Report: DEVO Comes Alive! (In S.F.)

The spudboys from O - HI - O recreate their classic debut LP - politically incorrect lyrics ‘n' all - last Friday (Nov. 6).

By Jud Cost

The recently renamed Regency Ballroom at the corner of Sutter and Van Ness - about a stone's throw from storied old San Francisco hippie venue the Avalon - was jammed to the rafters tonight with an all-ages demographic, abuzz over the reappearance of the Ohio spudboys, DEVO. There were tattered, 30-year-old DEVO t-shirts stretched over some patrons and flower-pot hats on others. One enthusiastic young guy, wearing a pork pie chapeau with glow-in-the-dark plastic ribbon spelling out the band's name, took a flying header trying to climb over an aluminum barricade. I never did see him get up; he might still be lying there.

As recent college students from Kent State and fresh out of Akron ("What's round on the end and "HI" in the middle? O-HI-O!"), DEVO first played the eye of San Fran's punk hurricane, the Mabuhay Gardens, in 1977 before they'd released their first LP on Warner Bros. A hardy crowd of about 60 were treated that night to a short, band-produced 1974 film called The Truth About De-evolution before the inventors of robot-rock took the stage. With their synchronized, herky-jerky movements, hazmat-style uniforms and mechanical vocals, DEVO left a trail of popcorn in the woods that night for such current practitioners of android-inspired indie-rock as Grandaddy, Radiohead and Mercury Rev to follow, decades later.

Oddly enough, George Hunter, the man behind the concept of the Charlatans, the Edwardian-clad, S.F.-based rock combo who trailblazed the hippie revolution in 1965, once told me of his original idea to dress the band like robots playing angular robot music. That probably would never have flown in the Haight-Ashbury during the Summer of Love, but DEVO took it to the bank 11 years later at the height of the punk revolution.

The blueprint tonight called for DEVO to play their entire debut longplayer, Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are DEVO!, something not to be missed. (The album was recently reissued by Warner Bros. in expanded/remastered form.) It was that rare occasion where a band now in its fifties doesn't lose much by being middle-aged. Graying hair and thickened middles only added to the suburbia-gone-insane original game plan. Mark Mothersbaugh peered briefly out at the already-gyrating mob through coke-bottle spectacles before leading his platoon, all decked out in banana-slug yellow jumpsuits, into an assault on the album's opener, "Uncontrollable Urge." Before the set was 15 minutes old, Mothersbaugh had ripped the sleeves off the rest of the band that included original members Bob Mothersbaugh and Gerald and Bob Casale, still squaring off their stage turns like it was Nazi boot camp. 

Eventually, the boys stripped off the sweaty jumpsuits, tossed them into the sea of faces, and lit a magnesium fire under the Rolling Stones' "Satisfaction," whose sprung rhythm was stretched like an industrial-strength rubber band with jaw-busting lyrics like: "And I try and I try/And I try try try try try try try/I can't get me no/Satisfaction." 

"Jocko Homo" is the one everyone's been waiting for: "They tell us that we lost our tails/Evolving up from little snails/I say it's all just wind and sails/Are we not men?/We are DEVO/Are we not pins?/We are DEVO!" The pinhead reference, of course, is just the tip of the politically incorrect iceberg. The original lyrics to the very rocking "Mongoloid," easily DEVO's best song, are diluted not a whit for the Obama generation. "Mongoloid, he was a mongoloid, happier than you and me/Mongoloid he was a mongoloid, one chromosome too many/And he wore a hat and he had a job and he brought home the bacon so that no one knew/He was a Mongoloid, he was a Mongoloid/And no one even cared." 

Complaining about tactless passages depicting the genetically challenged in these songs from almost 35 years ago would seem about as pointless now as sanitizing the insensitive racial terminology used by Mark Twain 125 years ago. The boys' own lyrics supply the answer to the conundrum: "Teachers and critics all dance the poot." After all, in the Old Testament according to DEVO, "God made man but the monkey supplied the rules."

[Photo of DEVO in Dallas 2006 by Michael Pilmer, via www.myspace.com/devo]