BEFORE: I've got some down time this week, the theater's shut down except for a screening of "Minions and Monsters" tonight, but I don't think I have the energy to figure out how that could possibly fit into my chain. There are concerts going on at Barclay's, but I have not been invited back for another concert, I only worked one when they were short-handed. So we went out to the Italian feast in Williamsburg, Brooklyn last night, then came home and took the trash to the curb, it's really the first Friday night we've spent together in at least 6 weeks.
I'm only 20% through with the doc block, but it kind of takes a turn here and gets into the "sketch comedy" phase, there are going to be a number of docs about people who were on SNL or SCTV (one person was on both...) or otherwise involved in comedy. I'll get back to music again near the end, remember that this kind of all came together organically and I didn't impose my will to hyper-organize it by taking it apart and jamming it back together in a different order. I thought, maybe, just maybe, it's already in the best, most inclusive order it can be - so I guess we'll find out if my instincts were right.
Also, remember I kind of jumped the gun and watched a doc back in January, "The Saint of Second Chances" because I wasn't sure if that would fit into the chain anywhere? The only real star in it was Bill Murray - well, if I had held off and had more faith in the system, THIS is really where that film probably would have ended up, with Steve Dahl (infamous disco-hating DJ) as the intro link and yeah, Bill Murray as the outro. Damn, I would have found a spot for it, but I just couldn't see it at the time. I have to stand by my decision, and that would have been the 51st doc, so you know, I probably would have cut something then, so maybe it's for the best.
The band Devo has it's origin story at the infamous Kent State university in OHIO, so that's our simple choice tonight for the fastest-growing segment "Get to Know a State", and it's a state I know all TOO well:
Date admitted to the U.S.: March 1, 1803 (17th state, but apparently this is a bone of contention)
Claim to fame: The heart of Rock and Roll, home of the Hall of Fame (another contested claim),
Prevalent language: German and Irish, from my experience
State Motto: "With God, all things are possible" Except the Indians winning a World Series.
State Flower: Red carnation
State Fruit: Pawpaw (WTF?)
State Fruit: Pawpaw (WTF?)
State Reptile: Black racer snake
State Mammal: White-tailed deer
State Tree: Buckeye
State Beverage: Jolt cola (again, from what I've seen...)
Notable Sports Teams: Cleveland Guardians (formerly the Indians), Cincinnati Reds, Cleveland Browns, Cincinnati Bengals, Cavaliers in the NBA and Blue Jackets in the NHL. So much losing that they're actually all tired of losing...
Fun Fact: Ohio is also called the "Mother of Presidents", with SEVEN having been born there: Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Benjamin Harrison, McKinley, Taft and Harding. This is second only to Virginia, where eight Presidents were born. You just know it's killing them in Ohio that they don't have that record - instead they hold the record for how many ingredients they can put on top of chili.
In case you can't tell, I've spent time in Ohio, my first wife was from Cleveland so between 1989 and 1996 I made a bunch of road trips and spent some holidays there. I remember a lot of bowling, Irish festivals and awkward moments. Anyway, that moves my record up to 9 states visited out of 11.
Dick Clark carries over from "Gloria Gaynor: I Will Survive" via archive footage.
THE PLOT: In 1980, new-wave band Devo scored a hit with "Whip It" and gained mainstream success with their message of societal "de-evolution" formed in response to the 1970 Kent State shootings.
AFTER: It makes sense that this quirky, rebellious band formed in the wake of the Kent State shootings - a couple of art-major grad students could not believe that their own government would send soldiers to invade their college and shoot at U.S. citizens, as a rejection of their Constitutional right to assemble and protest. Throw that on top of Vietnam, Cambodia, a lack of civil rights and you've got an entire generation ready to figure out that the government does NOT have their best interests at heart, and also that war is not healthy for most living things, plus the economy. But what can two people do except make art and/or form a band? Since we're basically in the same situation now - corrupt President, ongoing endless war, a tanking economy and the U.S. National Guard commanded to fire on civilians and quell protests, one has to wonder what types of bands are being formed RIGHT NOW in response to Trump - I guess we'll all find out in a couple years.
