ARE WE NOT MEN? WELL, ARE WE? [544]

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. 

GIVE THE PAST A SLIP [515]

DEVO, part 1/3: https://www.leighspence.net/2025/09/its-not-to-late-to-whip-it-511.html

DEVO, part 2/3: https://www.leighspence.net/2025/10/what-we-do-is-what-we-do-514.html

Back in May 2018, I began an article like this: “When you can no longer tell yourself that all will be OK in the end, and how it can’t possibly get any worse, you confide in the relentless march of time: it must be over soon.”

This referred to the term in office of the 45th President of the United States, well before their replacement and re-election. I continued: “What I do know is that everything will find its centre, or equilibrium once more, even if it has to make a new one, as people take stock of where everything has reached.” I later clarified that, “I hope it is clear that this isn’t a repudiation of the way politics is currently conducted in the United States, but of the way conduct is currently conducted.”

The heavy subject matter was my recognising how the philosopher Jacques Derrida’s concept of “deconstruction” was confused with “destruction”, a continuing reassessment over wholesale replacement: “Derrida had to explain that the notion of there being a ‘centre’ was a functional one, as there had to be a centre that helped to form our understanding. Then again, when all you have is the text, the words, to hand, you have to see them in the sense of how they have been used.” This led on to the President’s choice of words in public, on social media, and so on.

The title I gave this article was “You’ll Never Live It Down Unless You Whip It”, incorrectly contracting “You will” from the lyrics of DEVO’s biggest hit in the United States – in the UK, it was their cover of “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction”, but more about that later.

I always understood “Whip It” as being more than the cracking of a whip – the second line is “give the past a slip”, an immediate clue that something else is up here – but the song’s video, of a woman’s clothes being whipped away from them, was DEVO’s giving in to the literal and sexual interpretation made by people of the lyrics, rather than accepting them as faux motivational statements that mask the use of violence to solve problems. Infamously, the later song “Through Being Cool” is aimed at “the ninnies and the twits” that misunderstood DEVO in the wake of “Whip It”, the lyrics as playfully direct as possible: “Waste those who make it tough to get around”, and “Put the tape on erase / Rearrange a face / We always liked Picasso anyway”.

I am sure I have previously said that I use song lyrics to title these articles as a primitive mode of search engine optimisation, catching people searching for what they think they have heard. DEVO have also talked about using the tactics of Madison Avenue advertising in getting their message about de-evolution to people. But what both things appear to prove is that people don’t listen closely to lyrics, but those who do are justly rewarded.

One of the best song lyrics I have heard comes from “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction”, written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards: “Well I’m watching my TV, and a man comes on and tells me how white my shirts can be, but he can’t be a man ‘cause he doesn’t smoke the same cigarettes as me.” Richards was asked about this line in 1971, in an interview with “Rolling Stone" magazine, and he starts sounding like me talking about Jacques Derrida:

“A lot of them are completely innocent. I don’t think that one is. It might have been. I don’t know if it was a sly reference to drugs or not. After a while, one realizes that whatever one writes, it goes through other people, and it’s what gets to them. Like the way people used to go through Dylan songs. It don’t matter. They’re just words. Words is words.”

An ongoing theme on this website, since the first article in May 2016, is “all they have are words”, and everything that means. Now that writing about DEVO, a band for whom “In The Beginning Was The End”, has brought me back around to where I started, I feel that, next time, I need to see how I should follow another of their statements: “mutate, don’t stagnate”.

WHAT WE DO IS WHAT WE DO [514]

There is a lot going on here...

Following a new thrill down the rabbit hole is energising, and I am not ready to climb back out of the DEVO cave since writing about the artistic group a few weeks ago, because I am not done with comprehending the extent of their creativity.

This has been understanding the DEVO did not start as a band, but more as an exploration of agit-prop art – music was also among its members’ capability, both Gerald Casale and Mark Mothersbaugh having played in bands, and proved to be such a fruitful avenue for expressing their ideas that it became the major way of disseminating it, causing most casual observers to believe they were a band first... one that had a strong visual identity and philosophical grounding.

This has been realising how easy it is, in our current connected times, to get your own work out – DEVO Inc. was founded in 1978 as the group planned to self-release everything, divisions including Booji Boy Records; DEVO Vision for releasing the “video albums” they anticipated will become the norm; and Recombo DNA Labs, presumably the artistic equivalent of Laboratoire Garnier. They would later acquire a manager and record deals, but continued to make art among those compromises to the music industry as it then stood. Their latest album, 2010’s “Something for Everybody”, turned the capitalism, focus groups and press releases into part of the performance, bringing attention to the accepted parts of the industry machine. 

