For a great deal of the world at large, DEVO didn’t exist until they released their hit single “Whip It” in 1980, and for almost as large a percentage of the population, that one song remained their solo knowledge of the legendary new wave band. As it happens, however, DEVO was actually formed in Akron, Ohio way back in 1973, and aside from a five-year hiatus in the ‘90s, they’ve remained together as a musical collective, playing shows and making music when the spirit moves them.
If the preceding paragraph has served to spark your memory and has suddenly made you curious about DEVO’s history, including not only their music but also their philosophy of “De-Evolution,” Netflix is here to serve: the streaming service is now home to a new documentary about the band that’s called – what else? – DEVO. Directed by Chris Smith, the film takes viewers through the band’s highs, lows, and everything in between, and although the band let Smith hold the reins, they’re proud of the work he’s done and, indeed, frontman Mark Mothersbaugh spoke with Decider about the documentary.
In addition, Mothersbaugh is – as you may already be aware – a prolific film and television composer, having penned music for everything from Rugrats to Thor: Ragnarok, and in addition to discussing some notable moments of that side of his career, he also tackled a few topics that didn’t come up in the documentary, including DEVO’s appearances on Square Pegs and Fridays, while also revealing how DEVO’s appearance in Neil Young’s film Human Highway led to a moment where Mothersbaugh accidentally provided Young with the title for his tenth album.
DECIDER: It’s a pleasure to talk to you, but I’d already watched the documentary before I knew I was going to be talking to you, so…I’m a fan.
MARK MOTHERSBAUGH: So what’d you think?
I thought it was great. I loved it.
Oh, good!
What did you think of it?
Well, you know, for me it was a combination of things. First was relief just that, finally, it’s done! There was a long time that transpired. And part of it was because VICE was collapsing at the same time, and they were the producers, so we had to sort through the pieces. Not me or the band, but my wife, she ended up becoming a producer on it, because she did so much work to go out and get licenses and all the boring stuff that nobody wants to do. But I liked it, just because I feel like at least it gives you the basic information of why we were DEVO. And that was what was important.
I know you were looking at releasing some archival material, and then that turned into a proper documentary, but what was the process of actually getting it made? Were you friends with Chris [Smith], or were you looking for other documentarians and he just best fit the bill?
It’s kind of silly in some ways, but what started the whole thing wasn’t an interest in doing a documentary so much as there was this old archival footage. One of the people that I was working with when we first started DEVO was a guy who ended up being our engineer for live shows for at least three of the tours, and then he produced a lot of more esoteric art bands in the California region. But he had gotten ahold of a very early video machine, so we were lucky to have that in the early ’70s for our early shows. The first time we played, we called ourselves Sextet Devo. And the second time was Gerry, me, and my two brothers in the band, and both those shows were captured. So we were just going to archive that, but in the process, somebody said, “Well, it doesn’t look good on a big screen.” We should shoot some people talking to describe it, because nobody wants to watch two hours of live black and white, greyish video footage of the band shot on a single camera. So it devolved into a documentary.
Appropriately enough.
Yeah! But that was a long time ago, and…I’ve worked with a lot of documentarians. I’ve scored close to a hundred films, not even counting all of the TV shows I’ve worked on, so I’ve worked with, like, Morgan Neville and guys like that. And I’d worked with Chris. I think the first thing we did was Tiger King on Netflix. It was a crazy story that every week got even weirder. [Laughs.] So that’s how we met, and he had been in a DEVO cover band in college, and…I don’t know, we thought, “Well, let’s go with Chris!” And there are things that both Gerry and I think, “Oh, I wish that would’ve gotten in…” But mostly I’m just relieved that it happened and that the information is intact.
I was actually going to ask if you worked hand in hand with him as far as what footage made it in and what didn’t.
No, he kept us at arm’s length. Which was better, because otherwise we would’ve been all over him, ruining his documentary’s form. [Laughs.] The reality is, documentaries are the documentarian’s project. Everybody would see it different. It’s a little bit Rashomon, y’know? In the sense that Gerry would’ve done a different documentary than he did, I would’ve done a different one, Bob Mothersbaugh would’ve done a different one than all of us… So we get to see his version, and I like it. He’s an outside observer who just took all of what he thought were the most important elements and distilled them down.
