With the passing of original DEVO drummer, Alan Myers (a.k.a. 'The Human Metronome'), it's time to re chart the course of DEVO. The Men Who Make the Music is a VHS-era film that features not only a lot of the conceptual bafflegab that comprised the band's philosophical underpinnings but also a slew of fantastic live footage from their guitar-centered seventies era. Watch 'em rock:
The BBC got pretty much every surviving Stiff vet - The Damned, Elvis Costello, Nick Lowe, Wreckless Eric, Devo, Madness, The Pogues plus, of course, label honchos Dave Robinson and Jake Riviera - to talk up a storm for this hour-long doc.
Heading back in time, let us examine Devo's mid-seventies basement tapes via these long out-of-print Rykodisc collections. While Volume One does contain early version of later classics, like "Mongoloid", "Jocko Homo" and their cover of the Rolling Stones "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction", most of these fifteen tracks had never been heard before this was released in 1990.
The results, as the title makes clear (but the covert art muddies), are not for the lightweight, "Whip It" loving Devo fans. No, to love this pointy-headed artiness ya gotta wanna understand.
Nothing about Devo really made sense: not their ever-changing matching outfits and hats, their AC/DC meets Kraftwerk sound, their undergrad philosophy of De-Evolution, their robotic cover of classic rock staples, their nerdy synchronized dance movements and, least sensible of all, the fact that for a time in the late seventies and early eighties, they defined punk to the straight world in North America.
All those incomprehensible elements (their defining punk aside), their alien-ness made Devo irresistible to those who sorta understood. Even though I was listening to a steady diet of North American hardcore and British punk, I had tapes of every Devo album (though I admit that, fittingly, they got gradually worse through till 1984's Shout). Blame it on Fridays, that easier-for-kids-to-see version of Saturday Night Live for whom Devo was practically the house band.
This bootleg includes all those Fridays appearances as well as ones on Letterman, SNL and a set from the King Biscuit Flower Hour. It all makes clear Devo's complicated but comprehensible influence on much of modern music.
MRML Readers: Leave us a comment with your take on Devo and whether or not you want to hear more!
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Re: Re-Ups
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