Speaker 1: Welcome, Welcome, Welcome back to the Bob Left Sets podcast.
Speaker 1: My guest today is the one and only Mark mothers Boy.
Speaker 1: You know him from Devo, you know him from soundtracks. Mark.
Speaker 1: Great to have you on the podcast.
Speaker 2: Wonderful to be here, Bob.
Speaker 1: Let's start with this documentary. How did this come to happen?
Speaker 1: The one on Netflix?
Speaker 2: Well, it was kind of a long process actually, to
Speaker 2: be honest with you. Started quite a few years ago
Speaker 2: and didn't start off as a documentary.
Speaker 1: At first.
Speaker 2: I thought I was just doing I was going to
Speaker 2: archive some recordings of shows like the very first Devo
Speaker 2: show where we were sextet Devo, and then and then
Speaker 2: a year later another show, and I just wanted to
Speaker 2: put those on and I was doing an archival film
Speaker 2: and it turned into it to a documentary. It went
Speaker 2: through a number of different people and then it worked
Speaker 2: its way over to our our man, who took over
Speaker 2: and made it what it is.
Speaker 1: So why did you not do it yourself? Why did
Speaker 1: you bring in a director?
Speaker 2: You know it there would have been within within the band,
Speaker 2: there would have been half a dozen within the band,
Speaker 2: and the people that worked with Devo, there would have
Speaker 2: been at least a half a dozen totally different documentaries.
Speaker 2: So the idea of having somebody outside of us, kind
Speaker 2: of having an independent observation of everything, and and and uh,
Speaker 2: I'll look at it seemed like a desirable way to go.
Speaker 1: Okay, so the guy puts it together. You still have
Speaker 1: six different opinions, right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, you still have all the opinions, but it's
Speaker 2: like it's not any one of them taking over because
Speaker 2: we could still end up with Yeah, yeah, you know,
Speaker 2: we could still end up with a half dozen more
Speaker 2: documentaries if we could talk each other into doing it.
Speaker 1: So are you happy with the final product? Yeah?
Speaker 2: Yeah, relieved. You know, it's it's like, I think all
Speaker 2: the most important points were hit upon, and I think
Speaker 2: it it's I think it came out really well in
Speaker 2: the way that I think it would have. People that
Speaker 2: don't know anything about Devo might might find it interesting
Speaker 2: and and it might make them curious to learn more
Speaker 2: about the band.
Speaker 1: So since it's been out, have you felt any difference?
Speaker 1: Have you felt, you know, more acceptance of growing audience
Speaker 1: or we live in this modern world. You put it
Speaker 1: out there and who the hell knows?
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, it's a combination of things have been
Speaker 2: happening this year. We've been playing a lot of shows,
Speaker 2: and we were touring with B fifty two's actually, and
Speaker 2: I think, I think just what I've noticed is that
Speaker 2: kids seem to be they have a lot more information
Speaker 2: than I did when I was a kid. You know.
Speaker 2: It's it's like I would go to a record store
Speaker 2: and i would go past the Elvis Presley and the
Speaker 2: Frank Sinatra stand up cutouts, and I'd work my way
Speaker 2: back to the rock section, and then I'd go to
Speaker 2: a cardboard box that said other stuff, and then I'd
Speaker 2: go in there and I'd find capt'n beef Heart and
Speaker 2: Wildman Fisher and things like that. And now kids on
Speaker 2: their cell phone, they have so much power and they
Speaker 2: have the ability to find out so many things so
Speaker 2: instantaneously and easy. It's it's it's impressive. It's it's like
Speaker 2: we've been playing shows this year. I'm probably the documentary
Speaker 2: had a lot to do with it. We've been playing
Speaker 2: shows where instead of just being a bunch of people
Speaker 2: my age that were slightly younger that were at the
Speaker 2: shows in the past, there was like a lot of
Speaker 2: kids there, there's been a lot of kids at our
Speaker 2: show and surprisingly they're singing along. So it's like, you know,
Speaker 2: leave it to the Internet to help out on some things.
Speaker 1: Okay, if you talk the very late sixties early seventies,
Speaker 1: Captain Beefheart starts with Safe as Milk goes on make
Speaker 1: records with Zappa, while men Fisher, you're living in Ohio
Speaker 1: FM underground rock in Ohio, the snart to start as
Speaker 1: early as it does in La and San Francisco. Rolling
Speaker 1: Stone comes out in sixty seven, but it's not necessarily available.
Speaker 1: How did you know about those records?
Speaker 2: Well, see, that's what I'm saying. It was like a
Speaker 2: lot harder back then. You know, you had to you know,
Speaker 2: it was like craw Daddy if you saw the rare
Speaker 2: copy of a craw Daddy and then finally you know,
Speaker 2: like a rolling Stone coming along. But but you know,
Speaker 2: it really had to do with radio. Also, DJs were
Speaker 2: very important back then because DJs, as you probably remember
Speaker 2: on FM in particular, they were given a lot of freedom.
Speaker 2: And you know, i'd be I'd go I'd hear something
Speaker 2: on the radio where a DJ would say, Okay, tomorrow,
Speaker 2: I'm going to play you. There's a band called led Zeppelin,
Speaker 2: and I'm going to play their whole album NonStop with
Speaker 2: no commercials at eight o'clock tomorrow night, and you'd listen
Speaker 2: to the whole album and you'd hear this productions level
Speaker 2: that had never been reached before. And you know you
Speaker 2: had to depend upon them, you know, you depended upon DJs.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's go back to the beginning. You grow up
Speaker 1: in Ohio. You spent a lot of time in California.
Speaker 1: Needless say, the Internet and cable television has levined the
Speaker 1: playing field. What was it like growing up in Ohio
Speaker 1: in the fifties and sixties.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it was a cultural wasteland. We were in an
Speaker 2: industrial city Akron. It was you know, gray and overcast,
Speaker 2: and everything in the city centered around making tires to
Speaker 2: they'd put them on trains and send them up to
Speaker 2: Detroit for the cars back in those days, and and
Speaker 2: and so like, the whole city just was centered around
Speaker 2: this one industry. And you know, there were you know,
Speaker 2: one of the things that were good about being an
Speaker 2: Akron is that we were insulated, and we were in
Speaker 2: a you know, we were in a basement, an actor
Speaker 2: and writing music together to entertain ourselves. And and you know,
Speaker 2: like if you were a band in New York at
Speaker 2: the same time in the the mid or late seventies. Uh,
Speaker 2: you know, you'd you'd go, Okay, I saw the drummer
Speaker 2: left Talking Heads, and now he's playing with Blondie or whatever.
Speaker 2: You know, you'd watch these bands develop. And by being
Speaker 2: an acron that whole length of time, we had a
Speaker 2: chance to marinate and to to kind of fully form
Speaker 2: before we ended up, you know, driving to New York
Speaker 2: and and uh performing.
Speaker 1: So how did your family end up the acra? Oh?
Speaker 2: It was they were blue collar, my both sides of
Speaker 2: my family. They and they came out of coal mining towns,
Speaker 2: one from Pennsylvania and one from West Virginia. And during
Speaker 2: the depression, they just needed to be able to get
Speaker 2: food for the kids. And so because coal mines weren't
Speaker 2: doing anything, so they they all ended up in So
Speaker 2: both families ended up in in Akron working for the
Speaker 2: rubber industry, working at Firestone and Goodyear, and I was
Speaker 2: living in I was you know, I was around those
Speaker 2: kind of that kind of lifestyle.
Speaker 1: Then, you know, well, how many generations are your family
Speaker 1: in America.
Speaker 2: My grandfather on my mother's side was born in Switzerland,
Speaker 2: and my great grandfather on my other side was born
Speaker 2: in Germany. I'm pretty sure.
Speaker 1: So you've grown up in the fifties, you're going to school.
Speaker 1: What kind of kid are you?
Speaker 2: I was kind of out of place when I When
Speaker 2: I first started school, there were five kids in our family,
Speaker 2: and I'd walk to this elementary school and I remember
Speaker 2: in second grade my teacher saying, Okay, Mark, add up
Speaker 2: the numbers on the board, and I go, what's a board?
Speaker 2: And every all the other kids would be laughing and
Speaker 2: that she'd go, all right, smart guy, go sit in
Speaker 2: the corner. And I'd be like, how do the other
Speaker 2: kids know the right answer to that? And then at
Speaker 2: the end of my second year of school, I was
Speaker 2: just turned eight, I think, and and it was almost
Speaker 2: second grade was almost over. She was, she said to
Speaker 2: my parents. She saw me trying to read a book
Speaker 2: from about six inches away, and she asked my parents
Speaker 2: if they ever had my eyes checked, and they said no,
Speaker 2: and they found out I was legally blind. And I
Speaker 2: remember a day where I went came out of an
Speaker 2: optometrist office and I looked around me and I saw
Speaker 2: clouds and I saw birds, and I saw the sun
Speaker 2: for the first time of my life. I'd never seen
Speaker 2: telephone wires. I'd never seen the roof of a house
Speaker 2: except in pictures and books, and it was astounding. I
Speaker 2: saw trees, and I recognized them from books because I
Speaker 2: had only ever seen them in books or in photos.
Speaker 2: I'd never seen them in real life. And it was
Speaker 2: like this amazing experience. And it was my very last
Speaker 2: week of second grade, and my teacher was standing behind me,
Speaker 2: and I was drawing a tree because I was so
Speaker 2: excited about having seen them for the first time, and
Speaker 2: she said, you draw trees better than me, And it
Speaker 2: was the first nice thing that that teacher had ever
Speaker 2: said to me. She'd, you know, corporal punishment was like
Speaker 2: accepted back in those days, so she'd paddled me a
Speaker 2: number of times in front of the other students and
Speaker 2: things for being a smart ass. But I just I
Speaker 2: was legally blind, and and I getting glasses was this
Speaker 2: amazing thing, but it affected the trajectory of my life
Speaker 2: through school. I was the littlest kid in my class,
Speaker 2: and I had a big head and a tiny body,
Speaker 2: and I had glasses that looked like pop bottles, you know,
Speaker 2: on the bottom the lenses were like pop bottles glasses,
Speaker 2: So it was like a cartoon character. And I don't know.
Speaker 2: I pretty much fought with everybody between you know, first
Speaker 2: grade and twelfth grade, and.
Speaker 1: Okay, there are five kids in your family, how many girls?
Speaker 1: How many boys? Were you in the hierarchy.
Speaker 2: I was the first one to hit the ground. And
Speaker 2: then my brother Bob, who played guitar with Devo to
Speaker 2: this day, was was second. My brother Jim, who was
Speaker 2: our first drummer and really had a lot to do
Speaker 2: with affecting the esthetic of what Devo is and was
Speaker 2: because I was looking for sounds even back then in
Speaker 2: the seventies, I was looking for sounds that related to
Speaker 2: what was going on and in the world. And he
Speaker 2: was he was He had kind of an electronic acumen.
Speaker 2: And then it was my sister Sue, who as soon
Speaker 2: as she got out of school, she was like, I'm
Speaker 2: getting out of here and she went to UH, I
Speaker 2: think Arizona to become a uh she a park ranger,
Speaker 2: and she just she was she she really loved nature
Speaker 2: and UH and went there. And then my youngest sister
Speaker 2: stayed in Ohio and she's an artist and we talk
Speaker 2: at at different times. I see Bob almost daily. And
Speaker 2: then everybody else I see less often because they're in
Speaker 2: different parts of the country.
Speaker 1: Okay, so once you got glasses that you could see,
Speaker 1: did you do better in school?
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, to a certain extent because I could read
Speaker 2: things and I could I could read the board. I
Speaker 2: knew what a board was after that. But yeah, I
Speaker 2: just yeah, I still I still struggled with with my
Speaker 2: vision because I had to correct it so that it
Speaker 2: was twenty twenty. It also warped it into being a
Speaker 2: fish eye lens. So every day I could see things,
Speaker 2: and but they were all like like I was looking
Speaker 2: through a fish eye ends for quite a few years,
Speaker 2: even up until I got cataract surgery about six or
Speaker 2: seven years ago. And so school was yeah, school was
Speaker 2: something that that I was confused about and and you know,
Speaker 2: but I did love art and I loved drawing, and
Speaker 2: I really became obsessed with that, and it was kind
Speaker 2: of like my main love in life until I saw
Speaker 2: the Beatles on Ed Sullivan and then I was certain
Speaker 2: I was going to be in a band. I was
Speaker 2: absolutely certain. Like I guess, was it sixty four? Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: So if it was before May, I was thirteen. If
Speaker 2: it was after May, I was fourteen, and from then
Speaker 2: on I was sure I was going to be in
Speaker 2: a band for the up until I got in a band.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's let's just go back do a little clean
Speaker 1: up work. Usually the oldest kid all the families hopes
Speaker 1: and dreams, and the pressure is I'm the oldest kid.
Speaker 1: Is that an accurate description in your case? I think.
Speaker 2: I think it was slightly different with me because they
Speaker 2: were also guilty that they that I was eight years
Speaker 2: old and they'd never tested my eyes and found out
Speaker 2: that it was a miracle that I was able to
Speaker 2: walk to school and cross the street and not get
Speaker 2: hit by a car for two years. Uh So, so
Speaker 2: there was some of that, yeah, But but I also
Speaker 2: had stuff like my mom said, you know, when you
Speaker 2: were a barn, your head was so large, we were
Speaker 2: concerned that maybe you were a hydrocephalic child, and you know,
Speaker 2: so I had all those kind of of things to
Speaker 2: deal with, and then i'd probably my brothers and sisters
Speaker 2: were all smarter than me, if you want to, you know,
Speaker 2: I'm a If we all would have taken a test
Speaker 2: at the same time, they probably would have all scored
Speaker 2: higher than me.
Speaker 1: I just.
Speaker 2: They you know, my dad was kind of like this
Speaker 2: very optimistic all America, you know, American guy that believed
Speaker 2: in the American dream. And he was like, anybody can
Speaker 2: be whatever they want to be in this world. You know,
Speaker 2: we were in America. You can do what you want
Speaker 2: to do. And you know, he was very he was optimistic,
Speaker 2: like Tim Leary who was a friend of mine out here,
Speaker 2: and and they were they were maybe my the two
Speaker 2: most optimistic people I knew. And and so when I
Speaker 2: said I wanted to be a musician, he was like, well, okay,
Speaker 2: you know he's thinking, he's thinking, does that mean you'll
Speaker 2: be living in the apartment above the Roger? You know,
Speaker 2: what does that? What does that mean if you're in
Speaker 2: a band. But they were they were supportive of it.
Speaker 1: Okay, you're going to school because of your vision, you
Speaker 1: play any sports, you have any friends.