Was there any particular element that he included that you were surprised he put in there?
Uh… I think there was more time spent on Kent State than I would’ve put in, personally. Because I think you could just tell the information. But I think he wanted to make a point. Because I started thinking about it, and I think it was that, y’know, the one review I saw that was negative towards the film was where somebody said, “Well, they weren’t really protesters. They weren’t, like, the Clash or the Sex Pistols. They weren’t really protesters.” And I was, like, “Well, then you didn’t really watch the film, because we were protesters in the ’70s, and we saw kids get shot and killed just for thinking that America shouldn’t be in Vietnam.” And it made us feel like protesting was not the way to change people’s thoughts and change people’s attitudes or to influence them. We thought that maybe there had to be something else. And it talks about all of that in the film. So I think that, unfortunately for that one reviewer, everybody else liked it. [Laughs.] Although I’m waiting to hear what you have to say…
Well, I was particularly glad that there was some inclusion of DEVO’s collaboration with Neil Young (Human Highway) in there.
Oh, me, too! I’ll be totally honest with you: at the time, we were kind of, like, “Oh, Neil Young… Grandpa Granola…” We’re thinking of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, and Laurel Canyon, and hippies and everything. But when he made the movie, I have to say that you really saw what an artist he was, in ways more than just the music. Because his filmmaking techniques and ideas came more from, like, Robert Downey, Sr. and other avant-garde, sort of dada filmmaking that I really appreciated. I respected him for that. And it made me see him as bigger than I had thought of him before. Because I just thought, “Oh, the people in my town that are still smoking pot and driving around in vans, they like Neil Young, and Crosby, Stills and Nash, and I’m looking for something different.” I wanted a new music for the ’70s. I was looking for something new, now that rock and roll was over. [Laughs.]
Years ago, I interviewed Dean Stockwell, and he said that he was the one that helped get you involved in the film.
That’s absolutely correct. Yeah, when we came out to California… Well, Dean was, of course, really connected to Neil Young, but there was an interesting contingency of people that I was fascinated with because I loved old movies. So I met Dean Stockwell and Dennis Hopper and Russ Tamblyn and all these people. Even Toni Basil, who’d been a dancer in, like, Viva Las Vegas or something like that. Because when I came out to California, I remember going to Hollywood and Vine and going, “This is Hollywood and Vine?! It doesn’t look anything like what I’d seen in the movies! Everything interesting has been torn down, and now it’s just, like, this trashy tourist t-shirt stop.” And some woman walked up to me, and she goes, “Hey, do you wanna buy my glasses?” And I’m, like, “What?” [Laughs.] And I obviously didn’t have any money. I was just standing there in a crumpled t-shirt and a pair of jeans. And I thought, “Well, this place is seedy.” But then when you met the people who’d worked in films, that had a resonance to it.
So, yeah, Dean… Actually, before we worked with Neil, I scored an Ionesco one-man play that Dean directed and Russ Tamblyn acted in. I’d only scored DEVO things before that. Our films, there’s a lot of interstitial music, even in our very first films. I’d done all that. But he gave that [play’s] music to Neil, and that became about half of the music for Human Highway. So that’s what got me started with an interest in scoring.
I had to go back to check the interview to refresh my memory, but Dean said that his favorite moment in Human Highway was Booji Boy singing “Hey, Hey, My, My” in his crib.
Oh, yeah! That was kind of wild! When I went back and looked at the film, Neil really impressed me. And he crunched my playpen in that scene. If you remember, he fell on top of my playpen and was smashing his guitar against it while Booji Boy was sitting there in diapers. Well, not really diapers. We had Gurkhas on that were, like, these cheap things you could buy at an Army Navy surplus store, and they just looked odd, so we wore them. But I remember that day, when we were taking those off and putting our clothes back on, he saw my underpants.
