an oral history (interview) of Mark Mothersbaugh. transcript

Excerpts

what college did you go to? Mothersbaugh: Kent State University in neighboring Kent, Ohio.

famous for the Kent State-- Mothersbaugh: May 4th shootings

we were questioning everything that we were seeing going on around us.

this summer of revolution in the U.S. And there were shootings at number of campuses. And there were riots at a number of campuses. But in American fashion, when it got too real for everybody, they all kind of put their heads in the sand. And everybody went to sleep. And there were no Bob Dylans in 1971. What-- instead, what you got was you got disco, and you got basically corporate rock.

I had joined SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) a few days-- a few weeks before that. They had put out a pamphlet that said, “Watch us napalm a dog on the student campus--the student union.” And I thought, “Wow, I’ve got to go see that. That can’t really be true.” And I went. And they had a dog in an area. And they had a box with their napalm. And they talked about the reason they were doing it was so that people could see what napalm did to a living organism. And then they described what we were going to see. And that was like the napalm would touch the dog. But it wouldn’t go out. It would keep burning until it burned through the flesh into the internal organs. And everybody was kind of shocked. And they said, “Who’s going to stop us?” And everybody said, “I am.” And it was a very, very successful rally because they said, “Well, if you feel that way about this dog, how about all the people that our country is napalming in your name every day over in Vietnam?” And so, I signed up. And within a couple weeks, things escalated to the point of the shootings. They shut down the campus. It was May 4th

we were trying to determine what it was that we had just seen happen and what was going on in our world with the Vietnam War, shootings at our school, killings at our school, and decided that what we were observing was not evolution but rather de-evolution.

did you see your-- sort of your early Devo work as being protest music?

I thought the music sounded like aggressive calliope music but not that interesting

So, as an art student at that time, how did you see the influence of your work in-- your art studio work and such, on your music and vice versa?

Well, they came from the same place

it’s like the idea that the materials and the techniques were second to the idea, to follow the idea, and you could use whatever materials and techniques you wanted. I embraced that. And I loved printmaking, but I also loved making hydrogen bomb sounds on my computer-- on my synthesizer.

we always had a healthy interest in technology. We loved new technology when we saw things. But we were also-- we were also fairly skeptical.

when my younger brother-- my youngest brother, Jim, was playing-- he was the first drummer in Devo. And he was into electronics pretty heavy. And he used to take all of our gear and modify it and make it do things it wasn’t supposed to do just because he liked doing it. And then I loved the sound of that. I loved the way we sounded, especially in the very early days. It was really much more radical than once we started playing clubs.

called circuit bending today

I didn’t really like a lot of the synth music that was-- that first came out. Early synth music was like maybe Rick Wakeman or Keith Emerson, who I liked before he had a synth. I liked him when he was in The Nice. And he was doing everything he could to deconstruct a Hammond B-3 on stage. And it was really interesting. And then he started Emerson, Lake & Palmer. And

the first time that somebody did something that really shocked me and changed me and changed my attitude about synths was Brian Eno. And that was a throwaway song on the first Roxy (Roxy Music) album called “Editions of You.

And I started investigating who this guy Eno was and found out he had something called an EMS synthesizer. It was the AKS Synthi-- Synthi AKS

about that same time, Devo opened up on a Halloween in Cleveland for Sun Ra. And I watched him play it like this. And he just had an electric piano. But I said, “He looked like a baby.” It was amazing. He was just playing like this on the keyboard. And he sang, you know, “Twenty-five years ‘til the twenty-first century, twenty-first century. Twenty-five years,” or something, songs like that. And I was like, “This guy’s pretty great.

- how did the incorporation of synthesizers change your musical approach?

it freed me up, and it made it easier to become really conceptual about it, conceptual about what you’re doing. And you could talk about-- you could think of your songs as ideas. And so, when we-- depending on what song it was, I really thought about what I wanted my sound to be like. And I thought about sound effects and sound design.

