David Giffels is the author of The Beginning Was the End: Devo in Ohio, coauthored by Jade Dellinger and published by University of Akron Press in 2023.
…this is a story of five spuds from an industrial wasteland with big ideas. It never should have happened. But it did. And in its wake, it leaves a parable.
Hold onto your energy domes, readers! I spoke with award-winning author, Akron Ohio’s own David Giffels, about all things Devo–and much more.
David, how did your Devo fascination begin? How much did you know about the band before you started writing about it?
My first encounter with Devo was when they were on Saturday Night Live in 1978. I remember it being this spectacle of a rock and roll band, like something I hadn’t seen before—and being equally freaked out and intrigued. This was in their yellow suit era and they were doing their robotic stage moves. My parents were watching with us, and my mom said something about them being from Akron. I don’t know how much that resonated with me then. But I recognize now that I did associate them with the place I was from, and that meant something abstract but important to me then. And it means something very specific to me now, that in their era, Devo really did define what Akron was.
What made you want to go down the Devo rabbit hole, conducting scores of interviews with Devo members and Devo-tees to write this—and your last Devo book? And what changed between your last book and this one?
My coauthor Jade Dellinger and I met in 2000 at one of the first of the Devo fan conventions, called DEVOtionals. I was there covering the story for the Akron Beacon Journal and Jade was an independent art curator. I had been dabbling with the notion of writing a book about Devo, because there was no biography of them. At the same time, Jade had been compiling research. We were introduced and immediately hit it off and combined forces.
In 2003, we published the first serious biography of the band: Are We Not Men? We Are Devo, the title taken from the band’s first album. The book went out of print, and for years we’d wanted to bring it back. When we approached the University of Akron Press about publishing it, we hit on the idea of reshaping it into what we really felt was the heart of the book. The original book covers Devo’s entire career. But the most interesting part is everything that happens up until they become a famous, commercial band: the ten years that takes place in anonymity in Northeast Ohio.
The Beginning Was the End: Devo in Ohio is revised to tell the story of these outsider artists, who found each other in an unlikely industrial landscape and started to explore all forms of media, art, and music, and what it was like for them to not only be ignored but also almost universally reviled. And yet they stuck to it and found a way into the mainstream. What’s so fascinating is the moment of them making it is also the beginning of the end. I don’t want to spoil the book’s ending, but there’s this moment of: ah, we’ve arrived, and here at the arrival is the specter of doom.
This book includes so many wonderful photographs of the early days of Devo. That’s a change from the first book, right?
Yeah, by creating a tighter focus, there was room for more than 80 new photographs that had never been seen before. It’s an amazing collection of memorabilia that we were able to showcase in this book that we couldn’t in the last book. Most of the photos were taken by Bobbie Watson Whitaker, who was a Kent State student and there from the very beginning of the band. She was always taking pictures and really documented Devo’s whole first decade—it’s just amazing.
What was it about the Rust Belt of the 1970s, and specifically Northeast Ohio, that was the perfect petri dish to birth Devo?
I make the argument in the intro to the book that Devo couldn’t have come from anywhere except Akron and Kent, really. There are factors in their development and aesthetic and philosophy that are directly tied to their environment. The most important is that the key members of Devo were students at Kent State University on May 4, 1970, when the national guard murdered four students and wounded several others. Two of them were friends of Devo co-founder Jerry Casale. He witnessed the event, and it changed everything. Devo’s dabbling with the philosophy that humans are evolving in reverse—de-evolution, where they got their band name—became something much more real. Here was an inhuman act by the government that happened right before Casale’s eyes, and it changed his life.
Then there’s the waning industrial backdrop of Northeast Ohio, the factories and the monochromatic gray polluted skies, the monolithic blimp hanging overhead. It almost had a German Expressionist feel, and it worked like an art-directed backdrop for the music Devo was making. Early on, they were working with mechanical sounds, and while they are not an industrial band, they have a strong industrial aesthetic. The yellow suits, their defining uniform in the early days of the band, came from a janitorial supply company that supplied the factories—so they were picking up on these industrial elements.
Another very important factor specific to Northeast Ohio was a guy named Ghoulardi, who hosted a Friday night B-horror-movie show out of Cleveland. He wore a weird wig and sunglasses and performed in this hipster schtick way. He was this anti-authoritarian guy, who played primal rock and roll in the background while he was doing his monologue in between segments of the movies he made fun of. Out of Cleveland, he was seen by vast numbers of teens in the 1960s, who were also watching Ed Sullivan and the Beatles. Many artists and musicians who came from Northeast Ohio site Ghoulardi as a key influence for their twisted sense of humor and rebellious natures, and that was the case with Devo.
