Mark Mothersbaugh

29:02And that was it. There was nowhere in between for us to play except a club in Cleveland that we shared with Dead Boys and Pirubu. So it's like Bob Gasali and I are sleeping in this girl's living room. He's kind of in this room that's like off of the living room, like it's like a greenhouse room or something because it had windows all around. But it was cold in there. And I remember the morning that we got a call from Richard Branson. The window had blown open and Bob Gasali was on this couch out in that room and he was covered with snow underneath and he was trying to huddle underneath a blanket.

29:45And I was in a sofa that was like 20 feet away and I'm looking at him and I go, oh my God. And Branson called and said, hey, how would you like to come down to Jamaica? I go, you know, that sounds pretty good. He goes, yeah, just come on down for the fun of it. Did you have passports? Yes, we had because we had already recorded the album. Branson became interested in us because while we were in Germany recording our first album, we had let Stiff Records put out three singles, and they all charted. They all went number one in a different country. It was crazy. Like Uncontrollable Urge was number one in Yugoslavia.

30:27At the same time, Mongoloid was number one in France. At the same time, Satisfaction was in the top 10 in England, and Social Fools was in the top 10 in Germany. And I loved it. Jocko Homo was in the top 20 in Scotland. And I just thought, Jocko Homo, that's a perfect country for it. Scotland's a perfect country for Jocko Homo. Anyhow, so he flew to Germany where we were recording and talked us into signing with him and created this whole big problem. because Warner Brothers didn't want to give us up for Europe, and it doesn't matter now. So Bob Casale and I fly down to Jamaica, and we get off the plane, and it's kind of rough, the road between the airport and Kingston.

31:16There's like a, I remember a dead Great Dane that was in rigor mortis on the side of the road. Nobody had bothered to move it. It was just in a rigor mortis pose with its legs up, and we got to this hotel and Richard Branson and a bunch of guys, Simon and other people that, you know, South Africans that he'd started Virgin with were all sitting on the sofa and they were rolling these gigantic joints, which, you know, I'd never seen that much marijuana before, you know, like in Akron. Akron, it was always like about three-fourths oregano anyhow by the time it got to you. So he rolled these joints, and they're passing them around.

31:58Everybody's taking hits off of these giant joints. And I never was a smoker, but I gave it a try. I took a couple puffs, and then Bob Casale was a smoker, so he's just doing big hits. And then they'd come back to us, and we were smoking this stuff. And, you know, we're talking about nothing. And finally Richard goes, hey, the Sex Pistols broke up. And, you know, now I'm starting to get high and I'm like getting talking to them. I go, yeah, we hung out with them the night that they broke up. You know, Sid and Nancy and Steve Jones, everybody was over at this house where we were in the apartment where they made the magazine Search and Destroy, this really cool punk magazine in San Francisco.

32:40If you don't know it, you should check it out. And we were sleeping on piles of Search and Destroy magazines because they let us stay there for free because we didn't make enough playing a show at a punk club to get a hotel room. So we're talking. He goes, yeah, it's really a shame they broke up. They were so great. They were our favorite band. And I'm like at this point I'm just like blabbing away. And he goes, well, I'll tell you why you're here. I've got reporters The Melody Maker Sounds And New Music Express The three English papers They're all in the hotel right now And Johnny Rotten is here Johnny Rotten wants to join Devo If you want We can go down to the beach right now And make an announcement And sign something on the beach And Johnny Rotten can join Devo And I remember at that point All of a sudden And like I hit this brake and I'm like, and I'm like, oh, and I'm looking at Richard and he's like staring intently at me with this crazed look on his face.

33:48Because even to him, it must have sounded kind of crazy in a way to say that, you know, and he's smiling really wide. And I'm like, oh, my God, his teeth are protruding like a brain eating ape. And I just remember, like, I started stuttering and sputtering and Bob's like totally smashed. He doesn't even have anything to say about anything. He's just so high. He's like, whatever. I don't know what we're talking about. And I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. No, no, we love the band. And I love Johnny Rotten. He's so amazing. But, you know, Devo, we're something, you know, we're different. And we have our own thing.

