A Conversation with Devo’s Mark Mothersbaugh – HuffPost 7.20.10

Mike Ragogna: Mark, how is that “de-evolution” going?

Mark Mothersbaugh: Unfortunately, it’s healthier than ever.

MR: You’re back on Warner Bros., the label where you had a lot of early success though you started out as almost the prototype of an “indie” band.

MM: You’ve done some homework. Yeah, actually we recorded on Booji Boy Records. Because we were in Akron, Ohio, we had no idea what a record company was, so we just made up our own name for a company, pressed our own records and called it Booji Boy.

MR: What came first, your appearance on Saturday Night Live or the Warners signing?

MM: Well, actually, we had a record come out in ’78 and we were on Saturday Night Live, I think, in ’78 also. But it was about a month or so into a tour where we had no radio play outside of college and a few stations on the east and west coasts. Nobody really knew who we were, so Saturday Night Live was kind of our first “Hello, here we are!” to the United States.

MR: What a fun moment that was. That was one of the best things they had ever broadcast. That and Barnes & Barnes’ “Fish Heads.”

MM: As a matter of fact, that’s how I first heard of “Fish Heads”–on Saturday Night Live. Later, Billy Mumy came and worked for me for a number of years as a songwriter at a company I called, Mutato Muzika.

MR: Is that right?

MM: Yeah, he wrote about thirty-five songs for me in the late eighties.

MR: Nice. Of course, every good HuffPost reader knows Billy Mumy also was Will Robinson in Lost In Space, Lennier in Babylon 5, and is a terrific singer-songwriter and excellent guitar player. Years ago, I think his group Redwood was the inspiration for the trio of America. But I happily digress. Can you give us a Devo history lesson?

MM: In 1970, I was at Kent State, I was an art student, and I met Gerald Casale who was another art student. The two of us, along with my brother Bob, were all protesting the war in Vietnam in 1970 at Kent State. We were all at different protests, but Gerald was there when kids got killed, so they closed our school down and we couldn’t get there for four months. So Gerald would come to my house and we would write music. We were both musicians–he was in a blues band and I was into electronic, experimental music, and prog rock–everything that was more on the keyboard side. We thought of ourselves as sort of The Flintstones meets The Jetsons, and we started writing stuff. We were trying to figure out what we were seeing in our world from our viewpoint of Akron, Ohio, and we decided we weren’t observing evolution, but rather, a definition of what was de-evolution, and that became the name of our band. We shortened it down from The De-evolutionary Army down to Devo.

MR: Flash not to forward and you’ve got “Whip It” and a lot of your other memorable material. So, would you describe your early style as new wave, punk…

MM: …you know, we never really did. We never really thought of ourselves as a punk band either but they were contemporary to us, so we found ourselves playing venues with Punk bands and with New Wave bands and we got along with them.

MR: You were definitely in that grey area in between those.

MM: Yeah, we were kind of the abject prop band of the late Seventies and Eighties, so we weren’t really fashionable. We were really more of a theatre project than a band, and we really didn’t even start out to be a band. We thought Devo was going to be like the Akron, Ohio, version of Andy Warhol’s “Factory.” We thought that we weren’t even going to have to go on stage and play music. We thought we were going to be able to write songs, put together a visual show centered on the topic of de-evolution and what’s happening to our planet and our species, and write fun songs to dance to and listen to that also had something else going on in them. And we’d have four or five Devo’s going out. When I look back at the notebooks that Gerald and I used to make up, we were thinking kind of like a Blue Man Group of Rock ‘n’ Roll in a way. We thought we were going to be sending out other people to do it and we wouldn’t have to go on the road.

MR: Definitely something most folks don’t know about Devo.

MM: When we signed with the record company, they didn’t really understand that at all either. Even on much more obvious issues, nobody got why we were making these films with our songs in them. Why would you want to do that? You know?

MR: And then look what happened.

MM: Yeah. There wasn’t an MTV yet.

MR: Despite being associated with all the fun kitsch, your group is credited as being pretty innovative. And you might say that on Something For Everyone, your sound has, well, evolved.

MM: If you didn’t even like Devo, you’ll like this record. That’s the scary thing. We employed focus groups, and now the album has been fine-tuned to the point that there is something for everybody on it.

MR: The song, “No Place Like Home” is my personal favorite, it being a really cool anthem about taking care of that place you call home.