This is being confronted by Mothersbaugh’s crescendo of yeah-yeah-yeahs in “Uncontrollable Urge”, a song ostensibly about masturbation, while deconstructing two Beatles songs, “She Loves You” and “I Want to Hold Your Hand”. The jerky movement of the alien choreography of live performances for this song continue to this day, including the final formation at its end, Mothersbaugh and Casale sharing the microphone on the final yeah-yeah-yeah, cementing their claim as the de-evolution of Lennon and McCartney.

This has been dealing not with earworms, but earwasps, with irritatingly catchy bass and synth lines, glued together by Bob Mothersbaugh’s lead guitar, topped with wonderfully observed lyrics. A particular favourite is “Modern Life”, which may have been a demo recorded in 1982, eventually finished in 1998 for use in a video game, but it has infectiously catchy call-and-response lyrics: “It’s a modern life, but it’s not what you’re looking for”, and “It’s a modern life, but it reads better on TV”, followed by “wah-oh, it’s a modern life” or “wah-oh, like it came from a zoo”, with the later refrain of “Time to pay up for the fuck up”, one you could not have made.

This has been trying to find if the B-side song “Mecha-Mania Boy” has ever been released on CD. This synth-heavy piece has been a favourite for years, the story of a delinquent being: “In a crowd or all alone / No one's laughing anymore / Now he wants to know your human's name”. This may be a case of trawling the many compilations and re-releases of DEVO songs and albums over the years, an endless mixing and recontextualising of their back catalogue, before I find when it was made, and how much money someone wants for it.

This has been learning that, through many interviews that Gerald Casale has given that mention the massacre at Kent State University on 4th May 1970, that he considers himself lucky that, having concluded that protest had become a dead end in his country, he found a creative outlet for dealing with that, one influence by the subversive practices of advertisers on Madison Avenue than in organisations like the Weathermen. This makes DEVO’s eventual 2009 cover of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s “Ohio”, a song about the massacre finally performed by people that were there, all the more poignant and impactful.

This has been my thinking about what this means for the current moment. I began writing here in 2016, having recognised a febrile time of elections, the Brexit vote, and what felt like the death of a generation of pop culture – David Bowie, Prince, George Michael, Leonard Cohen, Sir George Martin, Sir Terry Wogan, Victoria Wood, Carrie Fisher, Muhammad Ali. That febrility has not subsided, instead exploited by opportunism: AI, far-right politics, clampdowns on free speech and civil liberties by all sides. The utopian view of the future didn’t arrive, so this must be de-evolution... but DEVO didn’t want to be right. I don’t think the group wanted to be interviewed in 2025 as sages of a world gone wrong, but here we are, and I am not done thinking about it.

Seriously, it's DEVO part 3 next time.

IT’S NOT TO LATE TO WHIP IT [511]

"New Traditionalists" alternative album cover

Having only discovered the genius of David Bowie after he died, and becoming enamoured with Kate Bush out of embarrassment for not having any of her albums [https://www.leighspence.net/2024/01/do-you-wanna-know-how-it-feels-432.html], I have, at the very least, understood DEVO, the “de-evolutionary” New Wave band and multimedia project, while it is still possible to see them live. As their catalogue of videos are restored and re-released to their YouTube channel, their work remains as vital and relevant as ever.

I first encountered DEVO many years ago, having had the name “Mark Mothersbaugh” drummed into my head as a child through his opening theme for the cartoon series “Rugrats”, also writing the incidental music alongside his brother Bob. I was pleasantly surprised by the big hits, formed of spiky synthesisers and guitars, driving rhythms and direct lyrics: “Whip It”, “Jocko Homo”, their idiosyncratic cover of the Rolling Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction”, and “Through Bring Cool”, a song so soaked with smart-ass attitude over being misunderstood – “eliminate the ninnies and the twits” and “time to show those evil spuds what’s what” – that I will never let go of it.

If I only had DEVO’s songs, that would be enough. “Concept albums” are such a ubiquity that I hadn’t considered how much further DEVO took the notion of a “concept”. Indeed, co-founder and co-lead singer Gerard Casale described “de-evolution” as a “technique”, a philosophy informing the group’s outlook and work. 

Casale and friend Bob Lewis had already formed the initial idea that mankind was regressing, instead of continuing to evolve, through increasing dysfunction in society and herd mentality, when Mark Mothersbaugh brought to them a Christian anti-evolutionary tract titled “Jocko Homo: The Heaven-Bound King of the Zoo”, written by a Dr B.H. Shadduck in 1924. Having attempted to read it, I saw it was trying to say that the meeting of liberalism, rationalism and Darwinism had attempted to pass off skeletons as evidence of progress:

“Old bones only prove that brute races and families have passed and will pass. Rudimentary organs prove that equipment not used, be it a wing or a soul, becomes atrophied. THAT IS NOT EVOLUTION, it is the opposite. It is going the wrong way. Show us a species that is coming or an organ that is in the making. Show us how to grow wings where there are none.” [Capitals and italics are as per the original edition.]

