These clips are hard to find on the Internet and who knows how long they’ll last out there before the dark corporate forces wipe them from view. The teachings of the SubGenius are under relentless assault!
Devo’s appearance on Saturday Night Live on October 14, 1978 was a visitation from a rock and roll galaxy far far away and yet so near. It was as if aliens from another planet had created a concept of Earthlings based on old television transmissions they’d hijacked of industrial training films, Triumph Of The Will, episodes of Hullabaloo and Saturday morning cartoons and then spewed it all back at us in a digitized replication missing a few ones and zeros. It was an attempt at communication, not unlike Klaatu’s failed efforts in 1951.
When I was looking for a suitable clip of Jimi Hendrix to go along with that pic of Jimi as Santa Claus, it reminded me that I should post the insane music video that Devo made for their amazing cover of “Are U Experienced?” from their 1984 Shout! album.
This video used to be widely known, but the Hendrix estate refused to allow it to be used after a certain point, saying it was insulting to Jimi (which it kind of is, I can see why they think that, but still, why deprive the world of this greatness?!). I used to have it on Laserdisc, but when that same collection came out on DVD, this clip—one of the best things on it—was missing.
From an interview with Devo’s Gerald Casale in Ear Candy:
Ear Candy: Speaking of de-evolution, why didn’t the Hendrix estate give you permission to put the “Are U Experienced” video on the DVD?
Gerald Casale: Further de-evolution. You understand that the consortium of people that now represent the Hendrix estate are basically run by lawyers; the lawyer mentality. Lawyers always posit the worst-case scenarios. Though that video was loved for years by anybody who saw it including the man who commissioned it—Chuck Arroff—a luminary in the music business who still claims to this day that it was one of his five most favorite videos ever; they [the lawyers] didn’t get it and assumed we were making fun of Jimi. That’s like saying “Whip It” makes fun of cowboys. This is so stupid it’s unbelievable.”
This high budget video, one of only two Devo promos to be shot on 35mm film, was produced by group and Rev. Ivan Stang, founder of The Church of the Subgenius. I especially like the part where Mark Mothersbaugh has the big eyes of Margaret Keane’s paintings. Apparently this particular video marked the first use of the “morphing” video effect.
C’est magnifique! A 1978 Devo performance from Paris sees the Spuds in fine form. This was right after their Brian Eno-produced major label debut had come out and they’re on fire here, starting with a great, almost hypnotic rendition of “Satisfaction.”
Watch any of Adam Curtis‘s acclaimed documentaries and it’s hard not to think: how much has Curtis lifted from Bruce Conner? Indeed without Conner, would Curtis have developed his collagist-style of documentary making? I doubt it.
And without all the found footage and archive, Curtis’s docs would be seen for what they are: absurd.
The late Bruce Conner is the real talent here - an artist and film-maker whose work devised new ways of working and presciently anticipated techniques which are now ubiquitously found on the web, television and film-making.
Conner was a heroic oppositional artist, whose career went against the staid and artificially created stasis of the art world. He opted for keeping true to his own vision, a Beat life, channelling his energies into art influenced by Dada, Surrealism and Duchamp.
Conner was cantankerous and one-of-a-kind. He would wear an American flag pin. When asked why, he said, “I’m not going to let those bastards take it away from me.”
He kicked against fame and celebrity, seeing art as separate from individual who may have created it.
“I’ve always been uneasy about being identified with the art I’ve made. Art takes on a power all its own and it’s frightening to have things floating around the world with my name on them that people are free to interpret and use however they choose.”
Born in McPherson, Kansas, Conner attended Witchita University, before receiving his degree in Fine Art from Nebraska University. At university he met and married Jean Sandstedt in 1957. He won a scholarship to art school in Brooklyn, but quickly moved to University of Colorado, where he spent one semester studying art. The couple then moved to San Francisco and became part of the Beat scene. Here Conner began to produce sculptures and ready-mades that critiqued the consumerist society of late 1950’s. His work anticipated Pop Art, but Conner never focussed solely on one discipline, refusing to be pigeon-holed, and quickly moved on to to film-making.
Having been advised to make films by Stan Brakhage, Conner made A MOVIE in 1958, by editing together found footage from newsreels- B-movies, porn reels and short films. This single film changed the whole language of cinema and underground film-making with its collagist technique and editing.
