Episode 807 - Mark Mothersbaugh
Marc:Lock the gates!
Marc:All right, let's do this.
Marc:How are you?
Marc:What the fuckers?
Marc:What the fuck buddies?
Marc:What the fucking ears?
Marc:What the fucksters?
Marc:What the fuckadelics?
Marc:What's happening?
Marc:I'm Mark Maron.
Marc:This is my podcast, WTF, and you're listening to it.
Marc:I'm now sitting in a hotel room in Minneapolis.
Marc:This is coming to you on Monday morning, but it's Sunday morning for me.
Marc:And I am waking up after recording my new Netflix special.
Marc:too real how do you like that the mark maron too real tour uh just came to a head last night doing two shows uh to record a special for netflix here in minneapolis and i know i've been talking about it obviously if you listen to the show you know we were moving towards this but i gotta say it uh it went pretty fucking good
Marc:I want to say I'm proud of myself.
Marc:I'd like to say also that I did my job and I enjoyed it.
Marc:I want to say all those things because they're all true.
Marc:There was a lot going on, but I'll tell you about it.
Marc:Today on the show is Mark Mothersbaugh.
Marc:who many of you know from the band Devo.
Marc:I was pretty excited to talk to Mark.
Marc:Again, this happens sometimes.
Marc:Yeah, sure.
Marc:I love Devo.
Marc:Who doesn't love Devo?
Marc:Devo is very important, very important in the life of some people.
Marc:People my age remember the Devo thing when we were younger and kind of followed it through.
Marc:But Mark has done a lot of stuff and has a lot of stories and is a
Marc:a really kind of a genius guy.
Marc:So I was happy to talk to him.
Marc:And also I want to say, if you're not signed up for my mailing list, you should go do that.
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Marc:So good job to all of you who are already signed up and get my little missives every week.
Marc:And if you weren't signed up, go do it now because we'll be running more promotions before the book comes out.
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Marc:So let's...
Marc:So let's get into it.
Marc:What exactly happened?
Marc:I mean, you know, this has been coming up, you know, I've been moving towards this for weeks and I've been talking to you about, you know, bringing that hour and a half, hour 45 down to about 65 to 70 minutes of standup.
Marc:And I was sort of slacking on doing that because I get on stage and I just want to keep going.
Marc:And I don't know, it locked in over the last few days, these Midwest shows, for some reason,
Marc:Well, I mean, there's good reason.
Marc:I love playing out here in the Midwest.
Marc:The show's leading up to the show.
Marc:I did at the Orpheum in Milwaukee, which is an amazing theater, and the dressing room is probably the best dressing room ever.
Marc:There's a whole common area.
Marc:They've got records.
Marc:They've got a record player.
Marc:They've got an espresso bar.
Marc:They've got separate rooms where you can hang out in.
Marc:The theater's gorgeous.
Marc:The staff is amazing.
Marc:And, you know, it was nice.
Marc:And that was, you know, that was the first show, I think, that I really tried to lock in to the 70 minutes.
Marc:And then we went to Madison, me and my opener, this leg of the tour, Amber Preston, the amazing Amber Preston, the Midwest's own Amber Preston.
Marc:And we did the Pabst.
Marc:In Madison, which was amazing, even though there's a lot of cement involved in the past.
Marc:I've never been to a theater, and I don't know when it happened, but the actual stage floor is poured concrete.
Marc:Made me a little nervous, because I did do a Pratt Fall.
Marc:I don't want to spoil, but there was a Pratt Fall, classic comedy device, in the special.
Marc:And then by the time I got to Minneapolis, I was locked in.
Marc:And we drove.
Marc:I rented a car.
Marc:We drove across, drove four hours.
Marc:And I knew that the crew and everybody involved with the special from Netflix to the local crew to the guys they brought in from Chicago and wherever to do their jobs had one day.
Marc:They couldn't load in the night before.
Marc:They had to load in that morning and put this whole thing together in one day.
Marc:And it just always amazes me.
Marc:how a good crew can just pull this shit together.
Marc:You're dealing with a blank canvas, an empty theater.
Marc:The lighting design was great.
Marc:The sound sounded great.
Marc:The set looked great.
Marc:It was just, it was, it was, you know, to show up at 11 in the morning and nothing is built and have that moment of like, oh man, what's a, I didn't have that because I knew they would get it together.
Marc:Lynn Shelton directed and it was just like wrangled all, I mean, it looked fucking great.
Marc:It was at the Pantages here in Minneapolis.
Marc:And it was just, it was exciting.
Marc:And I got to be honest with you, I wasn't, I wasn't freaked out at all.
Marc:I mean, this is my, I don't know, not including half hour special.
Marc:Like I did a half hour for HBO back in 95, but you know, the records, my records not sold out, tickets still available, final engagement.
Marc:This has to be funny, you know, all leading up to like Thinky Pain, which was an album and my first hour plus special for Netflix.
Marc:I did more later, another hour plus special for Epix.
Marc:And then this one,
Marc:It's a lot of work.
Marc:Sometimes I just have to say that shit to look and see the evolution over the past however long I've been doing this more than half my life.
Marc:So I don't know, man.
Marc:It's an amazing thing to accomplish, really.
Marc:To be able to do your job and have these things happen because you've spent so much time doing your job.
Marc:It's a little, you know, difficult now because of the political climate and what you're up against on a day to day basis, coming through your phone, coming through your TV, coming through just the.
Marc:Fear and or and or anger, just knowing that while I was doing my show, the president of the United States was doing one of his lie, divide and terrorized hate your neighbor roadshows across the country.
Marc:The press was doing their show for, you know, to to establish the fact that facts are important and we should celebrate that.
Marc:And I was doing, you know, my little self-involved mortality themed special here in Minneapolis.
Marc:And it was really amazing.
Marc:You know, I think primarily because, you know, I know my job and, you know, I pulled the set together and everybody worked to make it happen.
Marc:And it was just stunning.
Marc:And I chose Minneapolis because people in Minneapolis have a long tradition of live performing.
Marc:They're decent people.
Marc:They're respectful audiences.
Marc:The audience was amazing.
Marc:My fans are amazing.
Marc:They're grownups, even if they're kids.
Marc:And I don't mean kids.
Marc:I mean, you know, in their 20s.
Marc:I attract a certain type of person and they know how to sit and behave and enjoy and be polite and be attentive.
Marc:And Minneapolis is all about that.
Marc:I've always loved this city and I'm glad that I did it.
Marc:Not in the winter.
Marc:But I'm excited about it.
Marc:I guess that's what I'm trying to tell you people.
Marc:I'm excited about it.
Marc:And it went well.
Marc:And I was calm.
Marc:But I did have that thing.
Marc:And this happens.
Marc:I think the first show that we taped might be a little weird.
Marc:So I don't know which show we're going to use because they were both solid.
Marc:But I kept my emotions in check.
Marc:I was level-headed.
Marc:I was underplaying the whole experience so I could just show up and do it.
Marc:And when they brought me on stage, I was overwhelmed with emotion and fighting back tears.
Marc:Again, it happened to me at Carnegie Hall.
Marc:I don't know if it's big events that I've tried to make, not big events in my mind, but I had to struggle in that first minute not to cry on stage.
Marc:And I don't know what's that about.
Marc:It's not a bad thing, but it kind of upended my plan for how I was going to open the show and the tone I was going to open the show in.
Marc:So I did my first 45 seconds trying not to cry.
Marc:But it was good tears.
Marc:It was good tears.
Marc:And, you know, I don't know, man.
Marc:It just went great, and I'm proud of it, and I'm excited for you guys to see it.
Marc:So at the end of the taping, we had the crew out.
Marc:We did a picture, and Lynn and I had ordered, like, just a shitload of donuts and pizza and sandwiches.
Marc:So, you know, trying to be healthy.
Marc:I'm trying to be healthy, but man, when you get done with a big piece of work and you get off stage and you walk into that dressing room area and there's just a firing squad of donuts and pizza, you want to be part of that.
Marc:So that's another reason why I'm a little tired.
Marc:I think I've got a dough hangover.
Marc:But again, thank you, Minneapolis.
Marc:Thank you, Netflix.
Marc:Thank you, the crew that did it.
Marc:Some guys who worked on my last special, the set designer and some of the camera guys.
Marc:And Live Nation, thank you, Lynn and Avalon, my management.
Marc:And Kelly at Avalon, David.
Marc:What is it?
Marc:I'm not accepting an award.
Marc:I'm just I just want to acknowledge that a lot of people have to come together for me to do my little selfish thing.
Marc:And they did a great job.
Marc:So Mark Mothersbaugh.
Marc:I was nervous about this because, you know, he's he's done a lot of stuff and he is sort of an inspired and interesting person.
Marc:But, you know, he's very talkative.
Marc:And it was it was it was kind of a.
Marc:An amazing conversation.
Marc:He's got this retrospective exhibition of his visual art and sonic art, and it's now on display at the Gray Art Gallery at NYU.
Marc:The exhibition is open through July 5th.