And then there’s the work ethic of a working factory town. Devo stuck to this not-very-commercial art project for a decade—and that’s really the heart of the book—before they got any validation. That comes from that stick to it attitude that is baked into the nature of an industrial landscape.
What’s a favorite story of yours from Devo’s early days?
One of my favorite stories is the way they would get gigs around the local music scene. Most of the bars would only hire cover bands. So the guys from Devo would call up the owner and say, “Hey, we’re this band called Devo and we play covers,” and they’d get booked. And they’d go on stage and say, “Here’s one by Bad Company,” and then they’d play one of their tuneless songs. They were using a homemade electronic drum kit at the time that made these atonal sounds of metal on metal. So this was clearly not a Bad Company song. And they’d get through one song and then say, “Okay, here’s one by Foghat,” and they’d do it again. By about the third song, they’d get the plug pulled or be paid by the club owner to leave. But they just fed on that. It was a total punk rock move—without the glamour of punk.
Do you label Devo punk rock or new wave?
I think Devo is new wave, and Iggy Pop makes the case too that they are the defining new wave band. Their quirkiness, the colorful presentation, the use of new technology, they embraced and embodied all of that. Not only would I call them new wave but I’d say they are the quintessential new wave band.
Devo was made up of art majors and outsider artists who were just as interested in Art Devo and related artistic theories as in music. How much of this was real artistic statement? Performance art? Something else?
The first two people who started playing around with this were Jerry Casale and his friend Bob Lewis, who met at end of 1960s as freshmen at Kent State. As often happens with curious people when they make that big step from high school to college, every new idea seems like a bolt of lightning. Those two started having these late-night, pot smoke-fueled conversations about the fact that humans were devolving, and they started to write poems and manifestos about this, and I’m sure it had a serious intent, but it was also theoretical and philosophical. It was something they were trying out, as one does at that stage of one’s life.
I don’t think it was a joke, but until May 4, 1970, I don’t think there was as strong a political and social intent behind it. But the Kent State shootings changed this from theoretical to graphically real, right in front of them. Everything changed going forward.
One thing Devo did well was to mix up the joke with the serious intent in a way that one can’t be extracted from the other. So many songs that could be taken on the surface one way have something completely other underneath. Take for example “Whip It,” which has been cited among the Top 5 songs about masturbation, but it’s also a song that’s very much Dale Carnegie-pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps: “When a problem comes along, you must whip it,” as a serious self-help statement. As I write in the book, if the intent was serious, it was meant to be laughed at, and if it was a joke, it was meant to be taken seriously.
Devo’s costumes are iconic. Can you talk about the importance of the masks and uniforms they made into their costumes?
Masks go back to their very first performance in 1973—50 years ago—at an art festival at Kent State. Mark Mothersbaugh by default became the singer, and he was not at all comfortable on stage. The band was almost anti-music; they were making really atonal, mechanical kinds of sounds. Mothersbaugh wore a mask because he was terrified to be on stage. So it began with that, but as they went on and began experimenting with a performance art kind of presentation of their image, they started to adapt—first of all this sense of a uniform. They wanted to be seen as indistinguishable as individuals; that was part of the philosophy of Devo. It was part of the aesthetic, but also the philosophy that the individual is not important.
One thing they were trying to do was to undermine what had become part of established rock and roll culture. Men with beards, wearing faded jeans and leather—Devo wanted to reject that. The way to do it would be to put on a uniform and confront what rock and roll was. Of course, the first splash they made was by taking the quintessential rock and roll song, “Satisfaction” by The Rolling Stones, and turning it completely inside out. Musically and visually, that’s what they were doing to a rock and roll culture that thought it was radical.
How about the red, cone-shaped hats?
If you were going to have one new wave symbol, it would be those red energy dome hats they wore for the Freedom of Choice campaign of 1980, which are almost always referred to as the upside-down-flowerpots. And that seems like a silly, cartoonish, tossed-off gimmick. And yet you could write an academic thesis about what the energy domes really are. First of all, they’re drawn from an early image in Jerry Casale’s imaginative mind as a student at St. Patrick’s Elementary School in Kent, Ohio. He would walk down the hallways, and above him were these light fixtures that were art deco ziggurat shapes. Something about them stuck in his artistic mind.
