On the opening night of the 55th Nashville Film Festival on September 19, 2024, “DEVO,” a documentary about the 80s band directed by Chad Smith, was screened. The documentary premiered originally on January 21, 2024 at Sundance. DEVO, the band, formed in 1973 in Akron, Ohio. The band’s formation stemmed from the political unrest at Kent State, Ohio, that led to the May 4th, 1970 deaths of 4 students (and the wounding of 30 others). The students of Kent State, including the Mothersbaugh boys, were demonstrators against the Vietnam War.
Nixon had expanded the war in Vietnam without an act of Congress. The war was killing an entire generation of United States youth via the draft in an unpopular unwinnable war. The students set fire to the ROTC headquarters and burned the building down. Nixon sent in the National Guard, which fired on the unarmed students. The chaos in the world caused band members to feel that, instead of progress, things were going backward. They used the term De-evolution, which was eventually shortened to DEVO.
AHEAD OF THEIR TIME
Audience members at DEVO, the opening of the 55th Nashville Film Festival.
Through the years, the band worked to satirize society. They admit, “We did some absurd things.” In explaining the famous “energy hats” and the lacquered hair-dos that the band wore (based on JFK’s hair, not Reagan’s), the group admitted, “We like ironic humor. It was a cheap way to amuse ourselves—very Meta.” The group was anti-punk rock. (“We’re the fluid in the punk enema bag.”)
Over the years, DEVO saw the future of film in music and began making music videos, which were eventually shown on MTV (MTV didn’t exist when the band first formed). This idea of merging film with music was ahead of its time, although the Monkees, the Beatles, and the Velvet Underground inside Andy Warhol’s studio were also moving in that direction.
Not only was the band ahead of the curve in using music videos to promote themselves (most of which were directed by Gerard Casale), but DEVO contributed to the birth of electronic music. Jim Mothersbaugh created circuit bending before there was a name for that process. He went to a muffler shop to build a guitar that was a precursor of the Moog synthesizer. The film reminded me of the SXSW documentary “Resynator,” helmed by Alyson Tavel, recounting her father Don’s similar pioneering efforts to create the first Moog synthesizer. (Highly recommended).
FAMOUS FANS
Nashville Film Festival
After a video that the band submitted won an award at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, their fortunes improved. Famous fans included David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Jack Nicholson, Mick Jagger, Dennis Hopper, Leonard Cohen and Neil Young. Over the years, the band made appearances on “Saturday Night Live,” David Letterman’s “Tonight” show, daytime talk shows like Merv Griffin, “American Bandstand” and many others. Neil Young put them in a movie entitled “Human Highway” in 1977 (released in 1982) where the members of DEVO wrote their own parts and portrayed nuclear garbagemen.
Q&A
During the post-film conversation with three members of DEVO the trio shared some amusing details of what they term the “headache” solo. This episode is shown in the film. The small audience of 12 people dwindled to 6 people when the band played only electronic high-pitched sounds. As Mark Mothersbaugh said, “ The bit ran five times as long as we thought it would. It was Supreme Dada—like Andy Kaufman performance art.”
Zoom interview with DEVO at Nashville Film Festival Opening.
CONCLUSION
This documentary about a band that is best known for their #14 Billboard Hit “Whip It” contained so many film clips that assembling it must have been a gargantuan task. It is an object lesson in emphasizing the necessity of good marketing, good management, and good legal advice in the entertainment field. (The management and the legal advice seem to have been MIA). That, as much as anything else, led to the death of DEVO—(if they are really and truly dead, a debatable point.)
As Mark Mothersbaugh said, “Somebody decided that DEVO should die. We succumbed to the same reality we were satirizing.” He added, “DEVO didn’t officially end” and said, perhaps prophetically, “It’s better to burn out than to fade away.” DEVO, the band, has been nominated for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2018, 2021 and 2022.
A solid opening for the 55th Nashville Film Festival on Thursday, September 19, 2024.