Part of the way we paid for the first DEVO film was that Gerry and I started a graphic design company to make $3K to pay for the 16mm film and hiring people and renting the gear and all that stuff. And one of the jobs we had was, we came up with a slogan for an undercoating for a rustoleum company that sprayed underneath cars so that they didn’t deteriorate from all of the salt and snow back in Ohio. They’d put salt on the highways to melt the snow so you could still drive. So we came up with “Rust Never Sleeps.” And I bought just enough t-shirts so that we could make the $3K so we could start our film and we could shut down the graphic design company, but I needed to do some sample experiments with the silk screening squeegee, because I was printing them myself. So I’d use towels, and I had one or two of my own t-shirts, and I even printed it on the seat of my pants. And because I was wearing that underwear that day, he saw that, and about two weeks later he called me up and said, “Hey, can I use that for the title of my next movie?” And I was, like, “It’s all yours!” [Laughs.]
That’s amazing. I didn’t know that story.
Yeah! Ironically, somebody was over at my warehouse where I keep all the archival material, and they were going through some things, and…I’m in a studio now where I write music every day and have for the last 35 years, and they brought the underpants back and said, “Look at this!” [Laughs.] I was, like, “That’s the same pair!”
One key moment in DEVO’s history for me that wasn’t in the documentary: what do you remember about the experience of being on Square Pegs?
I remember it was really early in the morning, and we had to fly to Minneapolis immediately after the show and play that night. So that’s what I remember: a very, very long day. [Laughs.] But it was kind of interesting. I don’t think I’d ever been on a TV set before then. Or had I? What year would that be?
’82, I think?
Oh, maybe I hadn’t, then! Because it wasn’t until Pee-Wee’s Playhouse that I started scoring for TV and film and then hanging out on some of the sets sometimes. So, yeah, that probably was our first set. So that was interesting.
And I was so surprised that the doc covered your appearance on Saturday Night Live but never touched on Fridays.
Oh, I know! I liked the Fridays appearances, too. I don’t know if you saw them or not…
Oh, absolutely.
Yeah, one of them, we had the treadmills. So we were dancing on treadmills and playing our synths and guitars, and…I thought the treadmills were really cool. You could stand still, and they could take you all the way back into the proscenium facade that we were standing in front of with our gear. I liked Fridays! It was the afterthought to Saturday Night Live. Saturday Night Live was the granddaddy, the gorilla of late-night TV that really changed everything when it came out.
Do you remember how you got involved with Doctor Detroit?
How did we get involved… Probably Dan Aykroyd. He came over the studio, and he asked us if we’d be up for doing a song for it, and…that was it, I think. Did we do anything besides the song? I don’t think I scored it…
No, I think it was the song. And the video for the song, obviously.
Yeah, that’s right. Lalo Schifrin did the music for it! So, yeah, that was that. We didn’t even direct the video. But it gave me an excuse to pull my inflatable rubber outfit out. Since we were from Akron, Ohio, which still at the time had “The Rubber Capitol of the World” as a theme… This was before all the rubber companies moved to Malaysia and Vietnam and places like that, because they were, like, “Why hire people in Akron for $11 an hour when you can get people in Vietnam to work for $11 a month?” But I’d always paid attention to rubber things – like rubber outfits – and I found this odd rubber outfit online and inflated it and wore it during that video.
You mentioned Pee-Wee’s Playhouse. Between that and all of the various animated series, has working on kids programming helped to keep you young over the years?
I think so. I think there was a part of me that always kind of was connected to that, because I couldn’t see when I was four. I was legally blind. I was one of five kids, and nobody paid attention. And somehow I managed to walk to school for two years before somebody tested me and found out that I wasn’t just a smartass and that I really was blind! So I got a pair of glasses and my whole world changed! [Laughs.] But I think those years that I stumbled around blind, I think that really shaped the way I make music and the way I think about art. So it just felt natural when Paul Reubens called me up and said, “Hey, you want to score my TV series?”