34:23But we love them. And we think that's actually really, you know, complimentary that he would even think that or that you guys think that's a good idea. But, you know, we've worked so hard on what we do and we have something that we really know what it is. And then they're all looking at me like, oh, they thought they were going to do this big, crazy stunt. You know, it was going to be like the stunts that they'd done with, you know, like Sue Catwoman and Vivian Westwood and Malcolm and these people. They always had these outrageous ideas on how to like freak everybody out or get their attention.

35:00You know, I was not up for that at all. And I just remember thinking, oh, shit, are we, does that mean we don't have any place to stay now? Because I don't have any money. I can't even afford a ticket back. Well, what did happen? Did you just crash there? Like, they were cool? Like, what, okay, fine. Well, we hung out for a week. And they took us to these places. They took us to this place called the Hedonest Club. And I'd never been to anything. I'd never been anywhere out of Ohio except for Germany. And then we played three shows in England on the way back to the U.S. But that's all we'd ever done.

35:32Nobody had ever been to anything like Anna. Like when we went to the Hedonist Club, that was for people with money. That was more middle class and upper class people. There weren't any blue collar workers there except the ones that were working. Was Johnny Rotten around for all of that still? No. He left. I think it was like once we didn't say, hey, let's get together, he was like, fucking Richard, what a jackass. It's like he couldn't believe that Richard did that, I think. What was the vibe in the apartment of Search and Destroy the night that they broke up? Was it weird? Was it cool? It was like there was all sorts of people in there, all hipsters.

36:12It was all the hipsters from San Francisco. Yeah, there was every kind of craziness that you could think of was happening. And luckily I had this one room with newspapers and it was small enough I could just go in there and lay on a stack of newspapers. And finally at about four or five in the morning, I got a few hours sleep before we had to play later the next night. Man. And Sid and Nancy were there. That must have been a trip. Yeah, yeah, they were. Yeah, Sid was like, he'd walk up to a table or a countertop that had like a beer bottle or a glass with liquid in it, you know, like half a glass of beer or something.

36:48And he'd just slowly start moving it on purpose so that everybody could see that he was slowly with his finger going like this, pushing it closer to the edge of the table. And then it would fall and break. And then he'd look around to see if anybody was going to get excited about it. And nobody cared. Nobody cared that he was doing it. And he just kind of was like bummed out. I guess that was his idea of an icebreaker or something. like let's start talking now or something. But yeah, it was interesting. Wow, man. You were managed also by Neil's manager, Elliot Roberts. Yeah, after that. How was that?

37:29It was kind of wild, you know. He had stories, you know, about the rainbow, which was right down the street in his office, which is the room I'm in right now is like not that far away from where we're talking about because I'm on Sunset Strip. I've been here for about 30 years. I mean, I just assumed in my mind, because Nickelodeon, so I didn't know if that was like when you started scoring Rugrats. I mean, I don't know why that would be the reason you moved there, but it just occurred to me. Yeah, I was in my house. I had a bedroom in my house that was my scoring room. It was an extra bedroom.

38:02And I started doing more and more music. And then I did a couple, I did my first Wes Anderson movie in that house. and I was doing commercials. And why I ended up moving out of the house, because I liked working in the house, but one day I was doing a Pepsi commercial and the chili peppers were playing for me. And I only had them for like three hours. And one of my neighbors had called the police and the police came over and I go, please let me just do one more take. I need one more take. Let me just do one more pass. And they wouldn't let me. So I had to like use an older take and it worked out in the end.

38:42But it was like I thought, well, that's – now I know everybody hates me. So I started looking for a new place to move to. And while I was doing that, I just – the neighbors that lived closest to me, I bought them bouquets of flower once a week. I bought them each a bouquet and like about half a dozen houses. And then finally I got out of there after about four or five months because I found this building that I'm sitting in right now, 30 years ago. How did you end up in L.A. to begin with? How did L.A. sort of become your home base? Well, we did this film. Chuck Statler directed it. It was the first Devo film.