MM: Thanks. I’ll tell you a funny story about that song. It’s one of the last songs that we put on the record, and I actually wrote that music to be the main theme of a film called Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs. I played it for the directors early on, and there were a couple of other things that got their attention and they kind of forgot about that piece of music. When I finished that film, I realized that I still had the song that nothing had happened with. So, I gave it to Gerald, almost as a joke, because it’s a piano ballad at the beginning. It starts off sounding more like something Elton John or Journey would do rather than Devo. He really liked the music, however, and it made him go home that night and write the “No Place Like Home” lyrics. That’s the story, it’s probably the most atypical song we ever did.

MR: You might say, Something for Everybody.

MM: Yeah, that’s for the people that we were forgetting.

MR: Since you brought it up, let’s go over your film scoring career. You’re behind a lot of high profile projects. Could you give us the laundry list?

MM: Well, it’s a little too long to do the whole thing. I was just adding them up, and I’ve scored sixty-seven TV series, over forty-five feature films, about two-dozen games including things like Crash Bandicoot and The Sims, I don’t know if you know The Sims…

MR: Of course.

MM: For TV shows, I started with Pee Wee’s Playhouse. I started with the theme song, I wrote it with Paul Reubens, and Cyndi Lauper sang it for us. After that I did sixty-seven TV shows that included everything from Dawson’s Creek and goofball stuff like that, toRugrats, and there’s one on Spike channel called Blue Mountain State, and one on Cartoon Network called, Regular Show that hasn’t started airing yet.

MR: Nice. What are some of the films?

MM: For films, I did three Rugrat movies with big orchestra that ended up, between the three of them, doing about a billion dollars worth of sales. I did most of Wes Anderson’s movies, which is on the other end of the spectrum. And, like I said, Cloudy With Chance of Meatballs, that was the first 3D movie I got to do. I recorded that with The London Symphony over at George Martin Studio. I’ve got a movie coming out shortly called, Ramon & Beezus, on FOX which is based on a series of books for girls. I think if you were a girl growing up in the eighties or nineties, you probably read a Ramona & Beezus book.

MR: Let’s talk about the new album. You kick it off with “Fresh,” which describes the album perfectly, yet it’s still heavily Devo.

MM: This album has some things going for it that none of our other albums had. The biggest thing is, I think, that the passage of time has made Devo historical. We’re not outrageous or shocking or intimidating people anymore. Now, there is nothing that’s shocking–you’d have to kill yourself on stage to be shocking, and you can only do that once. And after a couple of dozen people do it, even THAT wouldn’t be shocking anymore. In the past we were always very insular because people would argue with us and say, “You’ve just got a bad attitude.” But now, thirty years later, Washington, D.C., alone has done so much to prove the theory of de-evolution and advance it at such a rapid rate, which is what we were warning people against back then and nobody took us seriously. But I guess that’s the way things go when you’re in a band.

On the other side, we became less insular, we always did everything ourselves. Gerald and I did the video, I always did the story boards, and he always directed them, we never hired outside producers or directors to come in with an idea for our song, we always thought in a visual manner with our music. This time, it was different because three years ago, when we got asked to do a song for a TV commercial and they said, “Can we use ‘Whip It’?” we said, “Well, can we do a new Devo song? Would you be interested in that?” They said, “Is there such a thing?” So, we let them check it out because we had some things that we’d been writing over the last fifteen years. There’s two sets of brothers in the band, basically, and we’d go out and for a couple of weeks a year and play festivals, and then we’d go back to our day jobs. So, we had a couple of things we’d sketched up, and we took one and recorded it for this Dell Computer commercial. That ad agency said, “This is perfect, we’ll take it. Do you mind if we re-mix it?” and we were sort of like, “No, be our guest, it’s a TV commercial.” That was the one place that we didn’t really care if people did things to our music. I mean, with “Whip It,” people had whipped it, stripped it, dipped it, flipped it, clipped it, and swiffed it for sure, if not more than that.

So, that was an area where we didn’t hold on too tightly, because we were pro-subversion. We learned something in the seventies about rebellion being obsolete. If you really want to change things in a democracy, you do it through subversion, and who does it better than Madison Avenue? So, we thought, “Alright, yeah you can do whatever you want to our songs.” I always felt like we were planting little time-bombs in people, and they may not get it right away while they’re listening to a pancake commercial that they’re hearing a song by Devo, but maybe they’d hear it somewhere else and say, “Those are different lyrics.” And then maybe they go and find out what the lyrics are about and they say, “Oh, these guys have content.” Then they’d become interested. Subversion is how you change it in this country.

