For decades, DEVO have been delivering singular music-based experiences along with their own catchy brand of electronically-influenced pop. Which is why the band’s third nomination for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is potentially a huge opportunity for their legacy to be recognized by the industry — though as Gerald Casale and Mark Mothersbaugh tell Consequence, receiving the honor wouldn’t necessarily define DEVO as a rock and roll band.
While Casale and Mothersbaugh weren’t totally sure on the specifics of what might happen should they be inducted into Rock Hall, they were up for discussing several key moments in their career, including their favorite instances of their songs being used in film, the time they covered Nine Inch Nails, and why DEVO as a concept means different things to different countries at different times. They also take us back to the time when they think MTV was actually “good” — which is far longer ago than you might think.
Thank you very much for joining me today. I just want to start off by asking, how are you feeling about this nomination this year? Congratulations, by the way.
Gerald Casale: Thanks. Well, it’s the third time. So, we’re hoping the cliché about the third time’s the charm is true.
Mark Mothersbaugh: Yeah, we’re tickled pink.
Casale: Not like the artist.
I’m sorry, what was that again?
Casale: Oh, Pink. Not the artist.
Oh, you are not the artist Pink.
Casale: We wouldn’t presume to tickle Pink. Especially in today’s environment.
Of course. When you found out that you were nominated, what was your reaction?
Mothersbaugh: Shock and awe. We were excited about it. It’s a wonderful honor. And it’s nice to be recognized for things you did that you think you work really hard on and you put a lot of time and effort in it. And for somebody else to acknowledge that and to say it has some sort of value is nice.
Casale: That’s right.
When people talk to you about the impact of DEVO as a band, what do they talk about?
Casale: Oh, well, it’s a plethora. It’s a full spectrum of “what’s your favorite color” to “what makes you think devolution is real?” So, it goes from banal and silly to really deep. Because we did put something out there that was rife with substance and meanings, so it inspired a lot of people to think. Which is all we were trying to do, ever.
Mothersbaugh: You know, I gotta be honest with you. I think every band in some way deserves to be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. And the reason why I think that is because what music seems to do, a lot of the time — it doesn’t matter what kind of band you are or what your ideas were, it’s like you fit into somebody’s life at a time when they were going, “The world’s totally crazy and I need something that makes sense.” And that could be Tom Petty and that could be DEVO. That could be any band, actually.
I’m not saying DEVO is exactly like every other band, because that is not at all how I feel. I feel like we gave people more to think about than most bands in some ways. And we do get slightly different fans. We get people who are into genetics or people into all sorts of things. They got into their life because of being inspired by DEVO, which I like.
Casale: We had a huge nerd contingent. People who were called nerds, who were labeled nerds. So, yeah, we had people coming to our concerts who were in law school, in medical school, geologists, that kind of thing. We represented some kind of haven for disenfranchised people in general.
We would hear these stories all the time and get letters and postcards all the time, back when people sent letters and postcards, where it’s like, “You guys, I got beat up because of you. I almost got murdered because of you.” Because they had a DEVO shirt on or they had dyed their hair pink at the edges or something and they got screamed at and the ubiquitous term for being different was “DEVO.”
When you get messages like that, do you feel good about being able to provide that kind of support for people?
Casale: Of course.
Mothersbaugh: Yeah.
Casale: I mean, yeah. We were sincere in what we were trying to do. So, it’s great when you bond with a certain part of the demographic in your culture.
Do you feel like there have been times, over the last few decades, where you felt like people understood what DEVO meant better than others?
Casale: I mean yeah, that would be the case with everybody about everything, wouldn’t it.
Mothersbaugh: DEVO in England was different than DEVO in Europe and different than DEVO in the US and South America and Australia and Japan. And at different times, people found out about us. Just the ways we were presenting in different areas, it was easier to understand in some places. And when we went to Japan, we felt like people had done homework and tried to figure out what we were talking about. That was interesting.
Casale: Each culture is different. And Japan is so serious, we thought they didn’t like us. We were at the budokan, and we’re looking at thousands of people clapping politely and not moving to the beat. Like, a completely different behavior than a US audience. And we though, “Oh my god, we’re bombing.” But they loved it! That’s just the way they showed their appreciation.
Mothersbaugh: Oh, yeah. But, also, when we played “Come Back Johnny,” because they had watched a video of “Come Back Johnny” before we came on stage, and they saw people mobbing the stage in the video, they did it. Ran up on stage. It was pretty good.
That hopefully didn’t cause any serious problems.