39:25It had two songs on it, Giacomo and Secret Agent Man. And the reason he made the film, you know, he thought, well, what if this band isn't together next year? What if they don't stay together? Because Jerry had his concerns about, well, this, I don't know. Mark likes this really weird shit, you know. So there was something like that going on. So he said, well, I'm going to make a film. So we did. And then, but what do you do with a film in 1975? Nothing. So, but he entered it in the Ann Arbor Film Festival and it won first place for short film. So that put it on a traveling tour before 76 was out.

40:05It was on a tour of cities and somebody who had just signed Tubes saw that film with us in it and they went, oh, wait a minute. Is this another Tubes? And so he gave us$2 ,000 to drive out there in our Econoline van and he put us up for a month and we rehearsed. and we did a showcase. And we decided, you know, since we were into film, that maybe, I mean, I thought we were going to go to New York because to me I felt really a kindred spirit with New York. I assume if you're an art student and, you know, you're into sort of experimental things, you're just going to go to New York and skip L.A. Yeah.

40:47Why? Well, what happened was just the film industry was out here, and we thought, well, maybe they'd do a film with us, you know, because we had ideas for films. And Jerry wanted to direct films. He really wanted that. And so that's how we ended up here. And it was cheaper. It was cheaper, you know. It'd be interesting to view an alternate timeline where you didn't go to New York instead of – We went to New York, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Or one where we stayed in Akron and we were just like – there wasn't like a receptive atmosphere in Ohio. Let me put it that way. It's like there were very few places that we could perform and nobody wanted to hear original music in Akron at that time.

41:30They wanted – they came to clubs to hear their favorites. And so what we even started doing is we would like call clubs up and ask them if they need a band. They go, well, what are you guys doing? And we'd lie and we'd say we were a cover band. And then we'd come out and we'd be in like janitor outfits and then we'd play like, all right, here's another one by Foghat. It's called Uncontrollable Urge. And then, you know, after the first set, you know, oftentimes, more often than not, we never got to finish our second set or third set at a place. They would tell us we had to leave or they would pay us to leave.

42:11They'd say, well, here's your money now. You can have your$50. and we go, no, but we've got two more hours worth of music for you. And they go, that's okay. That was enough. It's cooler to be doing that in an environment like that, though, than in an environment where everyone is just trying to outweird one another. I like that, that you guys were truly the complete oddballs of the area. Clearly wasn't to be popular. You guys weren't doing it to be. There wasn't much of a music scene back then, and there was no camaraderie. I was in a, before I was in Devo, I was in a band with Chrissy Hine. It wasn't our band, so we were in it for like, I think we played one or two shows at the most, and then it split up.

42:57But other than that, I experimented with a lot of different musicians, and I kept looking for the sound that I wanted to do. And then I had already known Jerry from school. We had collaborated on visual art projects before. And then we started talking about music together. And then he and this friend of his who was like this guy, Bob Lewis. To me, Bob Lewis was like, I felt like it was Peabody and Sherman when we were together because he seemed like a human encyclopedia. I like that guy. But Jerry and Bob found this book called The Beginning Was the End, How Man Came Into Being Through Cannibalism.

43:34And it was this crazy book that was basically preaching de-evolution. and saying that humans were the unnatural species. And it was kind of like how we already felt because we'd been through Kent State where we thought, yeah, we shouldn't be over there. I can't think of one Vietnamese person I want to kill, so why are we doing this? Let's stop it. And then you find out when the government gets irritated with you enough, they just kill you. So we had this kind of, we were kind of pissed off about humans on planet Earth and felt like we weren't like a natural species at all, that we were the one species at odds with nature in general, you know, and we were destroying the planet.

44:21You know, it wasn't like we wanted to sit there and beat a book and, you know, say that. It's like we wanted that to be part of our aesthetic and that people would know that that was our thoughts about things, that humans were unnatural and humans needed to change. Is that where the performing with masks and just the different looks came from? Was that a way to sort of— I'll tell you what happened with masks is none of us had any money. You know, we all had crappy jobs. I worked in an apartment building as a maintenance man. It was a 100-year-old building. So it's like somebody's drain would be stopped up and I'd take off the U-joint down underneath the sink.