I remember Time magazine right around the time of the Kent State riots, about a year or two later, they were-- they talked about a CIA program where they were using sound to try to -- for crowd control. And in the article, they said that there were some studies that had been done that high-pitched frequencies affected your-- you in ways that were similar to orgasmic patterns. And then they-- they said in-- but in the same article, they said that subsonic tones could make you lose control of your bowels. And so, the government was experimenting with using these trucks with giant speakers that could blast out subsonic tones to try and have an effect on you know like a protest march or some sort of a-- something on campus that was getting out of control for them. They would just go, “Okay, let’s make them all poop their pants.” They go . And so, I loved the idea.

said that he was going to add midi to it. And I thought, “Oh, that’s fantastic for all the guys like me that all we can do is make it go and can never get the right pitch. And it’s so hard to play.” I thought, “What a great idea to put midi into the mix.” And so, I called him and said, “Bob, I want to-- I want the very first theremin. So, I’m going to give you the money now. So, I--“ He said, “Okay.” He was happy to take my money. And then I called him about every month or so going, “Are you done yet?” And after about a year, he’s going, “Man,” he says, “I’m sorry. But it’s taking so long. It’s a lot more complicated than I thought.”

he finally said, “I’m going to send you something. And you have to stop calling me if I send this to you.” And he sent me a Memorymoog that was his personal Memorymoog. I still have it. And all of the sounds in it, he programmed. So, I have-- and it also-- the circuitry was a little bit different than the Memorymoogs that came out. And so, it has this kind of really-- it has amazing sound. It has a really great sound. And so, I’ve just made sure it always works and take care of that. And I used it just recently in the “Thor: Ragnarok” movie.

tell me about your relationship with Bob Moog

when Devo came out, we-- early on, he asked us to do ads for the company. And so, we did. We were glad to like

he would sometimes loan me things like the Moog Vocoder, which probably is one of the best-- the early ones-- the early Moog Vocoders were amazing

I’d done five albums. You know you write twelve songs. You rehearse them. You go record them. You go-- you start playing them for a tour. You design costumes and a stage show. You go out on tour. And a year later, you come back, and you write twelve more songs. And then you rehearse them, record them, go play them on a stage, go out on tour, and then you write twelve more songs. Well, a friend of mine in 1984-ish-- I can’t remember the exact year, but I think that’s when it was, said to me, “Mark, would you score my TV show? It’s called ‘Pee-Wee’s Playhouse.’” And I said, “Yeah, I got time right now. We’re kind of locked in a lawsuit.” So, he sent me a tape on a Monday. On Tuesday, I wrote twelve songs worth of music. On Wednesday, I recorded it. On Thursday, I took the tape, a two-inch tape, and sent-- half-inch tape, and I sent it to New York where he was editing his show. Friday, they cut it into the show. Saturday, it was on TV. We watched “Pee-Wee’s Playhouse” in the morning. Monday, he sent me another tape. And Tuesday, I wrote twelve more songs.

I think the first standalone computer that I ever owned was a Fairlight II

And it changed the way I thought about music in a lot of ways. And one of the things it did was it freed me from being in a band to being able to write things for a film or a TV show just pretty much all by myself. I didn’t really require other people to be with me to-- for me to be able to put it all down because you would play right into this computer. And to me, that was so transparent and so powerful. It was like-- you know because you played it in when you had the idea. So, it really became about conceptual art, writing music to me.

once we put out “Whip It,” and they had a platinum record, then all of a sudden it became a thing where we’d be working on writing music for the next album. And you’d look over and there would be somebody from Warner Brothers going, “Hey, you guys need anything? Keep up the good work. Just whatever you do, remember to write another ‘Whip It.’” It was like that kind of a thing. And it kind of became destructive. It became this destructive force. And so, when I started writing for “Pee-Wee’s Playhouse,” my only criterion was Paul said, “Well, if it’s something happy, make it really, really, happy. And if the scene is scary, make it really scary. And if it’s sad, make it really sad.” And he just said, “Make it extreme.”

