MUSIC INTERVIEW: DEVO

Gerald Casale on the Joy (& Pain) of Playing Ball to Create ‘Something for Everybody’

By: Team Buzzine

June 24, 2011

Aside from being the creators of such insanely catchy musical gems as "Whip It" and "Girl U Want," Devo has long enjoyed a privileged position, both as an iconic progenitor of modern electronic music and an ironic forerunner of the modern entertainment industry tactic of forming a marketing brand around an artist or project. So when it was announced that not only was Devo releasing their first new album in 20 years, but that they were crowdsourcing the ‘best’ version of that album in collaboration with focus groups and a cutting-edge ad agency, we, along with a whole bunch of other spuds, got very, very excited. Now that enough time has gone by for some hindsight and insight, Buzzine sat down with Devo’s Gerald Casale to talk music, marketing, double audiences, and de-evolution. And alien turds.

Gerald Casale: In 1990, we finished our deal with Enigma Records. It was a last nail in the coffin for Devo. Enigma was aptly named. They had received a huge cash infusion from Capitol Records. I think they got 50 million dollars as a start-up company, and their CEO basically did not spend it on the bands and promotion. I think a home was bought, a motorboat, some vacations… And Devo was just kind of dumped with the rest of their artists.

After that, Mark Mothersbaugh wasn’t interested in another label experience at that moment. Then we started playing shows in 1996. Actually, in ’95, we closed Sundance Film Festival with a big show. That was fun. And we filmed that show. We wore 1920s style prison suits that we got from a props company in L.A., so we did a special show with really old, hardcore Devo songs from the early ‘70s, before we ever had a deal. And we created an hour program called Butch Devo and the Sundance Gig. And it never came out. [Laughs]

And then we played festivals and limited dates after that – a few a year – and Mark never wanted to collaborate on new material, ever. And then in 2007, we did a song at my behest for Dell – their new XPS laptop computer campaign. And the agency doing the campaign was Mother, out of New York. The two guys behind that -- Paul Malmstrom and Linus Karlsson – had been genius creatives at…and I really mean…that word is overused, but they are. And they’re doing the coolest stuff in the world. They’d been at Fallon McElligott in Minneapolis, and then, because they were just so great, they got the nod from Mother in London, and they said, “Would you start Mother America for us?” and they said, “Yes.”

They came to us and said, “Dell wants to use ‘Whip It,’ but ‘Whip It’ has been used 50 times. It’s ad nauseum. What if you would do a new song?” So I talked Mark into getting about two hours of his time. I had written five or six songs. They liked a couple of them; they wanted to hear more, so Mark and I wrote a couple more, and “Watch Us Work It” was chosen. Everybody loved it and it just became this big song through the ad campaign, and the ad campaign ran nationally for over three months and right through the Superbowl.

That’s when everybody started coming out of the woodwork – producers, label people that I’d known from the past, engineers, managers – saying, “Why don’t you guys do a record?” And I said, “You’re preaching to the converted. I never wanted to stop doing Devo records. I always had things to say; I always wanted a voice in the marketplace. Talk to Mark.” Because it was always a collaboration, Devo. It was always a 50/50 collaboration on the songwriting, on designs for graphics, for video concepts. Even though I would direct them, we would concept them together. It’s like a Ferrari. You’re not gonna run it on half the cylinders, so unless he was on board, nothing was going to happen.

Finally, he begrudgingly came around when the manager of [the Swedish band] Teddybears told him that the they had only sold 30,000 records of their first CD, but had licensed four songs off that CD for a total gross of about $4,000,000. So Mark’s eyes got a little bigger than they usually are behind those bottle-thick glasses, and he went, “Okay.” And we set out and started writing a record in 2008, when he finally pulled the trigger.

SG: Right in the genesis of the album was marketing and commercialism, and Devo has always wrapped those elements all up into a ball, along with a healthy dose of creativity. At what point did the crowdsourcing idea become irresistible?

GC: The crowdsourcing idea, just to back up a minute, happened because Devo always played, on a much less formal way than we do currently, with the culture. We were always commenting on the culture, and we were always using publicity techniques and marketing techniques that we saw corporate America using, including how I would shoot the videos or how I would frame the shots by watching McDonald’s commercials. It was always tongue-in-cheek making a comment – having your cake and eating it too.