The tract later states that “The scholar who believes the ‘fact’ of evolution, doubts the infallibility of the Bible. I know of no exception.” The DEVO song “Jocko Homo” provides its own answer: “All together now, God made man, but he used the monkey to do it / Apes in the plan and we're here to prove it / I can walk like an ape, talk like an ape, I can do what monkey do / God made man, but a monkey supplied the glue.”

The “Devolutionaries” that make up DEVO – its classic 1976-84 line-up is Gerald Casale (vocals/bass/keyboards) and Mark Mothersbaugh (vocals/keyboards), their brothers Bob Mothersbaugh (“Bob 1”, lead guitar) and Bob Casale (“Bob 2”, rhythm guitar and keyboards), and Alan Myers (drums) – present as identically-dressed agents of change, shedding light how humanity is devolving, while technology and cybernetic systems rapidly advance, encouraging people to recognise their plight, and recalibrate and reorganise as a result. 

I may have made this sound heavy-going for a very fun, surrealist and Dada-influenced band, but “Whip It” is a string of motivational statements about dealing with problems, its video only making the “whip” more literal. A further element is potatoes, referencing people and fans of the band as “spuds”, equating with a lowly vegetable often underestimated, as in the line from the song “I’m A Potato”: “I'm a spudman, I got eyes all around”.

While DEVO did not form in answer to it, the shootings by the Ohio National Guard of thirteen unarmed anti-war protestors at Kent State University in Ohio on 4th May 1970, killing four, loom large over the pre-history of the group – Gerald Casale was at the protest, one of his friends being killed there, while Mark and Bob Mothersbaugh were attending another campus at the university that day. Despite their proximity, there is no DEVO song specifically about the incident – this was left to distant observers like Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, John Denver, Bruce Springsteen, the Steve Miller Band, The Isley Brothers, Genesis and so on – but it underlined the serious intent of highlighting “de-evolution”.

As early adopters of music videos, conceiving and producing them themselves, DEVO completed a short film in 1976 titled “In the Beginning Was the End: The Truth About De-Evolution”, building a narrative around performances that include characters General Boy and son Booji Boy. The film includes a “De-Evolutionary Oath”, adopting and repurposing a number of “Trick Rules” the “Jocko Homo” tract had “identified” as excuses for evolution theory, reappropriated as calls to action. For the sake of completion, these are: wear gaudy colours or avoid display; lay a million eggs or give birth to one; the fittest shall survive yet the unfit may live; be like your ancestors or be different we must repeat!

My favourite DEVO album is “New Traditionalists”, released in 1981 – it had to be, with “Through Being Cool”, a riposte to the band becoming “cool” after the release of “Whip It”, and employing a darker, more synthesised sound, albeit one caused by the master tape shedding oxide. “Beautiful World” may qualify as one of the best DEVO songs of all, a simple hymn to how great the world is... “for you, for you, for you”. The accompanying video creates a utopian montage of American cultural life, becoming darker and more menacing before the punchline of “It’s not for me” is reached.

I also love how they masqueraded as a corporation, press releases and all, for their most recent album, 2010’s “Something for Everybody”. I now know the famous red ziggurat “energy dome” hats were influenced by the work of scientist Wilhelm Reich, and that I would need to insert a hard hat liner not just for comfort, but to allow the hat to collect energy properly. I find it hilarious that they created the fake Christian pop band Dove, in order so they could appear as their own opening act, one that couldn’t be better than they were. I’m still not sure about the deliberately anaemic cover versions of their own songs in the “EZ Listening Muzak” tapes, originally created to stop live venues playing other bands’ songs before their concerts, but I think they are growing on me – the “EZ” version of “Come Back Jonee” sounds like I may have heard it in an episode of “Rugrats”.

This hasn’t been a case of me recounting lore or building a story. I have been genuinely fascinated by discovering DEVO’s vast body of work, and wanted to share my findings. At the same time, I hope it is as clear as possible that art and politics are not separate, and all art is political as a result – even if the group were just reflecting their current time, that engagement also confirms their intentions in creating that work, and in their continuing to perform it. This notion forms the basis of the art critic John Berger’s book “Permanent Red”, published in 1960:

“But why should an artist’s way of looking at the world have any meaning for us? Why does it give us pleasure? Because, I believe, it increases our awareness of our own potentiality. Not of course our awareness of our potentiality of artists ourselves. But a way of looking at the world implies a certain relationship with the world, and every relationship implies action.”

And so, I love DEVO, and I love how their work energises me.