paneling version of real wood paneling.” You know, it sounded like vinyl wood, or sounded like a plastic brick wall version of a brick wall. It didn’t really sound like a brick wall, but it sounded like the plastic, fake version of it. And so I loved the idea that I could write acoustic... plastic acoustic music

I’m pretty much at a point where about ninety-five percent of the music I write starts on a computer

sometimes I’ll have a musical instrument that actually is the centerpoint, or is the starting point for something, or inspires something else to happen-- you know, either an accordion, or whatever. But it’s-- now it’s, even in my life, it’s gone to a point where I’m designing musical instruments, and I use a computer to control those.

Keyboard magazine was the first place I ever heard about a Fairlight

I got Devo to come up with-- to separate with $35,000, and buy a Fairlight 2X, which meant it-- I think it had MIDI outputs. And... and that was something like-- somewhere around the Shout album is right about when we were doing that.

it was fast, but it also allowed you to create samples

I liked the idea of having the ability to blend acoustic instruments in along with my synth tracks

after working with it for a few months, I realized, “Well, these are even better than acoustic instruments, because they sound like the... the wood-

I wrote a bunch of albums that were-- I called them Musik for Insomniaks, because I just wrote them for me, to-- because I wanted something to listen to in the house, that was kind of like M.C. Escher meets Plastic Acoustic Instruments, or something like that. And so I would let them go on for a while

The last... the last instrument that really made me happy also eliminated my need for a celeste, a dulcitone, a lot of the keyboards that-- there’s a lot of them just sitting in the studio, that are collecting dust, because-- it was Keyscape.

Devo’s credited as having the first to score a video game

people play them maybe a thousand times, you know? It’s not-- or they play them 100 times, you know? They-- and they hear that music 100 times more. So video games-- it’s really important to come up with themes that are great

you’re going to play Level 1 a thousand times; you’re going to play Level 99 maybe only a couple times.

I came up with the theme for the first level, and everybody liked it. And you know that somebody’s going to be playing that level... the first time they play it, they might have to play it like five minutes or seven minutes before they get to the next one, or before they get knocked down and have to start over again. And so they’re playing it for a long period of time. And then, after you’ve done the game for a while, then it’s like, first level, 10 seconds, and you’re on to the next level, 10 seconds-- and you’d keep jumping through it. But it’s like you have to write the music for both the person that’s just starting, and the person who’s been playing it for six months

You have to be able to listen to that music for three minutes without wanting to kill the composer.

MP3-- I have a... there’s a time and a place for it. And the only thing I dislike about MP3s is that it’s crowded out a lot of higher-quality recording. The things I like about it is, it’s democratizing. It allows everybody-- it allows kids, it allows-- when I was a kid, I would look at albums, and I would go, “A recording studio. What is that?

I remember seeing a Todd Rundgren album that had a big effect on me

that struck me was not the music, as much as it was the album cover

And I could tell it was like a snapshot from a-- you know, an instamatic camera,

“That looks... that’s a reel of tape, and those are-- those look like mic cables. And he’s in a house. He’s not at a recording studio; he’s in his house, somewhere.” And I remember that, to me, was such a big thing at the time, and it made me and my brother go out and try to figure out how we could record in our house.

my brother Bob, then, he had a job delivering meat or something during the day, and he came back one day with this four-track tape recorder-- a Teac four-track. And... we were amazed

that was... that was a really big thing in my life, and it made me start writing music much faster.