45:04My brother and Jerry delivered meat for some meat company. And then Jerry had a job at a janitorial supply place for a while, which was actually really beneficial because he found in one of the catalogs. these hazardous waste material outfits that we went, oh my God, that's perfect for us. You know, they were like our anti-superhero outfit, you know, these yellow suits. And once we put an elastic waistband around the waist and cinched it in, it turned us into who we were, which looked like we could be cleaning up, you know, nuclear slop, or we could be, you know, like picking through body parts at a plane crash, you know.

45:47And they were inexpensive. They were like four bucks or something at the time to buy one of these plastic suits. And one of the masks I found at this novelty shop in Canton, Ohio, which is close to Akron, was this rubber baby face mask. And so I became Boogie Boy, who we referred to him as the infantile spirit of de-evolution. And that stuck with us. And Boogie Boy ended up coming out and still does. he still comes out on stage every night. And your dad used to come out as part of this stuff, right? He's a general boy. Oh, yeah. He was totally obsessed with it. He had this, I think he had this hidden desire to be an artist.

46:31You know, I think he really wanted to be creative in some way. He played clarinet and it even got a little overboard. On our first tour, he wanted to go on tour with us. He wanted to manage the band. And I'm like, you know, mid-20s, I'm thinking, my dad go on tour with the band? That's the last thing I want. I'm thinking, yeah, I don't want my dad on tour with the band. That sounds terrible. And it's too bad we didn't. He had a much better business acumen than any of us. There'll be more of my interview with Mark Mothersbaugh after one last quick break. In today's super competitive business environment, the edge goes to those who push harder, move faster, and level up every tool in their arsenal.

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50:00It's just like doing my eyes closed. I'm Manny. I'm Noah. This is Devin. And on our new show, No Such Thing, we get to the bottom of questions like these. Join us as we talk to the leading expert on overconfidence. Those who lack expertise, lack the expertise they need to recognize that they lack expertise. And then as we try the whole thing out for real. Wait, what? Oh, that's the runway. I'm looking at this thing. Listen to No Such Thing on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back with Mark Mothersbaugh. Is it true you guys first did a Jocko Homo, performed Jocko Homo opening for Sun Ra?

50:43Yeah, we opened for Sun Ra. That was amazing. That was like 75, I think. It was in Cleveland. And I remember we'd never been around a band that had a record dealer that was as prestigious as Sun Ra. And so I remember like before we went on stage, I was listening to these guys talk that were in the band, you know, and they're like saying, yeah, that's Sun Ra. He's like getting a big head. You know, he's got such a big head and he's like, it's not cool, man. It's like, you know, he took a taxi here from the hotel. then he says yeah the rest of the band all had to take the RTD from downtown to wherever this auditorium was we were playing at and I'm like wow that's what it's gonna be like when I get when our band gets a record deal we're gonna take the RTD to get to the show yeah I remember thinking that I thought oh I thought it was all like David Bowie I thought it was all glamorous glam but but Sun Ra was so amazing because he played his keyboard like it wasn't like he was like playing notes or anything he was playing clusters of sounds and i was so impressed fit though i'd imagine oh my god yeah yeah because it was more percussive than it was melody the songs were just incredible and but when he played like that i started doing it boogie boy started copying him i started i started playing my synthesizer like this.

52:12There were songs that I could do that on. Yeah, it was interesting. We got in a fight with the audience that night. They were DJs from WMMS, I think it was. And yeah, we were dressed like janitors. And then they were all dressed like Dracula and vampires and mummies and Frankenstein. And we look like the total opposite of like Halloween. And they're all doing nitrous oxide and margaritas, and they're getting really drunk and aggressive. And at one point, after about three or four songs in, like, my woman's subhuman, she can't walk. She can't talk. She just sits by a sign that says, I love you.

53:00And it was driving them crazy. They hated our music. And at one point, some DJ jumped up on stage. Are you going to let these people continue to prostitute music like this? And they started throwing paper cups with margaritas in it at us. And yeah, we ended up getting in fistfights with DJs. It was crazy. And then Sun Ra came out. I mean, if you can be too abstract for Sun Ra. I know. It's like, what the hell is happening? I know. Like, these guys are out to lunch. Let's get Sun Ra. I found an audio cassette that our sound man had put in a tape recorder, and he recorded that show. And it's really good.

