As expressed in the anthem "Be Stiff", Devo's proudly neurotic, uptight attitude was a revolt against the take-it-easy baby boomers. "We were anything but hippies - loose, natural", Devo founder Gerard Casale recalled years later.
Devo - Be Stiff 1977
Devo's first two singles, "Satisfaction" and "Jocko Homo" - self-released on the group's own Booji Boy label -were relatively torpid compared with their later frantic sound. This was partly because "Jocko Homo" and its B-side, "Mongoloid", were recorded in a garage with no heating during a freezing winter, with the band wearing gloves.
Devo - (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction (single version) 1977
Devo - Mongoloid (album version) 1978
Whenever feasible, Devo gigs began with The Beginning Was the End: The Truth About De-Evolution, a ten-minute film directed by their friend Chuck Statler, whom they'd originally met in an experimental-art class at Kent State University. Statler's minimovie generated the enduringly famous images of Devo: singer Mark Mothersbaugh as mad professor in bow tie and white coat giving a student lecture on devolution, the rest of the band wearing plastic sunglasses and colored tights pulled tightly over their heads to squish their features, bank-robber style.
Devo - Jocko Homo (from
The Truth About De-Evolution) 1976
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 producer Brian 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'".
Devo - Jocko Homo (album version) 1978
You can still hear the Eno imprint. "Shrivel Up" is dank with synth slime, giving the song an abject feel that fits the lyrics about decay and mortality.
Devo - Shrivel Up 1978
"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".
Devo - Gut Feeling 1978
"Uncontrollable Urge" makes rock's "wild sexuality" seem as absurd and humiliating as an involuntary nervous tic.
Devo - Uncontrollable Urge 1978
"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.
Devo - Come Back Jonee 1978
Their cover of the Rollling 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".
Devo - Satisfaction (album version) 1978