And in the 20 years that ensued, with being de-branded in the marketplace in a world where marketing is absolutely everything. Nobody knows what they like or why they like it, or they don’t even know it exists if it isn’t for marketing. So marketing becomes the art form. Just like in the art world, the concept of what a painting should be, or what an installation should be has become the art. The art world spoke to itself, and we knew that, and we thought, “What happens if we partner with a real ad agency, and treat Devo like a box of cereal?” The Who touched at that 40 years ago, and Devo on our first record – we did too. So we wanted to do it in a real way, and one of the main techniques that an ad agency uses today, like their lynchpin, is focus groups and crowdsourcing.

Mother lives and dies on the success of their incisiveness of the culture. They have to succeed for their clients. That’s how they stay in business. Record labels have always done marketing, but it isn’t specifically their named profession. It’s like an arm of what they do, but it isn’t like anybody in the company comes from formal schooling in marketing, or at least in the past it never was. So we thought, let’s have a marketing company work with the label, and the label is the finance partner and the distributor, and the marketing company is an ad agency, and we’ll go all the way. And we tried it, and it was an experiment. It was a synergistic experiment, and we wanted to take it much further and make it more real.

We wanted the focus groups to determine a lot more than they got to determine – not just which songs would go on a record, but which versions of the songs. Do you like this vocal better? Do you like a guitar or a synthesizer here? We wanted to really play it up big and get it talked about on a national level. We were hoping to break through somehow – to get CNN talking about this campaign. We did what we could. The best laid plans of mice and men. So it was fun for us to do that, but we wanted to even again, take it deeper and make it more real.

SG: There is another part to Devo opening things up. In the first phase of Devo, you guys kept things, creatively, very close to a core group. But for this latest album, you worked with Greg Kurstin, John King, John Hill, Santi White…you opened things up. Even before you got to the crowd sourcing, you immediately brought other creative minds into the studio. How did that change the process of making the album for Devo as a group?

GC: Devo was always hermetically sealed. People had this idea of Devo, pejorative or not, that we were aliens, we came down in a spaceship, we drop our product like an alien turd and then leave. And you take it or leave it. We were self-contained because we created an alternative world with characters in it and terminology that only we used, and we always wanted to spin that into a feature film – that was our intent.

But this time around, after you’ve done that your whole career and been accused of not playing ball and not connecting up and being a regular guy and part of the culture, we thought, well, we’ve done all that. What we never did was play ball, in that sense, so that’s what we were trying to do. We wanted to see what other people thought Devo should be.

In its ensuing 20-year hiatus, a whole new generation of people raised on the Internet had their idea of what Devo should be, iconically and sound-wise, so there were certain things they didn’t want to hear from us. Very interesting. And as far as producers - like Santigold and John Hill and especially Greg Kurstin – they come from the generation after us, of music people that… grew up with Devo, and Devo was an inspiration to them as they became adults and formed their careers. So it was interesting to see what they thought Devo should sound like.

And I thought Greg Kurstin did a particularly great job with that. We always sound like us because…how can you help it? You’re you – you can’t not be you. But he brought out some element that was always there, but just with a little fairy dust on it. Everybody that heard the record liked it. The record got, across the board, great reviews, except for maybe a couple snipey ones, to be expected. Rolling Stone was a bit trivializing, and New York Times was snipey, but that was about it. And the people that heard the record loved it, and they didn’t think that Devo had done something they shouldn’t do. They didn’t think we raped our sound. They thought it was like Freedom of Choice had been picked up again, like it picked up where Freedom of Choice left off – somewhere around that and New Traditionalists.

SG: External validation is always nice, but for you personally, what are you happiest about the new record?

GC: I suppose what I am happy about is that we were able to write stuff we truly liked; we were able to get rid of the stuff that sucked. We put out a record that we liked, and even though it didn’t achieve radio play or a broad audience, everybody that heard it thought it was just as energetic and just as fresh as anything we had done in our youth. And when we played live, we would mix the new songs in with the old songs, and nobody knew the difference.