Speaker 2: Uh you know, I kind of I made friends with
Speaker 2: a couple of the other kind of uh odd odd
Speaker 2: characters there was. There was a guy named Ted who
Speaker 2: who was a blue baby, and so he was the
Speaker 2: only kid that my size. I was really small. I
Speaker 2: think I was like eighty some pounds when I graduated
Speaker 2: from high school. The only sport I ever got involved in.
Speaker 2: Uh was wrestling because baseball, football, basketball. I was not
Speaker 2: of the size and shape that I could have participated
Speaker 2: in it anyhow. But also my vision and you know,
Speaker 2: it's like when you if you imagine, you know, you're
Speaker 2: looking into a doorknob and somebody throws up a football
Speaker 2: at you throw fifty feet away and it starts off tiny,
Speaker 2: it gets big and then it gets gigantic? Is it
Speaker 2: is it when it's about two feet away from you?
Speaker 2: So it was the whole thing with the with the
Speaker 2: fish islands? I where was made sports? Kind of like
Speaker 2: something that I never became participant in really?
Speaker 1: So was this public school or parochial school?
Speaker 2: Public school?
Speaker 1: Okay, so you go to high school? Are you so
Speaker 1: far off the radar screen? No one even knows you're there?
Speaker 1: We are they saying, oh, that's that weird guy, or
Speaker 1: that's the yard guy, or people pick on you. Where
Speaker 1: were you in the hierarchy in high school? Uh?
Speaker 2: Pretty far down at the bottom. I was like, uh,
Speaker 2: I was the Uh you know when I got to
Speaker 2: high schoo we had just moved into the suburbs. Well
Speaker 2: not even really this it's kind of more like a
Speaker 2: rural area just outside of the city limits, and my
Speaker 2: dad bought this place. It was like a green acres farm,
Speaker 2: you know, tiny. It was like five acres or five
Speaker 2: and a half acres, but had a little stable, just
Speaker 2: big enough to hold a couple of horses, and had
Speaker 2: an orchard, and he grew some stuff there because he
Speaker 2: kind of had a romantic notion about farming and farms
Speaker 2: and getting out of the city. So I went to
Speaker 2: a whole new school system for high school, and it
Speaker 2: just started off wrong. I said something to somebody and
Speaker 2: they punched me, and then I became the kick me guy,
Speaker 2: the guy with the sign okay.
Speaker 1: Prior to the Beatles, was there music in the home?
Speaker 1: Did your parents play records? Did anybody play instruments? Take
Speaker 1: any piano lessons? Any of that?
Speaker 2: Oh? Yeah, For about five years before I saw the Beatles.
Speaker 2: After I had gotten my glasses, I started taking keyboard lessons.
Speaker 2: My parents wanted me to be the church organist someday.
Speaker 2: They were hoping that, and I just thought music was
Speaker 2: something invented to torture me. I really didn't like it
Speaker 2: at all, didn't care for it. And missus Fox would
Speaker 2: come over once a week for two dollars. She would
Speaker 2: give me a keyboard lesson and she sang along while
Speaker 2: I played, And so my family would all be in
Speaker 2: the next room. I'd be in I think we had
Speaker 2: this little small Hammond organ in the dining room. And
Speaker 2: then right now I was right between the kitchen and
Speaker 2: the living room, and I remember trying to get my parents.
Speaker 2: They'd all be sitting there trying to watch the TV
Speaker 2: in the next room, and Missus Fox would be singing
Speaker 2: while I played, and she sang really out of tune.
Speaker 2: It was great, And so I'd played really slow and
Speaker 2: loud on purpose, so she'd even sing louder, and she'd
Speaker 2: be like the falling le drift by my win. It was.
Speaker 2: It was awesome. I would I'd be watching in the
Speaker 2: other room and they'd all be huddling closer to the TV,
Speaker 2: and I was hoping that they would say you're done,
Speaker 2: But instead the Beatles came along and it and I went,
Speaker 2: That's why I've spent my whole life being tortured learning
Speaker 2: how to play music. And so I entered a new,
Speaker 2: a new direction.
Speaker 1: Then, Okay, were you listening to the radio? Will you
Speaker 1: muse it fluid or is just your saw? The Beatles
Speaker 1: in Ed Sullivan and you go, holy fuck.
Speaker 2: Well, the radio that was being played in my house
Speaker 2: was AM Whacker Radio, and they played country music, which
Speaker 2: I wasn't interested in. They did play novelty songs, so
Speaker 2: every now and then I'd get interested in something like
Speaker 2: it's a bitsy teeny weeny yellow polka dot bikini. I
Speaker 2: think that's the first forty five I ever bought. And
Speaker 2: then Purple people Eater and stuff like that I was
Speaker 2: interested in. But my dad, in World War Two, he
Speaker 2: was a radio tech mission and he came back to
Speaker 2: the house and he kept a little workshop down in
Speaker 2: the basement and he built stereo amplifiers and electronic things.
Speaker 2: He built drones. Believe it or not, he built drones
Speaker 2: and we'd take them out on the weekend and fly
Speaker 2: them and crash them and lose them. But he built
Speaker 2: h stereo and I remember he bought these stereophonic albums.
Speaker 2: I think it was either Capital or RCA that put
Speaker 2: them out back in the day, and they'd had a
Speaker 2: hypodermic needle on the front of them because they were
Speaker 2: extra pumped up high fidelity and they were stereo, and
Speaker 2: they were actually kind of some of them were binaural.
Speaker 2: You know, binural was really popular when stereo first came
Speaker 2: out because it really separated, you know, like you could
Speaker 2: have a voice on one side of the room and
Speaker 2: the drums on the other side, and and people use
Speaker 2: that a lot. I still listen back to, like, like,
Speaker 2: if you ever listened to the Revolver album. On the
Speaker 2: original recording of it, they used a lot of binural recordings,
Speaker 2: so so like paperback Writer, you can hear somebody going
Speaker 2: while they're up to it. You hear him going pay
Speaker 2: paper paperback, right, it's so awesome if you ever listened
Speaker 2: to Revolver, But don't do the remixes or the re
Speaker 2: releases because they corrected the binaural stereo, so don't listen
Speaker 2: to that. But my dad would play. He'd set us
Speaker 2: on one side of the living room, all the kids,
Speaker 2: and then he'd put the speakers for the stereo on
Speaker 2: the far end of each corner of the room, and
Speaker 2: we'd listen to a train chugging going through the room,
Speaker 2: starting on one side, going to the other side of
Speaker 2: the room. And he loved all that stuff.
Speaker 1: Okay, you see the beales Sunday Night, February sixty four.
Speaker 1: You instantly say that's my gig. What action do you take?
Speaker 2: Well, I looked around for people that were playing instruments,
Speaker 2: and there was an accordion shop in Akron where they
Speaker 2: were you could also buy guitars like they had Italian
Speaker 2: Galante guitars there, and so so kids came in and
Speaker 2: they got a guitar and they took guitar lessons and
Speaker 2: there was nothing I could do at first. It took
Speaker 2: about a year of me persistently pestering my dad for
Speaker 2: him to buy me the most inexpensive bottom of the
Speaker 2: line for FISA organ but which was a couple hundred
Speaker 2: bucks back in those days. But we finally got one,
Speaker 2: and that's when I went out looking for people to
Speaker 2: be in a band with, and so it started off.
Speaker 2: I got in a band with these guys that were
Speaker 2: taking guitar lessons at this accordion shop, and that was
Speaker 2: the first band I was in. I forget what we
Speaker 2: called it. We might have called it Purple Haze, I
Speaker 2: don't know for sure, or the Shags or something. We
Speaker 2: just took a name that we heard already somewhere. I
Speaker 2: didn't even have anything to do with that.
Speaker 1: Okay, for those of us who lived through the era.
Speaker 1: We picked up instruments, we got together with other people,
Speaker 1: We played in the living room. Then there was always
Speaker 1: somebody who said we have to get gigs. Okay, So
Speaker 1: did your bands ever play outside the living room, the garage,
Speaker 1: basement wherever you're rehearsing rarely?
Speaker 2: I remember we played on Front Street in Cargo Paul's,
Speaker 2: which was like a community right next to Akron for
Speaker 2: there are one hundred and fiftieth anniversary or something, and
Speaker 2: they had a little like foot and a half high
Speaker 2: trailer that we all stood on and are. Our concept was, Okay,
Speaker 2: here's what our outfit's going to be, because you know,
Speaker 2: we couldn't afford like a to go buy suits like
Speaker 2: the or somebody, all those English bands, so our our
Speaker 2: our concept was we'd untuck our shirts. That was and
Speaker 2: I remember it because our bass player, halfway through the
Speaker 2: set of his parents showed up and he stopped playing
Speaker 2: bass in the song to tuck his shirt back in
Speaker 2: and then start playing it. Ah, you went disappointed, but
Speaker 2: that was so we did. There were very few places
Speaker 2: to play an Akron for for a band that was
Speaker 2: as much of a novus as us at first.
Speaker 1: See graduated from high school.
Speaker 2: Then what I'm graduated and by some miracle, uh you know,
Speaker 2: I mean my family nobody had ever talked about going
Speaker 2: to college. I had never thought about it. I never
Speaker 2: thought that was like something I would get to do.
Speaker 2: But I had an art teacher that took pity on
Speaker 2: me in high school, and she'd put my artwork in
Speaker 2: various local you know, like community art shows, and I'd
Speaker 2: won first praise a couple times for pen and ink
Speaker 2: artworks I'd done. And so there was a program at
Speaker 2: Kent State back in the late sixties where if there
Speaker 2: were kids that were had some modicum of talent in
Speaker 2: some particular area, but they were like probably not going
Speaker 2: to go to college, they had a program where they
Speaker 2: could give you a fifty percent discount. And she signed
Speaker 2: me up for that and didn't even tell me, and
Speaker 2: I got it. I got to I got a certificate
Speaker 2: them Kent and they put me on this fifty percent
Speaker 2: and I could so I could get a job at
Speaker 2: night and then during the day I went to school.
Speaker 2: And that was night and day different to go to college.
Speaker 2: First off, I was not like one in a class
Speaker 2: of ninety three kids that were that like all knew
Speaker 2: me as the weirdo I was, you know, at a
Speaker 2: school with like fifteen thousand kids or something at the time,
Speaker 2: and I loved it. I loved it. I could and
Speaker 2: I was. I was, you know, there as an art student,
Speaker 2: and I didn't know what that even meant, to be
Speaker 2: honest with you, I wasn't sure what I was taking
Speaker 2: or why. I just was. I knew I was. I
Speaker 2: knew it meant I didn't have to go to Vietnam,
Speaker 2: and that that made me happy because I remember thinking
Speaker 2: about Vietnam and watching it on TV and going there's
Speaker 2: not a single Asian person I would ever want to shoot,
Speaker 2: you know, especially if it's just because they have a
Speaker 2: government I don't like, you know, It's like I couldn't
Speaker 2: imagine doing that. And so going to Kent was a salvation.
Speaker 2: But I liked school for the first time. I loved school.
Speaker 2: And I found out about something called printmaking, and that was,
Speaker 2: you know, long before computers. You know, it was like
Speaker 2: super high tech, this thing where you could like have
Speaker 2: an idea for a piece of art and draw it
Speaker 2: and then put it on screens and then print it
Speaker 2: and do multiple copies of it. And I was really
Speaker 2: fascinated with that. I loved printmaking, and so early on
Speaker 2: I found out that that like at three point thirty
Speaker 2: when the school bell rang, all the other kids would
Speaker 2: run off to their sorority houses and fraternity houses or
Speaker 2: wherever they lived, and they'd go to the bars or whatever,
Speaker 2: and they'd be done for the day. And that to
Speaker 2: me just span that the art department was totally empty,
Speaker 2: and I could go into the printmaking department and I
Speaker 2: could burn a screen print a color. By the time
Speaker 2: I cleaned the screen and burned another screen, the first
Speaker 2: color was dry, I could print another color, and I
Speaker 2: could by three in the morning, I could have a
Speaker 2: finished piece of art. I didn't have to queue up
Speaker 2: every day and spend two weeks to do one piece
Speaker 2: of art. I could do a piece of art every
Speaker 2: single day. And so I got into doing this artwork
Speaker 2: at night at Kent, and I did things in a
Speaker 2: smaller size because of my vision. The fish eye lens
Speaker 2: made it so it was really hard to do to
Speaker 2: hold on to perspective, like when I was drawing if
Speaker 2: it was a big piece of art, whereas if I
Speaker 2: did something smaller and card size, I could hold the
Speaker 2: perspective you know, with with my with my glasses, and
Speaker 2: so I was printing these small things and I was
Speaker 2: in the decals. I don't know, maybe some making uh,
Speaker 2: plastic models. When I was a kid, I liked putting
Speaker 2: the taking the decals and putting them on the planes
Speaker 2: and the cars and the stuff. And and there was
Speaker 2: a someone who kind of saved my life in my
Speaker 2: high school days was a guy named Guilardi. He was
Speaker 2: a TV personality who was on He was a weather
Speaker 2: man during the day at w e ws UH in Cleveland,
Speaker 2: but at night he had a TV show and he
Speaker 2: wore like a fright wig, and he had a pair
Speaker 2: of sunglasses with one lens, and he had a mustache
Speaker 2: and a goat tea, and he looked like a beatnick,
Speaker 2: and he talked like a beatnik, and he made up
Speaker 2: his own terminology, like he'd say things like cool with
Speaker 2: the boom booms and purple caniff and he had all
Speaker 2: these phrases that he made up that if you were
Speaker 2: like a kid that didn't have a you know, a
Speaker 2: driver's license, because you're fourteen or fifteen and you're sitting
Speaker 2: at home by yourself on a winter day, you just
Speaker 2: turn him on and he played old B movies, C movies,
Speaker 2: and D movies. He played like the most funky, mostly
Speaker 2: black and white films. They probably were all black and white,
Speaker 2: I think. I don't think we had a color TV.
Speaker 2: And and he would sit on a stool in front
Speaker 2: of a blue screen. And he must have got this
Speaker 2: from being a weather man, because he would do this
Speaker 2: thing where like halfway through like fifty Million Years BC
Speaker 2: or a movie like that, Gulardi would like jump onto
Speaker 2: the blue screen and he'd be in the movie with
Speaker 2: caveman that we're trying to pick, yeah, caveman trying to
Speaker 2: pick fruit off of a tree, or they be running
Speaker 2: from a lizard that had a horn glute on its head,
Speaker 2: you know that was giant and chasing them, and he'd
Speaker 2: be running with them and he'd fall over right as
Speaker 2: the lizard got there, and stuff like that. And to me,
Speaker 2: that was like, how's he how's he allowed to do that?
Speaker 2: He's he's breaking the rules, he's busting through a wall.