But then again, we've got social media now, which is a place people can make their opinions known, and complain until they're blue in the face, at least when they're done eating food in their cars or chugging Everclear or trying to choke down a spoonful of cinnamon. Back in the 1980's we didn't have social media or the internet, so if a new band like Devo hit the scene, there was no resource where you could look up the band member's names, no chat room where people could discuss whether the band was serious or a complete parody of bands, and no place to watch these short-form "videos" that the band was making to promote their album. Yes, Devo was making videos before there was even a channel on TV to play them, or a web-site to let everyone look for them. It's almost like they KNEW something, or then again it's a bit like somebody built cars before there were roads, which would be very stupid.
So in those early days, debate probaby raged - was this the most clever band ever, or the stupidest? Were they "in" on the joke, or was there even a joke at all? Were they a punk band or were they making fun of punk bands? For some people, this might have been important, the answer would determine whether they "liked" the band or not - but again, you could NOT check in with your friends or people on Reddit about this, you just had to make this decision for yourself. I can tell this is very triggering for some of the youngs out there....
The road to Devo's fame was plagued with trial and error - and probably more errors than you might think. They were going to sign with Warner Bros. and then got contacted by billionaire Richard Branson, who offered them more money to NOT sign with Warner's, which sounded good to them, right up until they got sued by Warner Bros. The band never even thought to hire a lawyer to represent them in these proceedings, so the adults went to court and two companies carved up the band's worldwide distribution between them, leaving them with just as much money as they were due to make before jumping ship. They didn't have a manager, either, at first, so they signed with the first guy who was able to commit to getting them on this new show at NBC called "Saturday Night Live". For many people, this was the first time they'd heard of Devo, because most people didn't go to CBGB's for punk concerts where two bands were expected to cause each other injuries between the shows. (Presumably this is why we see Mark Mothersbaugh wearing a neck brace in so much early concert footage, right?)
The message that the band had for America was one of "de-evolution", during college these guys had come up with the theory that people as a whole were getting dumber, not smarter, and every day we were getting closer to using up all of our planet's natural resources, and we all didn't mind as long as we got to watch "Happy Days" and stand in line for "Jaws". Well, they're not wrong, and I think as more time has passed I can say they were really on to something. MTV later showed us "Beavis and Butt-Head" and "Teen Mom" and eventually stopped showing music videos altogether, those are all signs of the dumbing down of America. The latest sign is that everyone on Instagram is convinced that shutting down the hadron collider at CERN has caused us all to jump timelines, and as evidence they point to the fact that everyone remembers there was no "K" in "Chick-Fil-a", only now it seems to be back. You have GOT to be kidding me - suddenly everyone thinks they know how particle physics works, and they think time is slowing down, when really all that's happened is that summer is here, and the amount of sunlight has increased, but JESUS CHRIST the day is still 24 hours long, it only seems longer because more sunlight. The amount of gravity required to alter the speed of time would be monumental, like black-hole size, and we just don't have that. Plus, even IF the Hadron collider WERE causing worldwide effects, which it is NOT, you might expect them to occur when the machine was ON, not OFF. Look, I'm not a theoretical physicist or even close to one, but multiple timelines only exist in Marvel movies, not real life. That being said, if all time slowed down or the whole universe suddenly started shrinking instead of expanding, we are PART of the universe, so we might not even notice. Just saying.
So yeah, people getting stupider, I'm down with that. Urban legends, mandela effect, trusting the President, aka the biggest con-man in history. And Devo believed this way back in the mid 1970's, probably because they caught a few episodes of "The Love Boat" and "Fantasy Island". So the band did the talk-show circuit and preached about de-evolution and answered some questions posed by Dick Clark and Merv Griffin quite enigmatically, it only enhanced their mystique. They also took to wearing plastic hair (JFK style) and then these red flower-pots on their heads, but eventually it also came time to have real songs and not just stage gimmicks. Everything changed when MTV got created, and suddenly there was a market for bands with music videos, and Devo had 10 or 12 ready to go. The Buggles might have been the first band that AIRED on MTV, but Devo was the first band to take over the channel.
