Gerald Casale of Devo: Duty Again for the Future

In 1981, Devo declared they were through being cool. In case you missed it, that was a joke, son.

In case you also missed it, Devo returned to action last year with their first studio album since 1990’s Smooth Noodle Maps. Well, technically, Devo did release two new songs for their ‘96 interactive CD Rom game, Adventures of the Smart Patrol. Something for Everybody had every reason to mount a comeback for these pioneers of punk and electronic rock. Yet public awareness has become triple the task for any band—veteran or yeoman—since the early eighties when Devo scored huge with their landmark Freedom of Choice and New Traditionalists albums.

In the spirit of a new Tron film also from last year, Devo has returned from The Big ‘80s and this time, the energy domes radiate blue instead of their trademark red. Yet the will of Jocko-Homo Heavenbound still serves as bible in this band, even if the cadence of Devo in sound today is an updated round-up of Duty Now for the Future, Freedom of Choice and New Traditionalists. Something for Everybody has bounce and it has cynicism and the final song the record, “March On” serves as a prospectus. Devo is back, and you know that’s pep.

As a long-time Devo fan who traded fisticuffs with my middle school peers because I was known to scream “Whip It” as my personal mantra of empowerment, sitting down with Gerald Casale to discuss society’s continued de-evolution was more than a treat. To quote the opening number on Something for Everybody, it was so fresh.

RAY VAN HORN, JR.: I’d like to go back to your time in The Numbers Band, 15-60-15 for a minute. The sixties’ rock scene is looked upon historically as a great, big counterculture movement, but I can only imagine what was looming in underground groups such as The Numbers Band.

GERALD CASALE: I first learned how to play to blues music, playing roots-blues music like John Lee Hooker, Willie Dixon and Howlin’ Wolf. It was really powerful and really stripped-down, but hard to play right. It was all about a certain mentality and feeling and that got me a lot of discipline. I took away from those blues roots a kind of aggression and intensity that I applied conceptually in Devo without literally playing blues music. I consider we were white boys with blues, but we didn’t play the blues! Not historically the genre. (laughs) We were creating a new genre of blues!

RVH: Devo turned it more into a punk-oriented drive, especially on the first two albums.

GC: Yeah, and we were certainly a guitar and drums-based band. Mark [Mothersbaugh]’s synthesizer was more like a far-out overlay. There were no sequencers, there were no machines. Everything was real.

RVH: I’m sure everybody who talks to you brings up Devo’s cover of “Satisfaction,” but I consider it the greatest cover of all-time.

GC: Apparently, Mick Jagger agrees with you! He thinks it’s the best cover version he’s ever heard. It definitely pissed some people off! We were pissing off the right people, though, that’s for sure!

RVH: You were a student at Kent State in 1970 when the riot occurred. Were you there in it? If the memories aren’t too painful, can you put me there in the moment?

GC: I was in the middle of it, yeah. I could’ve been shot. I was in the same spot of the people who were shot. It’s an experience that’s now going on in the rest of the world. You know, America’s gone to sleep. Everybody’s too jaded and too stupid to be pissed off about what people are doing to them in government. Let me tell you, there’s plenty going on right in this country today that is just a mockery of democracy and a mockery of fairness and justice. Big-time, people are being reamed, but they don’t care! They’re too busy with their apps!

Back then, it wasn’t the case. There was more awareness among students across America about important social issues. Of course, the Vietnam War was a big deal! There was civil war going on in America then; you were really against it or you were really for it. Everybody had their reasons. That Kent State protest was over the expansion of the war into Cambodia without an act of Congress. That’s what I’m talking about; people knew that was in defiance of our own Constitution and separation of powers. Nixon just did this on his own, unilaterally. He just decided on his own with the Pentagon to go bomb Cambodia. People who cared about how America is supposed to work were outraged and they were informed. So that’s what the protest was about, and of course, we didn’t know that the National Guard who’d been dispatched to Kent to put down any protests had any live ammunition. It had never before happened in the history of protests in America.

So they surrounded us and the usual games where they shoot tear gas at you and try to herd you into an area where they can arrest you and then put you on buses and take you to jail…people were trying to get hell out of there, because things were getting very aggressive and gnarly on the part of the Guard. We were running from the tear gas and trying to find an escape route on campus when a second line of the National Guard showed up. We’re all looking at them and the first row knelt, the second row stood, and they all shot at once, straight into the crowd. It’s insane, and they got away with it! That’s probably what really changed me. They basically got away with murder. They killed four, wounded nine. The students were unarmed. The lies started that there was a student with a gun, but that’s not true. The papers spun it, the news spun it, the students were looked upon as the guilty party. Half of America though they deserved to be shot, and you just watch firsthand how what really happens doesn’t matter. It’s power and putting a spin on things. That really changed me. Of course, we live in a country today where it’s all spin, all marketing and all pundits and talking heads, and you have no idea what’s really going on! It’s become a clown show.

So we feel that our little cautionary tale that we call “de-evolution” actually came to pass, that de-evolution is real and things are far dumber and worse than we could ever have imagined! One of our favorite movies is Mike Judge’s Idiocracy. It’s the Devo movie we should’ve made! It wasn’t even far-fetched.