Anyway, they took the song, and they watched the work that we had written, and they let the Teddybears remix it. They sent us a copy back and Gerald and I both thought that it was better than what we did, it was really good. So, we talked to them, and they told us that they were big fans, and they’d been big fans. They said, “We think you guys should do an album.” We thought, “Well this could be our business model.” Because nobody sells CD’s anymore, nobody sells records. Kids just don’t buy records anymore, I’m not going to beat my breast over that and start wailing. I know there are people that do, but that’s just the way the world is, it’s changed. The Internet has totally changed the way kids perceive music, the way musicians create music and deliver it, and the way music sounds. It’s all been changed irreversibly by the Internet, and we thought, “That’s exciting.” We saw all the possibilities that came along with getting rid of the old business model and that’s what made us come back and do another record.

MR: And when you came back, it was to your old home Warner Brothers.

MM: Yeah. Three years ago, if you had told me that that we were going to sign with a record label in two-and-a-half years, I would have said, “Ha ha ha.” But then we went to Burbank to the offices we used to go to, and they were inhabited with people who said, “You know what? We’re an endangered species, and we know our time is limited, and we want to reinvent ourselves. We think you guys could help us.” It kind of made us say, “Wow, we wish this is where it was back in 1977.” So, we’re doing it one more time with a record company, before they’re gone for good or reinvent themselves and become something totally new and something of value.

MR: And just what is that, you know? There are just too many catalogs, too many fortunes to be working. In my opinion, major labels own so many assets, they can’t keep track of what they have anymore.

MM: The internet had changed everything. No longer are kids waiting for EMI Records or Warner Bros. Records to say, “Okay, we’re going to re-release this record now.” They can go to the Internet and they can find everything, it’s all available. And I think that’s pretty great. I think it’s an exciting time to be an artist; I think this is an exciting time to be making music. I wish this was the way it was when I was a kid, I wish the internet existed. YouTube is much more exciting than MTV ever was…I thought MTV was a big disappointment when it came along. I had all these dreams of it being much more exciting and something that was going to change pop culture in a big, meaningful way. Instead, it just allowed a lot of old dinosaurs to coast for a while.

MR: It became a device for sales rather than a device for art. It could have balanced the two better.

MM: I think, for all the warts and creepy aspects of the internet, it’s a great time to be making art, I think it’s a great medium to work in. We’ll see what happens when the Chinese decide they’re going to blow all the satellites out of the air and we can’t get our connections anymore. But until that happens, I think it’s a really interesting time. I’d love to be twenty years old right now.

MR: The album cover is a picture of woman, eyes closed, preparing to digest a little Devo cap, this time blue, not red. The flower pot cap?

MM: Yeah. Um, energy dome, please.

MR: Yes, of course. Energy dome…energy dome is what I meant to say.

MM: They didn’t really make very good flower pots. I even tried putting flowers in them just to see what people were talking about, and it wasn’t really very good for that.

MR: I know, it was a bad nickname. But the cover, with the energy dome about to go into her lips, what’s going on there?

MM: It’s something for everybody. It’s a demonstration on a cover. The art, on one level, is really bland, and it looks like it could have come out of an ad graphic clip book. But I think that’s what is likeable about it, I think that was the point.

MR: It’s terrific. Earlier, we were talking about how it would be great to be twenty and just coming into it now. On the other hand, I am grateful for my age, in some respects, because of the tactile relationships we had with albums. There was tangible, touchable artwork. With respect to art no longer being the focus and a download being the instant gratification, I think we’ve devolved back to the generic 45.

MM: Yeah, it’s interesting. We’re in a time that is undefined right now, where things are going to go with the Internet, and how pop is going to be disseminated. It’s really a fun time to be part of it.

MR: I love “No Place Like Home” and “Fresh” seems to be your bang up something or another…I don’t even know what you call them anymore. I know certain downloads, at different periods of a release schedule, are being marketed as “singles.” Another of my favorites, that could be designated a “single,” I guess, is “Mind Games.”

MM: Yeah, I like “Mind Games.” It sounds like the host of Concentration, who was the host of that show?

MR: Hugh Downs.

MM: Yes. Hugh Downs could come out and go, “Ok now! We’ve got some contestants here from…” Where are you from, Mike?

MR: (laughs) Really? Moved to Fairfield, Iowa, from L.A., born in NYC. Another of my favorites is “What We Do.”