Speaker 2: The fact that he was like that, he was like
Speaker 2: you know, like interacting and making fun of Hollywood movies
Speaker 2: blew my mind. And I just thought he was the
Speaker 2: coolest person that ever existed. And even up until I
Speaker 2: met him for one brief second. They in high school,
Speaker 2: they did this thing that I would never have gone to,
Speaker 2: but it was called donkey basketball, where for charity, the
Speaker 2: TV station would send people from the TV you know,
Speaker 2: the newsman, the weather cast or blah blah blah. They'd
Speaker 2: all come down and they'd dride donkeys in your in
Speaker 2: your basketball court. And so so the teachers in your
Speaker 2: school would do the same thing, and they'd try to
Speaker 2: play basketball on donkeys, which was really stupid. But the
Speaker 2: good part about it was that Gulardi came to my
Speaker 2: high school, the place I really dreaded to ever go,
Speaker 2: and he ever. I hated that high school. But I
Speaker 2: remember after the after the game, I was walking down
Speaker 2: the hallway to go to where my locker was and
Speaker 2: and get my jacket out, and I'm I'm the only
Speaker 2: one in the hallway, and then this guy comes out
Speaker 2: of the the men's locker room, the dressing room for
Speaker 2: you know, that's attached to the gym, and I go, oh,
Speaker 2: my god, that's Gulardi. And he's walking towards me, and
Speaker 2: he's lit a cigarette and he's smoking it in the
Speaker 2: high school and I'm walking that way, and he's walking
Speaker 2: towards me and we get like about six feet away
Speaker 2: and I go Gulardi and he goes fuck you. And
Speaker 2: I remember I was like it was like I had
Speaker 2: goosebumps all over me. I went Glardi talk to me.
Speaker 2: I was like totally flipped out. I was like, Glardy
Speaker 2: talk to me. That was so incredible. I could not
Speaker 2: believe it. But yeah, Ernie Anderson. He ended up coming
Speaker 2: out to California and becoming a voiceover and he made
Speaker 2: a lot of money doing that, doing commercials and voiceover stuff,
Speaker 2: and his son became a filmmaker. Why was I telling
Speaker 2: you that.
Speaker 1: You were talking about printmaking?
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, okay, so so printmaking. It'd be three point
Speaker 2: thirty in the morning at am. This is like nineteen
Speaker 2: sixty sixty nine, I think, is when I first found
Speaker 2: out about print making. And I made these small decals
Speaker 2: and stuff, and I would be so excited about it.
Speaker 2: I'd be walking towards the parking lot where my car
Speaker 2: was and on the way, I just had to do
Speaker 2: something with these decals, and I start putting them up
Speaker 2: on like fire hydrants and stop signs, and sometimes on
Speaker 2: somebody's bumper and on lockers and on teacher's doors and
Speaker 2: stuff like that. I put these up, you know, like
Speaker 2: something every day. And one day I think, I'm it's
Speaker 2: sixty nine and I'm now a sophomore, first quarter sophomore,
Speaker 2: and these two older guys walk into where I'm where,
Speaker 2: into the art class I'm in, and this one guy
Speaker 2: walks up to me and he goes, are you the
Speaker 2: guy putting up pictures of astronauts holding potatoes standing on
Speaker 2: the moon? And I go, yeah, what of it? And
Speaker 2: he goes, what did potatoes mean to you? And I
Speaker 2: was like kind of shocked about it. And then we
Speaker 2: started talking and he had this whole theory about, well,
Speaker 2: potatoes are like you know, in the vegetable Kingdom, they're
Speaker 2: the they're the proletariats. You know, potatoes are asymmetric, and they're
Speaker 2: dirty and they lived underground and uh they uh, but
Speaker 2: they're a staple of everyone's diet. Everybody eats potatoes every day.
Speaker 2: They don't even think about it. They're eating French fries,
Speaker 2: mashed potatoes, whatever kind of potatoes. They're a staple of
Speaker 2: your diet. They're important, but but they're you know, they're
Speaker 2: just they're not elegant or beautiful, like the asparagus or
Speaker 2: the eggplant or something. And he says, and also potatoes
Speaker 2: have eyes all around, so they see everything. And we
Speaker 2: started and we started talking, and then he had a
Speaker 2: he was a grad student and he was he was
Speaker 2: he had a project he was doing for his grad
Speaker 2: class and he said, how do you make those decals?
Speaker 2: I said, God, it's easy. I use lacquer inks and
Speaker 2: blah blah blah and special paper that's water release. And
Speaker 2: he goes, could you make some for me? And I go, yeah,
Speaker 2: what do you want? He goes, I want some potato men?
Speaker 2: And so I made him potato man decals and for
Speaker 2: his senior graduation project, he took the decals and put
Speaker 2: them on photographs of people he didn't like them as
Speaker 2: high school and that was his grad thesis picture. But
Speaker 2: it was Jerry Cassally and the thing that he said
Speaker 2: to me that was as important as all of that,
Speaker 2: as he said, you know, next quarter beginning of nineteen seventy,
Speaker 2: you should take this class. It's a conceptual art class.
Speaker 2: He goes, they've never had one kent before and it's important.
Speaker 2: It's going to be important, and I think you should
Speaker 2: sign up for that class. I go, I'm only as sophomore.
Speaker 2: I don't have the credentials. He goes, it doesn't matter.
Speaker 2: This is the first year they're using computers to to
Speaker 2: assign kids classes. And you can just write in that
Speaker 2: you have all the pre records. It's just right you
Speaker 2: have them all, and then sign up for the class.
Speaker 2: So I did it, and I got signed up for
Speaker 2: a grad student class. That was the spring quarter of
Speaker 2: nineteen seventy and I was in a conceptual art class
Speaker 2: with Jerry and Chuck Statler, who directed the first Devo film,
Speaker 2: and John Zabruckie, who came out to California and started
Speaker 2: Modern Props, which was one of the biggest prop companies
Speaker 2: out here. And it was interesting because after that I decided, well,
Speaker 2: I don't even care if I what do I care
Speaker 2: if I get a bachelor's degree aout, I'm never going
Speaker 2: to be a school teacher. I'd be terrible at that.
Speaker 2: I don't even like schools, so I don't want to
Speaker 2: go back to high school. So I just started signing
Speaker 2: up for all the classes I wanted to take, and
Speaker 2: I and when I finally left Kent State, I think
Speaker 2: I had a bunch of important classes like tennis and
Speaker 2: other sports classes and art history that that I hadn't taken.
Speaker 2: So I didn't ever get to officially graduate as a
Speaker 2: bachelor degree in art because of that. But I took
Speaker 2: a lot of classes that I wanted to take, and
Speaker 2: I made sure to take printmaking classes every quarter so
Speaker 2: I could continue doing what I really loved.
Speaker 1: Okay, you go to Kent State, do you bring your
Speaker 1: fur feast of Oregon?
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, And what I was doing at the time
Speaker 2: as I would go through the newspaper, like in sixty eight,
Speaker 2: sixty sixty eight and sixty nine, and I was I
Speaker 2: was looking for or bands that said, oh, we're a band,
Speaker 2: we need a keyboard player. We can supply the keyboard,
Speaker 2: and so if they had a keyboard, I could I
Speaker 2: could go. Uh And whether it was a jazz band
Speaker 2: or even a gospel band. I was in a couple
Speaker 2: church bands just because they had the equipment and I
Speaker 2: could I could play in them. And then you know,
Speaker 2: I got a job in one band that paid my
Speaker 2: way through college on my sophomore year. They played at
Speaker 2: a strip club, and so so I just had to
Speaker 2: show up at the strip club every night and play,
Speaker 2: you know, like Sly in the Family Stone and uh
Speaker 2: and Deep Purple or whatever they were going to be playing.
Speaker 2: And and I was still making music, but I wanted
Speaker 2: to make my own music. Uh. When I was in school,
Speaker 2: I I I saw movies I'd never seen before, you know,
Speaker 2: like I saw things by Enio Morricone his music, and
Speaker 2: I just heard all these different artists that were experimental.
Speaker 2: And and I saw my first synthesizer when I was
Speaker 2: at Kent State, and I thought, I want to write
Speaker 2: music for the seventies. You know, I'm going to write
Speaker 2: I mean, you know that I was looking back at fifty.
Speaker 2: I always wished I was born fifty years earlier. I
Speaker 2: wished I would have been a teenager in Europe during
Speaker 2: the twenties and early thirties, back back when Bauhaus and
Speaker 2: Surrealism and Dadaism and Futurism especially. I mean, although I
Speaker 2: didn't like their politics, their concepts about music were amazing.
Speaker 2: Remember you know, ballet mechanique and things like that. But
Speaker 2: but the Futurists, they were saying, the modern orchestra does
Speaker 2: not contain the instruments capable of making sounds to represent
Speaker 2: industrial culture. And this is like in the twenties, and
Speaker 2: so they were they were using like fog horns and
Speaker 2: they would spin a bicycle wheel and and U you know,
Speaker 2: play it with a with a drumstick or something, and
Speaker 2: they were I love that idea of just saying goodbye
Speaker 2: to contemporary instruments and looking for something new, and technology
Speaker 2: had brought this synthesizer along. I saw this guy, Morton Sebotnik,
Speaker 2: came to Kent State and he played a show and
Speaker 2: I just stood there right next to him, mesmerized the
Speaker 2: whole time watching him play. And I was like, how
Speaker 2: do I get one of those? And I thought it
Speaker 2: would never happen, you know, because I had no money.
Speaker 2: I mean, I remember at that time. I remember thinking,
Speaker 2: like cars, they're just a They're just, you know, a
Speaker 2: waste of money. I said, you know, I said, anybody
Speaker 2: that spends more than one hundred and fifty dollars on
Speaker 2: a car is a sucker. I said, you can get
Speaker 2: a car that can drive you anywhere for one hundred
Speaker 2: and fifty bucks. And I remember saying that to my
Speaker 2: friend and he was like, well, but you don't have
Speaker 2: a rear window on the passenger side of your car.
Speaker 2: And I go well that's yeah, But I just I
Speaker 2: can cover that up with a piece of cardboard when
Speaker 2: it's raining, you know. And I said, the car's only
Speaker 2: one hundred and fifty bucks. I can drive everywhere. So
Speaker 2: I'd been in all these different bands, and I mean
Speaker 2: even one of the bands I was in during that
Speaker 2: time period was Chrissy Hein. It was the first band
Speaker 2: she was ever in. She was singing and there was
Speaker 2: an older guy that was writing music and he wrote
Speaker 2: the songs and we played them and she sang and
Speaker 2: she was very shy, sullen, very sullen and very shy.
Speaker 2: And but we were in a band together before uh
Speaker 2: start a devo. Okay, So the drummer from that band
Speaker 2: that I was in with, Chrissy Hin he called me
Speaker 2: up one day. I was like a sophomore, or maybe
Speaker 2: I was a junior now, and he said, hey, Mark,
Speaker 2: how would you like to have a HAMM and B three.
Speaker 2: I go, that's some possible. They cost fifteen hundred dollars.
Speaker 2: I don't have any money. He goes, how would you
Speaker 2: like to have your own synthesizer? I go, that could
Speaker 2: never happen. They don't even have I don't even know
Speaker 2: if there are any synthesizers in Ohio, you know, and
Speaker 2: he goes, I got introduced you to these guys. I
Speaker 2: just I just met these guys. They're Vietnam Vets and
Speaker 2: they went to Vietnam and I did. I came over.
Speaker 2: I met these guys. They wanted to start a band,
Speaker 2: and but they were all sport guys. They were all football,
Speaker 2: basketball players, and they they you know, they they they
Speaker 2: they didn't wait to be drafted. They they joined up,
Speaker 2: you know, because they wanted, you know, they were they
Speaker 2: were they wanted to protect America from from communism, and
Speaker 2: so they went over to Vietnam. They did a lot
Speaker 2: of LSD and they killed people. And they came back
Speaker 2: and they were like, what just happened? What did we
Speaker 2: just do? And they weren't sure what they had what
Speaker 2: that was all about. And uh, they said, well, let's
Speaker 2: start a band. But none of them could play an instrument.
Speaker 2: But they all were getting money from the government because
Speaker 2: they had all been in in uh you know, in
Speaker 2: the in the military, and they all had jobs. So
Speaker 2: they they were hiring people to be in a band
Speaker 2: that they would put together. And so this drummer, they
Speaker 2: gave him a house and a car and and me.
Speaker 2: They said, well, you can move into the attic. So
Speaker 2: I moved into the attic at their at this house
Speaker 2: that they had in downtown Akron, kind of a really
Speaker 2: funky place. But we went to uh the Mogu, the
Speaker 2: original Mogue company in outside of Buffalo. It wasn't that
Speaker 2: far from Buffalo, New York. And we drove there and
Speaker 2: you know, we stopped and it was a farm with
Speaker 2: a gigantic barn. And we went into the barn and
Speaker 2: there were these lofts that that looked there were these
Speaker 2: tiers of wooden racks that might have held farm here
Speaker 2: at one time, or bales of hay. And they had
Speaker 2: mini mogush. They had like maybe one hundred minimugs that
Speaker 2: were in process of being built by hand right there
Speaker 2: and in New York, in this little rural I mean
Speaker 2: to me, I thought I was in like an outer space,
Speaker 2: you know, laboratory or something. When I saw this electronics
Speaker 2: and I saw this stuff, it was like it was
Speaker 2: like mind blowing. And we got a mini Mogue and
Speaker 2: we brought it back to Akron. Ohio.
Speaker 1: You got you gotta tell me you remember how much
Speaker 1: you paid for it?
Speaker 3: Oh?
Speaker 2: It was fourteen hundred bucks they were, which you know,
Speaker 2: now you can buy electronic gear cheaper than that, but
Speaker 2: those since now, to get one of those since some
Speaker 2: you know, the first couple hundred would it would cost you,
Speaker 2: I don't know, ten thousand bucks or five thousand dollars
Speaker 2: for one of them, but well.
Speaker 1: I guess. So these Vietnam vets laid down the fourteen hundred.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, they bought the synth and and all I
Speaker 2: had to do was come home and write music at
Speaker 2: the end of the day of going to school. It
Speaker 2: was like it was like it was like amazing. I
Speaker 2: couldn't believe it. It was. It was great. And so I
Speaker 2: was listening to all different kinds of music back then,
Speaker 2: and I remember I heard spiders from Mars and that
Speaker 2: that to me, was really impressive. I really said, well,
Speaker 2: this is what I want to be. I want to
Speaker 2: be an artist. I want to be an artist that
Speaker 2: makes music. And I kept listening to music, and I
Speaker 2: remember hearing the first Roxy album and I'd been playing
Speaker 2: with synthesizers for about about a year at this point,
Speaker 2: and it was all right. The lyrics were the best
Speaker 2: part of the album. I was thinking, you know, and
Speaker 2: then you know, songs like Inflatable Dolly and kind of interesting.