I’d been on this circuit where you write twelve songs, you record ’em, you come out, you make a video, you put together a live concert to go with it and you go on tour, and a year later you start the process all over again. And after about six or eight of those, it was just kind of, like, “Okay…” But when I started doing Pee-Wee’s Playhouse, they’d send me a tape on Monday, I’d write 12 songs by Tuesday, on Wednesday I’d record it, and because the internet was much different than it is now, I’d have to take a tape and put it on a plane with a courier and send it to New York. He’d rush it to the studio, and on Friday they’d cut it into the show, Saturday we’d watch it on TV, and on Monday they’d sent me another episode. So I was recording an album’s worth of music a week. And I was, like, “Sign me up for this job!” I just fell in love with composing for film and TV. It became a very exciting career change.
I asked Cyndi Lauper about it, but I can’t remember: was it you or Paul who asked her to contribute to the theme song?
Paul did. He knew her. And she sounded great! She did a very good Betty Boop impression.
Do you have a favorite underrated score that you’ve done over the years, be it for TV or film?
Probably… [Pauses.] Do you know Mike White, the guy who does The White Lotus? I did a film for him (Brad’s Status), but before that I did a TV series called Enlightened, with Laura Dern, and that music is the hold music at my office. Every day or so, somebody goes, “What’s that music? I love that music!” It just never got any attention anywhere. But I liked working with him. He was really easy to work with, and we thought along the same lines.
[FYI, the biggest reason the music never got any attention was that it was never officially released!]
I wasn’t sure if your choice might be Our Flag Means Death.
Oh, yeah! [Laughs.] Taika [Waititi] is a character. I’ve done a number of series with him, but I loved that series because it’s pretty okay for the first three or four episodes, and then it gets really super funny. It takes a great turn. And then every episode is so funny after that. Yeah, I loved that show!
(Writer’s note: At this point in the conversation, I asked Mothersbaugh a question about a Tim Burton score that – as it turns out – he didn’t actually do. But no harm, no foul, because it still led Mothersbaugh to reveal a connection to a Tim Burton film that he almost had…)
Sorry about that. Someone asked me to ask you about it, and I neglected to fact-check it beforehand.
Well, it wouldn’t surprise me if I’d forgotten the titles of a few of these things. [Laughs.] Because sometimes titles change, you know? A lot of times what studios do is, your show is called one thing up until right until it’s about to come out, and then they change it. And that way it throws people off who were trolling and wanted to let secrets out ahead ofd time. But I have to say, Tim Burton asked me about scoring Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, and I was going to be on tour exactly when he wanted me to write it. So I said, “No, I don’t think I’m gonna be able to do it.” And Danny [Elfman] was such a perfect fit. I mean, Danny had already done Forbidden Zone with his brother, and that film… I love that film, and I love Danny’s music in it. And I thought he did such a great job on Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure. He’s a great composer. I like Danny.
Speaking of great composers, do you still have Raymond Scott’s Electronium?
Yes, I do! You know, I’ve worked with a couple of different engineers and…it was a work in progress, I have to tell you. I met Raymond Scott about six months before he passed away, and he had already had about seven strokes. A friend of mine was a writer for Mix Magazine, and he said, “I’m going to Raymond Scott’s place to interview him. Do you want to come along?” And I go, “He’s alive?” [Laughs.] I didn’t even know he was alive, because his most famous stuff was in the ’30s, and this was in the ’90s! But he wrote all this music that later became Looney Tunes music (thanks to Carl Stalling adapting it). Because oddly enough, back before 1954, I think it was, cartoon music wasn’t considered worthy of a copyright. So anybody could just have it. Nobody cared about it. They didn’t pay you, other than the fee you got for writing and recording it. There was no back end to any of it.
So I went over to his house, and I saw that he had a guest house in the back that was totally disheveled. The ceiling was falling in and needed repair, the windows were open and dirt was coming in, and it was blowing on the Electronium, and it was covered in soot. And there were stacks of acetates. Not vinyl, but acetates. He had a radio show in the ’40s and ’50s where his band had singers come in every week, and these discs said, like, “The Raymond Scott Band with Dean Martin,” “The Raymond Scott Band with Frank Sinatra,” “The Raymond Scott Band with Ella Fitzgerald.” There was a stack of these discs, and there were some on the floor… It was a mess! And there was sheet music that was kicked over, a stack of 11″ x 17″ sheet music for orchestras that had tipped over and was all across the floor, and nobody had cleaned it up. And there was some guy – a gardener or somebody – who was helping his wife to get the guest house back in shape. She was going to clean it up and rent it out, and she was already thinking about doing this before he passed away.