Marc:Also, if you're in the New York City area, Mark will lead a six-sided keyboard performance of his compositions this Thursday, May 4th, at the NYU Skirball Center.
Marc:You can get tickets from the Skirball box office.
Marc:That's the kind of guy he is.
Marc:This is me and Mark Mothersbaugh back in the garage.
Marc:I don't know why I can't just unload it.
Marc:You know, because you get to a point in your life and you're like, what good is this stuff?
Marc:Do you ever have that moment where you're like, what would it feel like with nothing?
Guest:Yeah, it's easy to, well, you can imagine it when you're on the road, right?
Guest:Yeah, it's great.
Yeah.
Marc:You ever get in those hotel rooms, you're like, I'm not responsible for any of this and it's clean.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I took it to the extreme accidentally once because we used to have our suitcases picked up outside of the room.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I managed to put my suitcase outside of the room while I just had my underpants on for going to bed.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so I got, luckily somebody somewhere had a yellow Devo suit I could wear on the plane and make it to the next...
Guest:Is that real?
Guest:They took you close?
Guest:Well, because we put our suitcases out, and that was back in the days where we had disposable cash.
Marc:Oh, right, right.
Marc:But it was nice that someone happened to have a Devo suit.
Marc:Luckily, somebody had something.
Marc:Someone had fashioned some industrial garment for you to wear.
Guest:so this show that it's a retrospective right yes of everything of everything uh mothers bought well um yeah it's art related um it the show has about 300 pieces of art in it 3 000 i'm sorry isn't a now but wouldn't you consider everything you do art related really
Marc:i mean wasn't that how it well sort of well i mean maybe i'm not talking about you necessarily jobs but i mean from from the inception of your thing it was an art uh compulsion yeah yes that that's that's correct so like i would think that even earlier devo performances if not you know most of them through the beginning were were somewhat performance art pieces
Guest:Well, we thought we were, to tell you the truth, we thought we were an art movement.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:We thought we were Art Devo.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And we were art students.
Guest:Devolution.
Guest:And the music thing was part of it, but it was almost accidental.
Guest:Because we thought we were interested in all the art movements that happened in Europe between World War I and World War II.
Right.
Guest:So we loved agitprop.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And we loved the stage performances that included visuals and music and motion and theater and politics.
Guest:Yeah.
Yeah.
Guest:We thought that's what we thought we were doing.
Guest:We thought that was where we were going.
Guest:And then, you know, you get a record deal and then you find out there's other people that have ideas, too, of what you're doing.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:And they want to box you in and make some money.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And you end up going down these paths that were kind of not totally intended.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Well, that interests me, though, the sort of inception of everything, because you grew up in what part of Ohio?
Guest:akron we were the we were the rubber capital of the world we were at the time and for tires and things tires and all things made out of rubber yeah and um souls and uh yeah so that was so we were a wannabe like cleveland was kind of a detroit wannabe we were a cleveland and it was just you and your brother two brothers and two sisters and both my brothers were in the band originally
Marc:So when you're growing up, what was your dad doing?
Marc:Was he in the rubber business?
Guest:Well, kind of everybody is in a way, even if they're not.
Guest:But he was a salesman.
Guest:And he was kind of like, he had kind of like a Dale Carnegie kind of, he was America is a land of opportunity kind of guy.
Guest:He had a really great, you know who he reminded me of in a way is Timothy Leary.
Guest:Really?
Marc:Except for industry.
Guest:Yeah, except he was... Yeah, he was... Not acid.
Guest:He was a different... But I mean, they were both like super positive guys.
Guest:Charismatic.
Guest:Charismatic and the kind of... They were both...
Guest:The kind of people that would look at look at people at a party in a room or something and they'd they'd shake hands with the with the guys that were the most important.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And but they'd also go check out the people that were just wall wall flowers and were just and they'd talk to him and strike up conversations.
Marc:And so he had a hustle.
Marc:He was a good salesman.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So like the shift from because it seems to me like in looking at this stuff and growing up with, you know, the first few records in high school, I remember when the first one came out that you seem to define like this.
Marc:I don't know what you would call it.
Marc:I have a hard time labeling it, but it seems like what Devo stood for in the aesthetic of Devo kind of changed.
Marc:culture a bit and certainly music like there was a sort of an industrial Americana thing that you seem to kind of like I don't know what to call it but it seems to be referenced in exactly the world that your father came from and kind of turning it on its head a little bit just visually and otherwise
Guest:Yeah, I mean, this is like old territory, but you probably know I went to Kent State and we were parts of the shooting and that kind of really affected us.
Marc:Well, let's get there because I'm sort of obsessed with that right now because I've seen things about it lately.
Marc:But, you know, when you went before you got to Kent State, I mean, it's the early 60s, right?
Marc:When you're growing up.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And like the entire culture changed.
Marc:You know, the hippie thing happened.
Marc:And like when you were in high school, what were you gravitating towards, you know, before the shift?
Yeah.
Guest:well uh i i was an artist already i knew i was when did you find that out uh i was seven and i got a pair of glasses and found out i'd been going i'd gone through second grade legally blind and and i in one day i put on a pair of glasses and i saw things i'd never seen before including clouds and telephone wires and house it went on that long
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it's not that's not uncommon.
Guest:That's that's actually pretty common that kids can function fairly well.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then all of a sudden you find out, well, they've been doing this without really being able to see anything or at least, you know, just light and dark and colors and things like that.
Guest:But if you use sound, you know, you can like guide yourself.
Guest:Yeah, and, you know, if you come up and you grab somebody by the face to look at them, they just think you're crazy and need Ritalin or something probably.
Guest:But it's, you know, once you've made an identification, then you know that that pink and blue object is Granny walking around.
Marc:Right, you can name the shapes.
Right.
Guest:But I knew that.
Guest:But that's when I decided I was an artist.
Marc:When you could see clearly.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:That moment.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:What in that moment did you think your art was going to be?
Guest:Okay.
Guest:Well, here's what happened.
Guest:The next day I was back at school and my school teacher who had been spanking me because corporal punishment was very popular in...
Guest:I guess that was 1957 or 58 or something, whatever year it was, you know, and spanking me every day and putting me in a corner and sending me to the principal's office.
Guest:She's looking over, and I had never seen trees before.
Guest:I only knew the part that was attached to the ground that you could run into.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And she said, you draw trees better than me.
Guest:And just saying that, it was the first time she'd said something nice to me.
Guest:So it was like that made me think, oh, I want to be an artist.
Marc:And that was it.
Marc:That was it.
Marc:Now, when you kind of got into high school and stuff, were you gravitating towards the kind of hippie trip?
Guest:Yeah, it was like, you know, a few years pass and then we're sitting around in a kitchen with five kids at a table and my dad's got a little portable black and white TV set.
Guest:Like now you give your kid a phone or an iPad or something to keep them busy.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he'd turn on the TV and we'd all watch Ed Sullivan.
Guest:And I remember seeing the Beatles come on Ed Sullivan.
Guest:And I go, that's why I've been tortured with keyboard lessons for the last five years.
Marc:To do that.
Guest:I knew there was a reason I had to play music because I hated music up until then.
Marc:Really?
Marc:And when you saw the Beatles, that delivered the message?
Marc:That was like, that changed it.
Marc:The outfits, the matching outfits, was that the moment where you realized matching outfits might be?
Guest:They did this crazy music.
Guest:And then, you know, and then the second time they came on, you know, it's like John Lennon not only was playing the keyboard, but he used his, I didn't know who Jerry Lee Lewis or Little Richard were.
Guest:So when I saw John Lennon go like this, I thought,
Guest:I thought, Mrs. Savory never told me you could use your elbow to play the organ.
Guest:That's amazing.
Guest:I thought he was incredible.
Guest:I thought, how did he ever think?
Guest:And not only that, he was using this keyboard that was, the black keys were white and the white keys were black.
Guest:Oh my God, I'd never seen anything like that.
Guest:It was a Vox Continental.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:and that did it so that that really i became obsessed with the the british invasion as a kid as a kid and then when did you start you know doing visual art kind of like uh collaging and stuff that was before that probably oh yeah just doodling here and there yeah i was always i was always drawing i draw every day you do yeah and um
Marc:Is it therapeutic or is it compulsion or which is it?
Guest:All of it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, it's like that's what keeps me from... I've never shot anybody or I can't even think of anybody I want to kill.
Guest:And there's a lot of horrible people out there.
Marc:But it's okay.
Marc:So you decide to go to art school.
Marc:I'm just trying to picture the shift between... Because like recently...
Marc:You know, I read the book Altamont.
Marc:I read a very thorough book on Altamont.
Marc:Oh, okay.
Marc:So, you know, so this, you know, is one of the great kind of symbolic rituals of the death of the 60s.
Marc:And then I watched a documentary by Adam Curtis that really puts forth the idea that the Kent State shootings were the end of an active political left movement.
Marc:You know, by, you know, in terms of, you know, middle to upper class kids, you know.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Having the courage to push up against authority.
Marc:You definitely I saw that at my school for sure.
