M: Huh?
C: Like if you actually went there, everyone...
M: No.
E: It was the school uniform Chris.
M: No the uniform of the day was very simular to the uniform today; blue jeans and T-shirts and we wanted our own uniform. And these were cheap. They were cheaper than blue jeans.
C: Where did you get them originally?
M: Akron...oh,...no...Summit County... Akron Summit Janitorial Supply on Main Street, I think.
C: We'll be there. Now for the hard hitting questions...Your case for or against Jar Jar Binks... (silence) Star Wars...
M: Oh you know I don't know anything about Star Wars. I really don't.
C: So you're just kind of in the middle.
M: I'm kind of totally out of it. I have friends who are really upset with me that I didn't go with them before it came out to see it five times or whatever. I'm sure I'll see it.
E: Catch a matinee.
C: As spokesperson for the NRA, what would be your first act?
M: I think they should have one free-for-all day a year where everybody gets their grudges out and then the other 360-some days a year we could, uh, get along with each other. There's too many people in this country, on this planet anyhow. (To Bob) How about you?
B: I don't know. I'll just agree with Mark.
M: I've recently seen footage of him when he was a kid, uh, aiming a cap gun at two fake train robbers on a train at, uh...where was that at? Frontier Town? From the year, probably 1961-62.
C: So you're a hero. If there's ever a crisis involved in fake train robberies...
M: He knows how to use guns in an emergency.
C: How long will we have to wait for DEVO action figures or dolls?
M: Well, you know back in the 70s and even into the 80s, we were very active. But now you would need DEVO in-action, un-action, in-active figures!
C: No moving parts?
M: No moving parts. Just fermenting.
(They have since given a licence to a toy company who are now about to release DEVO action figures. I like to think that perhaps I planted a seed of thought somewhere regarding this.)
E: Where do you guys usually record your latest DEVO material?
M: Here.
E: Right here?
M: You were just sitting in the studio!
C: I like your watch. What does the button do?
M: Just lights it up minimally. Kind of like if you have your watch on and you're under the covers or you've zipped your sleeping bag over your head...other than that it's useless.
C: What's the SpooOOookiest MooooOOooovie you've ever seen?
(silence)
B: What's the spookiest move YOU'VE ever seen?
C: I'll say Poltergeist. That was a good movie.
M: I just saw "Freaks" yesterday. I think it's the same woman, isn't it, that's in Freaks that plays the old woman in Poltergeist.
B: She's scary looking.
M: That was pretty good, but for me it was Island Of Lost Souls singing, "Na na da da da da da." I like Island Of Lost Souls...It's kind of like...
C: It's campy.
M: It kind of made me feel like "I know these people."
C: Which version?
M: The original. The other ones are awful.
C: I like the Michael York one.
M: That one is sooo awful!
C: It's funny! "You all know the law!"
M: They even screwed up the chant. They didn't even do that right.
C: Then we won't speak of the recent one.
B: Marlon Brando. He was pretty good.
M: Bullshit. Marlon Brando... Yeah, he's pretty extreme...strange.
C: (to Bob) So no spooky movie for you?
M: Our father's home videos.
W: I was just gonna say that! Har har har!
B: I'll say the original Night Of The Living Dead. It was kind of scary, but...because, well, I took drugs when I saw it.
B: I never saw it all the way through. I think Silence Of The Lambs is kind of spooky actually.
C: Do you see yourself as a forefather to Nrrrd Rock? And I mean Nrrd rock as in N-R-R-D... which probably doesn't make any sense.
M: Mmm-Hmmm. Uh, like Riot Grrls?
C: Yeah.
M: In that sense I think we could identify with NRRD rock more.
B: We gave validity to a lot of kids out there that were probably nerdy... saw DEVO...
M: The disenfranchized.
B: Yeah.
E: Isn't that what most musicians are?
M: Yeah, I don't know if most, but quite a lot of them... Certain movements are filled with the disenfranchised and pissed off artists.
C: What I like about it is that even if you're the nerdiest kid in the school, at least you know you have a group you can belong to, you know?
