Mike Selby
They were called DEVO. The ultimate ‘80s new wave band actually had its start in the 1960s, and it was born out of tragedy. Four of the five band members were students at Kent State, and were there on March 4, 1970 when the Ohio National Guard shot into a crowd of unarmed students. Bass player Gerry Casale was standing with fellow student Allison Krause when a single bullet ended her life. Four students were killed that day, and nine seriously injured. Casale was friends with two of the deceased. (Another student there that day was Chrissie Hynde, who would also find musical success as the lead singer of the Pretenders).
“All I can tell you,” Casale would tell journalists decades later, “was that it completely and utterly changed my life. I was a white hippie boy and then I saw exit wounds from M1 rifles out of the backs of two people I knew. I would not have started the idea of DEVO had this not happened.” Casale and his friend Mark Mothersbaugh formed the band immediately after the shootings, recruiting each one’s younger brothers, somehow both named Bob.
Before graduation that horrible spring, the four sat in on a lecture by Eric Mottram, a British poet who lectured on an wide range of books. This lecture Mottram spoke on ‘Economic & Philosophical Manuscripts’ by Karl Marx; ‘The Joke and its Relation to the Unconscious,’ and ‘The Sexual Aberrations’ by Freud; and Mottrom’s own ‘American Poetry: A Diagram of Health.’ What the four future musicians took away from the lecture was the appearance of evolution working in reverse. According to these books, mankind was not progressing but “devolving.” DEVO seemed the perfect name for the band.
A band which would also seemingly do things in reverse. Instead of concentrating on getting on a music label, they worked on an bizarre art film called The Truth about De-evolution, which featured only one song. That film won the 1976 Ann Arbor Film Festival, which peaked the interest of David Bowie, who arranged for music producer Brian Eno to record this oddest of bands. Two albums were released in 1978 and 1979 respectively, followed by a performance on Saturday Night Live which “stunned audiences.” Fans eagerly wanted to know what DEVO’s third act would be.
They titled their third album Freedom of Choice and again, literary inspiration would play a large part. Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow is peppered with all types of poems and lyrical verses which satirized Dale Carnegie-type of insincere generalities. Casale thought these were genius, and wrote a song he called “Whip It” based on Pynchon’s work. It was this “bizarre, unprompted, yet brilliantly constructed” song which brought their tongue-in-cheek humour and “frightening insights” to the mainstream. The song went platinum, and was played on the radio so much so that it became a type of new wave anthem for the upcoming ‘80s. A video released the following year was also played ad-nauseam on a new television experiment called MTV.
DEVO wasn’t the only ‘80s new wave act to look to books for musical inspiration. The Buggles “Video Killed the Radio Star” is based on J.G. Ballard’s The Sound Sweep. Ballard would also be the inspiration for Gary Numan’s song “Down in the Park.” Morrisey’s “Every Day is Like Sunday” is a retelling of Nevil Shute’s post-apocalyptic novel On the Beach. “Dear God” by XTC is based on the entire Dear God series of children’s board books by Annie Fitzgerald.
In 1984, Australian filmmaker Russell Mulcahy had purchased the rights to William Burroughs’ 1971 book The Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead. Mulcahy had Duran Duran record the song “Wild Boys” which he would use in the film. He never did make the movie, but Duran Duran had a massive-selling single.
Penelope Farmer’s Charlotte Sometimes can be found not in one but in three songs by The Cure — “The Empty World,” “Splintered in her Head” and, of course “Charlotte Sometimes.”
New Order’s hypnotic “Blue Monday” takes it name from Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions, a book the bands drummer was reading at the time. Before their singer hung himself, New Order used to be Joy Division, a name they took from the 1955 book House of Dolls by Yehiel De-Nur.
But for DEVO, their third album was, in their own words, “the beginning of the end.” Although DEVO would continue to release numerous albums, videos, movie soundtracks, and still tour, that third album was the culmination of everything they had wanted to do. Each member now only spoke of the band in the past tense. Never would they be so cohesive, so in tune with each other, and so uniformly creative in turning the 60s into the 80s. “We are all DEVO” critic Evie Nagy wrote, noting the band’s 40-year influence on countless of musicians. “And it’s where we’ll probably stay.”
Mike Selby is Information Services Librarian at the Cranbrook Public Library