Marc:I mean, you were there.
Marc:That's why I'm trying to figure out, you know, when when you're there, it's two years in.
Marc:Right.
Marc:You're two years into art school and you're doing what music or those two years.
Guest:No, I didn't study music at all.
Guest:I came in on a partial art scholarship, and the first year, I didn't know exactly what I was going to take, and then I found out about printmaking, and I fell in love with it.
Guest:I became obsessed with printmaking.
Marc:Silk screening or the actual... Screen printing.
Guest:I did screen printing, lithos, copper plates, all the different styles, but screen printing was my love because I could...
Guest:I could wait until 3.30 and all the kids, they'd hear the bell go and then they'd run off to their sorority houses and their fraternities and their bars or wherever they were going to go party.
Guest:And that meant I had the whole art department to myself between, you know, 5 at night and 5 in the morning the next day.
Guest:And so instead of...
Guest:you know, queuing up with a bunch of kids to do a print, you know, I could burn all the screens in one night.
Guest:I could then print them one color at a time.
Guest:You know, by the time I finished cleaning each screen and re-exposing it to make another color, the paper would be dried so I could take them all back and I'd print the next color and I could finish a piece of art in one night.
Guest:And so I loved school...
Guest:I hated school up until then.
Guest:K through 12 were a nightmare because I was somehow the kid with a kick me thing written on my back permanently.
Guest:You didn't have any friends?
Guest:I had a couple friends, but they were all the outcasts.
Marc:What they would call the nerd crew?
Marc:Yeah, we were the... And did you get like, you just bullied constantly?
Marc:Yeah, pretty much.
Guest:That was pretty much it.
Guest:Just somehow I fit into that.
Guest:I had the right look.
Guest:I combed my hair down like the Beatles instead of back like Elvis Presley, which kind of was upsetting the status quo.
Marc:Did you build up a resentment over that?
Marc:I mean, were you quietly raging?
Guest:Well, you know, there wasn't any way to... I had no way to... I tried fighting back...
Guest:I got held down and had my hair cut off a couple times.
Guest:And one time I had a fork and I stabbed a kid in the arm and that didn't help.
Guest:It didn't help.
Guest:The fork wasn't enough.
Guest:The fork did not.
Guest:It was inspirational for my enemies.
Guest:So it was like I hated it.
Guest:yeah high school i just it just just turned out to be a bad experience and then college was this whole other thing i disappeared into the crowd my hair grew as long as i wanted it to i could wear whatever i wanted to wear nobody cared that i was invisible and i loved that and i could go to the art department i could print art i could make decals because um graffiti wasn't worked out yet so instead i would print things
Guest:on decal paper yeah and then i dip it in water and i go around the campus you know like in the middle of the night and i put things up on on uh mirrors and windows and just this was just a an inspired act yeah it was kind of my own graffiti yeah but there was no real no one knew it was you but no one knew like what kind of stuff were you stickering
Marc:Oh, so you're way ahead of the curve on that.
Marc:You might have invented that because now I get stickers every day.
Marc:Like people send me things with stickers and I'm like, I'm 53.
Marc:What am I going to do with the sticker?
Guest:Actually, that's how I met Jerry Casale.
Guest:He was a grad student and I was a sophomore.
Guest:And he said, he came up to me at school and he said, are you the guy that's putting up pictures of astronauts holding potatoes standing on the moon?
Guest:And I go, yeah, why?
Guest:He says, what's your interest in potatoes?
Guest:And we hit it off, yeah.
Guest:What was he doing in school at that time?
Guest:He was an art major, and he was...
Guest:getting ready to graduate and was going to do a grad student show and he liked my decals.
Guest:He said, can you help me make potato man decals?
Guest:So I helped him make Spudman decals and we put them on, he blew up photos from his high school yearbook and put them hanging off of people's faces.
Guest:Potatoes.
Guest:And that was his senior project and of course the teachers thought that was immature but...
Marc:Immature, but that seems to be influenced by some of the stuff here, at least the Dada movement and whatever, right?
Marc:Oh, yeah, yeah.
Marc:Like that there was sort of a kind of absurd hilariousness to it all that, you know, something you grapple with.
Marc:You're like, is there a point?
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:Right, but just enough to, like, make people think.
Guest:Right, well, if an astronaut.
Guest:Keep them uncomfortable.
Marc:Sure, sure, sure.
Marc:What is it trying to do to me, this art?
Marc:So neither one of you were playing music yet?
Guest:We were both playing music.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He was in a blues band momentarily.
Guest:His sense of humor didn't click with them, so he was ousted.
Guest:But he was more into the blues and played a blues bass.
Guest:That came in handy later, though.
Guest:That came in great.
Guest:And what were you doing?
Guest:I was, in my freshman year, I got a call from a friend of mine who was a drummer who said,
Guest:said hey i met these guys they're vietnam vets they were football players before they went to vietnam they went over there killed people found out about drugs came back decided they wanted to start a band but none of them play an instrument and so they're putting together a band and they bought me a drum set how would you like to have a b3 organ i said that's impossible yeah no come meet these guys and i met them and they were
Guest:They were totally from, they were probably from the world that would have been kicking my butt a few years before that in high school.
Guest:But they had gone through a life-changing experience.
Guest:Kind of broke them.
Guest:And came back.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:akron had changed while they were gone because um the reason they were over in vietnam was to help american business you know like exploit third world countries and use their use their resources in expense so that you know so it's people started people started uh i mean not people the all the tire companies kind of while while vietnam war was going on they started
Guest:moving out of akron going to brazil going to asia and uh hiring people for like 12 a month instead of 12 an hour and then and these guys were people were getting hip to that the counterculture and people were yeah because they came back they thought they were going to do what they're
Guest:and their grandfathers had done.
Guest:They thought they were going to work in the factory.
Guest:And, you know, just they thought they had a steady job, and that wasn't the case.
Guest:And Akron still isn't totally recuperated from it.
Guest:I mean, there are a lot of artists that came out of Akron, probably because of that.
Guest:But that whole area, there's something about...
Guest:There's something about what's happened in this country that is valid, that they're angry about.
Marc:No, definitely.
Marc:And it's been happening for years is sort of like what I'm getting from what you're saying.
Marc:And Ohio got hit very hard.
Marc:And, you know, the reaction to that over the last five, four, five decades has been this horrible opioid epidemic, which really started in Ohio, in southern Ohio.
Marc:Yeah, I just found that out.
Guest:Do you need anything, by the way?
Marc:Yeah, what do you got?
Nice.
Marc:So you're hanging out with these vets who are kind of, you know, pushing the edge.
Guest:So I was with them.
Guest:They said if I wrote music, they would pay my room and board.
Guest:So I already had my school thing worked out.
Guest:So I would go to school every day and do art.
Guest:And then I'd come home and I'd write music.
Marc:For these dudes.
Guest:I did that for a number of years before the shootings happened at Kent State.
Guest:And then that happened.
Guest:brought brought this guy jerry casale who who along with a couple of his friends they were already kind of they were definitely conceptual artists and he was definitely looking for something to do and it what we just kind of gelled together we talked about uh what we had seen happen at school what did happen how did it did you remember the whole build to it i mean were you at the protest what i don't i don't have a yeah an eyewitness account
Guest:I remember after the shooting, I remember FBI agents leaving my parents' house and going in and my mom was in shock because they had pictures of my younger brother who was, I think, a junior in high school at the time, had hitchhiked to Kent and he was lighting an American flag.
Guest:He had a flaming American flag and he was trying to stop firemen from putting out the fire at the ROTC building.
Guest:And they're like, it's our Bobby.
Guest:He's only.
Guest:15, how did this happen?
Guest:You know, it was like that kind of stuff.
Marc:Did it happen during a huge protest on campus?
Marc:Is that what went down?
Guest:Yeah, Kent State, when I got there, it was an amazing school.
Guest:And the art department was incredibly vibrant.
Guest:And they were bringing in artists from all over the world to do residencies.
Guest:And I saw films like...
Guest:satiricon and things like that that you didn't see if you went to the drive-in theater in Akron.
Marc:Right, and was there like art films like Kenneth Anger and stuff like that or all that kind of stuff coming through?
Guest:And we all got that.
Guest:And Richard Myers, the filmmaker, taught there.
Marc:Oh, okay, yeah.
Guest:and uh in those years devo even ended up um in footage that he says that i saw him last year and he said i know i got it in the basement somewhere but i don't know what happened to that movie so it was like uh it was really on the sort of uh kind of cutting edge of what was happening in experimental art and experimental film and music well yeah uh kent was it was beautiful and then
Guest:After the shootings, they closed the school for about four or five months, and when we came back in the fall to start school again, it was a totally different atmosphere.
Guest:It was like everybody had gone to sleep.
Marc:Did you know any of the people that were killed?
Guest:No.
Guest:As a matter of fact, some of them were just people that were not even part of the protests that just happened to be walking by.
Guest:Do you remember that day?
Marc:Were you there?
Guest:I remember armored vehicles going down the street and them going, Leave the city.