Speaker 2: It was like Bryan's kind of darkest, most arty album.
Speaker 2: And then I got to this throwaway song called the
Speaker 2: Editions of You, and it was just like this song
Speaker 2: where they gave everybody a solo, like like like if
Speaker 2: you were a band playing at a nightclub or something.
Speaker 2: They gave everybody these extended solos in the middle of
Speaker 2: the song and I'm like, just listening to it. It's okay,
Speaker 2: it's and then all of a sudden, the synths started
Speaker 2: and this guy's playing a synthesizer, and it was like, definitely,
Speaker 2: it was like a moment where I went that that's it.
Speaker 2: This guy, whoever this guy is, he knows how to
Speaker 2: make synth sounds that are unique and that haven't no
Speaker 2: one's ever heard him before, and he was playing it
Speaker 2: in a way that was unique and that no one
Speaker 2: had ever played it since before or played it because
Speaker 2: I mean there was people like Rick Wakeman and Emerson,
Speaker 2: you know that we're playing like they made They made
Speaker 2: like synthesizers sound like glorified organs or calliopes or something.
Speaker 2: They used really silly sounds with the since they didn't
Speaker 2: really know what to do with them. And I heard
Speaker 2: the solo by Eno, Brian Eno in this song, and
Speaker 2: it was incredible and it totally helped me turn my
Speaker 2: world upside down into find a direction to how to
Speaker 2: look for sound and how to how to experiment with sense.
Speaker 2: And so right about the same time this is all happening,
Speaker 2: is right about the same time, there's you know, we're
Speaker 2: at Kent State. It's April in nineteen seventy May. And
Speaker 2: you know, I felt in Kent State, I felt empowered.
Speaker 2: I felt like what I had to say made a difference.
Speaker 2: You know, there was a student union and people would
Speaker 2: go protest the war, or they would go protest different
Speaker 2: things going on in the world, and or they talk
Speaker 2: about them, you know, they talk about things. And I
Speaker 2: thought what I had to say made a difference. And
Speaker 2: so when they started talking about the United States is
Speaker 2: now secretly invading Cambodia and we've got to stop that,
Speaker 2: We've got to send a message to Washington, d C.
Speaker 2: I joined in the protests, and so did my brother Bob,
Speaker 2: and so did Jerry, who I just kind of barely
Speaker 2: knew at the time, and we were you know, they
Speaker 2: shot kids at our school and killed them. They shot
Speaker 2: like thirty some kids got wounded, but four of them died.
Speaker 2: And I remember after that, and they closed down the school.
Speaker 2: And I remember after that, I was saying, what maybe
Speaker 2: maybe when I I I think doesn't matter. Maybe you know,
Speaker 2: when they just get irritated with you enough, they just
Speaker 2: kill you, you know, And that's and protesting is a waste
Speaker 2: of time. And that's so Jerry and I we we
Speaker 2: got we had met and I was in that class.
Speaker 2: I was telling you about the conceptual art class at
Speaker 2: the time. And it got uh it got stopped in
Speaker 2: the middle of the class, and they closed the school
Speaker 2: down for three months during the summer, and Jerry would
Speaker 2: come over to where uh my brother and I lived
Speaker 2: and play music with us, and we talked about what
Speaker 2: was going on in the world. And and you know,
Speaker 2: we had some other friends from Kent uh and I
Speaker 2: had these people I was working with that were, you know,
Speaker 2: Vietnam vets, and some of them, this one guy, Ed
Speaker 2: Barger Uh was was working on sound with me. He
Speaker 2: was an engineer and and we we were creating sounds
Speaker 2: and looking for sounds and ways to make a synse sound.
Speaker 2: And you know, we're we're we're working on stuff in
Speaker 2: this little room, and we we kind of come to
Speaker 2: the decision that maybe, uh, revolt, you know, maybe you know,
Speaker 2: that's not the way to change things, you know, because
Speaker 2: if because the powers, when they just finally get irritated enough,
Speaker 2: they can just mow you down. And but at the
Speaker 2: same time we were we wanted to talk about what
Speaker 2: was going on, and and we you know, because of
Speaker 2: our interest in graphics and design and things we we
Speaker 2: loved like sixties and seventies stuff. You know, Spencer's catalogs
Speaker 2: cracked me up. I loved the useless things that they
Speaker 2: sold in a Spencer Gift catalog, and but I love
Speaker 2: the artwork also, for the these little postcard shape things.
Speaker 2: And at the time, you know, when I first went
Speaker 2: to Kent, when I was back in sixty eight, I
Speaker 2: found out about mail art and I started making art
Speaker 2: on postcard size because of my vision, and I was
Speaker 2: making it then, and so Spencer's Gifts. I would sometimes
Speaker 2: add images out of a Spencer's Gift catalog and then
Speaker 2: correct them, is what I'd call it, you know, when
Speaker 2: I added other artwork to it, and in the process
Speaker 2: we found different things. Jerry found a book with a
Speaker 2: friend of his, Bob Lewis. They found this book at
Speaker 2: a at like a witchcraft store or something called The
Speaker 2: Truth about No The beginning was the end how man
Speaker 2: came about through cannibalism. And it was a Yugoslavian anthropologist
Speaker 2: and you know, he was taking things that the maga
Speaker 2: of the the twenties and thirties, I mean of the
Speaker 2: thirties who were who were like, uh, you know, reacting
Speaker 2: to Darwin and they were like the you know, there
Speaker 2: was Christian groups back in the thirties that were like
Speaker 2: making fun of evolution and then they said, well, de
Speaker 2: evolutions more real, that's that's more likely, and it was
Speaker 2: like a joke, but it was like, you know, I
Speaker 2: found a reverend B. F. Shaddock from Rogers, Ohio who
Speaker 2: had done all these pamphlets, and one of them was
Speaker 2: called Jockohomo, and they were basically saying the same. They
Speaker 2: were making fun of of science and making fun of
Speaker 2: of of you know, evolution, and they were like say, well,
Speaker 2: de evolutions really more likely and more possible. And I
Speaker 2: remember we were thinking something about we liked the idea
Speaker 2: of the evolution. To us, it seemed like what if
Speaker 2: you took it serious instead of just use it to
Speaker 2: make you know. I mean, it was probably at the
Speaker 2: time it was like the equivalent of their eating the
Speaker 2: dogs and the cats, you know. And so we took
Speaker 2: this this idea and we said, we want to incorporate
Speaker 2: it into our art, whatever that is. And we weren't
Speaker 2: sure if it was music or maybe it was going
Speaker 2: to be like a cabaret because we were you know,
Speaker 2: we thought about all the cabarets that were going on
Speaker 2: in Europe at the time. But I mean in the
Speaker 2: twenties and early thirties, we were thinking about that. I thought, wow,
Speaker 2: that wouldn't that be great if we did did like
Speaker 2: shows like that? And Jerry and I were both into that,
Speaker 2: and so was into it. He just wanted to play
Speaker 2: guitar mostly. But we uh, we started writing songs and
Speaker 2: my brother was helping me, like look for strange sounds,
Speaker 2: and we found this thing by Electra harmon X. It
Speaker 2: was a stomp box that only made ugly sounds. It
Speaker 2: was called a frequency analyzer. It was incredible. The fact
Speaker 2: that they even made it and put it out. I'm
Speaker 2: still I'm still so happy for that because I used
Speaker 2: that to create so many of the DeVos sounds in
Speaker 2: the early days, things like the like the clown horns
Speaker 2: and Jockohan with the oh stuff like that, and I
Speaker 2: played it on. Jerry was writing these songs that were
Speaker 2: kind of like his songs were a little bit like
Speaker 2: the Thugs or something, but and I just put these
Speaker 2: ugly abstract sounds over top of it, and it gave
Speaker 2: it a whole nother feeling. It gave it a whole
Speaker 2: nother impetus. And anyhow, so I was writing stuff like Jockohomo,
Speaker 2: and it was like in a timing where you couldn't
Speaker 2: answer to it. It was like, really, I was thinking
Speaker 2: of it. It was going to go on a stage.
Speaker 2: We'd be performing it in a in a theater somewhere
Speaker 2: and do a show with it. And Jerry was He
Speaker 2: said to Bob, I mean to Chuck Statler. He said
Speaker 2: something like, I don't know about Mark and what he's
Speaker 2: doing with sounds. It's kind of stuff's all kind of weird.
Speaker 2: I don't know, I don't know if this band's gonna
Speaker 2: work or not. And so he he kind of was
Speaker 2: thinking about taking a he was thinking about maybe taking
Speaker 2: another path. I think he was gonna come out and
Speaker 2: work on the prop store with John zon Brookie. He
Speaker 2: was thinking about starting that company with him instead, and
Speaker 2: I said to him, I said, you can do whatever
Speaker 2: you want to do, but I'm doing a band and
Speaker 2: I'm gonna make sure that this happens no matter what.
Speaker 2: And Chuck Statler had left Akron to go to Minneapolis
Speaker 2: and to make commercials and a year or so before
Speaker 2: or that, and he came over right about at that
Speaker 2: time period and he U this, this is like seventy
Speaker 2: four now, and he had a I think it was
Speaker 2: a popular electronics magazine and on the front of it
Speaker 2: it had like a like a young couple, a man
Speaker 2: and a woman, and they're smiling and they're like going
Speaker 2: like this. They're they're like going like that with their hands,
Speaker 2: you know, like uh, like wow. And they had the
Speaker 2: silver disc in their hand that looked like it was
Speaker 2: the size of a of a LP but it but
Speaker 2: it was like a mirrored surface, silver mirrored surface. And
Speaker 2: it turns out they had something called a laser disc.
Speaker 2: And the magazine on the cover it said laser discs.
Speaker 2: Everyone will have him by Christmas. And you know, Chuck
Speaker 2: that to Jerry me and we're like that's what we're
Speaker 2: making music for laser discs. We're making art for laser discs.
Speaker 2: That's what we thought we were gonna We thought that
Speaker 2: laser discs. We in our minds we imagined forty five's
Speaker 2: would now all be silver. They'd be the silver material
Speaker 2: and uh LPs would be the silver material. And not
Speaker 2: only would you get, you know, like forty minutes or
Speaker 2: more of music, you'd get visual image to go along
Speaker 2: with it. And Jerry and I said, that's us rock
Speaker 2: and rolls over. This is something new, this is something
Speaker 2: this is the next thing. This is you know, sound
Speaker 2: and vision. And that's what we became interested in. But Jerry,
Speaker 2: but Chuck, he was worried that that Jerry was gonna
Speaker 2: quit the bat was gonna like gonna like stop working
Speaker 2: with me because of what I was doing with music.
Speaker 2: And and he said, hey, let's make a film. And
Speaker 2: so Chuck made up a move at seven and a
Speaker 2: half minute short film. It had two Devo songs in it,
Speaker 2: Jockohomo and then I wrote this song where I ended
Speaker 2: up taking thirteen words out of a Johnny Rivers song,
Speaker 2: and so I called it Secret Agent Man. But I
Speaker 2: wrote all the music, all the lyrics, all the melody,
Speaker 2: everything except for those thirteen secret Agent man they've given you,
Speaker 2: they've given me a number taking away my name. And
Speaker 2: back in those days, that meant that Johnny Rivers owned
Speaker 2: the song. That's how they used to do it in
Speaker 2: the old days, if you had an influence like that.
Speaker 2: But he made this film and it came out really good,
Speaker 2: and we all collaborated on it. Everybody had something to
Speaker 2: do with it. Everybody contributed, and Chuck after he did it,
Speaker 2: it's like, what do you do with that? You know,
Speaker 2: there was nothing to do with it. It's years before
Speaker 2: MTV was going to come out. So he just put
Speaker 2: it in the ann Arbor Film Festival and it won
Speaker 2: first prize for Film Short and we were like, what
Speaker 2: that's a movie called The Beginning?
Speaker 1: Was the End?
Speaker 2: The Truth about the Evolution? That won first prize in
Speaker 2: the film festival. We were like so blown away by it.
Speaker 2: We love that and it just kind of made us
Speaker 2: double down. Everybody really doubled down at that point and
Speaker 2: we really knew what we wanted to do and that
Speaker 2: was that was how it began. Pretty much.
Speaker 1: Okay, Jerry connected with you over the potato Jerry brought
Speaker 1: the book about the evolution all this from that starting
Speaker 1: point he found the book. Yeah, from that starting point.
Speaker 1: Is he the king of philosophy in the band or
Speaker 1: he just brought it? And now the two of you
Speaker 1: are more coming with philosophy.
Speaker 2: Well, you know, I think we both came up with it,
Speaker 2: I think, and there were other people that added things too.
Speaker 2: You know. It's like when I found the Jockohomo pamphlets.
Speaker 2: I found out that this reverend had done a whole
Speaker 2: series of anti evolution pamphlets with artwork and them and
Speaker 2: the word de evolution was printed on the chest of
Speaker 2: a devil in Jockohomo on the second page, and he's pointing.
Speaker 2: The devil is smiling, and he's pointing to a staircase
Speaker 2: that is the staircase to heaven. And each step is
Speaker 2: some human uh, some human wrongdoing like like uh like slavery,
Speaker 2: World War one, World War two, uh, murder. Each of
Speaker 2: the steps had a different night name all the way
Speaker 2: up to the top. And we all, you know, I
Speaker 2: think we all kind of contributed to it, you know,
Speaker 2: and everybody everybody had some piece of it. Uh. I.
Speaker 2: I got inspired in that time period in like in
Speaker 2: seventy five, I wrote a book by Boogie Boy and
Speaker 2: it was Dream of Consciousness and it was crazy. It
Speaker 2: was kind of like he took this guy that had
Speaker 2: that had been tortured in high school and and grade
Speaker 2: school his whole life and uh disrespected and he just
Speaker 2: like it was like it was like that that kid
Speaker 2: just took a stick and hit a pinata. It was
Speaker 2: his brain and all this stuff came flowing out. Lyrics
Speaker 2: for songs, the titles for our first three albums, imagery
Speaker 2: for our first three albums. Everybody, everybody had something to do.
Speaker 2: Jerry was a couple of years older than the rest
Speaker 2: of us, a couple of years than me, and then
Speaker 2: I was a couple of years older than Bob and
Speaker 2: Jim and Alan and Bob Sally and he was our spokesperson.
