Rip It Up and Start Again (14 page)

Sure enough, Warner Brothers, Island Records, and Bowie’s production company, Bewlay Brothers, began competing for the group. Devo looked like the next gang of marketable monsters after the Sex Pistols. Then Virgin Records entered the fray. In early 1978, Richard Branson invited Mothersbaugh and Devo guitarist Bob Casale to fly to Jamaica. When the boys had gotten very stoned, he popped the question: What did they think about inviting Johnny Rotten, freshly fired from the Sex Pistols, to become Devo’s singer? “He said, ‘Johnny’s in the next room, there’s journalists from
NME
and
Melody Maker
here,’” recalls Mothersbaugh. “‘It’s a perfect time to go down the beach, take some photos together, and announce he’s joined Devo. What do you think?’ I was too stoned to make the correct answer, which was ‘Sure!’ because we could have done the picture session, got the publicity, and then gone back to Akron and just said, ‘No way, forget it.’”

Devo recorded their debut,
Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!,
in Germany while still embroiled in negotiations with labels (in the end, owing to a dispute over verbal agreements, Virgin and Warner Brothers
both
got the group, releasing Devo’s records in the U.K. and America, respectively). Released in August 1978,
Q: Are We Not Men?
is a stone classic, but it does suffer slightly from falling between two extremes, neither capturing the full frenzy of Devo’s live shows nor making a total foray into Eno’s post-
Low
soundworld. “In retrospect, we were overly resistant to Eno’s ideas,” says Mothersbaugh. “He made up synth parts and really cool sounds for almost every song on the album, but we only used them on three or four songs…like the loop of monkey chanters that’s on ‘Jocko Homo.’ I’d kind of like to hear what the album would have sounded like if we’d been more open to Eno’s suggestions. But in those days we thought we knew everything.”

You can still hear the Eno imprint. Tinted and textured, Casale’s bass glistens wetly. “Shrivel Up” is dank with synth slime, giving the song an abject feel that fits the lyrics about decay and mortality. “Gut Feeling” takes garage punk’s woman-done-me-wrong rage and gives it a perverse twist: “You took your tongs of love and stripped away my garment.” “Uncontrollable Urge” makes rock’s “wild sexuality” seem as absurd and humiliating as an involuntary nervous tic. “Come Back Jonee” likewise turns Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode” inside out. In Devo’s tune, the heartbreaker bad boy “jumps into his Datsun,” the OPEC 1970s low-gas-consumption version of a real rock ’n’ roll automobile like a T-Bird.

While the band toiled away at their debut, Devo mania escalated. Stiff Records licensed the original Booji Boy singles and rereleased them in quick succession. In April 1978, their cover of the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction”—which defiled the iconic sixties classic by reducing it to a desiccated theorem—was a hit in several European countries. Devo’s disco-punk version resembled, in Mothersbaugh’s words, “a stupid perpetual-motion machine clanking around the room.” But by the time
Q: Are We Not Men?
hit the record stores at the end of August, the hype and marketing overkill was beginning to raise hackles. The U.K. press shifted into premature backlash mode. What were Devo “about” anyway? Devo interviews were full of opaque pseudoscientific jargon and references to a menagerie of bizarre characters like Booji Boy (a grown man with a baby’s face), all of which skeptics found both contrived and silly. It was unclear if the group’s devolution theories represented a critique or a cynical celebration of cultural entropy, corporatized rock, and the recline and fall of the West.