Guest:Leave the city now.
Guest:It was shocking.
Guest:They just closed down the whole school.
Marc:And then the guards started shooting?
Guest:They shot first.
Guest:That was their excuse.
Guest:They shot first, and then they closed things down, yeah.
Marc:Oh, my God.
Marc:I mean, like, I can't... The reason why...
Marc:when the politics changes as drastically as it has now, that you forget that that was and is part of our history.
Marc:And most of us have not seen that.
Marc:And you saw it.
Marc:That was here in America.
Marc:That was armored vehicles.
Marc:And that was killing kids as a reaction to political activism.
Guest:Right.
Guest:There was nothing happening that was threatening any of them.
Guest:It was just the governor just didn't like there being any lack of control for him.
Guest:And he wanted to just show a lesson.
Marc:How did it affect you personally?
Marc:you know, outside of the school closing, I mean, you know, you were there in this, you know, a free zone of creativity, and then this shit just kind of, the hammer comes down in the most extreme way.
Guest:Well, as artists, I was collecting things like...
Guest:it right about at the same time i had uh got invited to a free dinner yeah at a church and um a free dinner sounded great and i got in a car with these people and we drove up to cleveland and we went to a steel workers uh union hall and there was like it was a big cafeteria and they everybody got a free meal and uh great this is great and then afterwards then
Guest:Somebody stood up and they started talking about the end times.
Guest:And I went, oh, okay, now we're going to pay for dinner.
Guest:And this guy started talking about how the signs were becoming more and more prevalent and that we were getting closer to the end of planet Earth.
Guest:And the hair on my arms just stood up.
Guest:I was like, wow.
Guest:He was speaking in tongues?
Guest:And as soon as he stopped, somebody stood up in the audience and said, Jesus said that he will be coming back soon.
Guest:And when he comes back, there will be signs.
Guest:And then this guy went on and described it.
Guest:And then he sat down.
Guest:And when he sat down, somebody else got up and they had a whole other language.
Guest:It was like...
Guest:They had their own really intense, you know, like nonsensical, non-literal, guttural noises.
Guest:And somebody stood up and deciphered that.
Guest:And that happened about half a dozen times.
Guest:Sounds and the interpretation of sounds.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then they broke us up into little groups because they were trying to, because it was a recruitment thing.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so they went around a circle, and they got to me, and I didn't know what to do, so I just kind of emulated Fred Flintstone and went, yabba-dabba-doo, yabba-dabba-doo, a couple times, because I was just not prepared for where I was.
Guest:But I left there very impressed, and I remember...
Guest:Walking, because I lived in downtown Akron at the time.
Guest:I remember walking and I heard this homeless guy, you know, like ranting.
Guest:And it made me stop and I went over to listen to him.
Guest:Because I was thinking, where is this coming from?
Guest:There's something where people are...
Guest:relinquishing their intellect.
Guest:And they're embracing something nonsensical that they're looking for something spiritual.
Guest:And I was curious.
Guest:I was thinking, well, wait a minute.
Guest:We only use, there's only 10% of our brain that works in this language.
Guest:Maybe there's this other language that
Guest:Maybe that has something to do with the other 90%.
Guest:And I started paying attention to ranters and to speaking in tongues became interesting to me.
Guest:It became something that I thought might be a clue as to who we were and why we were here.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And what did you ultimately figure out?
Yeah.
Guest:Okay, here's what I think.
Guest:I think the 10% of our brains that we know about, it's a nanny for the other 90%.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:And it's like it has to do all the stuff like get dressed and make sure you... Process.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:Flush.
Guest:But the other 90% is the part that's like the dolphin part of the human or the alien.
Guest:It's the part that might still have telecommunication powers or might have fourth dimension powers or might...
Guest:So, of course, it's really selfish if that's the case, though, because it's not sharing much of that information with the other 10% that's in charge of things.
Marc:Or the other way, the nanny is not allowing it to connect.
Guest:Something, yeah.
Guest:There's something dysfunctional.
Guest:An adversarial relationship between the dolphin and the nanny.
Guest:And what you end up with is just this kind of...
Guest:unnatural, dysfunctioning species that is, like, dangerous to the rest of the planet.
Marc:Yeah, and driven by habit and fear.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:I agree.
Marc:Habit and fear.
Marc:Habit and fear.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Don't break the habit or the fear is unleashed.
Marc:And don't let that guy be different.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:So, anyhow, so...
Guest:Even with Devo.
Guest:And we decided we wanted to be music reporters.
Guest:And we did that with our art.
Marc:Well, when did the vision happen?
Marc:Like, you know, you have this moment.
Marc:You know, the Kent State shootings happen.
Marc:You find yourself in a strange church.
Marc:You're now, that kind of blew your mind in terms of, you know, what do we really know about who we are and how our brain works.
Marc:So when does the mission of Devo start to kind of manifest itself?
Yeah.
Guest:I think the first bits of it were happening in 1970.
Guest:I think it was post-shootings, and it was us all talking to each other.
Marc:Was it you, Jerry, Bob?
Guest:My brother.
Guest:There was a Bob Lewis who was kind of – he was interesting because he was like –
Guest:like he knew, he was like Mr. Encyclopedia.
Guest:I liked him because he had a lot of information about everything.
Guest:But then my brother was kind of, him and Jerry had this kind of more energy where they, like my brother Bob was kind of like a
Guest:He was a guitar player, serious.
Guest:That's what he was about.
Guest:And this other stuff, whatever you think.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:He just wanted to play guitar.
Guest:I lit a flag on fire and got in trouble for it.
Guest:I don't care.
Guest:And then my brother Jim, who was our first drummer,
Guest:we started talking about drum sounds and what we wanted the band to sound like.
Guest:And I really wanted to... I didn't want to be a rock and roll band.
Guest:I thought we were like this art movement anyhow, and the band part of it was just part of it.
Guest:And I said, you know, we need...
Guest:modern sounds i was thinking of like the futurists in italy that were like adding foghorns and uh and you know electric motors to orchestras yeah and i thought well you know we need mortar blasts and we need v2 rocket sounds and we need ray guns and we need sounds that come from our culture you know the to add to our music and my brother jim invented
Guest:Maybe the first electronic drum set.
Guest:He definitely, he worked at a Midas muffler shop at the time and he took tailpipes and built a stand and then took practice drum pads and added acoustic guitar pickups to them and ran them through fuzz tones and wah-wah pedals and echo plexes.
Guest:and uh ring modulators and he'd play drums and it's it was the most god-awful awesome incredible sound you ever heard uh and he was he but he became so obsessed with the electronic thing he became so into electronics that um he then started circuit bending and there was no such word as that at the time but he started manipulating all of our synths and our amps and everything and
Guest:Everything electronic, he would play with it and make it do things that wasn't supposed to do.
Guest:And he lost interest in drumming and just became interested in that.
Guest:That was the start, and we were like, at the very beginning was probably the most of an art band that Devo ever sounded, I think.
Marc:And some of those recordings are available, aren't they?
Guest:Oh, yeah, I'm sure.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:I think just about everything is.
Marc:Is out there in the world?
Guest:It's out there, yeah.
Marc:If it was recorded somewhere, it's probably out there.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And so it had nothing to do with songs or hooks or anything.
Marc:It was just expression and integration of sounds.
Yeah.
Guest:Although, you know, we were always interested in pop culture, you know.
Guest:So we loved the idea of instead of being another Piru Boo or another... Were they around then already?
Guest:They were, yeah.
Guest:Matter of fact, we swapped clubs.
Guest:They'd come down and play at the club that we played in in Akron.
Guest:And then we'd go up to Cleveland and play at the place that they used to play.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But they were more song-driven.
Yeah.
Guest:At the time, they became very art, farther out art, but they were like kindred spirit for sure.
Marc:He's an interesting guy.
Marc:What's that singer's name?
Guest:He was Crocus Behemoth at the time, and then he went back to his real name, David Thomas.
Marc:Yeah, he's sort of an interesting guy.
Marc:You guys are friends?
Guest:Well, I wouldn't say that.
Guest:We were like artists working from the same part of the world at the same time.
Guest:I mean, I got him upset one night because we played in Cleveland.
Guest:And our show was very...
Guest:For as weird as it was, it was also very formalized, and we'd wear these yellow plastic hazardous waist suits early on, and then we would rip them off about two-thirds of the way through the show, and we'd have another outfit on underneath, and we did the same.
Guest:We really built the shows really tight.
Guest:But the last song would be this character, Boogie Boy, that was kind of my alter ego.
Guest:And Boogie Boy could speak in tongues.
Guest:Boogie Boy would do things that we never knew exactly what was going to happen.
Guest:The other 90%.
Guest:And so just one night, Boogie Boy...
Guest:He stuffed his, I bought one of those like $3 plastic sauna suits or something that were on TV.
Guest:You know, one of those, it was like a, Ron Popeil probably sold them.
Guest:And I filled it full of newspaper.
Guest:So I was big like Crocus Behemoth was at the time.