Speaker 2: He was definitely our spokesperson, and he was always right
Speaker 2: on the mark. He was really good at that, and
Speaker 2: we liked that as a band. We liked having a
Speaker 2: spokesperson because you know, you'd see the sex pistols on
Speaker 2: TV or or even the Who, and they'd be like
Speaker 2: acting like school children, you know, misbehaving while they're sitting
Speaker 2: there doing an interview and like like you know, like
Speaker 2: Keith Moon would be like like you know, like trying
Speaker 2: to distract you know, uh you know, uh you know
Speaker 2: the singer or something from talking and uh where else,
Speaker 2: you know, Sid Vicious and Johnny Rotten would be like
Speaker 2: throwing things at each other on on uh you know,
Speaker 2: English TV and stuff like that. We wanted to we
Speaker 2: wanted to be totally different. We wanted to really we
Speaker 2: we considered ourselves uh an art project from the very beginning,
Speaker 2: and so we wore matching outfits. But it wasn't like
Speaker 2: tailored suits like uh all the British bands. It was
Speaker 2: like we were wearing matching jen natorial outfits and we
Speaker 2: look very you know, we look very blue collar, working class.
Speaker 2: And we had one person talking and it would be Jerry,
Speaker 2: and rather than nonsensical, he would be talking about the
Speaker 2: evolution almost every time.
Speaker 1: Okay, the late sixties, especially bleeding into the seventies, we're
Speaker 1: a time of irreverence. You'd reference the Thugs earlier, but
Speaker 1: they're almost lowbrow compared to all this irreverence, and all
Speaker 1: the art was based in alienation. Now, granted, we live
Speaker 1: in a multifurious world today, but we don't have that
Speaker 1: today everything is serious and money oriented. How come we
Speaker 1: don't have that irreverence today.
Speaker 2: I think you're just looking in the wrong places for it, Bob,
Speaker 2: I think, And it seems like every fifty years late.
Speaker 2: It's like fifty years before before this was was you know,
Speaker 2: the unrest and you know, in the Vietnam thing, and
Speaker 2: then fifty years before that was what was going was
Speaker 2: right between World War One and World War two in Europe.
Speaker 2: And I think what's happening now is there is a
Speaker 2: lot of exactly what you're talking about, but it's you
Speaker 2: have to look different places for it. Uh. I don't
Speaker 2: I think, you know, like you know, I'm you know,
Speaker 2: I'm not casting any aspersions. But I don't think Taylor
Speaker 2: Swift it is relevant to any of that. She's like,
Speaker 2: that's like a whole different kind of what what you know,
Speaker 2: music that makes money is is something totally different than
Speaker 2: what it was fifty years ago. But I think the
Speaker 2: irreverence is there. I think it's on the Internet. I
Speaker 2: think the hard part about it is you've got a
Speaker 2: lot of just plain old stupidity and you've got you know,
Speaker 2: if you go on the Internet and you look at
Speaker 2: responses to like anything that happened in the news today,
Speaker 2: you'll see an extreme left and an extreme right speaker
Speaker 2: that are saying things to try to get people upset
Speaker 2: or to get them worked up. And they don't really
Speaker 2: represent the left or the right. They're like just they're
Speaker 2: just you know, people that are trying to get attention,
Speaker 2: and they're trying to get people to like log onto
Speaker 2: their site with outrageous statements. I think kids are maybe
Speaker 2: a little wise to that, and wiser than we're giving
Speaker 2: them credit for, because I think I think they see
Speaker 2: a lot of that is nonsensical and it's not really
Speaker 2: where people are. I think most of the humans in
Speaker 2: the world are somewhere in between those two extremes that
Speaker 2: you hear arguing about, you know, you know, accusing immigrants
Speaker 2: eating dogs and cats and accusing uh uh, you know,
Speaker 2: the right of like being out to shoot everybody they
Speaker 2: can shoot. You know, there's there's like I think there's
Speaker 2: most of us, I think are more about common sense
Speaker 2: and about you know, survival. We want to live, you know,
Speaker 2: we're not trying to to destroy the planet. And but
Speaker 2: but I think from an art standpoint, I think there's
Speaker 2: even more outlets now than there were before, and that
Speaker 2: that's kind of great. I mean, and right at this
Speaker 2: this moment, this exact moment we're talking whenever it is
Speaker 2: when this, when this comes over the air, this thing
Speaker 2: with AI has totally raised all the ante and and
Speaker 2: the possibilities for what could be considered art and sentient thought.
Speaker 2: I'm I'm kind of I wish I was like fifteen
Speaker 2: right now. I wish I was young enough that this
Speaker 2: was I was just starting. I think this is an
Speaker 2: amazing time to be alive on this planet.
Speaker 1: Tell me more about the AI and your feelings about
Speaker 1: wanting to be young, etc. Go deeper.
Speaker 2: I see AI as being a way to I mean,
Speaker 2: think about how people felt when cars came out and
Speaker 2: they were like freaked out and they but my horse
Speaker 2: and buggy. I'll never leave my horse behind. I always
Speaker 2: have to ride my horse. I'll never ride one of
Speaker 2: those stupid loud machines, you know, and people freak out
Speaker 2: when stuff happens, but you know, cars are actually a
Speaker 2: lot more sensible in certain ways than horses and buggies
Speaker 2: sort of. I mean, now we've taken it too far. Now,
Speaker 2: maybe there's too many humans, but that's another story to
Speaker 2: talk about. But as far as ai, I think, I
Speaker 2: love the idea. When I was a kid and I
Speaker 2: wanted to be in a band, and like I told you,
Speaker 2: I'd read the newspaper to find out bands I could
Speaker 2: play it. I I remember thinking, well, it's cost too
Speaker 2: much to buy a keyboard. I can't own a Wurlitzer
Speaker 2: electric piano, so I can't be in a band. But
Speaker 2: but nowadays a kid can be walking home from school
Speaker 2: and they could they could have an idea for a bassline,
Speaker 2: and they could be going into their phone. They could
Speaker 2: go boom boom doom doo doo. Boom boom boom bo
Speaker 2: doo doo, and then they could go online and they
Speaker 2: could sign it to like you could say, oh, I
Speaker 2: want it to sound like the Foo Fighters, and so
Speaker 2: then they play that. They'd use an electric bassis sound
Speaker 2: like Foo Fighters. They say, oh no, I wanted to
Speaker 2: sound like John Coltrane, and then there would be an
Speaker 2: upright bass playing the part where they say, oh, I
Speaker 2: want it to sound like Windy Carlos, And then it
Speaker 2: would be a mini mog Since or a moge Since
Speaker 2: or something. You can you can do all that and
Speaker 2: then if you like that, then you could say, they
Speaker 2: can go into the same phone and they can go
Speaker 2: boom ba boom boom bah. They can do a drum
Speaker 2: beat in the phone and they can pick what kind
Speaker 2: of drums they want it to sound like what they
Speaker 2: are trying to do, change the tempo, the speed. They
Speaker 2: can put those two together. They can keep adding instruments
Speaker 2: on of whatever kind of instruments you want. I just
Speaker 2: picked really basic common instruments that you know, having a
Speaker 2: set of drums in my day meant that you had
Speaker 2: them down on the basement and after about an hour
Speaker 2: your parents would be opening the door going stop playing
Speaker 2: those things, you know, get off of that, you know.
Speaker 2: And now it's like totally different. And if a kid
Speaker 2: has an idea for a song, he can put it
Speaker 2: all together on his phone. You know. It's like your
Speaker 2: phone has more power than the Beatles had when they
Speaker 2: were recording in London and doing their albums, they had
Speaker 2: like these four track tape recorders and then it went
Speaker 2: up to eight, sixteen and twenty four. But kids now
Speaker 2: they have more power than that in their phone and
Speaker 2: they can do it so fast and if they get
Speaker 2: something that they like, they don't have to go out
Speaker 2: and find a record company. I mean, I remember when
Speaker 2: I was in out of high school. I remember thinking,
Speaker 2: I don't think there's any record companies in Ohio, and
Speaker 2: if you did, how would you get them to put
Speaker 2: out your record anyhow? And you know, now kids they
Speaker 2: can just go right directly to the Internet. They can
Speaker 2: put their song up on it, they can make a
Speaker 2: video to go with it, and they don't have to
Speaker 2: ask anybody. And it's like there's more artistic freedom than that,
Speaker 2: you know. That's that's how I feel. I feel. It's like,
Speaker 2: you know, it's a pretty great time.
Speaker 1: Okay, you were speaking of music. You talked about the
Speaker 1: two pole or opposites, the left and the right, expanding it.
Speaker 1: Since you have a band that was based on DV
Speaker 1: so we live in this era, how are things going
Speaker 1: to play out on a macro level, not just people
Speaker 1: making music?
Speaker 2: Okay, all right? I have to admit I've been the
Speaker 2: optimist in Devo since the beginning, and that's why I
Speaker 2: became the character Boogie Boy. I think I think Boogie
Speaker 2: Boy was always the optimist and looked at the bright side.
Speaker 2: Jerry is definitely the pessimist and thinks it's all going down.
Speaker 2: He thinks for this is the Titanic and it's all
Speaker 2: going under. I think I think people. I think people
Speaker 2: are just learning what their capabilities are and what their
Speaker 2: possibilities are, and I think they need to be aware
Speaker 2: of the fact that humans are the unnatural species, for
Speaker 2: better and for worse, mostly in a lot of ways
Speaker 2: for worse. I just finished a film with a Pixar
Speaker 2: and I can't talk about it too much, but it's
Speaker 2: kids film, but it's but it basically that's what the
Speaker 2: messages for kids are, like the animals save the humans
Speaker 2: in the end, and you're like, like, oh, maybe humans
Speaker 2: are the one species that are out of touch with nature.
Speaker 2: And I think I think some of that's going to
Speaker 2: come back. I don't I don't want to move to Mars.
Speaker 2: I think anybody that wants to go to Mars, oh
Speaker 2: my gosh, go go man. It looks beautiful up there.
Speaker 2: Have fun, you know. I want to see planet Earth
Speaker 2: get restored. And personally, I think maybe it means less
Speaker 2: humans or being more careful than just like randomly everybody
Speaker 2: just making kids. We've been too successful at that. I
Speaker 2: think it. I think it's kind of there's a lot
Speaker 2: of things to think about and I'm hoping, I'm hoping
Speaker 2: that we don't blow ourselves up. I mean, it could happen.
Speaker 2: I mean, if you put one crazy person in charge
Speaker 2: of a nuclear weapon, they could actually they could end everything,
Speaker 2: you know, And so that kind of stuff really worries me.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's go from thirty thousand feet down to the planet.
Speaker 1: We live in an era now that is completely different
Speaker 1: from when we grew up. I'm your contemporary, and what
Speaker 1: do we know. You have all these tools, generally speaking,
Speaker 1: baby boomers, A lot of Gen xers hate them. They
Speaker 1: think the smartphone is the devil, they think AI is
Speaker 1: the devil, etc. So you have all these kids who
Speaker 1: live in that world. We have a president who, let's
Speaker 1: just say he has authoritarian elements. Okay, we have the
Speaker 1: same people who are on smartphones, experiencing AI, living on
Speaker 1: the internet. Their future economically is not what it was
Speaker 1: for previous generations. So do we just stumble along or
Speaker 1: is our big bang event? How does this work out? Well?
Speaker 2: I think what's happening right now in politics all over
Speaker 2: the world is really educating everyone. And I think they're
Speaker 2: seeing that there are dangers to stupidity and greed, and
Speaker 2: you know, it's like I only know a few kids.
Speaker 2: I don't know how many are in your life. There's
Speaker 2: much less than used to be in my life. I
Speaker 2: have a couple of girls in the early twenties, and
Speaker 2: I talk to them and talk to their friends that
Speaker 2: come over, and it's that's about it.
Speaker 3: Really.
Speaker 2: I don't get to hang out with a teenager or ever.
Speaker 2: So I'm I listen to what they say and how
Speaker 2: they're reacting to things, and I think they have a
Speaker 2: much healthier attitude than than people that are like panicked
Speaker 2: and that are you know, that are to think there's
Speaker 2: only gonna there can only be a bad outcome to this.
Speaker 2: I think I think we're I think we're in a
Speaker 2: learning curve right now, learning process.
Speaker 1: Think you have these twenty year old girls, where are
Speaker 1: they at? More specifically, because you talk to.
Speaker 2: Them, they uh, they kind of they kind of they
Speaker 2: see technology in a much more realistic way than their
Speaker 2: mom and dads do. It's like it's like, you know,
Speaker 2: they look at us and and uh, my wife's saying, okay,
Speaker 2: film h Eddie's film No our show is on tonight
Speaker 2: on uh TCM. So we got to like be we
Speaker 2: got to be finished whatever we're doing so at eight
Speaker 2: o'clock we can see the show and my kids just
Speaker 2: roll their eyes, like, why you're you're you like you're
Speaker 2: like a slave to the time schedule of the of
Speaker 2: the TV set. You know, they don't they think that's
Speaker 2: that's humorous things like that. You know that they they
Speaker 2: do have more sophisticated, uh take on technology than us,
Speaker 2: and we're we're always are asking them how to how
Speaker 2: to make things work. It's never the other way around.
Speaker 1: Well, how about yourself, I mean, you were at the
Speaker 1: cutting edge with the mode you're talking about the future.
Speaker 1: Are you seeing that when it comes to tech you're
Speaker 1: somewhat of alvenite.
Speaker 2: I'm saying that there's so much information and there's so
Speaker 2: many things that you can be involved, and you can
Speaker 2: choose what you want to be involved in. And for me,
Speaker 2: I still have I still have a couple of things
Speaker 2: I love and one of them is writing music.
Speaker 1: That to me.
Speaker 2: Is a revelation that that, even more so than with DEVO,
Speaker 2: it came. I became aware of it when I started
Speaker 2: scoring films and games and TV shows. And I love
Speaker 2: doing visual art and I still do it in a
Speaker 2: small size, I still do it on postcard size because
Speaker 2: I was into mail art back in my teenage years
Speaker 2: and it meant a lot to me. And then I
Speaker 2: started keeping the art because it would have you know,
Speaker 2: like lyrics or ideas for album art or costumes, and
Speaker 2: so those are still really important to me. And I
Speaker 2: do incorporate technology, but I can't do everything. It's like
Speaker 2: I use my phone and I do work on AI.
Speaker 2: I do things like I do. I'm experimenting with like
Speaker 2: art for for Devo, and it's i mean even just
Speaker 2: plain old chat GPT, which is like about as run
Speaker 2: of the mill age you can get. When we were
Speaker 2: playing at the Hollywood Bowl a couple weeks ago, I
Speaker 2: took a couple of pictures that I had made on
Speaker 2: my phone while I was sitting on an airplane and
Speaker 2: gave them to our lighting director and he put them
Speaker 2: on the screen and oh my god, they came out
Speaker 2: full resolution, fifty feet across, thirty feet high. I couldn't
Speaker 2: believe it, and I made it on my phone. I
Speaker 2: was like, that's unbelievable. And I just found that out
Speaker 2: a couple of weeks ago. So now I'm really investigating
Speaker 2: that element because like I do stuff on cards, like
Speaker 2: I'll show you something here.