Devo worked in the studio with David Bowie and Brian Eno, also got advice from Iggy Pop and Neil Young (who did write that "Ohio" song about Kent State, oddly enough) and then they GOT the gig on SNL, performing the Rolling Stones "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" only sped-up and new wave-fied, with Mick Jagger's permission, somehow. Immediately they went on tour and started living out of a van, then toured Japan and went on Don Kirschner's Rock Concert, along the way they even fooled their own fans by appearing on-stage as their own opening act, a fake Christian soft-rock band named Dove (the Band of Love), and apparently nobody noticed that "Dove" was cheekily an anagram of "Devo". So imagine Devo fans very confused by watching a Christian band they'd never heard of, then screaming at Dove to get off the stage so Devo could perform. Yeah, remember that theory about people getting stupider? Umm, Devo is ALREADY performing, just under another name...wake up!
Then came the perfect storm of "Whip It", which was a weird, enigmatic song with an even weirder, enigmatic video, and MTV played the hell out of it. People thought the song was about drugs (whippets) or jerking off, or even S&M, which would make some sense. But read the lyrics, it's a silly song about making whipped cream! "Before the cream sits out too long, you must whip it?" What could possibly be sexual about that, there's nothing sexy about whipped cream! (Oh, wait a minute, maybe there is.) And then the video featured a person using an actual bullwhip to remove a woman's clothing, which WAS a real act at some rodeo somewhere, and that got everybody talking again, plus the video was sexist, racist, misogynist, you name it. But that was how you got a hit back then, really, is it any more suggestive than Pat Benatar's "Hit Me With Your Best Shot" or Billy Idol's "Dancing with Myself"?
Congratulations, after like five years of trying and failing, the band was an overnight success. But then they fell into the same trap as every other band, commonly known as "Umm, what do we do NOW?". Well, you go out on tour and you sell your t-shirts and then you come back and you go into the studio and try to make a better album so you can have another hit and go back out on tour and sell your t-shirts, etc. etc. Suddenly the band that was weird and different and had something unique to say was doing the same thing as every other band, getting on that treadmill to keep making money. The doc suggests that their cover of "Working in a Coal Mine" might give us some insight to how the band felt about all of this. But how long can you expect a unicorn band like Devo to keep up the act? Their success was a fluke to begin with, and only happened because they had spent YEARS accidentally preparing to have their work on a TV channel that didn't exist yet. They should have been spending time thinking about what the NEXT big thing was going to be after music videos, and, well, they didn't do that.
Instead they put out more albums and made a bigger, flashier stage show, and so by their fifth album in 1982, reviewers were calling them "fascists" or "clowns" or occasionally "fascist clowns". By the time of their sixth album, Warner Bros. was willing to buy them out of their contract, essentially paying them to NOT make any more albums - and if you can get someone to pay you for NOT making an album, you should probably do that, and also take the hint, the ride is over. It's not all that bad, the drummer was going to leave the band anyway, and Gerry Casale got into directing commercials and Mark Mothersbaugh composed music for "Pee-Wee's Playhouse" and this led to working on hundreds, if not thousands, of other film and TV projects.
There have been various semi-reunions over the years, but now two main members of the band are deceased, still various re-incarnations of the band have popped up at Sundance in 1996 and then Lollapalooza later that same year. They had a new stage show at SXSW in 2009, and a new album in 2010, there are still annual conventions devoted to the band and they last toured in 2023, around Europe to celebrate the band's 50th anniversary of sorts, and then they were out on tour again late last year - so yeah, I guess never say never.
Directed by Chris Smith (director of "Biggest Heist Ever" and "Wham!")