Guest:And I came out and sang his lyrics to one of his songs over the middle of Chocohomo.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:Because Jocko Homo was a song where it was like we would use that to make people go crazy.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:Because we'd do the Are We Not Men We Are Defoe chant for long enough so that finally there'd be some Vietnam vet who just came there because he wanted to hear Foghat and, you know, his favorite songs.
Guest:Right.
Yeah.
Guest:And after about five minutes of that, the guy would go, okay, that's it.
Guest:And he'd slam his beer down and he'd come up on stage and attack us.
Guest:And we loved being a lightning rod for hostility in those days.
Marc:Well, it was something it seems like you grew up with.
Marc:Yeah, it was kind of like.
Marc:And you turned it on itself.
Marc:It's like, come on.
Marc:It was something that we needed to expel, I think.
Marc:So the outfits and stuff, like this was, you guys were, you enjoyed the provoking.
Guest:Well, we didn't want to be a rock band.
Guest:Even then, we knew we didn't.
Guest:My brother Bob thought that was, he didn't care.
Marc:Why, because it was boring?
Guest:Well, we just thought it was, we thought rock and roll was over.
Guest:It was like already the early 70s, and it had been going on for like 20 years now.
Guest:Wasn't it time to end this stupid stuff?
Guest:And rock and roll.
Guest:But partly in defense of that was because what had happened in rock and roll is like after 1970 and after shootings around the country.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And everybody went to sleep politically.
Guest:Music came back as corporate rock.
Guest:It was like bands like Boston Sticks, you know.
Guest:Mid 70s.
Guest:Yeah, mid-70s.
Guest:It was like, I'm white, I'm stupid, I'm a misogynist, and I'm proud of it, was basically the politics of that stuff.
Guest:And then there was disco, which was kind of a beautiful woman with no brain.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And, you know, so...
Marc:You didn't want to do either of those.
Guest:And so we knew that wasn't anything what we were doing.
Guest:We were an art movement.
Guest:We were like, we were Art Devo.
Marc:And what was the intention of the movement in your mind?
Marc:Like Art Devo.
Guest:I thought we were like...
Guest:jerry and i we thought we were um musical reporters we thought we were uh our our visual reporters we were making these little films and we were we were like um we we fantasized a a devo vision re-education channel on tv where where kids instead of doing the stupid dances they did it at studio 54 and the clubs they'd come and they'd do like these kind of like paramilitary uh uh
Guest:aerobic classes.
Guest:We imagined everybody having this whole new set of, a whole new language of how to move at a concert, for instance, and how to behave at a concert.
Guest:But it was unified.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:The idea was that you want, but that was the joke.
Marc:It wasn't some sort of fascist movement.
Guest:No, we were saving the planet from stupidity.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:How'd that go?
Guest:Well, it didn't... I don't know.
Guest:If you look at what's going on right now, you'd say we were not paranoid at all.
Marc:That's true.
Marc:And did you find, though, at the time where you said you went back to school after a five-month hiatus and also what you're saying now about the evolution of corporate rock, did you find that that sort of somnambulistic or that sleepwalking
Guest:did you find that most creative people you know chose to to withdraw or go inside and create as opposed to continue to sort of like actively fight you know yeah yeah it's it's like um the people that were kindred spirits yeah before yes they were they were in shock too yeah of what had happened and nobody thought of that we we didn't think
Guest:protesting the war in Vietnam was worth, was something that we would get killed for.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, we thought we were, we thought this is the right thing to do within our moral thing to do.
Guest:It's the, it's the intelligent thing to do.
Guest:And I couldn't think of one single Vietnamese person I wanted to kill.
Guest:So it was especially absurd to me.
Marc:So then after that happened, and then I guess, you know, you know, capitalism and the market forces sort of won out and appropriated music.
Marc:So you guys were working outside off the grid to do something new and something jarring.
Marc:And how did that evolve into, you know, getting a record deal?
Guest:Yeah, you know, it's like we were thinking, who is it out there that we respect?
Guest:And, you know, I love people that spoke in tongues, like Wild Man Fisher and Beefheart.
Guest:I love them, and I met them, and it was unsatisfying in a way to meet them.
Guest:Why?
Marc:It always is kind of...
Guest:It is, yeah.
Guest:It's like Captain Beefheart, I think I saved him from going to jail one day because I was over at a rehearsal at his place.
Guest:Here?
Guest:Out here, yeah.
Guest:And he wanted some ice cream before he went home.
Guest:And so we took him to an ice cream place and I was talking with the drummer and we heard this woman screaming and we look over and...
Guest:And she's screaming because Captain Beefheart, who's in the middle of a really hot summer, has a long black coat on and a black hat.
Guest:He's like hoovering over this little kid, helping this little child draw something.
Guest:And this woman is freaking out because it did look weird.
Guest:And so we went over and we pulled him off and we took him out of the... And he said something like, my baby won't let me have a baby.
Yeah.
Guest:And we're like, wow, I can see why.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:It's a good hook, though.
Marc:That's a good song.
Marc:My Baby Won't Let Me Have a Baby.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He was impressive to watch with his band because although he couldn't write music out in anything that was even vaguely, and he could barely communicate in a way that people would play...
Guest:And all his band members all loved him, and they treated him like this amazing infant messiah.
Guest:And so they'd fight over, after he left, they'd fight over, what did he mean when he said, here's what your guitar should sound like.
Guest:Wah-ga-ga-ga, wah-ga-ga.
Guest:and he'd make these movements, and then they'd argue over what it should be, and they would try to work it out, and they'd show him the next day, and he'd go, no, yeah.
Marc:Stuff like that.
Marc:I became sort of fascinated with him, and I hear he was pretty kind of a taskmaster in terms of getting that sound.
Marc:But he would get it.
Guest:That was the impressive thing, that he would use these very...
Guest:and like watching him actually served me well when I kind of went into the belly of the beast and started scoring films because it made me listen to people that had absolutely no ability to talk about
Guest:what they wanted musically other than to say I just it's just you know it's Robert De Niro had diarrhea and it doesn't look like a love scene at all and the woman could smell and it just you gotta make them you gotta help it out you gotta help and they just have things or the sky was overcast and they needed it to be a sunshine sky so then they say you gotta help me make it a sunshiny day here right now and instead of like
Guest:being confused i just kind of learned how to like enjoy that part of my it's kind of in some ways i have to say i secretly love people that are totally inarticulate about anything musical but they know what they want in some way and that's really great they know a feeling or they know something they know something yeah they look for these words and then i get to try and interpret what they mean you're interpreting the speaking in tongues yes yeah
Marc:Okay, so you guys are plugging away in your hazmat suits.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Making noises.
Marc:So in Ohio primarily, when do you tour and when do you sort of become on the radar?
Guest:Oh, well...
Guest:You know, somewhere around 1974.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I'm a little bit dyslexic with numbers.
Guest:I think I'm correct.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:I have this nice timeline in your book.
Guest:Actually, being dyslexic is helpful for me because it's like if somebody says, can you write something like...
Guest:like Mozart's uh wedding march or something and then you go like this but then you if I I can have it in my head and I can write it incorrectly and then it becomes an original piece and so it's so it works the dyslexia is the so I I use I have just enough of it that it's useful everywhere except for I have to write down phone numbers because I can't remember seven numbers in a row
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Well, yeah.
Marc:And now all the area codes are different.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:It says 19, looks like 75, 76, 77.
Marc:Let's see.
Marc:No.
Marc:76, you produced the first single Jocko Homo with Mongoloid on your label, Boogey Boy.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:So is that what gets out there?
Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, right before that we had made a film with Jocko Homo and Secret Agent Man.
Guest:And we made the film because Chuck Statler, who was in that art class with Jerry and I, he had gone to Minneapolis because he wanted to be a commercial director.
Guest:And he came back and he had this popular science magazine back and shows it on the cover.
Guest:It says, there's this young...
Guest:White couple holding a silver disc that looks the same size as a vinyl LP.
Guest:And it says, laser discs.
Guest:Everybody will have them by Christmas.
Guest:That's basically what it said in the article.
Guest:And we're like, laser discs.
Guest:And they can hold twice as much material.
Guest:Plus, you get pictures with it.
Guest:And that's us.
Guest:We're audiovisual people for sure.
Guest:We're like, we make...
Guest:We make films and we make paintings and we design shows and music's part of it, too.
Guest:And so we thought, that's it.
Guest:We're making product for Laserdiscs.
Guest:That's what we thought.
Marc:It sounded good, too, with the word laser in it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it didn't sound like rock and roll.
Guest:We loved the idea that it wasn't saying the word rock and roll.
Marc:Like Satisfaction, like your version of it is great.
Marc:And there's been other versions, Otis Redding and so on.
Marc:But when you say that you had a sort of contentious relationship with Corporate Rock, what was the decision to do Satisfaction?
Guest:Well, I mean, we love the Rolling Stones.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Good.
Guest:Come on.
Guest:They were so freaking awesome.
Guest:Weren't they?
Guest:And it was 1974.