Speaker 1: Well, this is audio only, so you're gonna have to
Speaker 1: describe it for by audience.
Speaker 2: Okay, So this here, that's a picture that I found
Speaker 2: online of a potato. And instead of just starting out
Speaker 2: with a blank card, which I've done for decades, now
Speaker 2: I can put a potato on a card really easy
Speaker 2: that I find online. And then I'm using, like, you
Speaker 2: know that really irritating those ad camp means that like
Speaker 2: just to just like get in your way when you're
Speaker 2: trying to like read the news or or do something
Speaker 2: on the internet, even just use texting or use any
Speaker 2: or use your Google or something. There's all these horrible ads.
Speaker 2: But then I've started finding the artwork on them. I
Speaker 2: started finding it entertaining and and so I take some
Speaker 2: of the other artwork and I do the same thing
Speaker 2: I did with the Spencer Gifts art and I, you know,
Speaker 2: I just take these things off on my phone and
Speaker 2: I can just put them in a printer when I
Speaker 2: come to work here. I'm I've been writing music in
Speaker 2: this same building on Sunset Strip for thirty five years,
Speaker 2: and I have a printer here, so I could just
Speaker 2: throw these in the printer and print them up. And
Speaker 2: I'm not doing the most sophisticated AI work out there
Speaker 2: by any means. I'm doing this the most run of
Speaker 2: the mill, easy to do stuff. But what's exciting to
Speaker 2: me about it is if you're a conceptual artist. And
Speaker 2: this is what I've been talking to Jerry about this,
Speaker 2: because I do art all the time, I do physical
Speaker 2: art all the time, but he doesn't. And I said,
Speaker 2: you really got to investigate AI. I said, you really
Speaker 2: just got to try it out, because he's really good
Speaker 2: with ideas. He loves to, you know, come up with
Speaker 2: an idea for something, but he doesn't like to go
Speaker 2: through the you know, the the all the toil that's involved.
Speaker 2: So so I just I just think I'm going to
Speaker 2: start We're going to start seeing things from people. And
Speaker 2: it's just so early on. You know, AI hasn't been
Speaker 2: around that long and it and it's getting bigger and
Speaker 2: bigger all the time. I just love the idea that
Speaker 2: that kids could make films, that we all could make films,
Speaker 2: and you know, why not. Why shouldn't everybody be allowed
Speaker 2: to make films? Why should it only be like those
Speaker 2: that that a film company is willing to invest in.
Speaker 2: I love the idea of letting everybody make something, and
Speaker 2: then I think that's going to raise the level of
Speaker 2: quality and that you'll find things that then there'll be
Speaker 2: even more. I think they'll be more great art. That's
Speaker 2: what I think.
Speaker 1: Okay, in the seventies, Divo is toiling in obscurity. Then
Speaker 1: you get even before the Warner Brothers deals, you were
Speaker 1: in the Metropolis, they would play at Los Angeles on KOQ.
Speaker 1: This is the old free format chocube for the Rocket
Speaker 1: of the nineties, so you were aware. Then you have
Speaker 1: an album on Warner Brothers, so that people kind of
Speaker 1: paying attention know what's going on. Then you're on TV.
Speaker 1: Anybody with a modicum of hypnis knows who Divo is
Speaker 1: and know if nothing else that we make of satisfaction,
Speaker 1: then you're on ASSNL, and then you're on MTV. So
Speaker 1: the people who are completely not paying attention or aware
Speaker 1: of you today, that's an impossibility. The initial hurdle that
Speaker 1: Divo had, which was recording a national distribution, that's easy.
Speaker 1: Gaining the attention is difficult even at this laid date.
Speaker 1: For yourself. You create something, the ripples are not going
Speaker 1: to go as far. Is that frustrating?
Speaker 2: For you. I think it's a trade off because you know,
Speaker 2: back when I was doing it, or before I was
Speaker 2: doing it, and I was just a fan, Like I said,
Speaker 2: I would go to the record store and there would
Speaker 2: be a dozen or less albums in that box. There'd
Speaker 2: be one sun Raw album, there'd be one Zappa album.
Speaker 2: And now, if you go on the Internet and there's
Speaker 2: something you want to hear, you just throw a few
Speaker 2: words into you know, into Google or Amazon, and and whila,
Speaker 2: there's something anything you say you want to hear. If
Speaker 2: you want to hear a space age, hillbilly croquet music,
Speaker 2: if you put those three words in there, there's some
Speaker 2: band that does that. And I kind of love that.
Speaker 2: I think it's a trade off. And you're right if
Speaker 2: you want to be like, if you want to be
Speaker 2: a rock star, you know, maybe you missed your opportunity
Speaker 2: to be a rock star. I mean you can there
Speaker 2: are some. I mean there's Taylor Swift. You know, she's
Speaker 2: still out there and she's she's bigger than ever. She's
Speaker 2: bigger than anybody ever was, you know, the Beatles. She's
Speaker 2: probably sells more records in one year than the Beatles
Speaker 2: sold in their whole lifetime. But I don't know that number.
Speaker 2: I just made that up. But you know what I'm saying,
Speaker 2: it's like you're training for something that might be better,
Speaker 2: and that is that more people have access to the
Speaker 2: ability to be artists and the ability to make a statement.
Speaker 2: And because of that, the best stuff you can find.
Speaker 2: You're you're thinking that the best stuff gets lost, But
Speaker 2: I don't think that totally is the case. I think
Speaker 2: there's a lot of great music that there's people that
Speaker 2: that's what they're searching for, and so they put together
Speaker 2: a collection of White Mice or whoever the bands are
Speaker 2: that they like that are doing some certain kind of
Speaker 2: electronic music. And if you find one of those, if
Speaker 2: you if you even just say what it is you're
Speaker 2: looking for, there's these people will show you know, these
Speaker 2: sites will show up that will have that music and
Speaker 2: help you find it. And I think we're in a
Speaker 2: really nice time because of that. You know, if you
Speaker 2: got if you want to get into rock and roll
Speaker 2: because you want to get rich, well good luck. You know,
Speaker 2: that's another story. It's hard to be Taylor's whoever. Those
Speaker 2: people are, all those people that are getting to make
Speaker 2: all that money. But if you're doing it because you're
Speaker 2: an artist, or because you have something to say, or
Speaker 2: because you just love making music. Now's the best time ever.
Speaker 1: I just want to make a comment on Taylor Swift.
Speaker 2: I know I said her name a few too many times.
Speaker 1: No, since you mentioned it. The example I always uses,
Speaker 1: I can sing every lick of Louis Armstrong Slo Dolly,
Speaker 1: not because I liked it, but because I was waiting
Speaker 1: for the Beatles or British invasion. Whereas today, without making
Speaker 1: a judgment whatever, the average person can't mean to Taylor
Speaker 1: swift songs, never mind seeing them. She's making a lot
Speaker 1: of money, but even Taylor Swift doesn't have the ubiquity
Speaker 1: of acts Billy J.
Speaker 2: Kramer, Okay, maybe yes, maybe no. I think if you
Speaker 2: were the same age that you were when you were
Speaker 2: singing Hello Dolly or or Beatles songs for the first time,
Speaker 2: I think those people might know more about Taylor Swift
Speaker 2: than you think. And it doesn't matter if they do
Speaker 2: or don't. But I'm just saying you're in an age
Speaker 2: that doesn't need Taylor Swift.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's leave that aside for now. You and Jerry.
Speaker 1: He comes from the conceptual art world, you're an independent thinker.
Speaker 1: He's a few years older, which makes a difference when
Speaker 1: you're twenty, doesn't make a difference when you're seventy. Okay,
Speaker 1: and you he was a spokesman. So in this fifty
Speaker 1: odd years, how have you and Jerry gotten along?
Speaker 2: Very spinal tap But you know, it's like, to tell
Speaker 2: you the truth, I really respect what he did and
Speaker 2: who he is, and and we are quite different. You know,
Speaker 2: we are quite different as artists. But you know it's
Speaker 2: like I think, if we wouldn't have both been there,
Speaker 2: it wouldn't have been devo. And so I'm really thankful
Speaker 2: for that.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's go back to the silk call. Well, the
Speaker 1: early days, you formalize you have this movie that wins.
Speaker 1: You know, it's not you're a movie, but you're in
Speaker 1: it whatever, blah blah blah. You're on the path. But
Speaker 1: the breakthrough comes years later. How did you maintain optimism
Speaker 1: and say this is gonna work or maybe you didn't
Speaker 1: think it was gonna work. Maybe times you're going to
Speaker 1: give up. What was going on in your mind in
Speaker 1: those years?
Speaker 2: Well, I I just loved it, you know, I was
Speaker 2: enjoying it the whole time. To me, the idea of
Speaker 2: writing more music and coming up with more artistic ideas
Speaker 2: and making what we were doing bigger and better. I
Speaker 2: think Jerry was I love the idea of like working
Speaker 2: on it too. I we we both did, and and
Speaker 2: you know, it did take years for things to change.
Speaker 2: And you know, there were times when I thought, well,
Speaker 2: maybe this is as good as it gets. But I
Speaker 2: do remember, uh when Whip It became a hit, and
Speaker 2: all of a sudden, you know, like little kids would
Speaker 2: stop when I was walking down Wilsher Boulevard going to
Speaker 2: a print store or something, and like a little kid goes, hey,
Speaker 2: did you sing on that Jermaine Jackson song?
Speaker 1: You know?
Speaker 2: Or whatever? And I remember thinking, I'm going to always
Speaker 2: remember this time. This might be as good as it
Speaker 2: ever gets, and if it is, I want to I
Speaker 2: want to remember it forever and enjoy it.
Speaker 1: In that initial period prior to the first breakup and
Speaker 1: you moving into visual entertainment and making music, that did
Speaker 1: you guys make any money?
Speaker 2: Uh? When we signed a record deal, we were concerned
Speaker 2: about that, uh, And we decided we would rather than
Speaker 2: you know, you'd get your money from the record company
Speaker 2: and publishers, you know, in big chunks, you know, and
Speaker 2: we said, well, rather than like hand it out to
Speaker 2: everybody at once, we kind of wisely decided we're gonna
Speaker 2: pay ourselves the same amount of money as Los Angeles
Speaker 2: school teachers get. And that's basically what we did. We
Speaker 2: gave each other. We gave us ourselves enough so we
Speaker 2: could make our car payments, make our our our rentals,
Speaker 2: you know, for our house, and pay for our food.
Speaker 2: And uh, we didn't take all the money in one chunk,
Speaker 2: which a lot of bands did, and then they blew it,
Speaker 2: you know, like like in six months and they'd have nothing.
Speaker 2: And so we were we never uh you know, we didn't.
Speaker 2: We weren't the band that went out and bought mansions
Speaker 2: and Cadillacs in the first the first time, you know,
Speaker 2: with our first paycheck. So we were always and we
Speaker 2: always felt like, well, maybe we will never you know,
Speaker 2: maybe it'll never be bigger than this, and so we
Speaker 2: have to be. And the truth of the matter is,
Speaker 2: you know, it's like, you know, we're not anywhere near
Speaker 2: like the size of like somebody like the food fighters
Speaker 2: who followed you know later. You know, it's like those
Speaker 2: kind of bands are tight or even so much bigger
Speaker 2: than us and play much bigger venues than us. But
Speaker 2: you know, I think we kind of I don't know, personally,
Speaker 2: I'm pretty thanks for what I've gotten to do.
Speaker 1: Just to make a side comment here, however big the
Speaker 1: Foo fighters are in terms of playing arenas and regenerating revenue,
Speaker 1: they've had less cultural impact than DEVO period.
Speaker 2: Well I take that as a compliment, thank you.
Speaker 1: So it's beyond the compliment because it's not a mathematical thing.
Speaker 1: It's a conceptual thing. There was a lot of thought
Speaker 1: that went behind DEVO. There was a lot of thought
Speaker 1: about how the audience would or would not react. There
Speaker 1: was an art background. It wasn't as simple as let's
Speaker 1: you know, do verse chorus verse, Let's get all these people,
Speaker 1: get the company behind it and running up the chart
Speaker 1: and you know, get guarantees. You know that all comes
Speaker 1: in for everybody. But just jumping you know forward a
Speaker 1: few steps at this late date, are there devot royalties?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Yeah, you know, I don't think it's an an enough.
Speaker 2: We could live off of just the royalties, to be
Speaker 2: honest with you, but but that's why we play shows.
Speaker 2: So we're playing shows this year. I mean we had
Speaker 2: a few anomalies every now and then. Uh Ridiculousness made
Speaker 2: a deal with us. When they started that they thought
Speaker 2: they were only going to do one season and then
Speaker 2: go away, and then they've done like three hundred episodes
Speaker 2: and they kind of their lawyers out tricked themselves when
Speaker 2: they did the deal. And so we've we've gotten like
Speaker 2: nice payoff off of that show, off of that uh
Speaker 2: uh you know, Royalty Stream. But you know it's like
Speaker 2: for the most part, you know, we're playing, we're going out.
Speaker 2: We're already planning on shows we're gonna play next year,
Speaker 2: and uh.
Speaker 1: Well are you going now? You personally, you have a
Speaker 1: star studied career as a composer. Are you going out
Speaker 1: for the money? Are you going out because you want
Speaker 1: to play? What is the motivation because for a long
Speaker 1: time you weren't working live.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think I'm just I'm enjoying it more and
Speaker 2: we've I found ways to enjoy it. You know, it's
Speaker 2: like touring when you start off, you know, like when
Speaker 2: you know, when you're in your twenties, mid twenties and
Speaker 2: somebody comes downstairs and goes, oh my god, all these
Speaker 2: people were in my room last night. And they flooded
Speaker 2: the bathroom and the pillows are soaking wet, and blah
Speaker 2: blah blah, and everybody's laughing. And you go to the
Speaker 2: car and now it's like when you're in your mid seventies.
Speaker 2: It's like everybody's standing there at the curtain. I go,
Speaker 2: the car was supposed to be here three minutes ago.
Speaker 2: You know, it's like everybody's got it. You know, you've
Speaker 2: already done it, You've been you already know that you're
Speaker 2: going to go to you know, Minneapolis tomorrow and you're
Speaker 2: going to check into a hotel. You're going to have
Speaker 2: an hour or two before you go to soundcheck, and
Speaker 2: then you're at the venue all day and then you
Speaker 2: play your show and then you come back to the
Speaker 2: hotel and you pack everything up because the next morning
Speaker 2: you're taking off for another city. And so it's not
Speaker 2: as exciting as it was at one time. But I
Speaker 2: found ways like where I can do both art and
Speaker 2: I write music. Like I was working on scoring a
Speaker 2: film on our last tour, and that so I was
Speaker 2: in different cities every day and I'd set up my
Speaker 2: computer and my keyboard and I could I could write
Speaker 2: for a film and that was that was kind of
Speaker 2: taking up my time making it enjoyable. And everybody loves
Speaker 2: the hour and a half you're on stage, you know.