(Ernie sez that was deep.)
E: Well, music lets people break through socially. It's not like "he's part of the chess team, or he's part of the academic decathalon team... He's going to be playing for people and if they like the music, they like the music. It lets them get in touch with popular people, or whatever.
C: (laughing) Very insightful.
E: That's why I became a musician.
C: Me too...
B: What do you think of bands that emulate the DEVO sound?
E: We were gonna ask you the same thing! I think even NINE INCH NAILS took a lot from your sound, because I used to go to high school and sit on a bus listening to my walkman and my batteries would wear down and your music would slow down. The instinctive primortal beats would come out and I'm like, "Oh, total Nine Inch Nails!" They must have done the same thing I did... Just cheap batteries.
(Bob & Mark laugh)
M: The downward spiral is a reference to an old DEVO interview.
E: Is it? (silence) One where he was personally involved or that he read?
M: That he read. He must have read it, cause that's where it came from.
C: What's the best DEVO cover from a band?
M: My favorite is probably the DEL RUBIO TRIPLETS doing "Whip It". They took it way beyond from what we intended.
E: They used to play annually in San Pedro (California).
M: They are the hardest working band in California. They used to play 450 to 500 gigs a year.
E: I ran into them at a check cashing joint driving an old Pontiac Grand Am...
C: They all travel together?
E: Yeah, they all travel together and dress the same.
M: (to Bob) Do YOU like DEVO covers?
B: No, not very much.
C: Do you like DEVO songs?
B: No, not very much.
(laughter from all.)
M: More diversifacation. Technology and politics have made it so that music is more spread out, more DEVOLVED, more decentralization, and it's going to go further that way, with less super-bands, but who cares about those?... It's kind of a nice time for music right now. When we were kids we'd go into a record store and there would be maybe 200 records to choose from and a few new records every month and that would be about it. Now you go in and there are thousands and thousands of STYLES to choose from. The downside is that with the influence of MTV, you got a band that focuses on this song that they made a video of so albums tend to have one song where everybody put all their time, energy, money, and finances and pinned all of their hopes to and then you have 10 or 11 songs that are just...
E: That goes along with the CD format also where 10 years ago you'd get an album with maybe 10 good songs on it where now CDs have as many as 16 tracks or more. Plus you have the power to skip songs, so you don't get a good feel for a complete sound like on a Steely Dan album...
M: That's the downside of MTV. It's a big infomercial, really, for all of these big record companies. You got people spending all of their money on a video that a band could have used, say, 50 to 100 thousand dollars to live on for a year and write good music for a couple or few years until the band comes to it's maturity. Now a band's got one shot and that's it. It's gonna get worse for the artist before it gets better. Like what's going on in television and media networks where the artist is getting squeezed and corporations dictate what they want to put on and broadcast who pays the most dividends. It's nastier than ever. On the other hand, proletariats are going to be more present. Somebody in Tennessee sitting at a computer wired to the internet is going to be on equel footing with any rock star in Malibu. As a matter of fact, they'll be in better shape because they don't have the overhead that Axel Rose has. People are going to look back at the mid and last third of this century as an artistic rennaisance because artists were able to make money off what they did and that's going to go away soon.
C: Are you going to have music available on MP3?
M: We have songs and snippits on our DEVO site which you can pick up.
E: Being video pioneers, do you think video has helped or hindered music as an art?
M: Well, we had bigger plans and ideal on how to be more instumental in destroying rock and roll. Rock and roll on one level is SPINAL TAP. The politics are SPINAL TAP and there's no way around that. It's a big machine, kind of cool, it's made a lot of great rock and roll music, but we thought sound and vision was going to supercede it and create a new medium. Something where artists that were aware visually and or sonically were going to have more importance, but instead what happened was like I said... MTV turned into a big infomercial for record companies and bands that had no visual image were hiring ad agencies and comercial production agencies to create a video for a song that never should have had a video in the first place. So there's a lot of mindless stupid stuff that's been on TV over the years. We just thought it would be something different, that's all.
Click here to see the 3rd part of the DEVO interview!