Guest:It was 10 years later since the original.
Guest:We thought, well, it needs to be reinterpreted for the 70s.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But it happened kind of, it was a very organic thing.
Guest:Bob, we were in this, we were in a car wash in Ohio that we were allowed to rehearse in that had no heat.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so we're standing there next to like tubs of soap and things like that.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And paper towels.
Guest:And we're wearing coats and you can see your steam come out and Bob Gasali starts playing that kind of lick, lick, lick.
Guest:little riff.
Guest:And then Alan's playing something on the drums that's kind of very, it's like it's backwards or something.
Guest:And then Jerry's playing a bass and my brother's playing guitar and singing Satisfaction on it just made us all laugh.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And we loved it because it seemed like a way to... Because people would say, what are you guys?
Guest:What are you doing?
Guest:We thought if we... Satisfaction could be like a doorway in so you could see what Devo was about with that song.
Guest:That was better than like any kind of a verbal description of what we were trying to do.
Marc:And better than the anthem.
Marc:Yeah, which was the Jocko Homo to a degree?
Guest:Well, the anthem was really good for agitating people and getting them to pay attention.
Guest:But if somebody was curious what kind of music we were playing, and we played them...
Guest:Satisfaction, right.
Guest:And then maybe Uncontrollable Urge because that Uncontrollable Urge, we put that as the first song on our first album because I took the opening chords from I Want to Hold Your Hand and put them on Uncontrollable Urge.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And then... Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:That was all, you know, out of She Loves You, you know, but our reprocessing.
Guest:Right, right, right.
Guest:Oh, my God.
Guest:And so...
Guest:And it's funny because it wasn't unnoticed by John Lennon, who came to a Devo show one night in New York.
Guest:We were playing Max's Kansas City, and you set up your equipment in the back wall.
Guest:And to take your equipment out, we had to wait for the whole place to empty out at the end of the night.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:We had our Econoline van parked out front, and I'm sitting there in the passenger seat, and he's walking out with Ian Hunter, and they're both really drunk.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:And John Lennon looks over at me, and he's like, he goes, oh, I know, that's that guy that was, and he came up, and he stuck his face right here, and he went, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, right in my face.
Guest:And I was like, okay.
Okay.
Guest:We can drive off the road and die tonight.
Guest:I don't care.
Guest:Oh, that was great.
Guest:It was pretty awesome.
Guest:He felt it.
Guest:He knew it.
Guest:He knew it.
Guest:He sang Yeah, Yeah, Yeah more than I had at that point.
Guest:That's fucking spectacular.
Guest:Now I probably sung it more than he ever did.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But he sang it more than I had at that point.
Marc:And as you evolve as a band and you become popular and you're selling a few records, was there ever that... You changed the tone and the total outfits on occasion, but they all seemed to match.
Marc:Yeah, they were always not glamorous.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But I wonder if that matching outfit thing, that was something you pulled from the 50s bands, I think.
Marc:No?
Marc:Or maybe?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Except ours were more like maintenance men outfits.
Guest:No, of course.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:But the idea of it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:There was more than once where somebody would hand us, we'd be waiting out front for a cab to take us to a, or a car to take us to a concert we were playing.
Guest:And somebody would get out of their car and hand us the keys because they'd look at our outfits and just think, oh.
Guest:These guys are working here.
Yeah.
Marc:But that was mostly theater, really.
Marc:The intent was that not everything had a purpose.
Guest:Well, it was, I think it gave us an organized look.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I think that's really what we wanted out of it.
Guest:We wanted to look like cogs in a machine rather than, we were kind of already at that point, we were over it being things like Tom Petty in The Heartbreakers.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Or, you know, where one person comes out and they become the star of the band.
Guest:We were kind of less interested in that and we thought of ourselves as all like parts of a machine.
Marc:A movement still.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:We thought of like that scene in Metropolis where there's, you know, like guys controlling this gigantic machine, but they're just part of the machine too, really.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Now, I don't know if a lot of people know that Whippet was intended to be a political song.
Guest:correct yeah you know we overthought everything i'm sure but yeah but yeah it was at the time we'd been touring and people would say well we love america but your foreign policy is ridiculous and jimmy carter was the president at the time and uh it was kind of our like um it was kind of our like come on jimmy yeah
Marc:Did it read to the public as that?
Guest:No, of course.
Guest:It was like what happened is like some DJ in Florida actually started playing it in clubs.
Guest:And then when we'd show up at radio stations, because that was what they made you do when you were in a band, you're going to Toledo.
Guest:But before you go to the venue to do soundcheck, you're going to stop at KABD.
Guest:Sure.
Marc:yeah radio and and you plug it we'd be in they go i got devo in the other room and then he'd go you know i whipped it just this morning yeah right you'd be like okay so then it became a jerk off joke okay among things yeah what was he uh when you were writing that what was kind of the you know were you still drawing from actively drawing from uh you know other inspiration art and whatnot uh
Guest:Yeah, always.
Guest:I mean, that even, it was even kind of a bit of a deconstruction of, there's like a little bit of a bass line from Pretty Woman even in it, you know?
Guest:And there's like, so we would always like just...
Guest:Sometimes we started off our songs because of an idea for a film by that point, because we were kind of like at the forefront of that stuff.
Guest:We made our own films, unlike what became the method of doing it after... Music videos?
Guest:Yeah, music videos instead of art films.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It was this thing where the record companies would hire somebody to make...
Guest:make a film for you yeah but we used to make our own because that's what we did yeah and you know so so a lot of our songs started off as a an idea for a film before they became a song oh really and what about lyrically were you drawing from poets or you know did you have people that influence you
Guest:All different things.
Guest:You know, it's like I remember going to Japan for our Freedom of Choice show.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I was friends with this band called The Plastics.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And my friend Hajime came up to me and said, hey, Mark, you know what the name of your band is in Japan?
Guest:I go, no.
Guest:He goes, there's no direct translation of Freedom of Choice, so your album title is called The Psychology of Desire.
Guest:And we're like...
Guest:That's awesome.
Guest:What a great, that's so cool.
Guest:We loved it.
Guest:We were laughing that, of course, Japan has no freedom of choice.
Guest:And I remember before that tour was over, we were at a bar, and these two, it was just Devo, because it was late at night, and my brother Bob took the challenge to eat fugu, which is like a poisonous...
Guest:a poisonous fish, and they made him sushi out of it, and he got sick, and he's just sitting there with his head on the counter while we're still eating sushi.
Guest:Of course, we didn't take him to a doctor or anything.
Guest:And then there were these two businessmen that were watching us the whole time that were the only other patrons at this sushi bar, and they both had business suits on, and one of them comes up, and he's kind of drunk, and he goes, "'My symbol, big!'
Guest:And we just, we're like, what?
Guest:And then his friend comes up and goes, no, his symbol's small.
Guest:And then he goes, no, my symbol's big.
Guest:And he goes, no, his symbol's very small or something like that.
Guest:But we're looking and the one guy has this tie bar on.
Guest:And it's a hand, like a businessman's
Guest:suit sleeve with, you could see the little, you know, like a shirt.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it was a hand holding a pen and it went across the tie and on it it said New Traditionalists and we're like, New Traditionalists?
Guest:And we started talking about that.
Guest:We're saying, what does that mean?
Guest:And we thought, wow, that's a, that's kind of a cool term, isn't it?
Guest:Because it's like,
Guest:traditions that are new that's kind of what we're we want to do we want to start new traditions yeah like we want people to think first you know and we want to we want to do positive mutations instead of you know just letting mutations being you know pushed on you and we love that idea and so i remember we went back and we we went to write for that
Guest:album we're thinking so we named a song psychology a desire because we're like what are they going to translate it to freedom of choice you know we were laughing and i remember getting back to um and we named our album new traditionalists yeah so we get back to japan and i i told hajimi about the you know that the song title he goes oh yeah and he's i said what'd you think of the um i said what'd you think of the album title we got that from and i told him the story about the two guys he goes album title not so good mark
Guest:I go, why?
Guest:He goes, the new Devo album in Japan is called Yuppie.
Guest:New traditionalist translated to Yuppie in Japanese.
Guest:So we're playing a tour for an album called Yuppie.
Marc:but everybody showed up you know they all showed up it was kind of an interesting journey for that uh through words yuppie okay yeah so what um did was there a point where you guys kind of you know tapped out or felt like you know you were selling out or you know any of that well you know it was you know it was um
Guest:I think Whippet was like the double-edged sword for us because the first couple albums, it was back in the 70s, record companies made so much money and they sold so many records and they could put out anything they wanted and they could sell it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:They would sign bands like Devo and Warner Brothers would go, oh, you know, we have Captain Beefheart and we have Wildman Fisher and we have Devo, you know.
Guest:But of course we do Madonna and Prince, but we have these guys, you know.
Guest:And we were just looked at as like, you know, they just thought of us as like, well...
Guest:We're not losing any money on them.
Guest:They're always in the black.
Guest:They're careful with their... They budget their money and they don't charge us very much and they do all their own graphics and their own artwork.