Mothersbaugh: No. No, in fact it was all very tame. They just stood there and pogoed up and down until security took them one at a time off the stage.
Casale: Very polite. Very polite people.
That’s wonderful. In terms of talking about Rock Hall, I’m curious, did you get to see Dolly Parton’s response to being nominated this year?
Casale: Oh yeah.
Mothersbaugh: Yeah.
Casale: I love Dolly Parton and I was glad she said what she said. Yeah. And the Rock Hall wouldn’t even let her remove herself. They wouldn’t let her!
Do you feel like she should have been allowed to?
Casale: Well, she’s the artist. Yeah! How are they in charge instead of her? She’s great, and look at her career. My god.
Of course. I’m sorry, so are you saying that you feel like Dolly Parton should be nominated?
Casale: Well, oh, I see what you’re saying. We don’t make that determination. The Rock Hall is really recognizing all types of music. And “Rock and Roll” is a misnomer on some level. And, yeah, I mean Dolly Parton, why shouldn’t she be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame? She really deserves to be.
DEVO over the years has, at times, rejected the label of rock and roll.
Mothersbaugh: In specific senses, yeah. Rock and roll has a wide range of politics and there’s a lot of it we don’t and never did adhere to. Or feel like we had in common with the people that had those politics. So…
Casale: Yeah, that term just suggests a certain mentality that is very limiting and stultifying. Compared to Kraftwerk, DEVO rocks really hard.
If you get in this year, do you have a sense of how you’ll celebrate?
Casale: Well, hopefully, we’ll play really well at the award ceremony. That would be a celebration.
Mothersbaugh: And then we’ll go home and listen to Dolly Parton records.
Do you determine what you play at the ceremony, or is that a mutual decision?
Casale: I was hoping you’d know.
Mothersbaugh: We’ll let you know when we get there.
Casale: I thought Rock Hall determines how many songs you are allowed to play. And you may be able to choose them, to a certain degree.
This feels like a very mysterious organization.
Casale: Inscrutable.
Mothersbaugh: It’s like the Masons.
Casale: But not the Freemasons.
Just the regular Masons.
Mothersbaugh: More like the mason jars.
Looking back over your career, your music’s been used a lot in film and television — not just Mark’s score and composing work, but your songs have also been sampled in film and television. Do you have a particularly favorite instance of that happening? A movie or TV show you thought did a really particularly great job of it?
Casale: There’s probably many. I would think of Casino right away. The use of “Women” and “Satisfaction” to rapid-fire gunfire.
Mothersbaugh: Yeah, that was pretty good. That’s the one I like.
That makes sense. Were you having conversations with Martin Scorsese over it?
Casale: No. The man is a god, he doesn’t talk to the peons.
You just got a call saying Martin wants to use the song, is that cool with you?
Casale: Yeah, and he doesn’t want to pay the going rate.
Mothersbaugh: You know what the other one that was really good that I liked, was “Gut Feeling” in The Life Aquatic. Because it was kinda funny. The song starts with the build and keeps going and going and going and going, way too long almost. And then, the lyrics start. That’s exactly where he cut the song.
Casale: And of course, the king of them all, the Swiffer commercial with the “Whip It” parody.
When you’ve been doing something for so long that it’s playing with the idea of commercialism, what has it been like to be a part of commercials?
Casale: You know, if that’s not your goal, it feels kind of nice. Because it is like icing on a cake or just a surprise inside the box of cracker jacks. It’s the surprise.
Mothersbaugh: And in a way, it’s almost subversive, because kids hear your music in a commercial, and then if they recognize it outside of the commercial, then maybe they pay attention to your other music and they listen to what you’re talking about or they find out. So, it’s a nice way to introduce people to DEVO who may never have paid attention to DEVO.
Casale: And it’s a late life bonus in terms of some revenue. Because, we never made any money touring because we had elaborate, theatrical shows and you gotta remember, people were paying 7-10 dollars a ticket, that was normal, to see bands in our height of our career arc. And, we never made money.
But the commercials help.
Casale: And suddenly, yeah, here’s a hunk of money.
Something I came across in prepping to talk to you today, that I’d love to know a little backstory on, is that you did a cover of Nine Inch Nails’ “Head Like a Hole” for the Super Cop soundtrack. It’s a really good cover, and I was wondering how that all came about?
Casale: Mark, do you remember who asked us to do that?
Mothersbaugh: Ahhhh, who directed that?
Casale: I think it was some producers of the movie, right?
Mothersbaugh: No, you know who it was? It was… what was the company that Nine Inch Nails were signed to? Gosh, I can’t think of their name.
