginous journey into the music of Devo will be told in full detail one day, but until then, an infamously mythologised moment in the group’s history was finally unleashed in full on Friday 19th June 2026, and I was of course ready – I had it on pre-order since the end of March.
“Nitrous Nightmare” is a double-vinyl album (or double-CD, in my case) of one of Devo’s first few live performances, on 31st October 1975 at a private Halloween party in support of the jazz and avant-garde artist Sun Ra, recorded by them to a four-track reel-to-reel tape. Accounts of this event are of Devo’s setlist running so long, having refused to stop playing, that the audience became openly hostile, threatening the group, with their instruments finally being unplugged for them. Another account was Devo overran so much that Sun Ra would never get to perform, and that a rendition of their signature song “Jocko Homo” approached half an hour in length.
Some of this performance appeared in 1990 on “The Mongoloid Years”, a compilation of early live recordings, but “Nitrous Nightmare” is, as far as I know, the entire extant recording of the set, all one hour and twenty-two minutes of it. The British label Futurismo have given this release the full treatment of photographs, artwork and Halloween imagery, collaged together in a sickly green and yellow, with secondary oranges and pinks.
The title “Nitrous Nightmare” was chosen for this release by Devo co-founders Gerald Casale and Mark Mothersbaugh, as nitrous oxide turned out to be a major ingredient of the evening for the audience, along with alcohol and other drugs, and store-bought Halloween costumes. For their part, dressed in grey overalls, blue hard hats and face masks, Devo appeared as normal. Mark Mothersbaugh as “Booji Boy” on keyboards is the enduring character from a line-up where all then-four members adopted personas: Gerald Casale as “Chinaman” on bass, Bob Mothersbaugh as “Clown” on guitar, and Jim Mothersbaugh as “Jungle Jim” on self-made electronic drums.
With fifty years of mythologising now over, it is time to listen. The recording wobbles into life with the one “cover” Devo would perform that evening, as Bob Mothersbaugh sings Mark’s reworking of “Secret Agent Man”, followed by two more songs before Casale calls for a DJ to come to the stage, seemingly as a way to seal approval for the group to continue playing: “I know everyone’s looking at their programme right now... there’s a change in the programme... after that introduction, Murray reminded us that we’d better do it now”. That song, “Buttered Beauties”, is one of the initial “Hardcore” Devo songs that would not make it to later albums, although “Secret Agent Man”, “Smart Patrol” and “Auto Modown” soon will.
The Devo sound here is bluesier, rockier and noticeably slower, led by Casale’s bass and Bob Mothersbaugh’s guitar, while Mark Mothersbaugh’s punctuating keyboard sounds feel like a starting point with no tradition before it, although I still think the effect played in “Jocko Homo” sounds like a tiger. Jim Mothersbaugh’s electronic drums are interesting: while they do not match the force and drive that Alan Myers would later produce for Devo with a regular drum kit, you remind yourself that you normally hear electronic beats like these when they are regimentally programmed, not played manually like they are here. It is a tribute to Jim Mothersbaugh that his skill as a drummer is not overshadowed by his having built the kit.
The audience is not heard all that much on the recording up to now, with distant clapping, whistles and the odd comment. It sounds like the evening is running well enough until Casale, commenting on whether they have cleared the auditorium, says that “you just can’t take it... OK, here’s a man song, no Booji Boys”. To that end, the first public performance of “Jocko Homo” turns into eleven minutes of goading the audience. I remember the first time I heard the album version, thinking “oh, come on” upon hearing “we must repeat” after enduring “are we not men / we are Devo” sixteen times in a row. This time, I know what is going on: keep asking “are we not men?” until you pierce the surface of those who think they can say “no”. The moment one of the audience yells, “you’re not men, you’re fucking assholes”, the song then becomes, “is he not a man?” and “they are not men”. The sheer length of this version of “Jocko Homo”, which doesn’t yet include the middle section of “God made man, but he used the monkey to do it”, will begin to grate, until you laugh at how irritated you became. This is now my favourite version of the song, fully appreciating why “we must repeat”.
From then, you can hear the audience deteriorating, scandalised at their tastes being confronted, the sounds of beer cans hitting the stage. Devo’s answer? “We came here to observe your hatred.” After three more songs, proving they could rock as well as anyone – notably, the synth melody intro to “Chango” would be reused in 1988 for the song “Plain Truth”, on the “Total Devo” album – the question “want anymore?” ends the recording – nothing sudden action, and no popping sounds of plugs being pulled. Devo apparently decamped to a fish restaurant across the road for dinner, returning in their regular clothes to watch Sun Ra, no-one realising who they were.
For what I have heard about how badly this performance apparently went, “Nitrous Nightmare” was a rather good listen. If you have listened to Devo’s older pre-1978 material, recorded mostly in the seclusion of a basement, hearing them being performed in such a confrontational manner, with the audience reacting entirely as expected, is fascinating. You imagine the disparaging voices belonged to people who left before the end, satisfied they had maintained order, provided they were still able to think clearly. Other groups have been called worse, and had larger things thrown at them, but Devo made people look, then look again.
Gerald Casale’s liner notes for this release are much more extensive than those he gave to re-releases of the albums “Total Devo” and “Smooth Noodle Maps”, and read like it could be turned into a theatre or film script at a moment’s notice. I guess you had to be there, but if you did, the adrenaline worked better than the laughing gas could.
To clear up some inaccuracies I found in the notes, it was the album-oriented rock radio station WMMS-FM that held the private party at WHK Auditorium (now known as the Agora Theater & Ballroom) in Cleveland, Ohio, from which the radio station operated alongside the medium-wave WHK, then operating a hybrid country-talk format. Seemingly lining up with the “de-evolution” mindset, WMMS introduced “The Buzzard” as its mascot the previous year, a “scavenger” whose existence commented on the economic decline of its own city.
The DJ who comes to the stage after the opening songs, yelling “it’s Friday” and “you gotta go low with Devo!” is not “Murray the K” Kaufman, as implied in the liner notes. It is really the WMMS-FM DJ Murray Saul, who yelled “it’s Friday” in the same guttural way on his radio show – I guess “Murray the K” was a much less annoying Murray to remember. Murray Saul does not have a Wikipedia page, but “Murray the K”, who during the 1960s insited upon calling himself “the fifth Beatle”, does.
This Devo line-up was preserved in their later short film “The Truth About De-Evolution”, before Alan Myers joined as drummer, and Gerald Casale’s brother Bob joined on rhythm guitar, the “Bob 2” to the lead guitar of “Bob 1” Mothersbaugh. Jim Mothersbaugh left Devo to continue in electronic engineering, joining the Roland Corporation during the 1980s to help develop the MIDI technology standard that allowed musical instruments to speak to each other, something Devo had been able to benefit from for some time.
I only discovered Bad Company was a British band while writing this article, and I still cannot name any of their songs. Their first album was recorded in a former workhouse in Hampshire.
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