Kids don’t know it, but it’s like... I watch my kids. They have an iPad. And they were-- a couple years ago, when they were 10 and 12, they were making these videos. They would make a video on an iPad, and they’d be running around the house with their friends, and they’d make up a song to go with it, and they’d make up a storyline. And then they’d set up the shots, and they’d make this film. And they were just having fun, and they knew nothing about filmmaking, other than intuitive stuff. And I was like-- I remember thinking, “You little brats. Do you know how--? It took me a year to make the first Devo film

I avoided it for a long time. And... it took somebody-- it... and I hate to give him credit for this, but it was Henry Rollins who kind of pushed me into it. He introduced me to this woman who was a book publisher, and she came over one day with an Amiga computer, and just handed it to me. And she said, “Let’s do a book together.” And I was like... there’s all sorts of games and stuff. When I go to people’s houses, they’re all using their computers to play games. And I said, “I don’t want to get distracted, because I just want to... I’m a serious artist, and I just want to be tunnel-visioned on my art.” And... but I got this computer, and I wrote a book, and put images into it, that-- because I drew every day. And it was all downhill from there

they can take a phone, and there’s apps where you can sing a drumline into it. You can go boom bop, boom-boom bop. And then... it’ll quanti-- you can quantize it. Then you can pick what kind of sound you wanted. If you wanted an electronic sound, what kind of electronic sound do you like? What kind of acoustic drum kit did you want to have? Do you want to have a death metal kit, or did you want to have a Portland garage band sound, or-- you know, you could choose whatever you want

you can choose some of these instruments. It’s a $1.99 app, you know, we’re talking about, and it’s digital. And then you can do that-- you can add on all sorts of instruments. And if you get something you like, and you sing over top of it, and you mix it, and you really like it, you don’t have to go to a recording studio to do that. You don’t have to go to a record company and say, “Will you please release my record?” You just go to YouTube, and you make a little video of that song; and overnight, the whole world can be part of your art, or can be exposed to your art

when did you first use a computer in your art creation process?

But I draw on paper every day, since 19... early 70s. I was into mail art, is how it started. And I found that a nobody from Akron, Ohio, that nobody’d every heard of, called Mark Mothersbaugh, could take a piece of paper and send it to Robert Indiana, or send it to Jasper Johns, or Irene Dogmatic, or Mr. Peanut, and there was a good chance they would send something back to me. And it was like, to get something in the mail from Robert Indiana was such a... it was amazing.

it used to be all just drawings and collages. And then, about 15, 20 years ago, scanning-- I found out about how you could scan things. And so on these cards, in particular, that I’m showing you, I would take something and draw it, and then I could mutate it in the computer. And then I could print it again, and then I could draw over top of that.

I decided I wanted to build my own instruments.

looked at this film, and I started playing these birdcalls. And then I lost interest in the film, and I just wanted to write music for birdcalls. So I started playing these things, but it was kind of cumbersome and complicated to go back-- after being used to doing things in the computer, to go back to me playing all those things. But I hire players, so I’m thinking, “Okay, so what if I get 40 players to come over and teach each one how to play a different birdcall?” Like, “You’re going to play a duck call, and I want you to make it kind of flaccid-sounding. And I want you to make your owl call sound kind of, you know, energetic and worried.” And that didn’t make sense, either. But when I sampled things, then it just sounded like samples. It sounded like this, like-- it sounded like this....Totally fake. Totally fake-sounding. So... I found this guy who worked at repairing calliopes for amusement parks, and I told him I wanted to take and make... I wanted some way to make a duck call-- blow air through it-- but I wanted to have 50 or 60 different birdcalls altogether, that I could control with air or electricity, or with gears, or whatever, and write music on a keyboard form, but I wanted them to play acoustically. And so he was interested in that, and he helped me build one of my first orchestrions.

those little toys, where you go , or they go, “Moooo”? I’m also building in 18 of those to this. So it’ll have 18 foghorns and 18 cow-mooers

And then one instrument is tubular bells. It’s got about... it’s going to have about 30 or 40 tubular bells built into it, and... I use a lot of organ pipes,

that’s what I’m doing for fun right now, and for-- that’s my passion.

I like putting subliminal messages in films and commercials and TV shows, because it’s so easy to do.

I think my first one I ever did was a Hawaiian Punch commercial, was the first time I ever did this. And underneath a drum solo, I had it go, “Sugar is bad for you.”