DEVO
Directed by Chris Smith
Screening as part of The Strobe Film Festival
THOSE CRAZY KIDS, those wacky guys with the flowerpots on their heads, those cheeky fellows with all those visual double entendres through the Whip It film clip, those insurrectionists driven by a deep, righteous fury partially fuelled by watching friends shot by trigger-happy arms of the state … Wait. What?
One of the most interesting reminders in Chris Smith’s film about Devo – screening as part of the Strobe Film Festival next month after premiering at Vivid in May – is how distaste (for inane Christianity and American self-absorption), disgust (for American exceptionalism and the flow on from that) and disdain (for corporate rule and comfortable good taste) lay at the heart of their music, art and most importantly, philosophy. Anger was an energy, amusement was a byproduct, “eliminate the ninnies and the twits” was not a throwaway line when they quite reasonably and quite eloquently argued we were not progressing but de-evolving.
Mark Mothersbaugh and Gerald Casale met at Ohio’s Kent State university as the ‘60s turned into the ‘70s, they were on the march protesting the draft and America’s involvement in Vietnam in 1970 when National Guardsmen shot at the unharmed protesters, and they saw friends bleeding and bleeding out. When they formed a band, this wasn’t the only thing that was at play – not when art’s subversive qualities offered endless possibilities to provoke and antagonise and amuse, and music could infiltrate even better than film – but it was not nothing either.
The element of consciousness-raising and truth-telling, being “musical reporters” as Mothersbaugh says in one interview, mattered. “We were taking a position on the culture,” explains Casale. (Mind you, Casale also said Devo was the musical laxative for a constipated country. Now that’s Dada!)
Scions of respectable families in the industrial heartland town of Akron, they were a contrasting and yet perfectly matched pair – early photos at college show Casale as an earnest fellow with a wicket gleam, while Mothersbaugh was kind of a hunk really, but I digress – who dragged in a brother each and a friend who figured this looked like a lark, for shits, giggles and audience-disturbing fun.
“If you live in a small town, you might mean a dozen or two/Young alien types to step out and dare to declare/We’re through being cool.”
Actually, it’s worth correcting course here to say that one thing Smith doesn’t shirk while exploring the seriousness beneath the boiler suits and potatoes, is fun. Not all of it audience-disturbing either, with Smith’s cutting and structure loose enough to capture the fractured energy of the early footage of the band and the film heavily focused on the first decade of the band’s existence when few things, including Brian Eno who tried and failed to mould them when producing their debut, were sacred. You’re going to laugh at lot through this.
The pleasure the Mothersbaughs, Casales and Alan Myers were having is evident in the freakshows and provocations of their pioneering (pre-MTV and then briefly all-over-MTV) filmclips, in the choreography and potential for imminent collapse of their multi-discipline live shows, and in the way they kept ploughing on through appearances on TV with nonplussed or suspicious or hostile hosts (yes that is Molly Meldrum shown as one of those trying to act like he understands), explaining their philosophy of resistance.
Playing the game while trying to undermine it, if not destroy it, from within, before the inevitable obsolescence, was performance art of some high order and it worked. “When you have Dick Clark asking you about de-evolution it’s working,” as Casale cheerfully remembers.
Their greatest success though is one they can’t help but regret. Not the sales and tours, or the hits and merchandising (which was not approved of by an early champion, a man they called “Grandpa Granola”, Neil Young), but the eventual realisation that the de-evolving of humans they had tracked and the dumbing down to emptiness of the culture they predicted, happened exactly as they warned us.
“This is not how we wanted to be right,” says Casale ruefully.
Devo screens at Golden Age Cinema, August 10. CLICK HERE FOR TICKETS
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