Guest:We don't have to do anything for them.
Guest:So they were kind of like that.
Guest:They didn't care.
Guest:They didn't pay attention.
Guest:You had more freedom than most people.
Guest:And then once Whippet came out and there was a hit record, that changed everything because then it was like they were peering around corners.
Guest:They'd show up unannounced at...
Guest:rehearsals and go, hey, how are you guys doing, man?
Guest:You got another Whippet coming out?
Marc:Right, you'd walked into something.
Guest:They're like, hey.
Guest:They're like, do whatever you guys want to do.
Guest:And we're thinking, well, we didn't do Whippet on purpose.
Guest:It just was what we were writing at the time, you know?
Guest:And so it put this other pressure and this other energy on it that I think it kind of became the beginning of us going, this isn't what we thought it was going to be.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And we were feeling like we're not an art movement.
Guest:We're like, now we are just a... A hit machine.
Guest:We're just like this band that stumbled onto a hit record.
Guest:We did a few more records after that, but, you know, it's like...
Guest:You know, we got to this point where we had done like six or seven albums with Warner Brothers and it was the same thing.
Guest:You write 12 songs, you rehearse them, you go record them, you make a film for one or two of them, you put together a live show, you design the staging and the costumes and everything, then you go tour and then a year later you write 12 more songs.
Guest:And so somewhere after we left Warner Brothers and signed with Enigma Records, Enigma went bankrupt.
Guest:And in this place where we were in like a suspended animation, a friend of mine asked me if I would score his TV show for him.
Guest:And I said, I could try that.
Guest:I'd like to try that.
Guest:And so he...
Guest:I got to write this song with him.
Guest:Who was that?
Guest:Paul Rubens.
Guest:I wrote Pee Wee's Playhouse theme song.
Guest:And we had a lot of fun doing it.
Guest:And we got Cindy Lauper to sing it.
Guest:And there was a crazy fight between her manager and Paul's manager at the recording session.
Guest:And it was all kind of weird and funny.
Guest:And then they sent me a tape on a Monday.
Guest:I wrote 12 songs worth of music on Tuesday.
Guest:Wednesday, I recorded it.
Guest:Thursday, I had to put it physically in the mail.
Guest:and send it to new york and then friday they dropped it into the show and saturday we watched it on tv and then monday i got another tape and it started all over again and it was like instead of a year between getting to be creative and write 12 songs right
Guest:I got to do it every week.
Guest:And I said, sign me up for this.
Guest:I was totally fascinated with it.
Guest:And I could do things like I could make musical jokes about friends of mine, like David Byrne or something.
Guest:I'd put something in from Psycho Chicken in something.
Guest:Or I'd do something that had a little bit of a Devo thing.
Guest:Sort of, you could kind of hear it if you knew what you were listening for.
Guest:And then I found out about Subliminal Messages.
Marc:Uh-huh.
Marc:Just then?
Marc:I mean, that was the first time you got hip to it?
Guest:I found out that you could put them in TV commercials and nobody would know it.
Guest:Nobody would stop you, I mean.
Marc:Funny ones.
Marc:Like for you, not for the product.
Guest:Well, um...
Guest:I put in subliminal messages like, I think my first commercial I did was Hawaiian Punch.
Guest:There was a drum solo near the end that went, and I went, underneath the drum solo, I just went, sugar is bad for you.
Guest:And I remember going to Daly and Associates afterwards, and Bob Casale was my engineer.
Guest:We ended up having a long career together doing films and TV shows together after that.
Guest:But
Guest:We're sitting in this meeting with the ad agency and the director of the film and everything.
Guest:And I'm a really, I'm not that great a liar.
Guest:So it's like we get, it gets closer and closer to the point where it's going to play it.
Guest:And I just turn bright red and Bobby Sally looks over at me like, we're going to get in trouble.
Guest:We're not going to get paid.
Guest:And it goes, sugar is bad for you.
Guest:And there's this guy from Daly and Associates tapping his pen and they're all just kind of bobbing their heads.
Guest:And when it's over, he goes, yeah, Hawaiian punch hits you in all the right places.
Guest:And they all high five each other.
Guest:And we're just looking, Bob and I are just looking at each other and he's going, how did you get away with that?
Guest:And so then we started doing it on purpose.
Guest:You could hear it audibly?
Guest:Well, it's like if you're not listening for it, you may not go, wait a second.
Guest:And it's on TV.
Guest:So it's not like you're going to go play it 20 times in a row.
Marc:But you can hear it on TV.
Marc:You're like, there it is.
Guest:Well, we heard it because we knew it was there.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:We did about, I don't know, 30, 50 of those maybe.
Guest:Commercial.
Guest:With things like, we were doing commercials where like maybe there'd be a, you know, like choose your mutations carefully, you know, or be like your ancestors or be different or question authority.
Guest:You know, we'd figure something, and it would have to do with how
Guest:how neutral we were to whatever it was they were selling.
Guest:We did about, I'd say, probably 50 commercials like that.
Guest:Subversive.
Guest:Before somebody called me up who was a picture editor on a spot and he goes, I know what you did.
Guest:He says, take that out.
Guest:And he never told the client.
Guest:And so we just, so Bob Gasali did what he was supposed to do and he took whatever the message was on that commercial out and
Guest:And we still did it now and then on different things.
Guest:We'd find things to put it in.
Guest:And you could live with yourself.
Guest:we were having fun yeah that was making it like um yeah that made it kind of subversive right it's like you're still honoring the the uh the agenda of devo well because yeah because our our our thing was always you know like uh yeah making it into the belly of the beast sure and seeing how strong the concept was you know if it could survive or not
Marc:I love it.
Marc:So Pee Wee was really your first four-way.
Marc:Wow.
Marc:It was my first four-way, yeah.
Marc:Into scoring.
Marc:Yes.
Guest:Well, sort of, although I was doing scoring.
Guest:Your own stuff, right.
Guest:Like for our live shows, there would be instrumental pieces that would segue from one, you know,
Guest:But one set up to another.
Marc:But I like that.
Marc:The idea that you didn't have to do 12 songs that get strung out on the road, get exhausted, disillusioned before you could start creating.
Marc:And for somebody like you, you know, who's compulsively drawing and taking pictures that, you know, feeding that thing was at least engaging your creativity on a daily basis.
Guest:yes it was it was definitely and it was fresh at the time and i didn't know where the limits were so i loved it you know it was like you're learning on the job right yeah finding out we're gonna go and maybe i'm gonna get to do the next to kill a mockingbird or something you know maybe or rugrats
Guest:Or Rugrats.
Guest:Well, yeah.
Guest:And that's, yeah.
Guest:And it went there, yeah.
Marc:But that was, I mean, on some level, though, don't you, I mean, you say that with a mild bit of disdain, but I mean, at least animated, at least entertaining children is sort of a beautiful thing.
Marc:You can't really take that away.
Marc:There's no way to get cynical about that.
Guest:That's true.
Guest:And, you know, the thing is with kids is they're less formulated on what kind of music they want to hear.
Guest:So it's like, and that's what I learned from Pee Wee's Place.
Guest:I could mash together clog dancing music with a punk pogo song with Chinese instruments.
Marc:Yeah, they probably loved it.
Guest:And yeah, kids were always kind of like, wow, bring it on, whatever it is.
Guest:And with Rugrats, I did a lot of sampling of my voice to make the bass sound or to make different instruments.
Guest:I made different instruments that didn't really exist.
Guest:And then Rugrats did this other thing.
Guest:They did a feature.
Guest:I think we did three features together, but the first feature, I got an 80-piece orchestra, and so I broke through the catch-22 of, well, you've never scored for an orchestra, so you can't score our film with an orchestra.
Guest:So I did all these smaller films, like Wes Anderson things, and...
Marc:You were with him at the beginning, right?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so I'd do all these things.
Guest:You could have a small group, but Rugrats was the first movie I got to use a big, full orchestra on, and that was kind of cool.
Marc:That's exciting.
Guest:That was.
Guest:It was pretty interesting to get to write for that.
Guest:And then to hear the music like that, because you're always, for television, you're always writing where there's no budget, so you're using a synthesizer to make an orchestral sound.
Guest:It's a big difference.
Marc:With Wes Anderson, now, when you score a film, are you the music director or do you just do the original music on his movies?
Marc:Do you choose the songs as well and that kind of stuff?
Guest:Wes chooses the songs, and he's very hands-on everything.
Guest:The fact that he can't play every single instrument, he renames all my cues.
Guest:Every single piece of music I write, he renames it.
Guest:But...
Guest:he's the guy that like I remember Tannenbaum's I walked through the house with him and we're upstairs they're gonna film that day and he's looking at the ceiling and something's bothering him and it's in the room where where the kids slept in the bedroom for the kids and he goes up and he paints over the ceiling and he paints the painting because he said repainted where the kids had done graffiti on the wall because he said yeah that artwork wasn't that didn't look like what they would really draw on the walls like you know right right every little
Marc:thing every detail he he was aware of it and he he felt that stuff was all important i really loved him for that oh no he's meticulous with the framing you know what i mean like everything in every shot is you know on the color level on a placement level everything has to be there so working with him there's that meticulousness with the music too huh
Guest:Yeah, and we got along really well.