Speaker 2: The time you're on stage is like, you know, it's
Speaker 2: kind of like as close as you get to be
Speaker 2: in twenty five again when you're seventy five, you know,
Speaker 2: and uh, we enjoy that, and then it's like then
Speaker 2: you just figure out ways to enjoy the other hours.
Speaker 2: Jerry has his thing. He he loves food. He's a foodie,
Speaker 2: so he's already booked restaurants and is concerned about if
Speaker 2: we're going to get done in time, if there's enough
Speaker 2: time for him to make it over to the restaurant
Speaker 2: before it closes, and and he's got his own thing.
Speaker 2: And for me, it's it's I it's like I draw
Speaker 2: on these cards and I've I'm that they're they're they're
Speaker 2: that that makes me happy. They're they're like my therapy
Speaker 2: and my simple, inexpensive way to uh to enjoy the world.
Speaker 1: Have you been in therapy? No, never, I think I'm
Speaker 1: in entire life, I've never went to a psychiatrist, therapist whatever.
Speaker 2: I think. Yes, I did one time and then it
Speaker 2: was it was she was she did something like she
Speaker 2: came over while I was sitting on a sofa and
Speaker 2: she put her knees on my feet and then leaned
Speaker 2: into me and put her arms around my neck. And
Speaker 2: I thought, you know, I don't know where this is going,
Speaker 2: but this is but it's not my style. So I
Speaker 2: only went to one session.
Speaker 1: Why did you go to a therapist? And why did
Speaker 1: you go to see that particular person?
Speaker 2: God, I don't remember who she came. Oh, you know,
Speaker 2: it's a doctor I used to go to. And we
Speaker 2: were just talking about what makes you happy and what
Speaker 2: makes you not happy. And this was like I don't know,
Speaker 2: twenty years ago or something, twenty years ago or something,
Speaker 2: and he said, well, why don't you go see this there?
Speaker 2: So he just out of the blues suggested I go
Speaker 2: to a therapist. So I did.
Speaker 1: Well, you know, you're smiling, you're busy, you never get depressed.
Speaker 1: You see, you're an optimist, you never get depressed, you
Speaker 1: never get down.
Speaker 2: Uh, there's things that depressed me. But I'm actually I'm
Speaker 2: I uh, I'm probably well, I think compared to other people.
Speaker 2: I know, I'm probably a lot less depressed than a
Speaker 2: lot of I do have friends that are depressed and
Speaker 2: it's that's not a fun thing to be And now
Speaker 2: I don't I don't think of myself as depressed.
Speaker 1: Okay, so what comes first, the breakup of Devo or
Speaker 1: your composing career.
Speaker 2: Oh well, I mean in a way, I don't ever
Speaker 2: see Devo breaking up, because you know, we're an idea
Speaker 2: that we did and that it was. I mean, even
Speaker 2: my composing career is I think it's I think a
Speaker 2: lot of the way I think about music when I
Speaker 2: write music for films is the same way I thought
Speaker 2: about it when I wrote music for Divo. It's just
Speaker 2: you have different things you're taking into consideration. So I
Speaker 2: don't know, it's like composing for films. Yeah, that probably
Speaker 2: would go first. I'm pretty sure it would. I think
Speaker 2: Devo would be around for a long time.
Speaker 1: Okay. You had this crazy bout with COVID nineteen. Tell
Speaker 1: us about it.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, I was a guinea pig for COVID when
Speaker 2: it first happened. I somehow signed up to be one
Speaker 2: of the first people to get it, and they didn't
Speaker 2: have any treatment for it. The only thing they had
Speaker 2: is they thought they'd put people on ventilators. Well, I
Speaker 2: have really strong lungs. There was no reason to put
Speaker 2: me on a ventilator, but they did, and somehow in
Speaker 2: the process. In the first day or so, when they
Speaker 2: put this tube down my throat, I got hit in
Speaker 2: the eye. My eyes were closed, so I didn't see
Speaker 2: it happened, but I got hit in the eye and
Speaker 2: it hurt so bad. I pulled the tube out of
Speaker 2: my throat. I said, what did you do to my eye?
Speaker 2: And I was looking at a woman who had a
Speaker 2: plastic faceguard on, and I heard a man that I
Speaker 2: couldn't see that was like moving me like in my bed,
Speaker 2: probably just you know, moving you around like a sack
Speaker 2: of potatoes, he said, sedate him and whatever drug they
Speaker 2: put me on, I remember before I passed out, I went, hey,
Speaker 2: this is pretty great. And I don't know what it was.
Speaker 2: But I never take drugs. I never was I never
Speaker 2: really got into drugs. I don't think I even drank
Speaker 2: coffee till I was in my forties. And so they
Speaker 2: they kept me there way too long. They kept me
Speaker 2: there for like twenty days before they let me out,
Speaker 2: and they tried to talk my wife into letting them
Speaker 2: put me in a coma. And I feel like The
Speaker 2: only reason they did that was because they sent a
Speaker 2: lawyer down after they woke me up, after they gave
Speaker 2: me that first sedation. They woke me up, and this
Speaker 2: lawyer is like writing things down, saying, so, what are
Speaker 2: you saying about your eye? And I go, I don't know,
Speaker 2: but my eye's not working and it was totally red
Speaker 2: bloated my eyeball basically, so I to this day it's like, ironically,
Speaker 2: my vision in that eye is similar to my vision
Speaker 2: when I was the first eight years of my life
Speaker 2: before I had glasses. And it's kind of interesting because
Speaker 2: I have one eye like that and then I have
Speaker 2: one eye that's twenty twenty. But they, you know, they
Speaker 2: just they finally let me out, thankfully, and I've been
Speaker 2: you know, it's created problems for me, both for singing.
Speaker 2: There's a couple notes that are hard to sing, but
Speaker 2: I think they're coming back. I think everything's eventually coming back.
Speaker 2: I kind of changed some of the melodies and some
Speaker 2: of our songs to fit where I can where I
Speaker 2: can sing, and nobody notices it. Really, I mean, it's
Speaker 2: not like Devo Hat, you know, it's not like Harbor
Speaker 2: Streisan or something, you know, or Pavaratti. You know, it's like,
Speaker 2: you know, I did a lot of ranting when I
Speaker 2: was singing, so so it kind of it's kind of
Speaker 2: all right. The vision is still a problem. It's like
Speaker 2: it's like hard for me to work with computers for
Speaker 2: long periods of time. My eyes get really tired. But yeah,
Speaker 2: that was it. That was my and I think finally
Speaker 2: when they did try a drug out on me, it
Speaker 2: was the one that they ended up using on Trump
Speaker 2: a year later or so. So I was a guinea
Speaker 2: pig for Donald Trump.
Speaker 1: I guess, so the notes you lost, that's because you
Speaker 1: were intobated. Yeah. I saw a picture of my vocal
Speaker 1: cords like about eight or nine years before that, when
Speaker 1: Devo played somewhere some convention hall or some big place
Speaker 1: and Enver and and they had a they had a
Speaker 1: vocal doctor, and they saw me coughing because we'd been
Speaker 1: playing every night and I was coughing at sound check.
Speaker 1: And after sound check, the promoter said, hey, why don't
Speaker 1: you go check out? Why don't you go see the doctor?
Speaker 1: And I went and saw him, and while we're talking,
Speaker 1: he put a camera up my nose, down into my
Speaker 1: throat and he said, oh, you have a acid reflux,
Speaker 1: I think. And so I was like, oh, what do
Speaker 1: you do about that?
Speaker 2: And he says, when he just gave me some ideas
Speaker 2: on how to you know, reduce acid reflux. But I
Speaker 2: saw what my vocal cords looked like, and they were perfect.
Speaker 2: They were like, you know, like this shape and you know,
Speaker 2: and they were they were perfect. And then when after
Speaker 2: I was in the hospital with COVID, I went and
Speaker 2: I saw my vocal chords. They did it again to
Speaker 2: look because I told him I was having problems singing,
Speaker 2: and they looked at my vocal chords and there was
Speaker 2: a like a terror, you know, like like a scar
Speaker 2: tissue about halfway through on one side. And I don't know,
Speaker 2: I'm slowly getting that back. My singing in the in
Speaker 2: those notes is slowly coming back. So that's the good news.
Speaker 1: Okay, when you are on stage, you're amped up. I
Speaker 1: wouldn't say you're playing a character, but you're tell there's
Speaker 1: a lot of energy different from the average act. Do
Speaker 1: you have to get yourself in that space or you
Speaker 1: just go on stage and you can get there?
Speaker 2: You know, that's kind of us. We kind of do
Speaker 2: that anyhow, you know, it's like our drummer has to.
Speaker 2: He sits there in the other room, and he's like
Speaker 2: going on a on a on a you know, practice pad,
Speaker 2: you know, before he goes out on stage. And and
Speaker 2: he's got the most physical job of all of us,
Speaker 2: so he's doing that. And then afterwards he soaks his
Speaker 2: arms and epsom salt water and and he's got a
Speaker 2: bunch of stuff he has to do. But we're all
Speaker 2: kind of we're just kind of programmed. We are who
Speaker 2: we are, you know, and it's like we come out
Speaker 2: and do it.
Speaker 1: Okay. You talk about the era when you were first
Speaker 1: touring in the twenty people in your hotel room. You know,
Speaker 1: you're from an era with the sex drugs in rock
Speaker 1: and roll. To what degree did you participate in that stuff?
Speaker 2: Well, now, the drug thing I was never interested in. Uh,
Speaker 2: the sex I liked and but but it wasn't long
Speaker 2: after we, you know, became popular. Wasn't it long after
Speaker 2: whip it before people would say, hey, Mark Harris. Harris
Speaker 2: just went to the to the doctor with I thought
Speaker 2: he had the flu. He checked into the hospital on Friday,
Speaker 2: and it would be Monday morning. He says, he died yesterday.
Speaker 2: Like what why'd he died of the flu. And this
Speaker 2: was like eighty one or eighty two. It was the
Speaker 2: beginning of aides. So we were at the very last
Speaker 2: years of the sex, drugs and rock and roll by
Speaker 2: the by eighty two eighty three, it's like you were.
Speaker 2: You had to be really careful who you and you
Speaker 2: know who who you let in your room and it
Speaker 2: but it is crazy. There was a time where people
Speaker 2: were like just knocking on your hotel room door or
Speaker 2: sticking pictures of themselves underneath the door asking you to
Speaker 2: let him in. It was a We were part of
Speaker 2: that crazy era for a while. Unlucky none of us
Speaker 2: ever got sick.
Speaker 1: And so what's your everyday life like? Are you working
Speaker 1: all the time, you had contact with friends, you watch
Speaker 1: in streaming television? What's it like?
Speaker 2: Well, now it's sex, drugs and rock and roll every day. No,
Speaker 2: I get up. My wife has four small dogs and
Speaker 2: we deal with that. And right now we're fortunate enough
Speaker 2: that our one daughter, who is an artist, is staying
Speaker 2: at our house for a little while, so we're enjoying
Speaker 2: that that she's around. But I eventually I drive down
Speaker 2: the hill and I check into the green round building
Speaker 2: on Sunset Strip. And I write music every day, and
Speaker 2: I do artwork every day. And my you know, my
Speaker 2: big thing is grocery shopping. I hate to say it,
Speaker 2: but it's like I'll I'll go to maybe three grocery
Speaker 2: stores to get the different things that we want for
Speaker 2: dinner that night, because there's there's a one grocery store
Speaker 2: that has the best produce and one that has other
Speaker 2: things that we really that my kids like or my
Speaker 2: wife likes a lot, and and so I kinda I
Speaker 2: kind of enjoy that. I don't really enjoy clothing shopping anymore.
Speaker 2: It's like I'm not into fashion that much.
Speaker 1: I used to be.
Speaker 2: At one time, I was kind of really I was
Speaker 2: really intrigued with what was going on in the early
Speaker 2: eighties in Japan and in Europe, and but also the
Speaker 2: I liked just what designers were doing. And then then
Speaker 2: it went into the two low low tech, you know,
Speaker 2: like jeans and T shirts and and sweaters, and like
Speaker 2: now it doesn't matter if you're a billionaire or a lawyer,
Speaker 2: or a or a kid in high school or you're
Speaker 2: a school teacher. Everybody kind of wears the same thing
Speaker 2: more than they ever did. It's pretty rare to see
Speaker 2: somebody walking around, you know, in a suit, or at
Speaker 2: least they still do. But you know, it's it's it's
Speaker 2: that number's gone down, and then there's really fashion is
Speaker 2: just kind of at a strange place. I'm hoping that
Speaker 2: that all the craziness that's going on now is going
Speaker 2: to inspire artists and inspire stylists and inspire creative people
Speaker 2: in every walk.
Speaker 1: So, who knows what are the three grocery stores?
Speaker 2: Well, there's probably five, if I want to get serious
Speaker 2: about the numbers, because they there's five or six, but
Speaker 2: they're just they're a couple of them are in West Hollywood,
Speaker 2: A couple of them are in Hollywood, Good h I
Speaker 2: mostly just there's one in Beverly Hills and then they
Speaker 2: all just kind of it just depends on what we're eating.
Speaker 1: So the Bristol Farms in Beverly.
Speaker 2: Hills, yeah, oh they're okay, okay.
Speaker 1: And does Whole Foods or Arawans show up in any
Speaker 1: of this shopping.
Speaker 2: Of course, Erewon's and uh, well and there's yeah there
Speaker 2: there there's more. There's a Gelson's and uh there's one
Speaker 2: called Mothers that I just uh, it's a little further away,
Speaker 2: but it has different kinds of of My wife likes likes,
Speaker 2: uh herbal, herbal medicinal things, and so they seem to
Speaker 2: have a different, uh they have a different level of
Speaker 2: stuff than than arawans or sprouts. They're they're all, they're
Speaker 2: all different and they.
Speaker 1: As far as the mainstream, the Ralphs, the VODs, you
Speaker 1: ever go there, you have an opinion on those.
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, I mean Ralphs has there's these I found
Speaker 2: out about something. I think it's called Kingston. I don't
Speaker 2: know if that's what it is, but they make these
Speaker 2: foil bags you can barbecue things in, and it makes
Speaker 2: barbecuing on an outdoor grill so easy. And so if
Speaker 2: we're doing a barbecue, I have to stop, buy a
Speaker 2: Ralphs and grab a bunch of those.
Speaker 1: So you're in your office, you go home for dinner
Speaker 1: every night.
