Devo's Freedom of Choice (33 1/3) - Evie Nagy

Partial Excerpts (antilibrary)

Foreword by Fred Armisen

To me, the front cover of Freedom of Choice is an image in repeated motion. It moves, naturally, to the songs inside (on) the album. I don’t know how they designed the energy domes, but I picture them being worn by the band live, moving in the way that they do. You know how I mean that. Kind of instructional/presentational, but with conviction.

Introduction

After the critical and commercial failure of Duty Now for the Future as compared to the 1978 debut Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!, the band had one more chance to impart what co-founder Mark Mothersbaugh calls Devo’s “pro-information, anti-stupidity” agenda to the masses. “The initial, pure ‘art punk’ energy and kind of theatrical ‘hatchet-pop’ performance art that certainly put us on the map and got everyone to pay attention, had clearly run its course,” says Jerry. “We just had to concentrate on what we wanted to do musically, and Devo had always proceeded from ideas. So this was a make or break idea, and the idea was that we’d consider ourselves the ‘white robot James Brown.’”

before Devo’s internal and external conflicts propelled a rapid artistic and commercial decline in the mid–1980s, Freedom of Choice made them curious, insurgent superstars. Their only platinum album represented the best of their unreplicable code: dead-serious tricksters, embracing conformity in order to destroy it with bullet-proof pop sensibility.

Girl U Want

Where did these guys come from?” would be an understandable reaction to first seeing Devo’s alien robot act, but there’s never been any doubt about where they really came from. Postwar Akron, Ohio, was a rubbermaking hub, struggling, working class, and not generally teeming with subversive artistic philosophies

When Creem writer Richard Riegel asked Jerry Casale in 1979 what Akron was into if not Devo, Jerry answered, “Oh, vans. That’s it, vans and quaaludes.”

Jerry says that Devo came together not because they were alienated, but because “we felt more like aliens; that’s how we felt. Like aliens. We just couldn’t believe the things we would see and the things that would happen to us, from teachers and parents, to our peer group and the media

You had the same disgust over stupidity in exactly the same way. What you would experience is that good ideas didn’t win.

it was also dead serious protest, after the May 4, 1970 shootings at Kent State University, where they were students—Jerry watched in horror as members of the Ohio National Guard killed four unarmed students, including two of his friends, and the idea for Devo as a collective force began to form in earnest. “It was a life-changing event,” says Jerry. “It completely transformed me from a more or less laissez-faire, live-and-let-live hippie to a righteously angered activist, and a person who really, really had it in for illegitimate authority.”

In a 2000 interview, Jerry also explained how seeing a dead student’s exit wound “snapped me—how brute force and power control the planet, control information, control spin. It’s like primates playing king of the heap, whether in business or politically or with weapons.”

For starters, they were a fake band—or at least, the rock band Devo was initially a performance within a much larger performance, becoming a somewhat unintentional focal point after appearing in Devo’s ten-minute film The Truth About De-Evolution that won first prize at the 1977 Ann Arbor Film Festival

In the beginning, we were not thinking of ourselves as a rock and roll band,” says Mark. “We were conceptual artists. We were paying very close attention to art movements, to the Ant Farm, to Andy Warhol’s Factory. To people around the world who had become organizations that solved artistic problems. (scene)

I just remember thinking ‘this is great. Holographic animation has to be right around the corner. I want to make that the art form I work in.’ I remember thinking that Devo was going to make these films that would be full of three-dimensional imaged art that would fill an auditorium. And if there was a band performing, they would just be musicians that we hired that would be Devo.

But hipness didn’t translate into radio play, which was critical to album sales. “We never wrote radio songs,” says Mark. “There was always something about it that programmers could sniff out, that they were like, ‘this is a little bit different. This is weird. Or this is something that’s maybe making fun of us, or something I don’t get.’

many in the media, particularly the British press who spewed a great deal of ink over the Devo conundrum, refused to let themselves fall for what they did in fact perceive as at least partly a cynical joke

While walking a fine line between conventional chromatics and unlistenable anarcho garbage, Devo uses both subtle and blatant means to produce music that both stimulates and satisfies … Maybe they’ll pull it off in the long run if they don’t choke on their own nonsense

We had so many songs that we wanted, that we divided them up back in 1978 when we were recording in Germany with Brian Eno, and decided okay, here’s the first record, and here’s the second. The first record was our first record, just as we laid it out. When it came time to do the second, suddenly that cohesion among the band about ‘this is going to be our second record’ broke down, because Mark Mothersbaugh wanted to throw away half the stuff and just start over

but great songs were dumped, and things like ‘Swelling Itching Brain’ had to be lived through over and over and over, where it took an inordinate amount of time in the studio to record it over and over and over

The sound of the album disgusted me. The straw that broke the camel’s back was the way he recorded ‘Smart Patrol.’ I hated it; it destroyed the song; it, like, neutered it. It was like somebody de-balled it; it was a eunuch. It was a mistake; Devo and Ken Scott were not a good fit.

Guitarist “Bob 1” Mothersbaugh agrees, at least about the producer. “Who was that guy, Ken Scott? He would make us leave when he was going to do a mix. We did not like that. We’d come in and make changes afterwards. I don’t know how it ended up that the drums were so loud on that album. They were really loud.”