Also starring Gerald Casale, Mark Mothersbaugh, Robert Mothersbaugh,
with archive footage of Bob Casale, Jim Mothersbaugh, Alan Myers, Ernest Angley, Dan Aykroyd (last seen in "Roberta"), John Belushi (ditto), Pat Benatar (last seen in "Pee-Wee as Himself"), David Bowie (ditto), Mark J. Goodman (ditto), Paul Reubens (ditto), Chuck Berry (last seen in "Earth, Wind & Fire"), Richard Branson, Jack Cafferty (last seen in "Night Falls on Manhattan"), Robert Carradine (last seen in "Coming Home"), Jimmy Carter (last seen in "Golda"), Malcolm Cecil, Kip Cohen, Leonard Cohen (last seen in "Rosewater"), Bruce Conner, Jane Curtin (last seen in "Jules"), Mike Douglas, Anthony Edwards (last seen in "Val"), Brian Eno (last seen in "Moonage Daydream"), Max Ernst, Michael J. Fox (last heard in "Zootopia 2"), Fred Grandy (last seen in "A Disturbance in the Force"), Bernie Kopell (ditto), Merv Griffin (last seen in "Paul Anka; His Way"), Michael Jackson (ditto), Mick Jagger (ditto), Brian Jones (ditto), John Lennon (ditto), Andy Warhol (ditto), Dave Grohl (last seen in "Nothing Compares"), Daryl Hall (last seen in "Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary"), Cyndi Lauper (ditto), John Oates (ditto), Debbie Harry (last seen in "Stevie Van Zandt: Disciple"), Iggy Pop (ditto), Keith Richards (ditto), Charlie Watts (ditto), Corey Hart, Tony Hawk (last seen in "The New Guy"), Dennis Hopper (last seen in "We Blew It"), Billy Idol (last seen in "I Am Sam Kinison"), Billy Joel (last seen in "The 100th: Billy Joel at Madison Square Garden"), John Mellencamp (ditto), Bruce Springsteen (ditto), Jacqueline Kennedy (last seen in "Diana Ross: Supreme Sensation"), John F. Kennedy (last seen in "The Duke"), Robert F. Kennedy (last seen in "Join or Die"), Johnny Knoxville (last seen in "The Luckiest Man in America"), David Letterman (last seen in "Martha"), Bob Lewis, Huey Lewis (last seen in "The Greatest Night in Pop"), Christopher Lloyd (last seen in "Brats"), Charles Manson (last seen in "Barbara Walters: Tell Me Everything"), Bob Margouleff, Steve Martin (last seen in "I Am Mother"), Meat Loaf (last seen in "McEnroe"), Lorne Michaels (last seen in "Will & Harper"), Garrett Morris (last seen in "Jim Henson: Idea Man"), Robert Mothersbaugh Sr., Bill Murray (last seen in "Sigourney Weaver, the Most Iconic Action Heroine"), Laraine Newman (last seen in "Jaws @ 50: the Definitive Inside Story"), Richard Nixon (ditto), Jack Nicholson (last seen in "If I Leave Here Tomorrow: A Film About Lynyrd Skynyrd"), Neil Young (ditto), Gilda Radner (last seen in "Dear Ms.: A Revolution in Print"), Fred Willard (ditto), Ronald Reagan (last seen in "Rather"), Charlie Rose (ditto), Elliot Roberts, Rebecca Romijn (last seen in "Godsend"), Kal Rudman, Michael W. Schwartz, Bob Seger (last seen in "Muscle Shoals"), Chuck Statler, Rod Stewart (last seen in "Little Richard: I Am Everything"), John Waters (ditto), Spencer Tracy (last seen in "Call Me Kate"), Bobbie Watson, Jerry Wexler (last seen in "Wham!"), The Ramones, REO Speedwagon, and the Sex Pistols.
RATING: 6 out of 10 energy domes (oh, so THAT's what those funky hats are called)
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