We get a double audience. We get the old fogies that grew up with us, and they’re in their 40s and 50s. And we get the 20-something kids that all come because they saw all of Devo’s TV performances on the Internet, and they went and looked up our videos, and they know us from things like the Dell XPS commercial and Mark on Yo Gabba Gabba. And they come, and they don’t have this sense of history. They’re in an amorphous time zone, and they didn’t know these were new songs. When we would play the song “Fresh” or “What We Do,” or “Don’t Shoot, I’m a Man,” they just thought it was another Devo song from the same bag as “Peek-A-Boo” and “That’s Good” and “Whip It.”  

SG: I read that, when the album came out, there was a listening party online just for cats...

GC: Yes, there was a listening party online just for cats. That was an idea that was hashed between Mother and Warner Brothers, and the cats seemed to like it.

SG: That was the feline feedback – positive?

GC: I think there was a lot of scratching and urinating and defecation. The cats were crawling all over a giant blue version of the energy dome, and they wasted it. The thing is full of cat fluids.

SG: You have always directed the majority of the Devo videos, and then branched out into doing music videos for other people, and from there, commercials as well. When it came back to making a new music video for Devo, was there something you specifically wanted to achieve? Were you trying to raise the bar? Were you trying to, as with everything else, stay true to ‘the brand’?

GC: The subject of music videos and the new record is a loaded question and it’s a source of pain for me, because what is a music video at this point in time? In the past, Devo was on the cutting edge, and we were able to be on the cutting edge because we had support from early adapters in technology that would do us favors and give us things, and we had budgets that were -- like if you would extrapolate for inflation and change in the dollar – good budgets. So I was always able to do a version of the concept that we would come up with, and use whatever was happening then…

When blue screen was the big rage [laughs] and you could composite with much trepidation and lots of horror in post, we were right there doing it. Now the tools available today are ten-fold over any of those technologies, but suddenly Devo was in this strange position of being the guys that already did everything, so we’re not in favor with the new adapters. There’s nobody running to our door – they’re running to Lady Gaga or they’re running to Arcade Fire. Like, “Here, use this.” Like the Google technology that Arcade Fire used where you can put the guy running on your street so the song is customized for you.

We didn’t have any of that, and in the contract, there was really no video money that was earmarked, so when I did the first Devo video for “Fresh,” I did it for fifteen thousand dollars, and all I could do was what we had already done in the past – set us up in front of a green screen, shoot us in our silver suits, and license a bunch of really cool graphics and background material to composite us with. Then some people came forward – Jason Trucco and this graphic artist, Kii Arens – with this new camera system. I wish we’d had that then, because it’s a nine-camera hi-def system, monitored on a ring, that shoots 360. And then the computer program that goes with this camera system stitches together those nine cameras into a seamless 360-degree strip of action.

Not only that, but because it’s a computer program, then the interface -- the embed – lets you, the user, navigate it. So you use your cursor and your arrows to basically be like a guy wearing a steady cam, so you pan around as fast or as slow as you want, tilt up and down, zoom in and out – you decide what you see. So knowing that, what I did is stage our new video in the round, and Kii did all the graphics on the round wall, and we set up ten stations of activity using non-union actors, because that’s all we could afford. And it’s basically like a low version of Pina Bausch.

They do something at their station for three minutes, to the beat as fast as they can, without ever stopping. So a girl eats jello in the shape of an energy dome, two beefcakes – arm wrestlers – really arm wrestle with a referee and try to pin each other, and a guy that’s like an actual embodiment of Booji Boy for real, without a mask – all we did is put yellow hair on him and rouge on his cheeks – he’s a large, severely overweight guy with flesh that looks soft like a baby, and he danced in a diaper with two girls in French maid outfits painting his nipples, and so on.

There was a sign spinner we found off the street… So you get to decide: Am I gonna keep watching the sign spinner? Am I gonna go watch the big fat Booji Boy? And the whole time that’s going on, there’s a male model and a female model positioned 180 degrees from each other across the circle, trying on, as fast as they can, all the Devo fashions – trying one on, taking it off – and each time, they go behind a monitor to block their privates and change, and then come out. And you, the navigator/user, can click on any of those things they’re wearing and leave the video and buy them at the store, or just put them in the cart and come back later.