53:47It's really good. You hear it devolve. No. Yeah, maybe we should. But it devolves into the fighting and just the insane chaos of our set and everything. You guys should put that out. That'd be amazing. But we were kind of like, we were kind of lightning rods for hostility. We loved it. We would like, we think if we're pissing these people off, we're doing something right. Yeah. It was kind of that kind of approach. But I remember Jocko Homo. I would just keep going up to people and going, are we not men? You know, we are, are we not men? Until they were like sick of it. It was like, if it took 20 minutes, I would just provoke people until they would want to fight with us.

54:29Did you find like humor in this stuff? Were you a fan of comedy or humor or anything like that? Oh, yeah. And we took our humor seriously. Okay. And we were serious about our humor. That's why I was attracted to people like Subgenius, because when they first came out, the Church of the Subgenius, their early pamphlets, they didn't have enough stuff out to let you know if they were serious or not. And I was just hoping they were serious. And so it was back in the days where like we would like read National Enquirer and we'd read a poem by John Hinckley Jr. for Jodie Foster. And they'd say, he says here he's in the Maryland Bethesda Hospital.

55:14And Jerry and I would call up Maryland Bethesda Hospital and say, we're in the band Devo. Could we talk to John Hinckley? And they'd go, well, let me see. Then you'd wait a couple of minutes and they'd go, yeah, he wants to talk to you. And we'd get on the phone with John Hinckley. He goes, I have your first album. I remember saying to him, you know, we read this poem you wrote called I Desire. And we were wondering if you would mind if we use those as lyrics for a Devo song. He goes, hmm, let me hear it, okay? And so we said, yeah, before we do anything, we'll let you hear it. And so we wrote the song called I Desire with John Hinckley Jr.

55:53lyrics. Of course, if you're trying to impress your record company, don't do that. Don't do that. Don't write a song with the would-be presidential assassin. Yeah, he was not a favorite in the country at the time. But his poems were so good. His poetry was so good. I love it. I wanted to ask you something because I got to take photos of you one time, maybe 10 years ago for something. Oh, I was pole dancing at the time to make some extra money. Yes, it was there. It was that time. And you were talking to somebody. And I long felt I overheard that Joni Mitchell attacked you in a stairwell one time.

56:36I didn't know if I heard this right. Well, she didn't attack me. But what happened was she had the same manager as Neil Young. And we did our second album. And I was up at his office. It's just down the street here. But she's like, hey, are you that guy from Devo? I go, I'm that guy from Devo. And she goes, I'm going to be in a movie. And they want me to hold a ghetto blaster on my shoulder and put a song on the ghetto blaster. And I was like, OK. And she goes, I want to put your song on it, Swelling, Itching Brain. And I'm like, wow, great. Why would you pick Swelling? Because I'm thinking, that's such a radical song.

57:20On that album, it's like the most radical song. I go, why would you pick Swelling, Itching Brain? And she went, because it's the most obnoxious, horrible, irritating song I've ever heard in my whole life. I said, well, be my guest. Blast it away. It was at the end of it? That was it. And then she walked away. The only other thing that happened after that is her manager who was at Neal's at that time, he stayed managing with her years later after Ron and Elliot split ways. He was still working with her. And he called me up once and said, hey, this is like in the last 10 years even. I don't remember what year.

58:04Maybe eight years ago. And he said, hey, Joni wants to get into film scoring. He says, do you have any, do you know anything I should tell her? I go, you know what? You tell Joni, if she wants to come over to my green building, come over to the studio, I would love to show her while I'm working on something. And if she has a film she wants to work on, I will help walk her through it. I'll show her how to do it and make it easy for her. And she was like, what? The swelling, aging brain guy? No way. I'm not doing that. It was like, so we never, she never let go of disliking. Is it a true disdain or is it like, is she joking?

58:43Maybe it's better not to know. Maybe, who knows? She's a little bit eccentric. You know, she was, people would tell you that in some situations she was probably very hard to work with. She's super talented. I mean, you know, that goes without saying. Yeah. Do you still talk to Neil ever? Or you got like, or the band and Neil, is there any? Actually, there's a chance he might get interviewed for a Devo documentary to see what he thought about Devo because it could be funny because I don't know if we were exactly what he thought we were. But he was pretty interesting. I think back about it that he was doing Hey, Hey, My, My.