MM: Yeah. I’ve got to be honest with you, I’ve heard a lot of bands come back after twenty-five years and put out their new record and you’re like, “Oh God, I wish they hadn’t done that.” There’s a lot of that. But what I think is our strength is that we still write about the same things that we ever wrote about, and we still play and construct songs in the same fashion that we used to. The only thing that’s changed is the technology that comes with the times. Every single album that we’ve done, from a technological standpoint, kind of reflects what was out there, the state of the art. So, I think the employment of Greg Kurstin and all the other producers that worked on this record brought to it what this record needed, as far as input from outsiders, to make Devo’s sound relevant for the time.

MR: And what’s nice is that, as you mentioned earlier, most of them were probably influenced by what you were doing back then.

MM: That had a lot to do with who we chose. We picked people who said that they really liked us. I was thinking about how we thought about music when I was younger. When we did albums the first time around we just fought the producers all the time because we were so protective. But bands that we really loved, like The Rolling Stones, we did a version of “Satisfaction” and we felt we were updating it for the seventies because it was ten years old at the time we did our re-arrangement of it. Back in those days, you had to get permission from an artist if you were going to significantly change their song, you had to get permission to put it out on a record. So, we had to drive to New York from Ohio and go into Peter Rudge’s office. He was managing The Rolling Stones at the time. Gerald and I were really nervous, and we took the record in and then Mick Jagger shows up. So, we put the song on and after about thirty seconds, he starts dancing around the room. We were just crapping our pants because he’s our biggest hero. After it was over he said, “You know, this is my favorite version of this song.” And so that was about as good as it got in my life.

MR: What a cool memory.

MM: But we were hoping that the people that were working on our record would bring something to it like what we were trying to do with The Rolling Stones, and I think a lot of them succeeded. I think the songs all got lifted up beyond the recordings we had done at my studio here in Hollywood. We write and record in the same way we did in 1974, so it sounds like 1974 recordings when we do it. But when we handed them over to Santigold, and Greg, and John Hill, and everybody else that worked on this, it’s like they all brought something to the party that made the songs better than they were when we handed it to them. So, I can’t give enough credit to our producers.

MR: Yeah, it’s a labor of love. You can just hear that they really wanted this to work, and you guys are full throttle with your writing and with your performances.

MM: Thanks. You know, you don’t know when you start, you’re thinking, “This could end up being really, super-kitsch” because, let’s face it, we’re not twenty anymore, and that’s where a big part of your audience is. It’s younger than you are. Could be your kids in another situation, and maybe some of them are, who knows? But I think when the smoke cleared, it came out pretty well. And I’m sure that there are a lot of people who would blow smoke up my pant leg if they get a chance. But I found a lot of people that were fairly honest about it, or didn’t know that it was Devo that they were talking to. We really did focus groups, kind of as a joke, but kind of for real.

MR: You do have that sticker on your front cover, “Eighty-eight percent focus group approved.”

MM: Well, you know how it is in a democracy, people get to vote, but there is an electoral college to make sure the people don’t get out of control, you know how it is. So, the record company picked two songs they wanted to have on the record, but we said, “The only way we would do that is if they would let us, at least, put out a version of the record that is also one hundred percent focus group.” So both versions of the album do exist. There is a focus group version that you can buy.

MR: As far as de-evolution, what are you thinking when you read the headlines these days? What’s really irritating you and making you realize, “Yeah, we were right”?

MM: Don’t get me started. Just watching that oil spill out into the Gulf, it makes me feel like we’re living Idiocracy, we’re living a Mike Judge movie right now. It’s not the future, we’re here.

MR: And the fact that a Sarah Palin could be on the cover of every magazine again. What’s going on? Is this a cyclical thing where the nation gets unusually stupid, or does she just have a great publicist and a well-funded machine behind her?

MM: She represents idiocracy in a real, solid way. That’s the most solid evidence that it exists.

MR: And then throw into that, news networks that disseminate information like it’s been given talking points from corporations, or they’re just crying “fire” in an auditorium for ratings. And average, everyday folks actually believe them and don’t see it’s a form of marketing or a carnival.

MM: Well, look at what’s happened in this country. We’re reaping the fruits of taking education and putting it at the bottom rung of importance in our culture. So, that’s what you’re getting–people that don’t have the right information, and that aren’t properly equipped to even evaluate what they see going on around them. Personally, I don’t really consider myself with any party. I feel like I’m pro-education all the way, and I think that’s what Devo was about in the beginning. We were always pro-information, anti-stupidity, and we thought that the problems that we have in our culture now can be solved, they’re not unsolvable. Technology isn’t inherently evil, but it isn’t inherently good either, it’s benign. It’s the human mind, or lack of it, on this planet that makes the decisions and decides where we’re going to go as a culture.

Transcribed by Ryan Gaffney