SG: Do you then track what people are doing? Can you see, “Well, the female model wins,” or…?

GC: I think that people in the New Media department at Warners, like Jeremy Welt, are tracking that stuff.  Again, it causes much pain. The problem is that YouTube and iTunes won’t show the interactive video because it requires an embed, and they don’t want to go to any expense or any extra effort, so they lop it back onto the label, and the label said, “We’re not paying for that.” So the only place you can see the full concept is at mashable.com. It really works, but that’s a limited audience. So for most of the world, what they saw was a pre-edited version – edited in the sense that we navigated the video and saved those navigations until we found one that was perfect. So it serves as an example of what you could do if you got really good. So it’s kind of like a video game and a sales tool, and a video to the song all at once, which…what else is a music video except a commercial?

SG: And a commercial for products beyond the album. You sit there in a pair of Devo shoes…

GC: About to hit the market! We like these. They’re reflective like our stage outfits, so they work really well in the lights. This gets you right through airport security. This is so easy to get on and off. There’s no metal in it; it’s all synthetic and rubber, and quite dashing. Kind of retro-futuristic. You could wear this at a Palm Springs resort, or you could wear it on the street when you’re protesting at the G8. So it’s good. And there’s a blue version that coincides with the blue domes, so there’s one emblazoned with a blue energy dome logo and double high blue outsoles.

These were an early sample – I’ve been wearing them since February, so these are battle tested. And available now, finally. Made for us by Macbeth – I worked with them at the beginning of the year on a design, and I was elated because: a) they let me do that, rather than going, “Here. Pick from these shoe templates and you’re gonna use one of those.” That isn’t what happened. And; b) it was unlike a number of other projects for Devo in the past, where we designed great things and worked hard on designs that then went to the sample stage, when the buyers saw them, it was over.

SG: The fact that you can connect directly to your audience and get something done is definitely a key difference between now and 1973. What are the others?

GC: When Devo started, of course, it was a totally different world. There was no Internet. There were no desktop computers. I think computers were limited to the CIA and the Pentagon, and it was do-it-yourself. What we did is you’d play in the clubs and you would build up a little following, and you’d press your own 45 and get it to all the independent record stores. We made The Truth About De-Evolution, the very first ten-minute film, entered it in the Ann Arbor Film Festival. And all those avenues – independent theaters, independent record stores, small clubs were definitely the way that you did something previous to social networking and sites like Facebook and MySpace, and yet, while everything has changed upside down from that model and that time, in a weird way, nothing has changed.

Now you have 10,000 friends and you find out that none of them are really your friends. And maybe you still play in some small clubs, but you put your songs online and nobody buys them. There are no independent record stores left, per se. There’s no independent theaters. So you’re going back and using online techniques to replace the fact that those are gone. And of course it’s a strange catch-22 because the propaganda is…it’s like anyone can become president. Anyone can be a star!

You use the Internet and you’re going direct to your crowd. It’s like, that’s good, but unless there’s an aggregator telling people you exist and driving traffic to that site so you even see this band or hear this song, you can beat your head against the wall all day doing great stuff, and nobody sees it. Then there’s the random factor of the viral video. But I think research has even shown that, more often than not, the viral video is a novelty, and it doesn’t really generate any sales or stardom. People really want to see planking more than they want to see a new band… they want to see people being hurt more in the old bum fights that were going on, then they’d want to see a new song or a new singer. Unless it’s a beautiful young girl and she’s naked, then you’re on and it’s gonna be viral.

SG: And not much change there then…

GC: Exactly. Not much has changed at all. As much as things change, they remain the same.

SG: Is it satisfying or scary to see the degree to which De-Evolution has really come to pass?

GC: The fact that de-evolution is real and nobody is even contesting that anymore is kind of funny because, in the beginning, we were just considered outrageous – anywhere from clowns to Nazis. I think we were called both clowns and Nazis in a Rolling Stone article in 1978, which we thought, “Wow, Nazi clowns – maybe we’ll do that.”