59:21Then he gets Devo to come do it. But we're doing it in a recording studio in San Francisco and all the band has like Oompa Loompa pinhead hats on. and Boogie Boy singing it, sitting in a diaper with a Minimoge on my lap, singing, and I changed the words to, instead of Johnny Rotten, I said Johnny the Spud or something. But he crashed my playpen. He destroyed my playpen that I used to take on stage with me because he was playing solos and he just smashed, he just started falling on it and smashing it. And I couldn't see very well because I had a latex mask on, But I'm like looking at him going, wow, that's kind of crazy.

1:00:03He's like, he's kind of getting pretty punk for Grandpa Granola, which is what Jerry used to call him. Grandpa Granola. Yeah, it's an intense performance of the song in the movie. It's super intense. Well, what's funny, I'll tell you something funny about it. To pay for our first film, Jerry and I started a company called Unit Services in downtown Akron. And it was a graphic design shop. And mostly what we did is we talked people and letting us do the signs for their shops in this place because there were like 30 other companies coming in and we'd design signs for them. But we got this one job for a muffler company, Midas Muffler, and we came up with the logo Rust Never Sleeps.

1:00:45And they loved it. And they wanted T-shirts. So they wanted 100 T-shirts, and I bought like 101, just enough so we'd have one that we could do a sample on. And so I'm in the basement where I lived, and I'm getting ready to print. I go, okay, I tried it on the one extra shirt, and it was wrinkly looking. I went, oh, no. So I changed the ink a little bit and cleaned the screen. And then I was looking for that. So I found a couple of my T-shirts and a towel, and I started printing on them. And then I printed – I had a pair of underpants and I just printed it on the seat of the underpants, Russ Never Sleeps.

1:01:24And so that was the underpants Boogie Boy was wearing in the playpen when we were recording together. If Boogie Boy would have flipped over, you would have read it. But he never flipped over in the movie. But he called me up a few weeks later and he said, hey, Mark, that Russ Never Sleeps. Do you mind if I use that for the title of my next film? I go, no, no, that'd be great. And so then he made a film called Russ Never Sleeps, based on a Midas muffler gig that helped pay for the first Devo film. Yeah, the connections between you guys are interesting, between the Kent State connection and him writing Ohio, and then giving him Russ Never Sleeps as the title.

1:02:06It's like, damn. Isn't that funny? Well, he was an interesting guy. He was a much more interesting guy than we gave him credit for at the time. We were kind of punky assholes, what can I say? real quick i wanted to ask you about robert margaleff who yeah as someone who is very into synthesizers how was he as a person who i mean it seems to be i mean the the tanto machine and i mean what a kind of bizarre strange guy and doing all those classic records with stevie and then working with you guys to me he was the most of all the of all the produce outside producers that we used to work on Devo Records.

1:02:46He was the most successful and the smartest and taught me more than any of the other producers did. And yeah, the fact that he went between Stevie Wonder and the original neo-tombrol orchestra, Tonto, you know, that's why we asked him to work with us in the first place because we were, don't laugh, but we thought Freedom of Choice was funky Devo. We thought, okay, what if Devo did funk? What would it sound like? And that's what we came up with, which wasn't, I mean, I can't say it's a very funky album, but it was our attempt at it. And so we wanted a guy who was familiar with funk, but also familiar with electronics.

1:03:30And he was the perfect guy. And I still stay in touch with him. He's really smart. He's really articulate still, and somebody's looking for a great producer. He's a good guy to use. Is he still experimenting with stuff and with sounds? Mostly, yeah. And lately it's been headphones where you feel like you're an Atmos. It's like an alternate to the Atmos system, but a headphone version of it. and he can spread sounds really wide when you're in these headphones. That's the last thing I remember. Spatial audio stuff. Yeah, spatial audio. Yeah, I guess that's what it's called. And that's the last thing I remember him calling me about being really enthusiastic about.