The Conners moved to Mexico (“it was cheap”), where he discovered magic mushrooms and formed a life-long friendship with a still to be turned-on, Timothy Leary. When the money ran out, they returned to San Francisco and the life of film-maker and artist.
In 1961, Conner made COSMIC RAY, a 4-minute film of 2,000 images (A-bombs, Mickey Mouse, nudes, fireworks) to Ray Charles’ song “What I Say”. With a grant from the Ford Foundation, Conner produced a series of films that were “precursors, for better or worse, of the pop video and MTV,” as his obituary reported:
EASTER MORNING RAGA (1966) was designed to be run forward or backward at any speed, or even in a loop to a background of sitar music. Breakaway (1966) showed a dancer, Antonia Christina Basilotta, in rapid rhythmic montage. REPORT (1967) dwells on the assassination of John F Kennedy. The found footage exists of repetitions, jump cuts and broken images of the motorcade, and disintegrates at the crucial moment while we hear a frenzied television commentator saying that “something has happened”. The fatal gun shots are intercut with other shots: TV commercials, clips from James Whale’s Frankenstein and Lewis Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front. The film has both a kinetic and emotional effect.
REPORT “perfectly captures Conner’s anger over the commercialization of Kennedy’s death” while also examining the media’s mythic construction of JFK and Jackie — a hunger for images that “guaranteed that they would be transformed into idols, myths, Gods.”
Conner’s work is almost a visual counterpart to J G Ballard’s writing, using the same cultural references that inspired Ballard’s books - Kennedy, Monroe, the atom bomb. His film CROSSROADS presented the 1952 atomic bomb test at Bikini Atoll in extreme slow motion from twenty-seven different angles.
His editing techniques influenced Dennis Hopper in making Easy Rider, and said:
“much of the editing of Easy Rider came directly from watching Bruce’s films”
The pair became friends and Hopper famously photographed Conner alongside Toni Basil, Teri Garr and Ann Mitchell.
Always moving, always progressing, having “no half way house in which to rest”, Conner became part of the San Francisco Punk scene, after Toni Basil told Conner to go check out the band Devo in 1977. He became so inspired when he saw the band at the Mabuhay Gardens that he started going there four night a week, taking photographs of Punk bands, which eventually led to his job as staff photographer with Search ‘n’ Destroy magazine. It was a career change that came at some personal cost.
“I lost a lot of brain cells at the Mabuhay. What are you gonna do listening to hours of incomprehensible rock’n'roll but drink? I became an alcoholic, and it took me a few years to deal with that.”
Conner continued with his art work and films, even making short films for Devo, David Byrne and Brian Eno. In his later years, Conner returned to the many themes of his early life and work, but still kept himself once removed from greater success and fame. He died in 2008.
Towards the end of his life he withdrew his films from circulation, as he was “disgusted” when he saw badly pixelated films bootlegged and uploaded on YouTube. Conner was prescriptive in how his work should be displayed and screened. All of which is frustrating for those who want to see Conner’s films outside of the gallery, museum or film festival, and especially now, when so much of his originality and vision as a film-maker and artist has been copied by others.
Released only on VHS and Laserdisc in 1995, Neil Young’s film Human Highway, filmed in 1978, contains this marvelous footage of Young and Devo having their way with Hey Hey My My. Match made in heaven sez I ! Enjoy this excellent quality clip before the corporate music police take it down.
The Residents’ 1976 version of The Stones’ Satisfaction is nearly everything the better known version by Devo from a year later is not: Loose, belligerant, violent, truly fucked up. A real stick in the eye of everything conventionally tasteful in 1976 America. Delightfully painful to listen to thanks to Philip “Snakefinger” Lithman’s completely unhinged lead guitar and mystery Resident member’s menacing vocal, this is a timeless piece of yellow plastic.
Check the B-side and a demented live version after the jump…
While much of America has devoles to become, as William Gibson put it “Devo’s vision made flesh,” Devo’s own Jerry Casale, obviously a man of “wealth and taste” has revealed to Wine Spectator magazine that he’s taking a more sophisticated approach to life here in the Age of Ignorance, the Tea party and Fox News—the kinds of things he and his band mates were predicting back in the mid-70s.
I was at a dinner party that Jerry also attended a few years back, and I recall that the host was extremely impressed with the bottle o’ vino that Jerry brought.
Wine Spectator: How did you learn so much about wine?