This is a good point to acknowledge an important theme in the four-decade story of Devo: that Mark Mothersbaugh’s creative drive has regularly pulled him away from the band—primarily to writing music for movies and television, but also to visual art and other projects—and that Jerry, who sees Devo as his life’s most important work but impossible without his collaborator, is deeply disappointed by this. They both talk openly about this tension

It’s Not Right

When tensions eased post-Duty Now and Devo started talking about what to do for their crucial third album, the Midwestern white boys kept coming back to R&B. “Bob Mothersbaugh and I had listened consistently to R&B growing up,” says Jerry. “We loved a lot of Motown and early roots music. And we loved Prince, and Stevie Wonder.”

They agreed that Jerry would ditch the bass guitar for the Moog, and that they would write songs inflected with Devo robotic R&B as a concept. “That got everyone excited,” says Jerry. “There was a whole idea to it, that this would be an incessant, dance-oriented energy, but with Devo messages in the lyrics.” In other words, using recombo DNA, as Devo would call genetic hybridization, to put a white alien robot’s head on Charlie Wilson’s body.

Planet Earth

Planet Earth” comes in like a party song, all synth and drums and imagined laser lighting. The arrival of rapid guitars kicks it up even further, building chase-scene anticipation. Jerry’s first line, “I heard a girl in a dress say her face was a mess,” conjures Bowie’s “Rebel Rebel,” and we assume we’re in for hard-playin’ bands and hot tramps. And then the chorus comes in over a wistful, four-note keyboard chime: “On planet Earth, I’ll probably stay. On planet Earth, it’s a place to live your life.”

On May 18, 2010, Devo, Inc. held a live streaming press conference to announce the results of its months-long “Song Study,” an online survey to rank the public’s preference of sixteen previewed tracks. “As COO of Devo, Inc.,” said a grey-suited executive named Greg Scholl, “it is an honor and a privilege to share this special moment with all of you.”

The marketing campaign around Something For Everybody—and even the process of creating it—took the wry insight and mainstream commercial success of Freedom of Choice to its most parodical corporate extreme.

Working with ad agency Mother, Devo tested and focus-grouped everything about the album, from the track list to the imagery to updated energy domes, which Devo turned blue because the color got the most votes in an online survey

now that the world is devolved, let’s just embrace it. Their brief to us was, ‘How do we appeal to as many people as possible?,’ and our instinct was, ‘Let’s just test everything, as you would any other product entering the marketplace

Devo was now “the house band on the Titanic”—if de-evolution is here and real, there’s no reason not to devolve in all earnest

Perhaps the most on-the-nose element of the release was the fact that twenty-six years after their acrimonious split with the label, Devo re-signed with Warner Brothers for the comeback. Besides the fact that the executives were all new, the label’s incentive for the reunion was not hard to figure out; they owned six albums’ worth of Devo catalog that could get a boost from renewed public interest

This sense of the label system’s desperation, and Warners’ agreement to Devo’s unorthodox approach, is part of what finally convinced Mark to sign on, after years of refusing to work with a record label ever again

Ad agencies, their agenda is getting people interested in things they might miss. A typical ad agency has to go out and sell one car out of 50 that are coming out that season, and they have to succeed. If you fail, you’re fired and no one else will hire you. Record companies have this whole other trajectory. They release like 200 albums, and they’re shooting all this stuff out and seeing what sticks, and if a big company like Universal or Warner gets one out of a hundred bands successful, they’ll high five each other. For us, we said, this is our only album. So we thought, what could we do to stack the deck in our favor?”2

Even more experimental for Devo, but par for the course in commercial modern pop, was the decision to let not just one external producer, but half a dozen into the studio

release. “Now, we realize, people do have a better idea of what we were talking about—they have references now. And there’s a lot Devo stands to benefit from the added brainpower of people who are better sound mixers than us.”3 And the results, full of bounce and crunch and a rekindling of the guitar-synth balance that had defined Freedom of Choice, ranked with some of Devo’s best work in the minds of many. In The Times, Stephen Dalton called Something For Everybody “classic Devo: sarcastic, neurotic, ironic lyrics, wrapped in shiny-happy sugar-rush synth-pop and sci-fi imagery,” that “fizzes with misinformation and mischief.”

Pre-album performances included both the hugely popular Coachella festival in Indio, CA, and at the opening ceremonies of the Vancouver Winter Olympics. The band appeared on the coveted Colbert Report, reaching an ideal new audience of young, satire-savvy spuds. Mark and Jerry both spoke publicly about using the new profile to reinvigorate Devo’s multimedia mission to do television and stage shows, and, as Mark said, reimagine the Devo message in “mediums that haven’t even been invented yet.”8 The people seemed to be ready to embrace their de-evolution

But ultimately, the masses didn’t put their money where their mutations were. The radio play never really materialized, and while Something For Everybody peaked at No. 30 on the Billboard 200

According to McClure, “the way Warners had written the deal made it impossible for anybody to make any money, including management, and they wanted to hold the reins on it. It was a sizable deal, and it was getting a lot of attention, but the grief-to-earnings ratio went completely upside down. Devo were suffering on the road, suffering to the point where every time they turned around and wanted to do something with the label, there was friction

Mark calls Freedom of Choice “the pinnacle” of Devo’s creative cooperation, “but also the beginning of the end.” Devo’s real unification, he says, “didn’t happen before that album, and then it wasn’t really there anymore after that album. But you know what? We did pretty good.