Forrest writes:
I don't know if there's any place for this in the land of Ishbadiddle, but I did a radio interview last week with Gerald Casale of DEVO. Here's the transcript:
. . . . . . . .
FO: If we could just start at the beginning... when the whole thing started, you and Mark [Mothersbaugh] were at Kent State, right?
GC: Yes.
FO: And you were there when all the stuff was going down. What did you see? How did that affect you?
GC: Well, I suppose whatever I would say would maybe sound trite, but it changed my life. I realize that sounds gaggy, but it did. Until then I probably was just a participant in pop culture, and was a bit of a hippie, and subscribed to that kind of apolitical, "love will conquer all" kind of feeling that was rampant. I had joined SDS a year previous to the murders - they were murders - at Kent State, and I had become somewhat politicized. I'd listened to Mark Rudd from Columbia, I'd heard Tom Hayden speak, and Jerry Rubin, and I'd started to understand the connections between big business and the military and how decisions were getting made. I was well aware of that by the time the governor of Ohio at the time, Governor Rhodes, declared conveniently martial law - which is something no kid today has ever heard about; they don't believe this can happen. But you can go back to the labor movement in the 30's and look at the killings at the Ford plant with mounted police on horseback and guns... it's happened several times in our history, not just against minorities but always motivated economically whether it's racist or not. Anyway, to make a long story short it was hideous and they got away with it, and they declared martial law and took away our rights to assemble. We assembled because of the expansion of the war into Cambodia. And National Guardsmen that were hiding in the heating plant and the gymnasium from the night before materialized within moments with tear gas and loaded M-16's.
FO: So in terms of the band, how much of what you were doing was trying to convey a serious message and how much of it was a put-on? Or were you using the humor of it to slip the serious message in?
GC: I can't really speak for the band, but certainly that's what I was doing. I realized all the way back then that if you met these issues head-on, like a person like Huey Newton did, you were going to end up in jail or shot. I probably didn't have their balls, nor did I have that position in life, so I resorted to creativity, you know, satire and Dada acts, and I think Mark shared that aesthetic with me. We were doing an end run, basically. We were very serious about our joke. And certainly musically we were serious!
FO: I know you had ongoing problems with distribution and promotion really throughout the history of the band. Going back now and listening to the stuff you guys did, is there anything you listen to and you say, "man this was really great, why didn't people get to hear this?"
GC: [laughs] Yeah, I suppose that's the story of our lives. We were the Rodney Dangerfields of pop music. We got no respect because I think we did it before they decided they wanted it. In other words, we did all the work, and we had the cutting edge and the content. Then people like the Cars just took the style or the form and namby-pambied it and made millions off of hits. But I don't see why "Girl U Want" or "Uncontrollable Urge" or "Freedom of Choice" shouldn't have been hits, other than the fact that mainstream radio, you know, FM radio controlled by people like Lee Abrams at the time, hated DEVO from the beginning for doing something before they decided it could happen.
FO: And yet, despite not having the mainstream success of some of those other groups, it seems like you hear DEVO all over the place these days, and in some really unexpected places.
GC: [laughs] Right.
FO: What do you attribute that level of success to? It's sort of a stealth success.
GC: Yeah. It doesn't translate to my lifestyle, that's for sure. But I just think it's because sometimes you can't kill something if there's a kernel of validity to it. And I certainly think we were what was new about New Wave, because we did structure songs differently, we did introduce new sounds into the lexicon of mainstream rock and roll music, we had lyrical content that was unprecedented at the time. And so I think what encourages me, like even what happens with our little Web site, clubdevo.com, is the people that e-mail me are like sixteen, eighteen, twenty-two. They've discovered DEVO, they've listened to the "Greatest Hits and Misses" on Warner Brothers or they've heard the "Pioneers Who Got Scalped" on Rhino for the first time. And they have some bootleg videos because those are unavailable, and a couple bootlegs of live, and they're turned on because they think, there's things that we did that are now totally in line with the best music going on today. It still sounds modern to me, even.
FO: Yeah, I'd agree with that. You guys were ahead of your time in so many ways. Videos are something that easily comes to mind, and you directed all of them, right?
GC: Yeah. It was at a time when there was no outlet for videos. MTV wouldn't exist at all for another three years when we started doing videos, and when they did exist they I think opened up in three or four major cities in the US and then didn't become a national franchise until, I think '83, or '82, maybe. And so at that point we'd already made six videos, and John Sykes and Bob Pittman who ran the company came to us and took us to an Italian restaurant for lunch and explained their wonderful vision which we, as naïve artists, totally sucked up, and said you know, "but we need your videos for free... but this is gonna help you guys immensely."
FO: "Exposure," right?