Casale: Oh, Nine Inch Nails. Well they were on, that was Jimmy Iovene…
Mothersbaugh: He’s the one who was talking to…
Casale: Interscope.
Mothersbaugh: Yeah, Interscope.
Casale: It was their idea.
Mothersbaugh: Their idea, yeah.
It was their idea to do that specific song?
Mothersbaugh: To ask DEVO to do the song, yeah.
Did they say why they thought it’d be a good match?
Casale: No. [Laughs] It’s kind of intimidating, because that’s one of Trent’s best songs. Other than “Closer,” that’s what you think about. Maybe it’s because we had the quote-unquote “balls” to cover [The Rolling Stones’] “Satisfaction” that they thought, “Oh, DEVO won’t be intimidated by trying to cover Nine Inch Nails.”
Another thing I wanted to ask you about is a sadder topic of conversation. But I saw you’re donating your song royalties from the month of April to the Ukraine relief, and I wanted to ask you to talk about why that feels really important to do right now.
Casale: Well, it’s like, anybody with half a brain left in the Western world of supposed democratic rule would see this egregious attack on a country that did nothing to them. And want to pitch in any way they could. I mean, we would hope that other people in the music industry on a scalable level of means greater than ours would also join in and do the same thing so that it reaches critical mass. So, we could buy these people some weapons to defend themselves.
Mothersbaugh: You know, it’s… people, they do license our stuff quite frequently. And maybe they would say, “Oh, I better call during the month of April.” And that’d be great.
Casale: Yeah, we just tried to get the ball rolling in our own way that we could given our means.
Something else that I wanted to ask about is this — the music video as an art form has evolved a lot. It’s gone through different permutations, we watch music videos now in very different ways than we used to, and I wanted to get your thoughts on where you think the music video is in that evolution. How do you feel about that as an art form today?
Casale: Well, it kinda went back to an art form. Because, between the record companies and MTV that devalued it and made it a throwaway promotional tool, and then stopped showing them and stopped funding them, it’s back to people actually making, for the internet, artsy videos that go viral. And that’s interesting to me. It’s back to the beginning, when we were doing it. There was no MTV. We were making short films — there was no word, “music video,” but we were making art films. Music-driven art films. And it’s back to that. We had no budget, it was do it yourself. It was DIY.
Mothersbaugh: MTV for better or worse decided that they were going to be a promotional facility. And so, they were like… They didn’t pay for the videos, ever. The record company didn’t really want to pay, and it ended up getting thrown on the bands quite often. So, it’s like… record companies only wanted to make promo videos, like baby pictures.
Casale: They drove it away from an art form into a factory and then you know that all the videos started looking alike. And the same things would happen in each of them. There would be an angry woman who would grab a vase and throw it on the ground and it would break and the flowers would go [everywhere]. And the guys were always leering at the women and making macho moves. And it became a joke.
Mothersbaugh: Yeah. And, quite a few of the songs that got played a lot were only there because they were on the charts, not because the video and the song were a clever combination. It often just looked like somebody threw a bunch of stuff at the screen and that was a music video.
Casale: There was about a year and a half, a little window, where the prospect of MTV seemed kind of real. Where they were promoting great videos that were music-driven by good songs. And then, like Mark said, it just became… when they got the American Express money and it was a national franchise, they tied their playlist to the top 40 FM radio playlist. And so, if you weren’t rising in the charts or in the top 20 of that, they weren’t going to put you in the rotation. They weren’t planning on doing it. So it didn’t matter how cool your video was.
When would you say that year-and-a-half period, where it was all actually good, was?
Casale: Well, when did Bob…
Mothersbaugh: We’re being generous.
Casale: It was like 1980… late 1980 to ’81-82.
Mothersbaugh: That was when there was a higher chance that someone was going to be interesting, because it was early on. And then it really did just turn into looking like ad agency directors that were looking to expand their resume. That stuff was not interesting or clever, even.
Casale: We were in a weird position because we had four videos that we had made before MTV had existed at all. So when Bob [Pittman] came in, and John Sykes, the original people who started MTV — when they came to us, they were looking for programming. They had none. So, they were playing our four videos all day long, along with “Video Killed the Radio Star” and “Ashes to Ashes” by David Bowie, directed by David Mallet. And a couple of Rod Stewart’s terrible live performance videos. And that was it, and it just rotated all day long. And we were on all the time, and Mark and I thought, “Okay! We’re vindicated! It’s gonna happen!”