Hatched by Mothersbaugh and Casale in the early days, devolution was a patchwork parody of religion and quack science woven together from motley sources, including the Second Law of Thermodynamics, sociobiology, genetics, the paranoid science fiction of William S. Burroughs and Philip K. Dick, and anthropology. The pair found an especially rich source in all those dodgy nineteenth-century eugenic theories involving notions of degeneration and the decline of civilization (often attributed to race mixing). Virgin’s press release for the album claimed the band “devolved from a long line of brain eating apes, some of which settled in north eastern Ohio.” Casale sampled this absurdist notion from a three-hundred-page treatise by a deranged Bavarian pseudoscientist. The tract argued that humans descended from cannibalistic monkeys whose diet of ape brain had resulted in bizarre mutations and the loss of their ability to live in nature. Devo also pillaged evangelical crank literature and pamphlets from millenarian Christian sects such as the Jehovah’s Witnesses. The album’s most physically galvanizing song, “Praying Hands,” was a stab at imagining a Christian fundamentalist dance craze. “Two of the biggest televangelists, Rex Humbard and the Reverend Ernest Ainsley, broadcast out of Akron,” says Mothersbaugh. “We saw how disgusting and evil these people were, and so we took delight in turning their cosmology upside down.”

In Devo’s music, a puritanical streak of revulsion jostled with an uncontrollable urge to revel in the mire. Talking of American pop culture, Casale describes being “raised in mindless electric filth.” Devo seemed to be starting from the same place—a sense of impotence and suffocation—as those great misanthropes of modernist literature, Louis-Ferdinand Celine and Wyndham Lewis, whose quest for purity in a tarnished world made them sympathetic to Nazism. In the first three decades of the twentieth century, abhorrence of capitalism led almost as many intellectuals to fascism as it did to communism. And some were quick to accuse Devo of being “fascist” themselves, most notably
Rolling Stone
magazine (who clearly recognized on some level that everything
they
stood for represented “the enemy” in Devo’s worldview). Actually, it’s more the case that Devo managed to include both abjection and the “fascist” response to it within their art simultaneously in their pantomime of disgust and discipline.

Properly attired, Devo stepped forth as “the clean-up squad” on a mission into the goo-goo muck zone of mainstream American culture. Interviews teemed with imagery of decay, obesity, excretion, flaccidity, infestation, tumors, putrefaction, and bulimia. “Progress” was a belief system that had gone “absolutely rancid.” One sequence during
The Truth About De-Evolution
saw the group sealed inside latex bags, writhing “like maggots, paramecium, fetal things.” But Devo’s absolute favorite set of metaphors revolved around constipation, with Devo variously figuring as the laxative, the enema nozzle, the enema bag, or “the fluid in the bag.” “Gerry and I both had parents who’d read in Dr. Spock that it was a good idea to give your kids enemas once or twice a month,” says Mothersbaugh. “We lived in fear of the next enema, the warm soapy water. When we were in our twenties we finally said ‘Dad, that’s enough!’”

This icky squeamishness contaminated Devo’s sex songs, from their earliest efforts like “Buttered Beauties” (in which Mothersbaugh imagines female secretions smeared all over him like “glossy tallow”), to the chorus “I think I missed the hole” in the debut album’s “Sloppy (I Saw My Baby Gettin’).” They loved pornography, whether it was Bataille’s avant-garde version or
Hustler
’s mass-market hardcore.
Hustler
was the first newsstand porn mag to show gynecologically explicit photographs. “I wrote a song called ‘Penetration in the Centerfold’ about the first
Hustler
I ever saw,” says Mothersbaugh. “Porn is important to the lower economic levels, simply because you can’t afford real sex.” What emerged from these impulses and inputs were songs that, beneath the quirky Dada surface, were often plain misogynistic in the most conventional sense. On the debut, “Gut Feeling” segues straight into “Slap Your Mammy,” while “Triumph of the Will” on the second album,
Duty Now for the Future,
reads like a Nietzschean justification for rape: “It was a thing I had to do/It was a message from below…It is a thing females ask for/When they convey the opposite.” Much of
Duty
sounds like a robotic version of the Knack’s sexually pent-up “My Sharona,” all choppy New Wave guitar and frantically pelvic jack-off rhythms.