RVH: Yeah, I’ve always said throughout the years following Devo that you guys were soothsayers, and you guys were giving out the warnings with “Gates of Steel,” “Freedom of Choice,” “Beautiful World” and “Clockout.” The world really has devolved as you say, and I’m sure you’ve sat back and thought to yourself, People, we told you so!

GC: Yeah, but it doesn’t make me happy! (laughs) I didn’t really want this to happen! Yeah, we were warning people, but nobody listened. Our side lost. The Chaneys and the Nixons of the world won. The corporate wad.

RVH: With Oh No! It’s Devo, I feel it carries a venting vibe, more so than its predecessors. I believe you stated in the past that album was reactionary to the press of its day who called Devo “fascist clowns.” Put me there at that time in the band. While writing Oh No! It’s Devo, do you feel it became a retaliatory album?

GC: Once Reagan and the religious right got rolling, a lot of people were sniping at us because we had these anti-fundamentalist views and we were pro-logic and information. We were making fun of all the “believers” and we were getting heavily attacked and put down, even by people we never thought would do that to us. A lot of people even on the radio were saying ‘Oh, those guys, they’re fascists, they’re commies,’ or whatever. Come on! So yeah, Oh No! had quite an edge to it, other than we were feeling very attacked and put upon, and I think we were reacting to it.

RVH: Between 2008 and 2010, you guys wrote, recorded and tweaked Something for Everybody. There’s a cheerful vibe to this album, even with many of the songs carrying sarcastic lyrics. What was this period of production like for the band? Stressful at all or was it smooth sailing?

GC: I can pretty much talk only for myself. For me, I’d been waiting to do this for so long. I’d never wanted to be sidelined or de-branded, and of course Devo is a complete collaboration with Mark and I. Once you get a guy who doesn’t want to collaborate and wants to put it on ice, you can’t go around with half an engine. So for me, this was fun. This is what I wanted to do. It’s what I’ve always wanted to do and what I had been doing. I love writing songs and I love the vehicle of Devo. So for me, it wasn’t stressful; it was beautifully fulfilling. I think it was, to a large extent, for Bob Casale too, but I really can’t speak for Mark and Bob Mothersbaugh. They’re not too vocal about that.

RVH: One thing’s for sure, you and Mark mesh together as well as ever, songwriting-wise and with your trademark answer-and-call vocals, using “What We Do” as an example. The chemistry is undeniable.

GC: Yeah, I’ve always liked those songs too and especially the way we did that song. I think people like them in general. I love “What We Do.” It’s one of my favorites and we shot a video to it. It’s kind of a groundbreaking video and it’s really cool. We have nine cameras arranged in a ring that shoot 360. Then a computer stitches together the nine camera images as one 360 degree strip visual. We shot it in a round room with all kinds of bizarre activities going on at stations that are equally spaced around the room, like spokes on a wheel. Then Mark and I are running around in a mid-range circle in front of it. You’re going to be able as the user—you don’t just view this video, you use your cursor to navigate the space. So in real-time, you can go during the song wherever you want to go in this room and look at whatever you want to look at, and everything’s going on all at once! What you’re about to see, you’ve never seen anything like it.

RVH: “Mind Games” is another one of those tunes carrying such a gleeful groove with more of those snarky lyrics. For me, though, when I hear this song, I think if Square Pegs had lasted beyond a season, this song could’ve replaced the original theme.

GC: That’s true! I never even thought of that, but as soon as you said it, that sounds like a good idea.

RVH: Tell me what it was like being on the set of Square Pegs for the Devo episode. Sarah Jessica Parker was still a young thing back in the eighties, but what were some of your impressions of that set?

GC: We had never even watched the show before we went on it. We didn’t have any expectations, but let me tell you, some of what the right wing says about Hollywood is actually true! (laughs) What I mean is, we were shocked! Most of these kids were underage and they were out of control! It wasn’t Sarah Jessica Parker, but it was some of the other girls. All I remember was some of the actors’ trailers for the kids on the show, they had drugs, they had alcohol, we’re hearing about all of these fuck parties. It was obscene! They weren’t messing around, you know? It was kind of threatening! I kept to myself! I thought, ‘My God, somebody’s trying to get me put in jail here!’

)RVH: You and Mark split most of Devo’s songwriting, but I think one of your individually-written songs that really shines on_ Something for Everybody is “Later is Now.” I just love your roasting on the procrastination generation.

GC: Yeah, I was trying to do something that sounded like a news theme. You know how news themes sound so incessant and so important? It’s like, ‘Listen to this, we’re about to bring you some news!’ I just thought that was perfect and I tried to make that kind of genre, given the kind of lyrics that I wrote.

RVH: Thank you for torching the metrosexual invasion with “Cameo!” Once I hear the shaved dick line, I’m gone, every single time. Sorry, but with my generation and I’m sure everybody else before ours, we were proud of our pubic hair! If we got lucky and reached down someone’s pants and found no hair, it usually meant we were going to jail!

GC: (laughs) I get you! I wrote that song about a very upsetting character here in L.A. His name is not Cameo, but let me tell you, he’s not far from that guy. He’s very disturbing!

Photo of Gerald Casale courtesy WB Records. Photo of Devo by Joshua Dalismer.