GC: Yeah, and it was like, "okay great, here you go!" when they didn't have any programming yet, an then as soon as they went national and tied to a Top-40 playlist, they quit playing us. And when our manager, Elliott Roberts, called and goes "what's going on? These guys gave you all their videos, they're pioneers," they go "hey, they don't have a top 40 hit." [laughs] Meanwhile in the press they were taking credit for breaking bands and creating hits! Oh, it was so beautiful.
FO: Since the DEVO era, you've been doing a lot of other music videos and commercial work. Do you find that when you're up for a commercial directing job or a music video directing job, people look at you and say "oh, he's DEVO," and they put you into a pigeonhole? Is it like a straitjacket?
GC: Absolutely. Yeah. You know the old adage, "let no good deed go unpunished." What's wonderful in America is these kind of people who manage everything and are in positions of pseudo-power. They perceive their power as the power to be mean and say no. That's just America. It's becoming America more than ever. It didn't even used to be that much like that, but now that we live in neo-corporate-feudal fascist times with a completely right-wing government that's strangling the last juices of freedom out of the whole country, I mean I've lived now to watch... I was afraid in the '60s. And I watched along with my activist friends freedom being eroded then. And that was kindergarten compared to what's happening now. I've lived long enough that I will die watching no democracy left. I've lived long enough to watch the end of democracy and I never thought I'd end the last quarter of my life that way. But I can say safely that that's clearly what's happened here. Make no doubt about it.
So anyway, these guys go, "No." So what do they do about me? They go, "oh he did that? That means he can't do anything else." Rather than go, "well, that was brilliant, he must have a certain mental ability and aesthetic; if he can do one thing right maybe he can do another thing right." No, no, not in this mean-spirited, asinine culture. It's like, "well then, he's stupid and he can't do anything else." It's brilliant, it's just so brilliant. It's endless, and thousands of people can tell you the same story.
FO: It seems like every year, every two years, DEVO as an entity sort of re-appears, for an appearance on a soundtrack or something like that. And there was the Lollapalooza business a few years ago. Are those occasional reunions fun?
GC: They're certainly fun for me. I'd be doing a lot more if it was up to me. I don't think DEVO exhausted its reservoir of something to say. I mean every artist only has so much to say and then they should be quiet. Mostly it works the opposite way, long after they've had nothing more to say, they keep going. But I think the opposite happened with DEVO. I think it's more truncated relative to potential. And that came from the fact that Mark decided he didn't want to do it anymore and only concentrated on his scoring work, and I just personally find that apples and oranges. I don't understand... it's two different arenas. In one arena, you're getting paid to solve other people's problems, like I do when I direct commercials. And they go, "well here's the idea, how would you do this, how would you make it work?" And I solve it for them. They're paying me for problem solving, like in a college class where the professor gives you a theme and you go do it. When you're a band with original music, you're getting paid for being you. In other words, nobody knew they wanted that stuff until they heard it. So you're not problem solving, you're a voice in the marketplace. You're getting paid for being a poet. As to why he doesn't make that distinction, you'd have to ask Mark. We'd do a lot more if he wanted to do it, but nobody wants DEVO without the two guys who wrote all the songs and created all the stage shows and ideas and costumes.
FO: What was the dynamic between you and Mark in terms of songwriting? Was it complete collaboration or did you have specialties?
GC: In the beginning it was complete collaboration. And then in the boring kind of VH-1 Behind the Music reality that is such an idiotic cliché at this point in time, to every kid in the culture... It's like then once there's money flowing in and a lot of evil people whispering in ears about you're really the guy and he can't do that and you can do that, then it just gets all political and guarded, and not fun anymore.
FO: I don't want to take up you're whole afternoon, but there's one more thing I'd like to talk about. You mentioned the Club DEVO Web site. Who's involved in that? You're doing quite a bit there.
GC: I do as much as I can without having a major exposure of people knowing the site exists. We should do a lot more in terms of that, but that costs a lot of money. All we're doing is kind of maintaining. We can, because people have wanted some of the old stuff like the t-shirts and the red hats and everything on a merchandise level, provide that, and we do a "Tell Us DEVO" question-and-answer thing, and we have "The Brainwasher" [online newsletter] that I try to update. I'd like to expand it a lot further. In other words, DEVO is like The Onion. I love the paper The Onion. We should have our own Onion, but that requires full-time, 24/7 commitment. But the sensibility, the point of view expressed in The Onion is completely DEVO.
FO: You do a lot of interviews. Is there anything that nobody gets around to asking you and you wish they'd ask you?
GC: [laughs] Yeah! They never say, "Gerry, why do all the dumbest and meanest people rule the planet?"
FO: All right. Gerry, why do all the dumbest and meanest people rule the planet?
GC: Because we're all DEVO.
FO: I couldn't have said it any better myself.
| DEVO | Gerald Casale |
