DEVO’S ‘Something For Everybody’ – A Chat with Mark Mothersbaugh

by bill biss

Devo hasn’t lost a bit of their zip on the new CD called Something for Everybody. It’s very clean Devo and as the band is known for, the songs combine a double dose of clarity and cleverness.

 

The group is headlining the San Diego Pride Festival this year. So, for those across Southern California who have “devolutionized” with Devo since their very first album in 1978, come on down to the festival on Sunday night, July 18 at 7:15 p.m. to be thoroughly entertained with their live performance.

 

Mark Mothersbaugh took a few minutes out of his schedule to talk with The Rage Monthly about the new work and share a few memories along the way.

 

Mark Mothersbaugh: I tell ya, TCM is my favorite TV channel. She’s embedded in my brain, that’s for sure. I see her movies all the time. I’ll tell you the history of the song. I actually wrote the music to be the main theme for a movie I was scoring at the time called Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs.

 

It was the first piece of music I played for the two young directors. It was their first film. They reacted to it really positively. Then I wrote something else for the picture and that first piece didn’t get used. I loved the theme so much and thought it was a great song.

 

So, I took an instrumental copy of it and gave it to Jerry [Casale, Devo bandmate]. He came back the next day with a whole set of lyrics. So, we have to ask him about Judy Garland (laughter).

MM: We started writing music because Jerry and I were at Kent State. We were there and my brother was there too. We were there protesting the war in Vietnam and they shot kids at Kent. They killed kids at Kent.

 

So, our school got shut down. We were both art students and collaborated together on visual projects. We were talking about the world around us and decided that we were seeing things devolve rather than evolve.

 

We felt like during the early 1970s, it became this time when people realized there was an upper barrier or glass ceiling to democracy and to things in our culture. You could protest but not too much, or want to try and change things but not too fast.

 

MM: We saw music that all of a sudden…the Bob Dylan’s disappeared. The people with messages disappeared. Music kind of took a turn to the right with concert rock…bands like Foreigner, Styx. With a lot of the music, the politics were “I’m white. I’m stupid. I’m a misogynist and I’m proud of it. I’m a conspicuous consumer.” Those things.

 

The music that sounded the best was disco. But, disco was like a pretty girl with a beautiful body but no brain. Most of the lyrics were like “I’m gonna party all the time.”

 

MM: We were thinking we want to take the best of what was going on with electronic music and Rock and Roll and still talk about ideas.

MM: Ah, thanks.

 

MM: It seemed kind of counter-intuitive back some thirty some years ago and going “been there, done that.” But, when we went into Warner Brothers, we went in there and talked to people six months ago, it just seemed like a good time.

 

The one thing that we asked for was, we said, “Can we use an ad agency to do the marketing for the record?” The ad agency put together a lot of video with us. It was just a way to try and engage people with a band that had let our branding kind of dissipate over the last 20 years. It’s been a lot of fun.

 

MM: Just the idea that we can do it in a different way is exciting for us. You have to understand. In 1978, when we went into Warner Brothers, they said, “Come on in. We’re going to have a marketing meeting. We went in to find out what they were going to do to sell our record.

 

We walked into this room with all these people. One guy goes, “Okay. Here’s our marketing plan. We’re going to make life-size cut-outs of you guys and put them in every record store in the country.” Then, he smiled and folded his arms leaning back in his chair. That was their marketing strategy! It was that easy back in those days.

MM: One of the things that worked to our benefit was we spent a lot of time in West Hollywood at the studio. Our first album…we got to put three or four years into it before it came out. Every album after that, it was like three months. You had to get off tour and then quickly turn around a new album.

 

Write it, record it and make a video and go out on tour again. This album, we put almost three years into it. This was the first time we had the luxury of putting all that time into the record. I think we ended up with a good record because of it. The idea, that we didn’t just fire something out as fast as we could.

 

MM: I’m totally pleased we get to do this show. It was really a nice phone call to get…when we got invited to it.