Speaker 2: Most of the time. I mean, you know, we eat
Speaker 2: out a lot, and then we also we get lazy
Speaker 2: and we order in too, So it all happens.
Speaker 1: I guess you know those hours after work, what are
Speaker 1: you filling them with other than eating working on art?
Speaker 2: You show me, yeah, working on it. If I told
Speaker 2: you that cards that size since the early seventies to now.
Speaker 2: Every time I get a hundred done, you know, you
Speaker 2: do them one at a time, and every time I
Speaker 2: finish one hundred, I put them in these read archival
Speaker 2: books that they've been making ever since the sixties. Was
Speaker 2: at I was a stamp nerd, a stamp collector nerd
Speaker 2: when I was in high school, So I knew that
Speaker 2: they had these books that held postcards. And so when
Speaker 2: I was getting a stack of postcards, I thought, well,
Speaker 2: I better get a book to put them in. They
Speaker 2: still make that same book all these years later, at
Speaker 2: the exact same book, archival book. And so I've been
Speaker 2: I think I'm up to around seven hundred and fifty
Speaker 2: of these books that each have one hundred pieces of art,
Speaker 2: pieces of poetry, pieces of collage, were sketches, all different
Speaker 2: kinds of things.
Speaker 1: Okay, my favorite Devot album is Do Traditionalists. That's the
Speaker 1: one where suddenly you're producing it yourself. But it sounds
Speaker 1: you know, lots of bands produce themselves, they go off
Speaker 1: the rails. So what was it like producing yourself as
Speaker 1: opposed to dealing with these other people?
Speaker 2: In some ways, it was a lot better because you know,
Speaker 2: he was I think he was unprepared for us, and
Speaker 2: we were kind of unprepared for him. He really wanted
Speaker 2: to I think he wanted to make a bigger aesthetic,
Speaker 2: have a bigger aesthetic input than he got. About five
Speaker 2: years ago, I was transferring over the twenty four tracks
Speaker 2: that we had recorded with him to digital, and I'm
Speaker 2: looking at He's got his beautiful handwriting of all because
Speaker 2: it was before automation when we did this album in
Speaker 2: seventy eight. It was like his beautiful handwriting of all
Speaker 2: the eqs and all the effects and everything. But I'm
Speaker 2: looking at I'm seeing things like there's channels and it
Speaker 2: says Brian's guitar part. Then I see another channel called
Speaker 2: David's vocals, meaning David Bowie. And I'd see these on
Speaker 2: like almost every single track. There were all these, and
Speaker 2: then I remembered that when we were mixing them, he
Speaker 2: would he was like trying to put you know, other
Speaker 2: things into the songs, you know, synth parts, and and
Speaker 2: we did use some of it. I mean, we did
Speaker 2: use David and Brian's backup vocals on Uncontrollable Urge, for instance,
Speaker 2: and he put like monkey chants in Chockohomo and we
Speaker 2: tried to like make a tape of that and then
Speaker 2: recreate it live, and it was impossible because it was
Speaker 2: back before the days of midy and so there was
Speaker 2: really no way to sync up with you know. We
Speaker 2: were playing in seven four time, you know, and then
Speaker 2: switching over to four four time, and there was just
Speaker 2: no way to get it to match exactly. It always
Speaker 2: sounded slightly ugly. So we didn't really do that, but
Speaker 2: he said he he once said he was kind of
Speaker 2: unprepared to work with us and didn't know how to
Speaker 2: talk about it. So I was doing things like, you know,
Speaker 2: we'd hit record for recording from the twenty four track
Speaker 2: over to the two track stereo master, and everybody'd be
Speaker 2: looking straight ahead at the speakers, but I'd be standing
Speaker 2: next to Brian and I'd just reach up and pull
Speaker 2: down the tracks that said Brian guitar and David vocals
Speaker 2: and just keeps looking straight ahead and out of my
Speaker 2: peripheral vision, I could see his head snap and look
Speaker 2: at me. But he never said anything. He never challenged
Speaker 2: me about it, and so that was odd. And but
Speaker 2: Bob Martyloff was great to work with. I have to say,
Speaker 2: he was really great and he taught us a lot
Speaker 2: about engineering that I hadn't expected. And he also his
Speaker 2: concept about how to be a producer was different than
Speaker 2: a lot of people. It's definitely different than Ken Scott,
Speaker 2: for instance, or or Roy Thomas Baker. So so it
Speaker 2: was it was I really like him. He keeps saying,
Speaker 2: we mark, we have to do something again, and I'm like,
Speaker 2: you never know, Bob, you never it could happen.
Speaker 1: So what was his philosophy of production that was different?
Speaker 2: Well, he understood that, you know, and this was back
Speaker 2: before automation, so he realized that there were problems like
Speaker 2: if you did a synth sound or a guitar sound
Speaker 2: and you record it with just the drums or something,
Speaker 2: or everybody records as you start mixed at netting and
Speaker 2: vocals and backups and all these things, what you want
Speaker 2: that guitar bass to sound like changes And he did this.
Speaker 2: He taught us this way to record, where you put
Speaker 2: your you would record your like a bass or a
Speaker 2: guitar into two different You'd send a line into two
Speaker 2: different rooms, and you'd record it over two different amplifiers
Speaker 2: so that it sounded totally different in both rooms. And
Speaker 2: then you'd have a direct in also, so you could always,
Speaker 2: you know, go back and use the original guitar sound
Speaker 2: to adjust that sound. And he was really empathetic. He
Speaker 2: was a very empathetic producer. I would recommend him for
Speaker 2: anybody that was looking for somebody like that. He was
Speaker 2: very easy to work with and he was always he
Speaker 2: had a good attitude about things.
Speaker 1: He was. He was very optimist and a hotted Tony
Speaker 1: Basil end up recording It's a Different Name and her albums,
Speaker 1: you got a problem. How did that happen?
Speaker 2: She was one of the first people we met when
Speaker 2: we came out to California. Uh. I was kind of
Speaker 2: really interested in all the all the actors, some older films.
Speaker 2: I was. When I got a chance to meet Dean Stockwell,
Speaker 2: it was totally fascinating to me to meet him and
Speaker 2: to think of him as as a little guy, you know,
Speaker 2: as an actor, and seeing him on screen and then
Speaker 2: seeing him in uh blue velvet and stuff, and and
Speaker 2: uh Dennis Hopper and Russ Tamblin people like that. I
Speaker 2: I really enjoyed joined them and they all had different
Speaker 2: personalities and they had all done different films, and you know,
Speaker 2: I liked hanging out with him, and Tony was Dean
Speaker 2: Stockwell's girlfriend at the time, and then somehow her and
Speaker 2: Jerry started kind of they hit it off and and
Speaker 2: she was one of the early fans of Devo out in.
Speaker 1: L A.
Speaker 2: And I think I'm correct that she introduced us to
Speaker 2: Iggy Pop. Well, well, you know what, Iggy Pop knew
Speaker 2: who we were, because we had given David Bowie some uh,
Speaker 2: some demo cassettes when he when he was playing an
Speaker 2: Iggy's band after they did the first time I think
Speaker 2: it was first one was the Idiot, uh and and
Speaker 2: then he went out on tour with him, and so
Speaker 2: he was one of the people that I thought, if
Speaker 2: I was going to have a producer, I'd want it
Speaker 2: to be either Brian Eno or David Bowie. So we
Speaker 2: got those tapes to them to him and Iggy. When
Speaker 2: they went back to Germany to record LUs for Life,
Speaker 2: h Iggy was digging through a suitcase full of demo
Speaker 2: tapes and pulled the Devo one out and they listened
Speaker 2: to it and they all were laughing. They said, this
Speaker 2: isn't a real band and uh. And he says that
Speaker 2: that some of the a couple of days while they
Speaker 2: were recording. They would just start off the day with, uh,
Speaker 2: you know, hunting Tony Sayles and David and Iggy jamming
Speaker 2: on Devo songs before like uncontrollable urgent stuff because and
Speaker 2: and so. Anyhow, so she told Iggy because they were friends,
Speaker 2: I guess through Bowie. Uh she told When Iggy came
Speaker 2: out to stay in l A for a while, she said, Hey,
Speaker 2: Devo's playing this next weekend, you got to come see
Speaker 2: him with me, and so so she she brought uh
Speaker 2: Iggy over to see us, and uh, that's that's kind
Speaker 2: of how that happened.
Speaker 1: Do you care about Devo's legacy or not?
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, you know, I think one of the things
Speaker 2: unique about Devo. You know, I would never say I
Speaker 2: was the singer that ninety percent of the singers that
Speaker 2: sing in bands, you know, at the same time as me.
Speaker 2: I would never say that Jerry could play bass as
Speaker 2: good as ninety percent of the bass player ninety five
Speaker 2: percent of the bass players that were putting out records
Speaker 2: at that time. But I would say that by being
Speaker 2: artists and being conceptualists and thinking about our music from
Speaker 2: a totally different angle than most bands ever, did I
Speaker 2: think I think it gave people. I think it gives
Speaker 2: us reason to be to be remembered, to have a
Speaker 2: legacy to because people can think differently about how and
Speaker 2: why you do a band. I mean, all the bands
Speaker 2: when we were first doing it, it was all sex,
Speaker 2: drugs and rock and roll. Yeah, you know, it was
Speaker 2: like I'm snorting whiskey and drinking cocaine. Think I'm going
Speaker 2: to go in saying, you know, that's what rock and
Speaker 2: roll was when we first got into it, and and
Speaker 2: we would already missed you know, we already missed all
Speaker 2: the artists that were like you know, like even you know,
Speaker 2: like uh one, two three, what are we fighting for?
Speaker 2: You know, even stuff like that was gone after the
Speaker 2: after the government, you know, like shut down all the protests.
Speaker 2: It's like things got really strange after nineteen seventy one,
Speaker 2: and and music pop, you know, rock and roll music
Speaker 2: went two directions that went into like corporate rock. You know,
Speaker 2: it was like bands that were named after countries and
Speaker 2: cities and stuff that, and it was like white guys
Speaker 2: that were massogynistic, took too many drugs, were conspicuous consumers
Speaker 2: and proud of it, you know, and and the other
Speaker 2: the other uh direction, music went at that time was
Speaker 2: was disco and it was like Jerry said, once, I
Speaker 2: thought it was really funny. He said, disco. To me,
Speaker 2: it's kind We loved all the sounds in disco because
Speaker 2: they use these great synth sounds and it was like
Speaker 2: amazing sounds. And he said, yeah, but it's like a
Speaker 2: pretty woman with no brain. That was his take in disco,
Speaker 2: and I thought that was really good. And then then then,
Speaker 2: you know, then the punk things started up, and I
Speaker 2: was really interested in that because it was it was
Speaker 2: rebellion again. But then it was nihilistic and it was
Speaker 2: just you know, they just all fell apart, you know,
Speaker 2: and they all self destructed. And we thought, well, that's
Speaker 2: not what we are. You know. We just really thought
Speaker 2: we weren't any of those three things. And that's that's
Speaker 2: how we hit on on the evolution. You know. There
Speaker 2: was a movie from the fifties called Inherit the Wind,
Speaker 2: and it's the person first place I ever saw the
Speaker 2: word divo, and it was because there was you know,
Speaker 2: it was for the Scopes monkey trial. The movie was
Speaker 2: about it, and and there was like a it turned
Speaker 2: into a carnival outside of the courthouse where you know,
Speaker 2: people were in this little town were like selling whatever
Speaker 2: they could, hawking their wares. And this one guy that
Speaker 2: was like a circus barker, he's going he had a
Speaker 2: he had a chimpanzee smoking a cigarette sitting on a
Speaker 2: on on the table next to him, and behind him
Speaker 2: it said the de Evolution Man. And at one point
Speaker 2: he's like going, e people, do you believe that this
Speaker 2: is your uncle up here? Do you believe you're related to.
Speaker 3: This this guy sitting on the table here, And he's
Speaker 3: like making fun of de evolution. But but like at
Speaker 3: one point there's a shot where the monkey's sitting there
Speaker 3: smoking the cigarette, and on one side of him you
Speaker 3: see the beginning of the evolution and you only see
Speaker 3: Devo and it says Divo and on the other side
Speaker 3: it says man. For about twenty seconds in the film,
Speaker 3: and that's the first place we ever saw the word.
Speaker 3: We love that. We love the idea of the chimpanzee
Speaker 3: being the Devo man.
Speaker 1: Well Mark, we bookended the career of Divo. We'll have
Speaker 1: to do another time about the records and making and
Speaker 1: meeting Eno, but I think we're going to stop here.
Speaker 1: This is very insightful, very stimulating. I want to thank
Speaker 1: you for taking this time with my audience.
Speaker 2: Thanks, Bob. You know I'm kind of inarticulate and a
Speaker 2: lot of you know, to be quite honest with you,
Speaker 2: I'm like, I like think things and I best express
Speaker 2: them through music and art and not words. So I
Speaker 2: hope it wasn't too tortuous for you.
Speaker 1: I don't think that's inaccurate. First of all, a couple
Speaker 1: of questions I asked, I saw you thinking about it.
Speaker 1: A lot of people have been interviewed so many times
Speaker 1: they just have their knee jerk answer. The other thing is,
Speaker 1: I used to have this theory that there were waves
Speaker 1: that came in and in the fifties and early sixties
Speaker 1: it was a beatnix. The wave would go out and
Speaker 1: certain people would be left on shore. Okay, you still
Speaker 1: have the values of the seventies. What I mean by
Speaker 1: that is the perspective which started in the sixties, and
Speaker 1: you're true to that when almost I can't think of
Speaker 1: anybody else who is so A that's stimulating, and B
Speaker 1: it's like, yeah, you got the ideas out. Once you
Speaker 1: get into your groove and you're starting, I can listen forever.
Speaker 1: I'm only cutting it off for now, I say, you know,
Speaker 1: as I say, there's a lot of other questions I
Speaker 1: had if you and me were like, these are some
Speaker 1: of these just basic? Well what really something would really
Speaker 1: happen with the draft. I'm sure ultimately if you went
Speaker 1: for a physically ye had the eye thing whatever. But
Speaker 1: you know, digression is a spice of life, and your
Speaker 1: digressions were great, So I don't think you were being
Speaker 1: fake self deprecating and you really think you're not that articulate,
Speaker 1: But once you find your groove, it's pretty good and
Speaker 1: it's a lot more meaningful and rich than it is
Speaker 1: from the average person.
Speaker 2: Well, maybe we'll get a chance to talk about beating
Speaker 2: next sometime. I'm I think DEVO has a strong relationship there.
Speaker 2: But that's another story.
Speaker 1: That opens the door to like twenty five minutes right there,
Speaker 1: beating it, culture, et cetera. But we're going to end
Speaker 1: it here for today till next time. This is Bob
Speaker 1: left six