Guest:He liked being able to hang out at the studio while I was writing, and yeah.
Marc:And you've done like four or five of his movies, and you've had this huge career in soundtracks, and it's pretty amazing.
Marc:Sounds like you like the busyness.
Marc:I do.
Marc:I do.
Marc:And the book of your exhibition, I didn't see the whole show, but I feel like I saw one of the sound sculptures.
Marc:Was that in a group show?
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:It's been filmed a number of times, and it's been on tour in about six museums or so.
Marc:Yeah, I know I saw it somewhere.
Marc:It's pretty fascinating.
Guest:There's a number of those now.
Guest:I like building instruments.
Guest:I found...
Guest:And that actually was a Wes Anderson movie that made that happen.
Guest:He sent me footage for Moonrise Kingdom, and it didn't have any sound on it, and it was just footage of kids running through woods, and there were birds flying, and wind was blowing the trees.
Guest:But because they were just shooting at them above, they weren't recording anything.
Guest:So it was silent, but you saw this movement in the...
Guest:And so I collect eccentric music instruments and sound makers.
Guest:And I have about 150 Berg calls that I've collected through the years.
Guest:And so I started playing some along with the picture.
Guest:And then...
Guest:I lost interest in the movie, and I just wanted to write music for bird calls.
Guest:And I started, because I was like, wow, you could program, you know, if you record it onto tape.
Guest:I'd never done that before, other than just one track as a sound effect for something.
Guest:But I realized, you know, they have their own notes, and you have this kind of, depending on which ones you use,
Guest:you have certain notes that you can repeat and it it becomes uh uh you know like percussive and it becomes melodic at the same time and i was fascinated with it but it was hard writing music for like 50 of them right you know because what do you do get 50 people in the room that's expensive yeah yeah yeah say okay here's what the how you read the music and then you have them play it so
Guest:I found this guy that repaired calliopes for amusement parks.
Guest:And I asked him if, like, the thing that they blow the air through for the calliope, because I have a calliope.
Guest:And I said, could you hook those air hoses up to...
Guest:Berg calls.
Guest:He goes, why?
Guest:I'd be no problem at all.
Guest:And we started doing some.
Guest:And as we did them, well, some of them, some of the Berg calls are just like leather pouches with a little thing.
Guest:So you tap it with your hand.
Guest:So it'll go beep, beep, beep.
Guest:There's rubber tubes that look like rubber shotgun shells.
Guest:They have these little brass pieces at the end that when you shake it, it sounds like a flock of quail.
Guest:Oh, wow, yeah.
Guest:And I said, well, these ones, they need to shake, or these ones you need to tap.
Guest:And he'd go, oh, I could do that.
Guest:That's just a little mechanism.
Guest:And we started designing mechanisms.
Guest:And so we made this machine that plays about 50-some bird calls.
Guest:And I started writing music for it and I could write it on a keyboard then because I was using MIDI to control them.
Guest:But they were all played acoustically.
Guest:They're not just sampled and played.
Guest:And so it made me think about music in a different way to write music for these things.
Guest:It became so liberating because I'd spent so many years, so many decades writing music that...
Guest:to have something where the where the instrument doesn't have the same uh parameters is all the instruments of an orchestra or of a synthesizer or any instrument of any instrument it's like it was a new it was a new terrain that's exciting and it was yeah it was it was like finding a new kind of paint to work yeah yeah you never used before did you use it in the movie
Guest:Well, there is a movie that they're asking if they can be the first movie to use it.
Marc:Oh, you didn't use it for Wes's movie?
Marc:That was just the inspiration for it?
Guest:Yeah, it just made me... Actually, I did play stuff in his film.
Guest:I don't think I used a bird call in it, but I played some of the stuff at the camp.
Marc:In the photography, I love the postcards.
Marc:I love the drawings.
Marc:I love these... I don't know what you call them.
Marc:I guess you'd call them new instruments.
Marc:Yeah, orchestrions.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:and you do one with flutes or whistles, right?
Guest:They're all organ pipes.
Guest:One with doorbells, actually.
Guest:There's one with tuned doorbells, and it sounds really great.
Marc:I bet.
Marc:All different kinds.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But the photography was sort of fascinating to me because I just, like, I guess the question is,
Marc:The device of the mutant photography is using the same side twice, I guess.
Marc:Was that relatable to your condition?
Marc:Did you find that you were inspired at all by your vision?
Guest:You know, I became interested in symmetry, yeah, probably the same time I got glasses because...
Guest:Like right now, part of how I correct my, I have myopia, extreme myopia, but I can read, you know, like the small line above your name on that poster back there.
Guest:But the tradeoff is that I'm looking into a doorknob, basically.
Guest:I have a fisheye lens.
Guest:And I'm used to ignoring the fact that when I go like this, I'm bending the corners of the walls on both sides.
Guest:And this part of my vision, they're bending about a foot and a half down when I go between this and this.
Guest:And I'm just used to looking in a...
Guest:a doorknob kind of a fisheye lens my whole life.
Guest:And somehow symmetry kind of fit into that.
Guest:It's like both musically, the idea of scales that go both ways.
Guest:And at the same time I was doing those images, I was working on, it was Life Aquatic.
Guest:And it's another Wes Anderson thing.
Guest:On the movie before that, it was...
Guest:Royal Tannenbaums.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:There was a scene that he liked the music for where, so Gene and Angelica are walking through Central Park and it's kind of a, it's a scene where he's being the least kind of an a-hole that he's been in the whole film.
Guest:He's kind of like a real shit.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, self.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:self-promoting and taking advantage of everybody but he's being really nice to her because he's trying to get on her good side again and he's like being complimentary and sweet and she's enjoying it even though she has a new boyfriend she's still like she's enjoying that he's not being a jerk yeah and um so there was a piece of music that was written for that and wes kept referring to that as he said you know when in in this movie now a life aquatic when um when um
Marc:Bill Murray.
Guest:Bill Murray is talking about his boat.
Guest:He's so proud of his boat, and we're going to a cutaway.
Guest:And I went to Italy, to Rome, to see this soundstage he was working at at Cinecitta, I think it's called.
Guest:And there was a giant, big, life-size boat cut in half.
Guest:and that it was like there were all these different rooms and people were doing things in it and he did this, it was a camera sweep through the whole thing and he says, I want to have music that sounds like that music where they're walking in the park.
Guest:I want to have something like that for the boat.
Guest:And so I wrote like three or four pieces for him and he's like,
Guest:No, not that.
Guest:And then I wrote him another one.
Guest:He goes, not that.
Guest:And I'd been working on these symmetrical mutations.
Guest:And so I just took the sheet music for the scene that he liked in Central Park.
Yeah.
Guest:and I played it backwards.
Guest:I just held it up to a mirror and I played it backwards and then I recorded it for him.
Guest:And so I literally just played, like if you put him, you know, like took one and put it in a mirror and did this.
Marc:It was like it was the same on both sides going the other way.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I played it for him and he goes, that's it.
Guest:It was awesome.
Guest:He loved it and I didn't even tell him until after I recorded it what had happened.
Marc:And then that has that secret sort of subversive connection to the other film.
Guest:Yeah, and if you put the two sheets of music together, I don't know if it's in there or not, but somewhere I put them together, and you can see that it looks like... It's just a mirror image?
Guest:Yeah, a mirror image.
Marc:Well, that's fascinating, man.
Marc:And I love the art, and I love all the work, and it was great talking to you, man.
Marc:The same, sir.
Marc:You feel good?
Guest:I do.
Guest:I like your place out here.
Guest:It's very, it looks like it's packed with all sorts of information.
Marc:Yeah, I'm comforted by it.
Guest:Hey, look, there's a Tim Leary book sitting right here on the shelf.
Marc:Yeah, big biography.
Marc:I got some of the old Ginsburg poetry books from City Lights over there.
Guest:Oh, that's nice.
Marc:Yeah, you know, it's just a... You're a star.
Guest:People send stuff to you, right?
Marc:Sometimes, yeah.
Marc:I don't know if I'm a star, but I'm a guy who talks on a microphone.
Marc:So, I mean, some people think... Like, you know, yeah, the pedals and things.
Marc:Maybe we'll find you a pedal from Earthquaker.
Marc:Thanks, Mark.
Marc:Thank you.
Marc:Wow, quite a life, like a real artist, a real artist, and it's always good to talk to real artists, a true original, Mark Mothersbaugh.
Marc:And again, go to wtfpod.com, get on the mailing list for an opportunity for some deals around our new book, Waiting for the Punch.
Marc:And, you know, try to fight the good fight, live life, don't get psychically pummeled.
Marc:by a cultural momentum that is malignant and hopefully not terminal.
Marc:Boomer lives!
Marc:No guitar.
Marc:I'm in a hotel room.