DEVO
GVC in concert with Devo, 2024
Gerald V. Casale interview
by John Wisniewski
(June 2024)
Despite being ignorantly excluded from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Devo made music history regardless. Starting out in 1973 and pre-dating not just new wave but also punk by years, a group of Kent State students (who actually knew the people murdered at the 1970 massacre there), including bassist Gerald V. Casale and singer Mark Mothersbaugh, not only started writing their twisted, brainy, hilarious songs but also came up with the idea of 'de-evolution,' turning Darwin's theory on its head. Soon, they found fans in David Bowie and Brian Eno (who would produce their debut) and made a splash on Saturday Night Live. It wasn't just the songs, many of which Casale and Mothersbaugh wrote, that proved influential but also their eye-popping, weird, provocative (and funny) videos, many of which were directed by Casale. In turn, they would find fans decades later among the Northwest grunge bands.
Casale himself would also direct TV commercials, music videos for other bands (including the Cars, Foo Fighters, Soundgarden) and start his own solo project, Jihad Jerry & the Evildoers. After teasing a musical based on the band's work and a film about their early years, a Devo doc finally came out this past year, appropriately titled Devo.
Here, we talked to Casale via e-mail about his mad genius and why we still puzzle and thrill ourselves over Devo, despite seeming to know them for decades.
PSF: What kind of music influenced you early on?
GVC: Howdy Doody, Tex Ritter, Elvis Presley, Frankie Lane, Ray Charles, Johnny Mathis, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Yardbirds, The Velvet Underground, Captain Beefheart, Terry Riley, Smokey Robinson, James Brown, Roxy Music, David Bowie, Bob Marley, Bach, Beethoven, Spike Jones, among others.
PSF: Obviously the Kent state massacre left an impression on the band but what else was it about the school that helped make DEVO what it was?
GVC: Kent State University was a concentrated hotbed of creativity, activist politics, and DIY counterculture. It fueled a hostile local resident scene, and a fantastic faculty from the East Coast, West Coast, England, and all points in between. High academic standards mixed with the cultural flashpoint issues, and technical innovations of the late-'60's. It was quite radical in its own way.
GVC as Gorj with an unidentified baby, circa 1968
PSF: What was the early DEVO band like as opposed to the group we heard on the debut album?
GVC: Clearly, we were more experimental and more innocent. We had not yet gelled into the all-for-one/one-for-all industrial music machine that we became later, through our hard work and intense repetition. James Brown from the waist down and Kraftwerk from the waist up.
PSF: Early on, the group had a rep for being confrontational with the audience. Any stories to share about that?
GVC: We thrived on the polarization that we unintentionally caused by projecting our original aesthetic. Our look and sound and lyric content were antithetical to the prevailing pseudo hippy conformist culture. We felt energized and vindicated by the verbal and physical assaults from the small crowds who came to see us in local clubs and were duly offended.
PSF: How did you and Mark split up the songwriting or share ideas with each other early on? How did that change later?
GVC: In the beginning, it was total unfiltered collaboration. We would share notebooks with imagery and lyrics and work on sounds and progressions together, inspired by verbal and visual ideas from TV commercials, feature films, comic books, high art, classic literature - whatever turned us on.
PSF: In most of the punk scene, much like the classic rock scene, being tough was part of the persona, but DEVO seemed to give off the impression of being smart and maybe a little nerdy. Was that a conscious reaction against other bands?
GVC: We merely projected a meta version of who we really were. We were not shrinking violets, but we were also not anti-intellectual tough guys posing as rebels. We were real punk because we refused any orthodoxy. We were anti-stupid, no matter what form that stupidity took. We had a healthy disrespect for illegitimate authority, modeled with a very Dada sense of humor about human nature.
PSF: What was it like playing at CBGB in the early days? What was the audience reaction to the band?
GVC: CBGB was our trial by fire. We won over the audience when we successfully fended off being attacked on stage by the Dead Boys during Jocko Homo. They were unwitting actors in the song's narrative.
Devo in 1977, with GVC in the center
PSF: Was Brian Eno really a jerk? He seemed to stay out of the band's way more than most with the Are We Not men? album.
GVC: Eno was no jerk. He had moved on from his outrageous Roxy Music persona and become a rather zen influenced proponent of electronica and ambient music. He was a bit threatened by our strident, industrial, aggressive sound to which we were committed at the time. He tried to soften the edges and add beauty. We definitely frustrated him, in retrospect.
PSF: Though David Bowie didn't produce the first record, how much was he really involved in the end product?
GVC: As a muse, Bowie was central to what happened. Like Merlin in medieval times, he magically appeared, sprinkled fairy dust inspiration, giving us his blessing, and disappearing back into his Byzantine world.
PSF: Were you surprised when "Whip It" became a hit? What do you think people picked up on there?
GVC: People thought it was about sadomasochism and masturbation luckily. It became a hit because it was danceable for a new wave crowd. We just put songs out that we liked. Period. Never thinking about hits - isn't that obvious?
PSF: How fun it was to open the '81 Radio City Music Hall show riding up on the stage elevator? That was a great show?
GVC: For me, that Radio City show was a highlight of my entire career. All the planning and stage design, plus the video element, came together with the grand theatricality of the venue, and the hydraulic stage gimmick. The crowd rose from their seats with a roar and didn't sit down again. Joe Papp said it was one of the best entrances he had ever seen, Broadway productions notwithstanding.
PSF: Did you guys want to shock or surprise your audience with your music videos?
GVC: We wanted to show the audience who we were and what we were thinking. It shocked them, but there was substance behind the scare.
PSF: Obviously the band had a good sense of humor but were you ever concerned that there were some serious ideas you were trying to get at that were lost otherwise because of that?
GVC: In the '60's, an interviewer asked Bob Dylan if it bothered him that nobody got the meaning of "Like A Rolling Stone." Dylan answered "No, if they understood it, it wouldn't have been a hit." That's the way I feel about DEVO - serious ideas and humor mix.
PSF: Later on, grunge bands like Nirvana picked up on DEVO and were fans. Did that surprise you? What do you think they latched onto with the band? Did you ever meet the people from that scene?
GVC: They saw past the upbeat professions and caffeinated vocal delivery into that substance you mention. But their DEVO covers made us sound boring. Ha ha.
PSF: What was DEVO's finest moment?
GVC: Saturday Night Live, October 1978.
PSF: Are Booji Boy and Spazz Attack in fact one and the same?
GVC: They are two sides of a coin.
PSF: With the recent documentary out, do you think some of the mystique of the band might be harder to maintain after all the details there are out?
GVC: The documentary is just a snapshot - CliffsNotes - compared to the complex layering that is in fact DEVO. It's a tip of the iceberg. And more was left out than made it into the cut. I could give myself, and 10 great directors, all the underlying audio and video assets that Vice has had at their disposal and you would see another 11 documentaries that would leave you wondering, what - if anything - you are supposed to believe.
PSF: What are you working on now?
GVC: In the past few years, aside from my DEVO work, I've directed 3 new music videos, and released a couple of records. Next is a suite inspired by the Native American concept of "Wetiko." Google it.
'4-Dimensional' music video collaboration with drummer Josh Freese (Foo Fighters), and guitarist Steve Bartek (Oingo Boingo), Casale is performing as another alter-ego named Jihad Jerry, released in 2023