Unlike Pere Ubu, who happily remained a cult band, Devo’s mission to subvert from within would only work if the band was massively successful. With this in mind, they moved to Los Angeles, capital of the entertainment business, and with 1980’s
Freedom of Choice
made a record even more calculatedly commercial than the clinical-sounding
Duty
. The concept was “electro-R&B” but the results were more like a fusion of New Wave and Eurodisco. Everything was played by the band in the studio, but it
sounded
like it was programmed using sequencers. The electronic textures felt standard-issue, like the preset sounds you get on a synth. Still,
Freedom of Choice
achieved a New Wave–inflected dance rock sound that Billy Idol would later ride to stardom. And it gave Devo their own platinum album, spurred on by the Top 20 success of “Whip It.”

Written during the ailing twilight of the Carter presidency, “Whip It” offered Dale Carnegie–style advice to the embattled leader. “Come on, Jimmy, get your shit together,” laughs Mothersbaugh. By the time Warner Brothers allowed Devo to make a promo clip for the song, it was clear that Reagan was heading for a landslide victory. Devo made the video into a surreal commentary on America’s shift to the Right. The result was a video that twenty-five years later is not the least bit dated looking and is still a huge hoot. It was Devo’s one true moment of mass-cultural triumph.

Pitched somewhere between a John Ford Western and David Lynch’s
Eraserhead,
the genuinely creepy video for “Whip It” perfectly crystallizes Devo’s “freak show aesthetic.” As a bunch of Texan stud muffins and blonde bimbos gawk and giggle, Mothersbaugh wields a whip and one by one lashes away the garments of a strange Grace Jones–like amazon of a woman, whose legs start trembling in an indescribably abject way as she waits for the final whip crack to strip off her last shred of modesty. Meanwhile, the rest of Devo performs the song cooped inside a cattle pen—pasty-faced spud-boys wearing shorts that show off their scrawny knees and the famous “flowerpot hats.” “We were horrified by Reagan’s ascent,” says Casale. “So we were just making fun of myths of cowboys in the West. It was based on a magazine I’d found, one of those 1950s gentlemen’s magazines with soft-core nudies. It had an article about a dude ranch owned by an ex-stripper and her husband. As part of the entertainment, he’d whip her clothes off in the corral for all the guests to watch.”

As the new decade proceeded, the original “eighties industrial band” got chewed up by the industry. Slowly, steadily, Devo capitulated to the record biz way of doing things. The band had sold two million albums by 1981, but this only made Warner Brothers increase the pressure in hopes of breaking them even bigger. “They wanted us to be at the Cars’ level,” sighs Casale. Even as they railed against Reaganism with songs like “Freedom of Choice” and “Through Being Cool,” Devo found themselves increasingly bossed around by their record company. They struggled on for years, wrangling for the “Whip It”–scale radio hit that never came, stuck at a middling success level just a notch above cult. In a savagely ironic twist, they succumbed to their own unique form of devolution, winding up as a sort of New Wave version of Kiss, peddling costume rock for nerd diehards. Obsessed with flashy high-tech projections, they resorted to playing gigs to a click track fed through headphones in order to stay in sync with the visuals. Instead of a parody of regimentation, they became the real thing—slaves to slickness, peons in the “corporate feudal state.”

SHEFFIELD AND MANCHESTER,
the twin engines of the industrial revolution in Britain, were peculiarly receptive to the bleakly futuristic, synth-enhanced sounds of Devo and Pere Ubu. Less than forty miles apart in Northern England but separated by the Pennines mountain range, these cities shared with Cleveland a self-belief only slightly dented by having fallen on hard times, a sort of “we used to be great…and we’ll show you yet
”
attitude. Both cities also had their own equivalents to the Flats in Cleveland, harsh-on-the-eye hinterlands where heavy industry clanked and pounded day and night.

Sheffield was the home of innovations like stainless steel and Bessemer’s converter (which made mass production of low-cost steel possible in the late nineteenth century). Although just a ten-minute drive from the picturesque Peak District and the vales of Derbyshire, Sheffield’s enduring popular image is grim and gray, based on the inner city and the heavily industrialized East End. “That’s where I lived with my parents,” says Richard H. Kirk of Cabaret Voltaire. “You looked down into the valley and all you could see was blackened buildings. At night, in bed, you could hear the big drop forges crunching away.” Human League’s Martyn Ware likewise talks of growing up in a clangorous science-fiction noisescape, all the strange machine sounds generated by Sheffield’s steel industry.

