Crash Course, No. 39: DEVO, The Art School Project that Got Real Big

I was witnessing genius...

I had a very satisfying project called One Hit No More, and that’s what steered me to DEVO. At the same time, hitting DEVO put that project into the realm of bands I grew up with, aka, bands I know fairly well. And DEVO fits that better than most.

Having grown up on early (the earliest, in fact) MTV, I couldn’t wrap my head around DEVO as a “one-hit wonder.” Part of that followed from the fact that MTV playe a lot of DEVO; between “Through Being Cool,” “Beautiful World,” “Love Without Anger,” “Freedom of Choice,” and “Satisfaction,” it simply never occurred to me that “Whip It” was their only Top 40 hit.

And that was despite all the visibly weird shit/themes they presented and played with. I remember watching it, understanding it was different, but, young as I was - their prime years hit when I was 9-11 years old - all of it went over my head. So, let’s fill in some blanks.

Somewhat Briefly
“…here are the five basic components of the Devolutionary Oath:

1. Wear gaudy colors or avoid display
2. Lay a million eggs or give birth to one
3. The littlest may survive & the unfit may live
4. Be like your ancestors or be different
5. We must repeat”

Even if I, like everyone from DEVO, came from Ohio, I had no hope of wrapping my head around that. Then again, they had quite the head start…

The main members of DEVO - Mark Mothersbaugh and Jerry Casale - met at Kent State, when Kent State was Kent State, i.e., Casale was present for the university’s most infamous moment, saw his friends die, and lived through the hyper-reactionary backlash. Suffice to say, it changed him:

“Until then I was a hippie. I thought that the world is essentially good. If people were evil, there was justice and that the law mattered. All of those silly naïve things. I saw the depths of the horrors and lies and the evil. In the paper that evening, the Akron Beacon Journal, said that students were running around armed and that officers had been hurt. So deputy sheriffs went out and deputized citizens. They drove around with shotguns and there was martial law for ten days. 7 PM curfew. It was open season the students. We lived in fear.”

Crash-Course No. 11: UltraVoxyCars, From the '70s Into the '80s

Behind the scenes, Sirens.

Another week, more tweaks to the format; the benefits of having a tiny platform never stops giving, really. Moving past that tiny pile of rubble...

Background
Learning a bunch of cool shit about Hall & Oates triggered a very specific and personal childhood memory. When that coincided with the recent passing of Ric Ocasek, the lead singer and public face of 1980s legends, The Cars, I decided to make this The Cars Week. Like most people, I comfortably karaoke at least a half dozen Cars songs, maybe even more, but I didn’t know much about them. There was the thing how googling “Ric Ocasek” reliably extends to “Ric Ocasek’s wife,” something that wouldn’t surprise anyone who knows anything about either Mr. Ocasek and Paulina Porizkova. (What so many failed to recognize: Ocasek had talent.) As for that memory…

Throughout my childhood, other kids, my older sisters, just society kept telling me that this band (e.g., Simple Minds for reasons I can neither recall nor explain) or that band (Split Enz?) started as a “punk band.” The angularity of The Cars’ sound (I borrowed that adjective, btw) made me wonder they fit that bill. The Cars arrived into the music world more or less fully-formed, as it turns out. Ocasek, along with the earlier departed Benjamin Orr, hit the ground running; some of their biggest hits – e.g., “Just What I Needed,” “My Best Friend’s Girl,” and “Good Times Roll” – appeared on their debut album. While I’m sure they have more ins, outs and points of interest than my cursory dip into them turned up, the only ones that feel worth mentioning are, 1) Orr and Ocasek starting in a Midwest-based folk act called Milkwood; and, 2) does anyone still represent for the band’s third album, Panorama. (For the record, I didn’t, but I also only gave it one, semi-distracted listen.)

So, ruined as I was by that Hall & Oates experience, I shifted to thinking about other bands. The time spent on The Cars wasn’t a total waste: I kept “Bye Bye Love” from their debut for the playlist plus the title track and “Let’s Go” from the follow-up, Candy-O. And The Cars are one of those bands that no one else really sounds like, and that’s admirable. Just not what I was after...

On Finding What I Wanted Across the Pond
Because I watched MTV from the get-go, I associate The Cars with a bunch of bands from the same time that got lumped under the label, “new wave,” most of them English. As happens with genre labeling, the filing gets complicated from the get-go, but I stumbled across a nice key-word definition in the Wikipedia entry on “new wave” that lays out a good, broad outline: