When Devo’s first album Q: Are We Not Men A: We Are Devo! came out in 1978 it was completely original, completely insane and completely unique. NOTHING else was quite like it. David Bowie and Brian Eno produced it. Brian Eno even paid for the production. They were immediately signed to Warner Brothers and Virgin in a joint contract. Everything happened extremely quickly and created a Devo whirlwind that has continued to inform and influence generation after generation of new musicians. Thirty years later a new album is on the horizon, a movie detailing all the events of the controversial and exceptional Devo history is due next year and on May 6th the band will perform their first and seminal album Q: Are We Not Men A: We Are Devo! in full. Big City Redneck catches up with founder Gerry Casale who is stuck on the Santa Monica Freeway and has been trapped on it for some time…
BCR: So how are you feeling about doing Are We Not Men! We Are Devo! in full on May 6th?
GERRY CASALE: We’re looking forward to it but there’s a little bit of high anxiety about it. Because it’s such a strange idea we kinda warmed up to it. It seems like it’s almost like doing a museum performance art piece or something because we’d never ever played the whole record. Even in 1978, we just played the songs that we wanted to play from it in an order that made sense live and mixed songs we had written that ended up on the second and third records. To do this in the sequence of the first record, it’s almost comical. But what’s intriguing intellectually – obviously what a band picks on their debut record, it’s a big deal, to pick the running order – you’re making a statement. It’s your opening manifesto. Having to do this we listened to the record and we go “why did we do that?”… So it takes you back in a time warp and puts you in touch with who you were then and makes you rethink everything. So it’s been a bizarre but pleasantly bizarre experience.
BCR: Have you figured out what kind of stage show you’re going to do?
GERRY CASALE: We’re going to behave more like we did then. We all wish we were that skinny but we think we can still make those precise moves. Devo in the beginning was really deliberate and controlled every single moment. There were no arbitrary movements. We either did nothing or something we thought of doing. No walking around between songs, no communication with the crowd. Nothing. Almost like a machine that just turned on and off. Twelve times.
BCR: It’s your paramilitary team isn’t it?
GERRY CASALE: We were, we were almost making parodies of marshal band stuff and marching… We kept using those kinds of things. But we tried to be as precise as the military - that’s the good thing that they do.
BCR: I see you guys as Art House really in terms of the performance because it’s so wrapped up in concept so…
GERRY CASALE: We intend to cover the stage in black plastic just like we did in 1978, just like we did on Saturday Night Live. We played on black plastic and we only used orange, lime green and light white and we never cut the sleeves off our yellow suits back then. We’re still looking for 3D paper glasses – they don’t make those anymore. We’re going to approximate the intensity… all the songs – the tempos are really fast. When you saw us at Primavera, even when we played a few songs from the first record I can guarantee you we weren’t playing them as fast as we did in 1978. We’re trying to bring it right back up to speed. Part of the insanity of Devo was the tempo assault. Kind of like Polysics, they play at the speeds we used to play at. When people watch them song after song being precise like that, they can’t believe it.
BCR: Everything does seem very contained and specific – I know this is an odd bridge but you’ve often said that Devo wouldn’t be Devo if not for the Kent State shootings, does that still drive you?
GERRY CASALE: It’s kind of transitioned or mutated into something more abstract and deeper. When that happened it fired up every bit of hate and disgust I had in my body. It was directed very politically and directed at illegitimate authority and authority figures who are clamping down on personal liberties and telling me lies. That never changes, that’s the world we live in, that’s the human condition. What I believed then was that humans were essentially ok, easily led by directed intelligent evil. In other words a few bad men could take a whole herd of normal people and misdirect their energy. I don’t think that anymore. I think it’s deeply within human nature itself that the reason these injustices in humanity exist – I think anyone in the right circumstances is capable of it. We all have it in us. It’s more Jungian, everybody’s got the monster and the monster is always ready to come out. Human nature is innately flawed. It isn’t like there’s a bunch of nice people who get tricked by the bad guy.
BCR: There does seem to be something, like in the Nazi regime there were many people who opposed its practices but turned a blind eye because of the ideology that screamed that it could save Germany. They were complicit while ignoring their own disgust.
GERRY CASALE: There’s always that duality, there’s always a paradox. That’s why when you read Animal Farm, it’s an indictment of Communism, fascism – the higher the ideal, the further you have to fall. On paper Marxism looks great, sounds great and it just gave people the ability to spout high minded ideals while they were screwing everybody. That’s what’s funny about the duality of capitalism and democracy in America – those are mutually exclusive ideas, practically. They’re definitely at odds. There’s definitely a struggle and a conflict there.
BCR: They’re almost mutually defeating.
GERRY CASALE: Well, Capitalism easily wins out over democracy, hhaa, and in fact has. And that’s why this country went into the toilet. Now greed is rampant. China was smart – they jumped straight from socialistic communism to capitalism without democracy, without freedom and human rights. So they don’t have to shoot their public. They don’t have a populace that they have to keep lying to and selling the brand of democracy to, or the brand of freedom to. Nobody has that idea to begin with. They’re a clean machine. They’re not sitting there in a mess like we are where we have to pretend that we care about equality and human rights and the rights of minorities. The Chinese just laugh at us!
BCR: Is it this politicisation that had you doing the Barack Obama concerts? Were you asked to do that?