One of the first British cities to become industrialized, Sheffield rapidly acquired a proletariat in the classic sense defined by Karl Marx—human beings reduced to appendages of flesh attached to machinery, acutely conscious of both their exploitation and their common interest in struggling for better conditions. Until recently, the city was a bastion of
old
Labour, the pre–Tony Blair party that was closely linked to the trade union movement and whose members took seriously the Labour charter’s commitment to state ownership of major industries such as steel, 90 percent of which was combined into the publicly owned British Steel Corporation in 1967. The Sheffield region was nicknamed “the People’s Republic of South Yorkshire,” on account of the city’s hard-line Socialist council, who actually flew the red flag from the town hall.

For those who grew up in the suburban south of England, becoming a left-wing militant was rebellious, a way of defining themselves against their bourgeois parents. But in Sheffield, where hard-Left politics was an everyday thing, the dissident thing to do was to become an artist. For the teenage Richard H. Kirk, being a member of the Young Communist League was almost like going to Sunday school. “My dad was a member of the party at one point, and I wore the badge when I went to school. But I never took it really seriously.” Instead, Kirk was drawn to Dada’s unconstructive revolt and intoxicating irrationalism.

Although other heavily industrial parts of Britain suffered steadily rising unemployment and factory closures in the seventies, Sheffield remained relatively prosperous. The steel industry didn’t sharply decline until Thatcher took power in 1979. If there was deprivation, it was cultural. Nonconformist Sheffield youth grabbed on to whatever sources of stimulation they could find: pop music, art, glam clothes, science fiction, or, better still, some combination of them all.

That’s why
A Clockwork Orange
—Anthony Burgess’s 1962 book, Stanley Kubrick’s 1970 film,
and
Walter Carlos’s electronic movie score—had such an impact in Sheffield. Set in a near future Britain,
A Clockwork Orange
focuses on a marauding gang of teenagers, vicious dandies who live for gratuitous “ultraviolence.” Roaming a grim cityscape of high-rise apartment blocks, power plants, and dilapidated Filmdromes, these glammed-up thugs mug old people for a lark and spar bloodily with rival gangs. Although Burgess drew specific inspiration from his hometown of Manchester,
Clockwork Orange
’s backdrop was familiar to anyone living in urban Britain during the 1970s. Tower blocks, skyways, shadowy underpasses: This was the desolate psychogeography of a new England created by town planners and Brutalist architects from the early 1960s onward. The Human League titled their second EP,
The Dignity of Labour,
after a mural in the high-rise Municipal Flatblock where
Clockwork Orange
’s antihero, Alex, visits his parents. Martyn Ware and Ian Craig Marsh later named their post–Human League outfit Heaven 17 after an imaginary pop group in the novel. Adi Newton, a former associate of Ware’s and Marsh’s, called his band Clock DVA—“DVA” meaning the number two in the pidgin-Russian slang that Alex and his “droogs” speak.

As for Walter Carlos’s
Clockwork Orange
score, this was simply the first time most Sheffield kids heard full-on electronic music. There’d been tantalizing glimpses of synthesized sound here and there in progressive rock from groups like Emerson, Lake, and Palmer. “ELP were awful rubbish apart from when Keith Emerson was playing the Moog, and then it was
sublime,
” says Phil Oakey, singer of the Human League. Otherwise, just about the hardest hit of electronic sound you could get from pop in the early seventies was Roxy Music, which featured Eno’s abstract spurts of synth noise.

Roxy were massive in Sheffield. The group’s flamboyant, future-retro image inspired the posthippie generation to glam up and dance at Sheffield clubs like the Crazy Daisy. And Roxy performed regularly in the city. “When you went to see them you’d wait until you were on the bus before applying the glitter, so your mum and dad didn’t see,” recalls Oakey. “Martyn was more daring than me, he’d be going through the toughest areas of town in green fur jackets and high-heel shoes.” At parties, people used to greet Ware and Oakey with, “Oh, look, it’s Mackay and Eno,” Andy Mackay being Roxy’s fruity-looking saxophonist. Ambiguously pitched between irony and romanticism, Roxy were the aesthete’s option. “I remember buying the first Roxy album and listening to it with the gatefold sleeve open, spread out on the floor,” says Ware. “The entire atmosphere around the record was as important as the music. It all came together as a
piece of art,
for me.”