1:04:18I was listening because Robbie Robertson died recently and so I listened to the first couple band records front to back for the first time in a long time. And the narrative on the band was that they made everyone want to go back to like roots music essentially you know like strip it all back but because of garth hudson the organist there was always really weird sounds you would never hear in like a country record or like an americana record and i just i never picked up on that when i used to listen to them i didn't know if you listened to them and you know that was the part that i picked up on i liked all the eccentricity i was not into country country when i was in high school was the music I got my ass.

1:04:57That was the soundtrack to me getting my ass kicked by kids that wanted me to be more like them or something or to be less of a weirdo. So I never was a fan of country. But I liked those albums. And I loved some of the lyrics like, take a load off, granny. To me, that was just kind of absurdly hilarious, some of that stuff. And I liked Big Pink. I thought that was a good... Big Pink was a cool record. Any other early keyboard or synth inspirations? I loved Walter Carlos' Clockwork Orange soundtrack. I thought that was incredibly genius. And that probably helped make me even more aware of soundtracks then, because that music was...

1:05:49It was Beethoven mostly, but it sounded so good. And nobody's ever used a vocorder again the way he did it in that movie. I would defy you to find something that sounds like that. It's so incredible. And then I think for me, I remember listening to a Roxy Music album. I think it was the first one. And the lyrics were good on everything back then. I'm less of a fan of when it turned into Avalon. I loved all the early stuff. like inflatable dolly, you know, stuff like that to me was like creepy and cool. But I was listening to this song. It was like a throwaway song on Roxy Music Album called Editions of You.

1:06:37And so there's a saxophone, takes a solo and goes, and then the guitar player gets a solo and then Eno gets a solo. And I didn't know who Eno was. and I hear this, he did this solo that I went, that's the best electronic music synth solo I've ever heard in a rock and roll song or a pop song. I thought that was incredible. It made me want to meet him. It made me want to see what he used. It made me want to talk to him. And that's when I just was, I was, you know, when people asked me who I wanted to have produce Devo, I said Brian Eno's first choice. And so that's how that happened. But his, I just thought he was like the early pioneer that did it.

1:07:29I think that song is like if you were looking for electronic pop, new wave punk or whatever that music was. I don't even know. I don't know how to classify it. I know. His solo was like very, it was just totally abstract. That was so great about it. It was abstract with electronics. And as much as I thought Satisfaction was the epicenter of rock and roll, it was the best song ever. Matter of fact, that's why we did our version of it, because it was 10 years later, and I thought, well, it's about time to reinterpret and update that song to match what's going on now. And I mean, Bob Casale actually started playing that riff out of nowhere.

1:08:15And within an hour, we'd put the song together. And then I was singing on it, Satisfaction. But I thought Satisfaction was perfect because I thought, well, it's 10 years. It's time to reinterpret what pop music is. Was Jerry into your... Because early on, I mean, Jerry, listening to the sounds can be very bluesy and very... I mean, it had almost like a garage rocky thing. Was he into your experimenting with sounds? I think maybe less than I was into the blues thing. I loved having a blues progression underneath things I was writing because it gave me a chance to do really abstract things with great rhythms to it, you know.

1:08:56And I could take really abstract sounds and, you know, mortar blasts, ray guns. I could put like ray gun sounds, you know, like in Space Girls, for instance. Yeah. And these warbly sounds.

1:09:14And, you know, so what he was doing kind of worked with that pretty good. Like Otto Modown, you know, it would be a cool example of that. And then the synth was like, Otto Modown's a good example of like, that's the Sun Ra approach. Because that was.

1:09:35It was like playing it so that they were noises, and they were more percussive with a little bit of melody in the sound, because you'd hear notes in it, but they'd be, in an automodon they were kind of like car horns. They sounded like three or four car horns. hitting at the same time in different pitches. That's a song I return to a lot. That's such a cool song. That's a good song. And that has Jerry's rhythm, his bass rhythm going on in it. Yeah, I love that song. I love that song too. Yeah, that's an incredible one. Do you have an opinion on the sort of progression of electronics in music, the way it's evolved over time?