Mothersbaugh: “We’re not on the radio, but we’re on MTV.” So that was cool.
Casale: Only in three cities, though. And then they went national. And then it was like, “Sorry, DEVO. Your song isn’t placing on the charts. Sorry.”
I do agree that the rise of digital distribution has really changed this in a lot of respects, and over the years, DEVO as a band has really had some fun as a band experimenting with the potential there.
Casale: Yeah. And now it’s back to that with young bands that are just able to make videos. They’re out there in the wilderness, with no real help or support, but they can make a great video and it can go viral. You can do TikTok and suddenly be huge. Right? But, there are great videos being made now, again. You see here and there incredible pieces.
Have you looked much at TikTok?
Casale: At the urging of people in my sphere who are younger than me. They direct me to watch stuff, yeah.
Mothersbaugh: I’ve never… I never do.
Casale: But TikTok is changing rapidly. It’s mutating in a pretty good way actually.
Yeah, it’s a lot similar to how, in the early days of YouTube, there was just a lot of figuring out what you could do with the platform.
Casale: Right, right.
I do want to ask, who are you excited about right now? Who are other artists that you are seeing at work who make you think, “They’ve got it figured out, they’re gonna go really far?”
Casale: You know what, I need your help. Because as much as I want to hear that, exactly what you are talking about, I don’t. I just hear really slick, imitative stuff that sounds like the same two producers with a computer created all the music and then the vocal effects and singing style with the cadence and the sing-songy cadence… I don’t know, I can’t tell if it’s Ariana “Grand” or Dua Lipa or whatever. It’s like, who is that? It’s all the same.
The last thing I saw that I was excited about, it’s old now, I’m sorry, it’s Childish Gambino called “This is America.” Blew me away. That did it. It’s like, I was jealous. It’s like, that’s a video DEVO should have made. Or that’s a video in the spirit of what we were doing. And it was a great song. But, I know that’s old now.
It’s older certainly.
Casale: Older, yeah.
Lil Nas X, I think, is at least having a lot of fun experimenting with the music video as a format.
Casale: Yeah. I have heard songs that I like a lot. And I can’t remember the name of the artist. Because it isn’t like they put out a body of work and it’s recognizable. It’s like, one song. And my wife, who’s younger than me, will play me stuff, and I’ll be like, “That’s really good,” but it’s not something that’s on the radio and it’s not something that’s part of the mass culture of whatever that terrible show is where everybody… on television where everybody competes singing, they had a… I don’t know, what is it called?
American Idol?
Casale: Yeah. That depresses me. I don’t know what to say. If American Idol determined back in the ’60s what music was, then you would have never seen Bob Dylan or Jimi Hendrix or anyone. Because they would have gone, “They can’t sing!” They would have had to come on a show and sing like Frank Sinatra, right? And, luckily that didn’t happen. But now it’s stultifying.
Mark, are there any artists that you are excited about right now? Anyone you’re paying attention to?
Mothersbaugh: I’ll tell you what I do. I get up early and I come into work and I start writing music. And I write music for a good part of the day, and by the time I go home, it’s like, that’s the last thing I want to listen to. So, I’m not playing the radio or… I hear stuff my kids like and I don’t try to influence them. I just let them get into what they get into. Most of it, I understand it’s for them. So, I don’t know all the artists, to be honest with you.
What do your kids think of DEVO?
Mothersbaugh: They find it curious. And they never… they didn’t really… My one daughter started college, she’s at Pratt. And she acted like she was shocked to find out that other kids knew about DEVO. And my other daughter, who is a dancer, listens to classical music all day. So, they’re freaks I guess.
Before I let you go, please tell me anything you have coming up that you want to mention — anything that you are excited about.
Casale: Well, we get to play live coming up in May.
Mothersbaugh: Yeah, we are going to play some shows and that will be fun.
Casale: We’re playing the Cruel World festival at the Rose Bowl. And we are playing in New York and I can’t remember the name of the venue. Terrible. [Note: DEVO will be playing at The Rooftop at Pier 17 in New York on May 18th.]
What has it been like going back to playing live, after everything that has been happening over the last couple of years?
Casale: Well, we can still do it. Which, it’s proof of concept.
Mothersbaugh: You know, there’s always been a certain amount… there’s always been a percentage of chaos in almost every DEVO show. No matter how much we tried to be perfect about something, our shows are always kind of… Something mutates every show. So, it’s always interesting.
Casale: Sometimes the chaos results in a good outcome. Sometimes, not so good.
Mothersbaugh: Well, that’s the roll of the dice.