Jerry Casale: When we signed with Warner Bros. Records and moved to California [in the late 1970s], a world opened up to me. We hit California not only when there was an explosion in the music scene, but there was a revolution in cuisine. All the restaurateurs were now famous and had cookbooks out and were new and young and were stretching food consciousness. It stretched from Alice Waters, in San Francisco to Bruce Marder, Sam Clark and Michael McCarty. I met them all, and they were Devo fans! I got to eat and drink in their restaurants and ask a lot of questions. I started from zero and learned and learned and learned. Touring completed the picture. In Europe, I was able to visit vineyards. It was a revelation. I was so into it that I taught wine [at the Wine House in Los Angeles].
Wine Spectator: How long did you teach wine classes?
Jerry Casale: It was in the years that Devo were in some kind of suspended animation, when there was no activity—sometime between 1992 and 1995. [The Wine House] was a serious operation: 1,000 feet of retail space, plus a restaurant and a classroom. I wanted people to strip away all the assumptions they’ve made and things they’ve learned that were wrong like sniffing corks [laughs]. Wine represented some kind of hoity-toity frightening thing to them.
Casale hopes to begin developing his own wine within the next couple of years. Below, “Mongoloid” performed in France, 1978.
Calling it “flawless,” and “rife with sci-fi paranoia and doomed futures,” Popmatters today celebrates the reissuing of Devo‘s Duty Now for the Future. I love that ‘79 album dearly, but looking back at that era now, I can still remember the absolute, utter contempt some of my fellow Angelenos reigned down upon Akron’s spud boys.
Being a time when authenticity seemed prized beyond all other attributes, it’s not hard to see why. Devo had uniforms, a mythology, tightly orchestrated playing. But Gabba Gabba Hey, so did these guys. And whatever doubts I had about the band were quickly and forever banished by this.
So, here we are today. With authenticity no longer a concern, like, at all, are we not better poised, err, evolved, for Devo’s return? And, more importantly, will the world switch with them from Whip It red to Winter Olympic blue?
Devo’s upcoming album, its first in 20 years, comes out June 15th. And perhaps mocking, perhaps embracing, this focus-grouped-to-death time of ours, the band’s calling it, Something For Everybody:
Though the 12 songs on Something for Everybody are built on Devo’s signature mechanized swing, the recording and presentation of the album saw the band experimenting with an entirely new approach. Greg Scholl was brought in to serve as COO for Devo, Inc., and—working with the advertising agency Mother LA—conducted a series of studies through the Club Devo site to help the band with its creative decisions, from color selection to song mixes.
“We decided to actively seek comment and criticism from outside people and use that as a tool, rather than shunning or ignoring it,” says Gerald Casale. “Our experiences participating in secondary creativity—things like corporate consensus building, focus groups—make you appreciate the connection that an artist has to society.”
An amusing “touch test” for Something For Everybody follows below:
Given the passing of time, and people, it was a moving, memorable evening, but I think no band played tighter—or stronger—that night than closing act Devo. They opened (I believe) with Jocko Homo (Are We Not Men?), and I remember shooting friends WTF looks as the whole gallery started quaking (see photo below).
Well, starting this fall, you can witness some of that “Akron magic” yourself:
Ohio nerd-rock legends Devo are taking the whole playing-a-classic-album-in-its-entirety trend to the next level. On their November tour, they will play two-night stands in every city, dedicating each night to one particular album. The first night, Devo will play their 1978 debut Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo! straight through. The next night, they’ll run through 1980’s Freedom of Choice. So you’ll be able to choose between experimental weirdo Devo and early-MTV new wave Devo, or you could just buy tickets to both shows.
And sure, doing the “whole album in its entirety thing” is, by now, not the newest of tricks. But let’s give the boys…er, men, their due, shall we? As you can see from the below promo film touting “laser discs,” when it comes to embracing new forms, be they mutant or technological, Devo’s always been on the cutting edge.
’ 1976 version of The Stones’ Satisfaction is nearly everything the better known version by Devo from a year later is not: Loose, belligerant, violent, truly fucked up. A real stick in the eye of everything conventionally tasteful in 1976 America. Delightfully painful to listen to thanks to Philip “Snakefinger” Lithman’s completely unhinged lead guitar and mystery Resident member’s menacing vocal, this is a timeless piece of yellow plastic.
