Devolution

When I stumbled across a YouTube video of a Devo live performance on French TV from 1978, it validated what I already felt about this band. Underrated and sometimes regarded as a novelty act, Devo were easily the equals of the greatest performers in the 35-year (or so) history of rock 'n' roll music (roughly 1950--1985). As a songwriting team, Mark Mothersbaugh and Gerry Casale were as good as Lennon/McCartney or the Supremes, and probably better than Jagger/Richards. And the band's live performances exploded with energy as concentrated as those of the very best among rock's pioneers -- Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Fats Domino, and Little Richard.

The earliest incarnation of the band was in 1973, and its music from the beginning was "message" oriented. Devo's name began as a bit of cultural pessemism -- a joke, really -- cooked up by a couple of Kent State art students and escapees from Akron, Gerry Casale and Bob Lewis. "De-evolution," first expressed in the pair's art class projects, is the idea that the human race stopped progressing some time in the recent past, and the species is now in a retrograde, de-evolutionary mode, headed back down the ladder toward early primatehood. The concept was the theme of the band's breakout LP, "Are We Not Men," and after they'd achieved success Bob Lewis successfully sued Devo for theft of intellectual property.

Early Devo included Bob Lewis as a vocalist and several drummers, the longest tenured of which was Mark Mothersbaugh's brother Jim. As with a lot of other bands, ultimate success hinged on finding the "just right" drummer who would complete and drive the group's sound. Devo first refined itself and became a remarkably symmetrical unit consisting of two matched sets of brothers from Akron: Mothersbaugh and his brother Bob (Bob1), and Casale and his brother Bob (Bob2). They were fortunate at this point to obtain the services of Alan Myers, a seasoned and accomplished player who took the band to what people like to refer to as "the next level." Myers was not part of the Akron crowd; he was an outsider, and the quality of his playing, added to the already-strong guitar-and-keyboard instrumentation, gave the group entree into the big time

One of Devo's big problems over the course of its ten-year run near the top was that their first album was so good they could never top it. Every cut on "Are We Not Men" is a small masterpiece, from the postmodern lament of "Space Junk," in which the singer's girlfriend is killed by falling post-orbiting debris, to the controversial and politically incorrect "Mongoloid," in which a Down Syndrome victim passes for normal in his community, because:

He wore a hat,
And he had a job,
And he brought home the bacon
So that no one knew...
Mongoloid, he was a mongoloid.

"Mongoloid," like all great rock 'n' roll, is visceral as opposed to intellectual, with a sharp edge of hostility toward society. It is also simple, repetitive, driven at top speed, and bursting with overpowering energy due to Myers's smoking and relentless drumming. His contribution on Devo's cover of the Stones' "Satisfaction," on the same album, is so flawless and original that it elevates that piece to possibly the group's greatest effort, and a version of the song superior even to the great original. Myers here breaks up four/four time into discrete quarters, and plays it upside-down, with the accents on the first and third beats of each measure rather than the usual "backbeats, two and four. This gives the song an off-balance feel and an irresistible downhill momentum.

When searching for Devo videos, avoid footage from their "reunion" tour, which might have been called the old, fat and low-energy tour. The band's reprises of their classic pieces do not bear comparison with their beat-down-the-walls performances of 25 and 30 years ago, and they would have been better advised to stay home.

But looking back, how fitting that the final great flourish of one of America's indigenous art forms should have been home-grown in Akron, Ohio, of all places, which is also the birthplace of Alcoholics Anonymous. I suppose there are other places a band like this could have germinated, Youngstown, for example. In the grimy, post-industrial environment of the rust belt in the early seventies, pessimism and hopelessness must have been unavoidable. America got lucky (again) by domestically germinating some kids who, entirely under their own steam and using only their own, instinctive, youthful wisdom, cooked up a way to have a load of fun with pessimism and gloom.