1:10:20Yeah, I think pop music is on some level stupid, you know, no matter what era you're talking about. Even the stuff I liked, there was a stupid side to a lot of it. But the thing about pop music is pop music, it's important to kids that are like just coming of an age, whatever age that is, if it's 11 or if it's 19 or anything, where they go, the world is insane. Nothing makes sense to me. who am I, where am I? And then you find something. And for some people, it's Taylor Swift. They find it in Taylor Swift. Some people, it was the Beatles. And some people, it's Neil Young or it's Jimi Hendrix. But this music is like where you go and you go, ah, I feel this reminds me of when I needed a refuge.

1:11:10It's like for Devo, it's like there was a time where I was kind of like, well, I don't like playing the same songs. These are songs I wrote when I was 25. five. That's like 50 years, almost 50 years ago now. Why don't people want to hear the new stuff? But you know, the reality is if the ghost of David Bowie came up to me tonight and went, Ooh, Mark, I'm going to do a concert for you and you only. It's going to be a brand new album. Nobody's ever heard these songs. It's all about everything that's going on in the world now. Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Ukraine, or it's going to be Spiders of Mars, the live show that blew your mind.

1:11:54You're going to see that exact, absolute exact same show, and you can sit anywhere in the audience you want. I go, I'll take Spiders of Mars, and you can save your brand new stuff for somebody else. And so I understand it when kids come up and go, you know, people picked on me, and they called me Devo when I was in high school. but I loved your music and I love that stuff now. And what is, you know, what does a blockhead mean to you or something like that, you know, or, or what does gut feeling mean? And you, instead of going, I wrote that when I was 25, I don't fucking remember, you know, it's like, you know, it's like you go, well, you know, you, you talk to him about it.

1:12:35And then in some instances, do you also just hate to try to remember what your access 25 year old Mark emotions? It seems like a lot of work to try to go back and rehash shit and pinpoint the— Well, you know what? We did choose a weird life for ourselves, you know, because that's what I'm going to be doing, you know, until we end up stop touring. You know, it's like we're going to—we'll play new songs and people will be polite and sit through them. And then they'll get to the stuff that they wanted to hear. You know, you'll play Uncontrollable Urge or you'll play Satisfaction and they'll lose their minds, you know.

1:13:13And I like that. That's what, you know, and so for me, it's like I write a lot of music for myself that nobody ever hears. Sometimes I put it out. Like I put out one set of six 45s called Mutant Flora. And that was music that I'd written for Taika Waititi. What was the name of that movie? Thor Ragnarok. You know, stuff like that. Then I did a set called The Most Powerful Healing Music in the Entire World. And it was like I'd be working on a Wes Anderson film or something, Lego or something. And my head would start getting tightened. And I'd just go into the lunchroom here that's over there about 30 feet.

1:13:55And I had a home organ from the 80s set up there. And I would just do stream of consciousness, easy listening home organ music. and I did a six-album set of it. I might re-release that. You've got to put out like a library of just stuff, like an online library accessible whatever, you know? You know, I'm thinking, I'm totally thinking that I'm putting out a set of books, and the first one's coming out in December. And the next one, though, it's going to be about 1 ,600 pages. It's going to be super fat, and it's going to be big pages, and it's all art. and I'm going to put QR codes in it and where I could put music you could listen to while you're looking through the book and videos and stuff like that.

1:14:44Well, look forward to seeing the books. That's cool, man. December. Well, I can't wait to see that. It's a pleasure talking to you. Thank you so much. Thank you. You too. Thanks to Mark Mothersbaugh for sharing some of those incredible stories. You can hear our favorite songs from Devo and Mark's solo career on a playlist at brokenrecordpodcast.com. Subscribe to our YouTube channel at youtube.com slash brokenrecordpodcast where you can find all of our new episodes. You can follow us on Twitter at Broken Record. Broken Record is produced with help from Leah Rose and Eric Sandler. Our show is engineered by Echo Mountain.

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1:16:37You got a hoodie on, take it off! I'm Manny. I'm Noah. This is Devin. And we're best friends and journalists with a new podcast called No Such Thing, where we get to the bottom of questions like that. Why are you screaming at me? I can't expect what to do. Now, if the rule was the same, go off on me. I deserve it. You know, lock him up. Listen to No Such Thing on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. No such thing. This is an iHeart Podcast.