Devo had a new look for every album and was very much about their visual presentation. So, when the members were designing the Freedom of Choice look, Casale went with this art deco, ziggurat shape. But it wasn’t just that. Devo also decided to call them energy domes, and the idea was that this would be a way to concentrate the psychic energy of the universe into the mind of the wearer. And of course nobody knew or cared—they were just the red flowerpot hats. But again, if it’s a joke it was meant to be taken seriously, and if it was serious it was meant to be taken as a joke. And I think the members of Devo are quite happy that the people who get it, get it, and the people who don’t, don’t.
Devo left Ohio in the late 70s and didn’t play in Akron again until 30 years later. Did you see them perform?
Yes. The last show they’d played in Akron was their homecoming tour in 1978. Then in 2008, they were invited to do a fundraiser for the local democrat party. It was Devo, Chrissie Hynde and the Black Keys—the three most iconic musical acts from Akron’s rock history—and they played together and it was an amazing night, to see those artists on the same stage. They jammed at the end, all playing together, which was really cool.
We all know Devo’s 1980 MTV pop hit “Whip It,” but what Devo songs do you think we should be listening to today?
The most interesting Devo music to me has always been what falls under the tag of hardcore Devo, which is their early demos of what became their early albums. It’s the pre-Warner Brothers recordings. There’s a new hardcore collection that just came out. [50 YEARS OF DE-EVOLUTION (1973–2023), a retrospective collection, also released in 2023.] I would recommend that more than their mainstream commercial releases, because I think it captures their rough edges. To me that’s the true spirit of Devo.
Devo has been on tour this year, what’s being called their farewell tour, though they don’t like it called that. Part of it is that they’ve been nominated for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame the past few years. This is another one of those ironies of Devo. An outsider band being put in the museum for rock and roll—that would be very Devo.
What’s the current Northeast Ohio music scene like? In addition to writing, you play in a band. Can you tell us about it?
I’m currently playing bass in a band called Dave Rich and His Enablers. It’s sort of indie rock power pop. The drummer is Chis Butler, who was the founder of The Waitresses [“I Know What Boys Like”], another Akron new wave icon. He had a lot of interaction with Devo, because they were in the scene at the same time, so he has lots of Devo stories to tell, himself. As far as the Northeast Ohio music scene, it feels like things got splintered with Covid. Over the pandemic everything was done alone in isolation, and the music is just now creeping out of the basement and back into the light of day.
What is the Devo parable, and what can we learn from their story? One of the parables is that if you mess with the system, the system will devour you. It’s better to know that it’ll happen and do it anyway than fear it’ll happen and not do it. That’s very much what happened with Devo. At some point they changed from wanting to be pure artists to wanting to join the music industry and get signed to a commercial label. As they were undergoing that transition, they were very aware that they were just meat in a world of vultures. That’s the main parable. They knew they were going to get scalped, but they did it anyway.
The second lesson is that their own theory also defined them. Their belief that evolution is working in reverse applied to them. Their music was so vibrant and new when they began, and then they slowly fell into some of the cliches of the rock and roll world: drugs, infighting, and problems with the record label. All of that started to pull them apart and they devolved from being bold iconoclasts to having to play the game. As they devolved, their music devolved—as they had predicted it would.
David Giffels is the author of eight books of nonfiction, most recently The Beginning Was the End: Devo in Ohio, coauthored with Jade Dellinger. His 2020 book Barnstorming Ohio: To Understand America, was described by Publishers Weekly as a “trenchant mix of memoir, reportage, and political analysis,” and selected as one of Library Journal’s Best Books of 2020. His other books include the memoirs Furnishing Eternity and All the Way Home, both winners of the Ohioana Book Award, and The Hard Way on Purpose, a New York Times Book Review “Editors’ Choice.” A former columnist at the Akron Beacon Journal, his writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Parade, The Iowa Review, Esquire, Grantland, and many other publications. He also wrote for the MTV animated series Beavis and Butt-Head. He is a professor of English at the University of Akron, where he serves on the faculty of the NEOMFA creative writing program.
The Beginning Was the End: Devo in Ohio
by Jade Dellinger and David Giffels
Many thanks to David Giffels for sharing his insights and time with us here at Rust Belt Girl. Can’t wait to read what’s next!
Check David out at his website. And be sure to pick up The Beginning Was the End: Devo in Ohio for all the new wave fans on your holiday gift lists!
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*Photos provided by David Giffels
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