The early seventies were the golden age of both theatrical rock performers (Bowie, Alice Cooper, Peter Gabriel–era Genesis) and rock theater (musicals such as
The Rocky Horror Show
and
Rock Follies
). So it’s only right that in glam-besotted Sheffield, a future generation of local pop stars would be nurtured in a youth theater project. Funded by the city council, Meatwhistle evolved into a kind of experimental performance space for bright teenagers. Amongst its participants were a good proportion of the future prime movers in Sheffield’s postpunk scene, including Ian Craig Marsh and Martyn Ware of the Future/Human League/Heaven 17, Adi Newton of the Future and Clock DVA, Paul Bower—founder of the punk zine
Gun Rubber
and leader of the band 2.3—and Glenn Gregory, who would become the singer in Heaven 17.

“Meatwhistle started in the summer of 1972, when I was about sixteen,” says Marsh. “They came up with this idea of opening up the Crucible Theatre to teenage schoolkids for the summer.” After a wildly successful production of
Marat-Sade,
Meatwhistle’s organizers—arty bohemian playwright/actor Chris Wilkinson and his wife, Veronica—were given an entire vacant school. “It was a big, old Victorian building, three or four floors, huge ceilings,” recalls Ware. The Wilkinsons lobbied successfully for funding for lights, video cameras, and musical instruments. “Gradually Meatwhistle got a lot more experimental and creative, as all the disaffected juveniles in Sheffield started congregating there,” says Marsh. “Bands were rehearsing at Meatwhistle because there were loads of spare rooms. Generally speaking, everyone was free to do what they wanted.” There was a strong element of everybody colluding, Marsh says, to get away with as much as possible. The name itself, Meatwhistle, was dead cheeky. The Wilkinsons claimed it was Chaucerian. Actually it’s slang for the male member.

Each Sunday, the Meatwhistle collective staged a show, which might encompass anything from bands playing to short plays to comedy sketches. It was for one of these Sunday revues that Marsh formed his first group, the shock rock duo Musical Vomit. “I got the name from a
Melody Maker
live review of Suicide. To
MM
with its prog-rock attitude, Suicide were a sheer insult to your ears, so the reviewer described them as ‘musical vomit.’ I thought, ‘What a great name for a band.’ This guy Mark Civico sang and I’d go onstage with a guitar I could barely play, making percussive noise and feedback.” After a while Marsh left and Musical Vomit became closer to a proper band, albeit with a spoof rock edge and an ever shifting, expanding, and contracting lineup that included at various points Glenn Gregory, Paul Bower, and Martyn Ware.

By this point, Meatwhistle was a cross between an “intellectual youth club” (as Ware puts it) and an experimental-pop laboratory, with an endless stream of imaginary bands that only existed for one night’s performance and had names like the Underpants, the Dead Daughters, and Androids Don’t Bleed. “The vibe was very New York Dolls, everyone dressing up madly and adopting fake names like Eddie Brando and Dick Velcro,” recalls Marsh. Musical Vomit, meanwhile, had graduated to performing intermittently before real audiences. With sick, humorous songs about masturbation or necrophilia, and stunts like the lead singer puking up vegetable soup, the band operated somewhere between Alice Cooper–style shock rock and the satirical-theatrical comedy rock of the Tubes. Poly Styrene of X-Ray Spex later declared Musical Vomit, whom she’d seen in the midseventies, to be Britain’s very first punk band.

