q: are we not men? a: we are devo!

Devo wrapped their new philosophy into the regressive robotic rapture of this new wave manifesto. The genesis of the band came from Gerald Casale and Bob Lewis while they were students at Kent State. It started as a joke about the absurdity of life and how human society had stopped moving forward and had begun to regress with herd mentality and willful ignorance. The ideas took on more serious overtones in the wake of the shootings in 1970. Mark Mothersbaugh joined the duo around that time and they began performing in various configurations over the next few years with Rod Reisman, Fred Weber at first and then Casale's brother Bob and Mothersbaugh's brother Jim and Bob joining the fun. In 1976, the band was featured in a documentary by by Chuck Statler called 'The Truth About De-Evolution' which won a prize at the Ann Arbor Film Festival and led to more exposure. Their demo tape made it to the hands of David Bowie and Iggy Pop; and Bowie declared them to be the band of the future. He was determined to produce their first album; but was unable to do so when he was involved in a film. Brian Eno stepped in and took the helm on their debut album before they even had a record deal. The sessions took place at Konrad Plank's studio located near Cologne, Germany with Bob Casale on rhythm guitar, additional keyboards, and occasional backing vocals; Gerald V. Casale on bass, additional keyboards, and lead vocals; Bob Mothersbaugh on lead guitar and backing vocals; Mark Mothersbaugh on keyboards, occasional guitar, and lead vocals; and Alan Myers on drums.

Gerald Casale recalls: "It was outside of Cologne in a place called Neunkirchen, and we were staying in this bed-and- breakfast type hotel that was a couple of steps up from a student hostel. There was no central heating, like everything in Europe. We were there in the winter under big down comforters, and we had to get up early in the morning because the schedule we were on was absurd. We'd get picked up and driven over the frozen tundra into this studio that was a converted barn in the country. The studio owner [Konrad "Conny" Plank] had a wife [Christa Fast] and kid, and we'd all eat breakfast with them in the morning. It was a selection of heavy meats - processed meats, sliced like Monsanto floor tiles. We didn't know what the hell it was, but they had a huge array, and this is how we started our day. It was insane...I do think that being isolated with no distractions probably was a good thing, because all we could do every day was work hard and concentrate. Obviously we produced an extreme-sounding record. It's so extreme-sounding that it's hard to date it. You don't hear it and go, "Oh, that's what they all did in 1978...At the time there was mostly disco and lightweight stuff, middle-of-the-road ballads and English punk...It was funny because Brian had worked through his Roxy Music phase and was into ambient stuff by then. He had done Music for Airports. He was into beauty by the time he got around to producing Devo, which was pretty strange because Devo was about this brutal, industrial aesthetic."

'Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!' was eventually released on Warner Brothers Records in the US and Virgin Records in the UK. It charted at number seventy-eight in the US, fifty-seven in Australia, twelve in the UK, and seven in New Zealand. The album takes its title from refrain of 'Joko Homo' which was inspired by the film 'The Island of Dr. Moreau'. The album cover features a drawing of professional golfer Juan "Chi-Chi" Rodríguez that was combined with a morphed picture of the faces of United States presidents John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford.

Their art films prefigured the age of MTV. Mark Mothersbaugh remembers how their video aesthetic developed: "Here’s what it was. Somewhere around 1974, a friend of ours, Chuck Statler, came over to where we were rehearsing. He said, “Check this out.” It was a Popular Science article all about laserdiscs. 'Everyone will have them next year!' it said. And they were described as whole albums which not only had sounds, but visuals. You could almost get a whole movie on them, the original ones, and they looked just like a vinyl record. And we thought, 'Damn! That’s the end of rock and roll, because the great artists are going to be the ones who are into both sound and vision.' We became totally convinced then that we wanted to make art for that world—the one beyond rock and roll, which we were sure was going to be populated by people who had something to say both visually and musically. Which felt good to us, since we were visual artists in college. So we were writing music that was saying good-bye to rock and roll. That’s what we thought we were doing: deconstructing music that was popular at the time—disco and concert rock, like Styx and Foreigner. The message for that music was “I’m white, I’m stupid, I’m a conspicuous consumer and I’m proud of it.” Disco, on the other hand, was music that was like a beautiful woman with no brain...Originally, our goal was to make our own films. We made short films. Actually, we predicted MTV five years before it happened—we talked about the idea of music television in interviews. But we didn’t realize it was going to be so awful. We were looking for a new art form, a new way to think about our relationship to culture, something smart, a light step forward. Instead we ended up with a Home-Shopping Network for music companies. The sad thing was that it didn’t have to be that way. In the beginning, MTV was getting bombarded by artists around the globe with short films that were not just about a Fleetwood Mac–lookalike band mugging in front of the camera, or some kind of retrofitted Tom Petty song. They were getting original, unusual things. I know this because MTV would have these contests that they asked me to help judge. MTV knew me, knew us, because by the time MTV started, we already had made all sorts of clips—we’d started filming them in maybe 1974—and so you would see one Devo song just about every hour. Anyway, that’s how I started helping to judge these contests. I remember one time, there was a band called Tone Set from Arizona. They were so cool. I was sure they were going to win. This was in the early ’80s and they were playing stuff similar to what became trance and rave music. They didn’t have guitars and they had an electronic drum kit. But I was voting with people from the music companies—managers, agents. And I think it was a band that just spoofed ZZ Top—spinning their guitars—that won. I remember our first album had a song on it which didn’t use any guitar. And a reviewer, I think he was from Rolling Stone, was totally incensed by that. [Laughing] It was different times back then. These days you pretty much have to sit on an electronic drill in a video for anyone to react."









http://www.clubdevo.com/











'Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!'
full album:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d43gKl9xIME

1. Uncontrollable Urge - 0:00

2. (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction - 3:09

3. Praying Hands - 5:49

4. Space Junk - 8:37

5. Mongoloid - 10:51

6. Jocko Homo - 14:35

7. Too Much Paranoias - 18:14

8. Gut Feeling / Slap Your Mammy - 20:10

9. Come Back Jonee - 25:07

10. Sloppy (I Saw My Baby Gettin') - 28:54

11. Shrivel-Up - 31:33

Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo! Live At The London HMV Forum:

1. Uncontrollable Urge - 34:41

2. (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction - 38:08

3. Praying Hands - 41:30

4. Space Junk - 44:50

5. Mongoloid - 47:27

6. Jocko Homo - 51:17

7. Too Much Paranoias - 57:06

8. Gut Feeling / Slap Your Mammy -59:39

9. Come Back Jonee - 1:04:06

10. Sloppy (I Saw My Baby Gettin') - 1:08:32

11. Shrivel-Up - 1:10:59