We really pissed people off with even just some of the theories we espoused when we would say, “Things aren’t getting better. There is not progress. Things are falling apart and entropy is taking over. De-evolution – it’s going down and there’s no difference between the Democrats and the Republicans, and people are less able now to sustain critical thought – they’re responding to sound bytes like little insects…” and we were considered inhumane and disgusting, and now you can hear that espoused on any 24/7 cable network or on Bill Maher real time.

I’ve read the use of the word “de-evolution” in the last week in major newspapers three or four times regarding world situations, of things falling apart in Yemen or… So what’s interesting is it’s no longer a theory and we’re no longer smartass quacks. It’s just, “Oh yeah, those guys – how ‘bout that? They were right. Hahaha. Who cares?” Because when devolution is real, you’re in it. So if somebody had shown you, in 1980, in a crystal ball, the world in 2010, you would have thought it was a bad, cheap, B, sci-fi movie featuring a dystopia that will never really happen, and yet we’ve slowly inched into it, so it’s like… getting used to the water… and we’re there.

It doesn’t make Devo go, “Yeah, we were right!  We told you so!” It’s almost like, shit. I wish we had been wrong. You don’t really want to live in that world. But here we are, and it’s definitely happening fast.

SG: But our toys are so shiny!

GC: That’s right. You’ve got to have shiny toys, especially when your whole food supply is contaminated, and the water and the air are full of heavy metals, and the larger, more complex fish are dying off and all that’s gonna be left is jellyfish and plankton. Yeah, you’ve got to have shiny toys.

SG: We cannot quite leave on that note; otherwise, we’ll all just slope away and kill ourselves or get drunk, or possibly both. We interview a pretty good variety of artists, and we try to ask them all the same question, and the younger ones don’t always have a very good answer, but I’m going to be disappointed if you don’t.

GC: You’ve put the pressure on me.

SG: Okay: What has been the single best rock-star moment of your career so far?

GC: [Laughs] The only problem I would have answering the question about what’s the single best rock-star moment of my career so far would be that it’s hard to choose from among the top ten. But rather than the obvious sexual escapades that seem to be a perk that comes with the territory, like girls that would not give you the time of day, suddenly see you on Saturday Night Live and everything changes. It’s like no-holds-barred and three-ways abound, and it’s not that. None of that.

It was when we first went to Italy, and we were on our first tour of Italy, and we heard that our promoter was a mobster, which was, in retrospect, no big deal. He had a hands-on dwarf – an Italian dwarf – that was the daily enforcer guide for his will in Devo. He was the connective tissue, and everywhere we went, there were strange deals going on and arguments behind closed doors. [Laughs] And we were in Milan waiting to be bussed to a gig, and it turned out that they had made deals with two competing tour bus companies, and both tour bus companies showed up in the parking lot at once in this massive old hotel – I think it was the Hotel de Milan – it was definitely a Mussolini remnant.  And these guys start screaming at each other. It looks like it’s gonna get physically violent, and we’re worried about missing the next gig.

So I go over... I was always the one like, taking responsibility, wanting to know what’s wrong, calling people out when they were full of shit and lying… So I go over to Tony the dwarf and I say, “Hey, we don’t want to be late for this next gig. What’s going on here?” And he goes, [Italian accent] “Hey Devo, you don’t want trouble, you stay at home.” And I went, “What? You’re telling me?” and he goes, “Yeah. I am telling you. Come with me.” And he walks me into the Hotel de Milan, he calls over a guy, and the dining room is closed. He goes and tells the guy to open up the dining room and bring us anything we want while they work out, for the next hour and a half, who’s gonna get to bus us. And the whole band goes in, and they start bringing out trays of roasted peppers and mozzarella [laughs], grilled eggplant, prosciutto, melon, fine wine… And at a certain point, we don’t care anymore if we’re going to the next gig.

So then he came in and said, “You see? I tell you. You don’t want trouble, you stay home,” which I think is one of the greatest pieces of advice I could have ever gotten.

Devo’s ‘Something For Everybody' is out now on Warner Bros. Records.

The interactive, 360-degree version of the "What We Do" music video can be watched here.

The crowd-sourced version of the album is available here.

The Devo/Macbeth shoes are available here.