Although they didn’t participate in Meatwhistle, Cabaret Voltaire sank many a pint with the Musical Vomit crew. One thing they had in common was a passion for Roxy Music. “That era in ’73 when Roxy were really at the cutting edge, that’s what really got us going,” says Richard H. Kirk. “We’d read Eno in interviews talking about how anyone can make music because you don’t need to learn an instrument, you can use a tape recorder or a synth.” The group were such fans that Kirk and fellow Cab Chris Watson even went to hear Eno speak at Bradford Art College, clutching a reel-to-reel tape of their early recordings. Unable to buttonhole him after the lecture, they cornered Eno in the men’s bathroom and pressed the demo reel into his apprehensive hands.

Echoing Eno’s rhetoric, the group initially saw themselves less as a musical entity than as a “sound group,” says Kirk, doing a lo-fi, garage band version of
musique concrète
. “We started in late 1973 and initially there was a large group of people involved, a gang of mates interested in a bit of art and some films and a few strange books.” Most prominent among those “strange books” were the works of William S. Burroughs. In the early seventies, Burroughs was esoteric knowledge. His sixties notoriety had waned, he’d disappeared into reclusion, and his novels weren’t that easy to find. Cabaret Voltaire were especially taken with the cut-up techniques developed by Burroughs in tandem with Brion Gysin. These involved chopping up text or sound and recombining them in order to disrupt the linearity of thought, each snip/splice serving as a fissure through which “the future leaks,” as Burroughs and Gysin put it. You can hear another Burroughsian influence—the flat, matter-of-fact depiction of extreme and grotesque acts of sex and violence—in the spoken-word voice-overs that accompany some early Cabaret Voltaire pieces, such as the fetid imagery of “Bed Time Stories”: “With dogs that are trained to sniff out corpses/Eat my remains but leave my feet/I’ll hold a séance with Moroccan rapists/Masturbating end over end.”

Kirk, who left art school after the first year, was a fan of the original anti-art art movement, Dada. The name Cabaret Voltaire came from the Zurich nightclub/salon where Tristan Tzara, Hugo Ball, et al. declaimed their sound poetry while World War I raged across Europe. Chris Watson, outwardly the most “normal” member of the group (his day job was working as a telephone engineer) was also a Dada fiend. He’d stumbled on a book about the movement as a teenager in 1970, an experience that “just hit me so hard it changed the way I’ve thought ever since.” Dada’s assault on meaning and taste, along with its collage techniques, fired the group’s imagination.

By 1974, the gang had whittled down to Kirk, Stephen Mallinder, and Watson, whose attic became their sound lab. “We studiously went there Tuesdays and Thursdays every week and experimented for two hours or so, during which time we’d lay down maybe three or four compositions,” recalls Kirk. The trio recorded their abstract sound collages straight to tape, resulting in a massive archive, some of which was exhumed for
Methodology ’74/’78. Attic Tapes;
, a box set released in 2002. Creaky and homespun, the Cabs’ early stabs at
concrète,
such as “Dream Sequence Number Two Ethel’s Voice,” have an alien-yet-quaint quality, while more ferocious tracks like “Henderson Reversed Piece Two,” all rattling synthetic percussion and soiled sheets of sound, recall avant-classical electronic composers such as Morton Subotnick.

At this point, Cabaret Voltaire didn’t resemble a rock band in any respect. For starters, they didn’t have a drummer. “We didn’t want a rock guy showing off and doing drum solos,” says Kirk. “We wanted steady, mechanical repetition.” At a Sheffield music shop, “a dodgy-looking chap with a toupee” approached them and sold them a Farfisa drum machine he had at home. Guitar didn’t enter the picture until quite late. For a while they didn’t even have a proper synth, instead using tape loops and a primitive oscillator built by Watson. Kirk’s primary instrument was the clarinet, fed through effects to sound harshly processed and eerie, as on the psychotic-bucolic “Fuse Mountain,” which summons up the image of a circle of cross-legged hippies playing flutes on a mound of iron ore outside a derelict steel mill. Almost every sound source—the group’s voices, Mallinder’s bass, Watson’s organ, found sounds—was sent through ring modulators or a chain of effects devices, emerging warped and contaminated on the other side.