DEVO interview

June 15, 2010 by Bill Palmer

Three decades ago DEVO informed us that society was regressing and the world was in search of a handbasket. And now that it’s seemingly happening, the band returns today with its first new album in twenty years to serve as, in the words of co-founder Gerald Casale, the house band on the Titanic. As DEVO now gears up for everything from a stint on the Colbert Report this week to a gig at Lollapalooza in August, Jerry explains how the band unapologetically used corporate market research to craft Something For Everybody, and how things operate these within his literal band of brothers…

You guys have been threatening to make a new DEVO album for so many years. Has it sunk in for you yet that it’s actually coming out now?

Well yeah, I would have one a long time ago had it been up to me. But DEVO is a collaboration, or like an eight cylinder Ferrari, and it’s not gonna run on four.

What strikes me about Something For Everybody is that I get ten seconds into the first track, and it’s immediately recognizable as being DEVO. A lot of veteran bands, when they make their first record in awhile, for some reason they just can’t pull that off. Was that something you had to work toward getting back to?

Not really. As soon as we actually started writing together, we just did what we do. You can’t not be who you are. It’s like every Jeff Koons painting looks like a Jeff Koons painting, every Andy Warhol looks like an Andy Warhol, they can never help it. They can keep reinventing pieces of it, but people wouldn’t like it if they quit being them (laughs). We had no reason to not be us. In fact I don’t see how we’d have a choice. You’d have to be counter intuitive and go well gee, let’s not do what I feel like doing, let me not write what I feel like writing.

This is an era where no one is sure what the fate is going to be of the big music corporations, and a lot of established bands are leaving their label, going indie. And yet here you guys are, you’re going more corporate. You’ve got a Chief Operating Officer now, you’re using market research for your tracklisting. What was your impetus for going with the grain at a time when others are going against it?

Well we investigated all our options and found out that in reality there were no viable options. These alternative ways of putting out music, avoiding a collaboration with a label, were in fact not there. All these ideas about hey, go to AEG or Live Nation and they’ll advance you money on a hundred shows and then that’ll give you the money to make your record and live, and you don’t need a label, you just make a deal with a digital distributor like Orchard and you get to keep eighty percent of your profit, well it was all hot air.

So was the sponsorship route. Corporate society has taken such a big hit. I know they’ve also been the cause of why they took the hit (laughs), but I mean we have financial meltdown. No sponsor or no corporate entity is putting big money into bands. It just isn’t happening. The ones that did went for the top acts and got burned, never got their money back.

So looking at all that, knowing that A) nobody wants to pay for music in this time, in this culture, B) music has been devalued because there’s so much of it and it’s not culturally significant like in the days when people would wait for the new Bob Dylan song to change the world, and C) with the implosion of the record business as it’s fairly reported, there is no way a new band can even be known without marketing. Marketing is the end all be all in this corporate society. Why do you know DEVO had a new record out? Why do you even care if you care about the music? Marketing. There’s ten thousand CDs a month coming out. There’s every new band making a record in their basement or bedroom, putting it out through MySpace, Facebook, high hoping that they can just rise to the top off the internet, American Idol style.

In fact, when you investigate the music played and what the hit songs are, none of it’s true. Not even close. So our only chance, after being debranded and forced to sit ice for twenty years, was to go to professionals and say, “How do you bring a band that everybody knows, and everybody knows iconically whether they bought a record or not, how do you bring them back?” And you couldn’t rely on a record company for that. We relied on a record company for one thing, the marketing money. And why would they give it to us? Because they own our back catalog of over a hundred and some songs from the old days. So their risk is minimal.

I honestly wasn’t sure whether to interpret the whole market research thing as a satire or whether you really truly went and did that.

It’s actually both. We really truly went and did it. And we really truly paid Mother to use the same techniques that they would use for a Dell XPS computer or Cheerios. Is it a satire? Well yeah. We feel that the way people go about things in corporate society for releasing new content is built-in satire. We didn’t have to have to put parentheses on it or put a wink on it, we just did it. And the fact of DEVO doing it, you see, almost makes it seem funny.

What happens to the songs that didn’t make the cut? Are they going to see the light of day at some point?

Oh sure, because that’s another thing, Amazon wants something special, Wal-Mart wants something different, iTunes demands that they have extra tracks. The demands of the marketplace mean that no song that you like disappears. There’s a use for it.

Talk to me about the concept of Devolution. Decades ago you guys predicted that the human race and the world would eventually go down the toilet. Are you starting to feel like Nostradamus now? You guys called this awhile ago.

Yeah well, we didn’t really want it to happen (laughs). It was a cautionary tale. But yeah it happened, alright.

Did you ever think it would get this crazy within your own lifetimes?

In the particular way that it’s gotten crazy, I’d have to say no, to be honest. I’m not as surprised as a lot of people. If you went back thirty years and somebody had a crystal joke back then, and they showed you the world in 2010 in the crystal ball, you certainly wouldn’t have believed it. You certainly wouldn’t have believed what you were seeing as events of the last ten years kind of played out in a montage. You would have thought it was a bad cheap B-level science fiction dystopia written by a hack writer. And here we are, for real.

A lot of bands, especially when they’ve got new material, after thirty years of performing their biggest hit song they  just get tired of it. Are you guys still embracing Whip It?

We weren’t writing to try to write hits, that should be kind of obvious to everybody. We were writing from just an aesthetic point of view and we liked everything we put on our records. We weren’t having people and producers tell us what to do so that we were really puppets for somebody else’s sound, so we have no problem playing anything that we ever wrote, because we like it for real. We play Whip It, I think, better than we played it then. But we also enjoy playing the new songs. In fact by the time we’re doing a headline tour off this new record, we’ll probably be playing six songs off this new record in our set.

You guys are doing the talking head TV talk show circuit this month. Do you feel like that’s part of the devolution too?

Yeah, we’re part and parcel of what we speak.

So if you can’t stop the downfall of society, you’re willing to participate in it on the way down.

We’re willing to celebrate it. Like I’ve often said, we’re the house band on the Titanic now.

Learn more at ClubDEVO.com • iTunes • MySpace • Facebook • Twitter