And I said, “Hey, what are all those acetates about?” And this guy said, “Hey, you wanna hear one?” And he grabbed an acetate…and as he’s walking across the room, he steps on another one and breaks it. And they’re one-of-a-kind recordings! Each is the only recording of a moment in time that was on the radio. He had the wherewithal and the technical expertise to save that. And I said, “You just broke one!” And he said, “There’s hundreds of ’em!” And he started laughing as he put one on the turntable. So we went home that day, and Mr. Bonzai (David Goggin) – who was the writer – and I, we contacted Hal Wilner, who had already been rifling through all of Raymond Scott’s stuff, looking for things that he could make money off of. And I was, like, “No, this stuff just has to be preserved! This is this guy’s intellectual archives here, and nobody cares!”
So we did get it all archived at the University of Missouri, because they specialize in archiving composers, but they didn’t want the Electronium, because to ship it there… I mean, the thing weighs so much, it feels like you’re lifting two refrigerators at once! So they didn’t want it there, and [his wife] put it in the trash, so I gave her some money and said, “Let me just take it and hold onto it for you, because I have a warehouse that we can store it in.” So I ended up with it.
But it was a work in progress that he kept changing through the years. The original cabinet is still intact. It looks like a telephone operator’s work station. But he had changed over from tubes. He’d started adding transistors into part of it. And although there were, like, two milk cartons that were full of handwritten notes that went along with it, the two people that looked at it, they both failed at trying to restore it.
The closest we came to it is, a friend of mine, Yuri Suzuki, he lives in England now, he’s an artist / musician / inventor, and he came up with a fully digital version of the Electronium. He recreated all of the switches and things. So it kind of sounds like the Electronium did. I’m sure it does. It’s, like, if you listen to Soothing Sounds for Baby or those albums, it does sound like you could recreate that music with this version of the instrument. And it looks kind of like it, because he uses three monitor screens that are the way the cabinet was built. So we’re going to do something…probably next year, because this year is so full of stuff going on. But we’re probably going to do something with that, and with the original Electronium, putting them together. I have an art gallery in Chinatown in L.A., and I do kind of more esoteric stuff. Like, the show we just took down was Tomata du Plenty’s artwork. He was the lead singer of the Screamers back in the ’70s, which to me was… I thought they were the most interesting of the punk / new wave art bands of that era from L.A. I thought they were the best band. And that show just finished, and…I just do that kind of stuff. It’s just kind of a fun place, an eccentric gallery, that I work out of. But we’ll do something with the Electronium there, I’m sure.
I know I have to wrap up, so as a last question, do you have a favorite music documentary?
God, I just saw a couple of good ones. I liked some of the Led Zeppelin documentary (Becoming Led Zeppelin), because I didn’t know their back story. I didn’t know [Jimmy Page] sounded like that live, and that was killer for me to see him play stuff off the first two albums. I like the first two albums, because his production was so revolutionary, but his guitar playing… It sounded just like the album! I was really impressed with that. And, you know, I loved watching Paul McCartney fiddle around with “The Long and Winding Road” (in Beatles: Get Back), where he’s just starting to work on it. I’m, like, “How did they let people with cameras in there when he was doing that? How brave is that, to have that in a documentary?” I couldn’t watch the whole thing, because it was too long and there was too much stuff. [Laughs.] But I loved that bit that I saw!
Will Harris (@NonStopPop) has a longstanding history of doing long-form interviews with random pop culture figures for the A.V. Club, Vulture, and a variety of other outlets, including Variety. He also collaborated on Surely You Can’t Be Serious: The True Story of Airplane!, a book with David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker. (And don’t call him Shirley.)