GERRY CASALE: Yeah, we were asked to do that and we’ve never become involved in anything overtly political or specific or partisan in the past but as flawed as Obama is and as much as he’s owned by the men behind the curtain, it just seemed clear to us that the idea of McCain and Palin would be the last nail in the coffin in America. America has already become a joke because of Bush and if we want any kind of respect from serious people around the world - Obama is a smart man. He may be fundamentally in the pocket of the men behind the curtain and definitely a song and dance man for the New World Order but the funny thing is that’s the best case scenario. In other words that’s all we can hope for, to be led inside the castle so to speak. Under McCain and Palin we would have become a complete laughing stock and fallen further behind where we would be in the New World Order. Obama’s a slick guy, man, slick.
BCR: So Obama is the insidious terror…
GERRY CASALE: He’s charming, he’s a charismatic speaker, he’s got a high IQ. I’ll tell ya I’d rather be tricked and screwed by a smart guy than a dumb guy. It’ll feel a lot better going down.
BCR: So you’re still a proponent of the De-Evolution, there’s still no hope?
GERRY CASALE: Absolutely. That’s the one thing, that’s probably why we’re still here. We had all these half baked ideas, this smart assed pose outside of college and it was based on meaningful analysis; Devo had ideas behind it. It wasn’t just style. We never thought, for a minute, that that stuff would really happen that way. We were just like a kid that likes to conjure up scary monsters for mental exercise and then you go, whoa, I didn’t mean it! Well, the illusion is real. I think everybody today agrees; they don’t think that Devo is some far out controversial idea in that what are those guys talking about? Everybody just goes, oh yeah, salty bald men, oh yeah. Gotta have respect for you fool! It’s devolved beyond what we could imagine and it happened quicker.
BCR: What happened with Jerry Jihad & The Evildoers? The backlash on that seemed ridiculous…
GERRY CASALE: Jihad Jerry got no love. Fundamentalist Muslims were writing me hate mail on my website, which was called Mine Is Not A Holy War.com by the way. I thought the satire was obvious and the first single Army Girls Gone Wild ?– I don’t know if you saw the video? How could you not laugh at that? That’s what I don’t understand. American’s didn’t find it funny either, so it’s like ok, we’ve really lost our minds now.
BCR: It’s weird this blinkered ideology…
GERRY CASALE: Well, nobody knows what they think and what’s worse is that nobody knows how to think. This was the real thing that we were horrified by that we started seeing in the seventies. The increasing inability of a mass of people to have any analytical or reflective processes with their brains. Unbelievable. They look at a bunch of information and they don’t know how to organise it or see through it or read between the lines or figure it out. They just like sound bites, like the sheep in Animal Farm who repeat the rules on the side of the barn and when the horse points out that it had changed from last week all the sheep say no, it always said that! Because they don’t even remember. And that’s how 24/7 news cycle works and that’s why Fox became the number one news organisation in America. It is pure propaganda. The fact that they would adopt a log line of “fair and balanced; we report, you decide” was brilliant because that’s the ultimate misappropriation of truth – to take something that is true, turn it inside out and make it propaganda.
BCR: It’s a packaging for the reaction you want. Do you think that’s why the early shows, the promoters were so antagonistic to you – because your songs were seen as so controversial?
GERRY CASALE: We always had that problem, people were like “wait a minute, these guys think their shit don’t stink”. They always felt like we were the ones tricking them when we were the people trying to tell the truth. But that’s always how upside down it is. There is the disconnect right there. Like Fox news, it works, they convince you, the common man out there, that there’s people who are elitists when they’re the biggest elitists. That’s the fucking thing. They’re using cornpone propaganda to make everyone else seem like the other, the outsider, the enemy. You know “that person thinks he’s got ideas, that person thinks he’s smart”. That’s who you’ve got to distrust. It’s brilliant.
BCR: To swing away from politics for a minute – how’s the new album looking? Is it coming out in the autumn?
GERRY CASALE: I think it’ll come out at the beginning of October, the time line keeps stretching. We’ve done final recordings of six songs and we’ve chosen all the rest of the songs we’re putting on the record and we just have to re-record them properly from the demos and send everything to producers to see who’s interested.
BCR: Yeah, I heard something about Snoop Dogg wanting to produce it?
GERRY CASALE: Yeah that’s right, we’re sending out to him and Andre 3000, James Murphy from LCD Soundsystem, the two guys from Justice, Fatboy Slim, Alan Moulder who works with Trent Reznor, Nine Inch Nails. We don’t want to produce these songs ourselves. We’re done with the do it yourselves.
BCR: I’ve got to say that Teddybears did a great job on the single Watch Me Work It…
GERRY CASALE: They’re smart. They said “here’s our idea of what Devo should be because we love Devo, but here’s our idea of Devo, rather than Devo’s idea of Devo”. And that was brilliant, like a post-post-modern idea to take yourself and rather than self parody run through the imagination of other people who think they know what Devo is.
BCR: I really liked it – it’s so distinctly Devo but in sharper focus if you know what I mean…
GERRY CASALE: I agree, I totally agree, that’s what I liked about it. It was a needed twist, it was that dimension we needed and we’re looking to repeat that. We’re going back to them with several tracks cos they’re ready to go.
BCR: So how many tracks are going to be included in the new album? I’ve heard everything between 14 and 17 tracks…
GERRY CASALE: When it eventually comes out it’ll be twelve but we’re going to be releasing stuff in clusters over a period. CDs and album releases don’t mean anything anymore. We want to stay in front of people over a period of time and people like smaller bite sized discs. They don’t need a big smorgasbord all at once.
