Music Book Review: Recombo DNA: The Story of Devo, or How the 60s Became the 80s by Kevin C. Smith

Recombo DNA: The Story of Devo, or How the 60s Became the 80s
by Kevin C. Smith (Music 781.666 Dev)

 

Devo, the synth-pop superstars behind the 1980 hit “Whip It,” helped to spearhead a new wave (pardon the pun) of keyboard-fronted bands, and they were also among the early bands to embrace the creativity possible through the music video format, helping to popularize the idea in the early years of MTV. They had a few other near-hits throughout the 80s before laying down their energy dome hats in 1991, but the truth is that there was a lot going on behind the scenes with this band. You can read all about their story in the book Recombo DNA: The Story of Devo, or How the 60s Became the 80s by Kevin C. Smith, which you can borrow from the Polley Music Library.

 

The title of the book is shared by a retrospective release of demo recordings made by the band. I can’t think of a band that has released so many compilation anthologies, demo albums, and b-side collections after they became mostly inactive, but it’s clear that there has long been an audience interested in dissecting everything they made. It’s also worth bearing in mind that most of their 1980s albums were panned by music journalists, and record sales also dropped off after the first few albums. So why all of the reassessment of this body of work?

The book Recombo DNA serves as a history of the band, and also helps to satisfy this persistent curiosity about the significance of their music. As it turns out, their collective story is unusual as band backstories go, and in a sense, Smith takes an unusual approach with the book that underlines their curious position. That is to say that for a band so often remembered as an iconic representation of 1980s pop culture, most of their work was a commentary on sociopolitics of the 1960s and subsequent failures in the 70s, but it was all packaged in a form that became very chic in the 80s. The book itself is chronological, but nearly all of the activity takes place in the 70s. The 80s are only represented by a 10-page epilogue! Clearly there are strange forces at play here.

 

If you only have a passing familiarity with the band, it’s likely that you don’t know about their origin story, which is discussed in detail throughout Chapter 1 of Recombo DNA The original band members are all from the Akron, OH area, and were affiliated with Kent State in 1970. It was the end of the 1960s and all of the hopes and dreams of youth culture in that era seemed to hit a wall in short order. For many in music, the philosophical “end of the 60s” came at the Altamont Speedway Free Festival in December of 1969, a concert headlined by the Rolling Stones that erupted in violence led by the Hell’s Angels who were there as security. For the soon-to-be-members of Devo, it was May 4th, 1970 and the Kent State Massacre, when the Ohio National Guard killed 4 and wounded 9 unarmed students on the Kent State campus. I’ll let readers get all of the details in the book themselves, but suffice it to say that the incident was the flashpoint for the concept of “de-evolution,” or “Devo,” in the mind of Gerald Casale, who eventually met up with future band member Mark Mothersbaugh in the years following the massacre. The earliest versions of their concept were also inspired by pop culture references, such as Wonder Woman comics and the old “Island of Lost Souls” film, which inspired some of their favorite early catchphrases like “Are we not men?”

 

Chapter 2 is where the band starts to become a public entity. Initially, a sextet version of the band was assembled for a one-off performance in April 1973 on the Kent State campus. Some early members shifted around, and their 2nd performance was the following year at the same Creative Arts Festival at Kent State. It’s interesting to note that founders Casale and Mothersbaugh both ended up cajoling siblings to join them in the band. Two siblings, both named Bob, ended up staying with Devo for the long haul. The band also continued to find references in culture that furthered their “devolution” concept, such as a 1924 anti-evolution pamphlet called “Jocko Homo Heavenbound,” which became the inspiration for the song that might be considered their theme tune, or the book “The Beginning Was the End” by Oscar Maerth, whose title and some concepts the band borrowed for their short film a few years later. Devo’s third gig was about a year later, and again took place at Kent State. This time, they played two sets, each time acting as a warm-up for screenings of the film “Pink Flamingos.” This time, they were approaching the high-concept style they would become known for. The band all wore costumes and used fake names, and by a few months later, they were opening for Sun Ra wearing matching costumes. However, their music was still somewhat unrefined.

 

The year 1976 stands as the point where everything started coming together. The band decided to create a short film about their devolution concept that could be released on laserdisc, the brand-new video format at the time that anticipated the compact disc by almost a decade. “The Beginning Was the End: The Truth About De-Evolution” functioned basically like a music video for two songs, and became one of the early music videos that excited people about underground music. Smith takes a detour in the book at this point to compare Devo to the work of The Residents in San Francisco, who were kindred spirits in many ways as artists working with video and primitive electronic music, learning as they went along. In the Devo camp, along with creating their new video, they found the yellow suits that they all wore during the early segment of their career, the excellent drummer Alan Myers joined the band, which created a more professional backbone for their sound, and they started consciously honing details of their songwriting technique and performance aesthetic. They wanted to emulate the sounds and movements of a machine. And they honed their skills by finally starting to play a lot of local club gigs.

 

1977 was the year Devo went national, at least in an underground sense. This year finds them showing their film publicly, releasing their first single by themselves, and touring to NYC and California, where they found many kindred spirits performing around the country, such as Pere Ubu in Cleveland, Suicide in New York City, or The Units in San Francisco. In the book, this part of the Devo story takes us to roughly the halfway point—7 years of slow development take up the first half, and now just three years of accelerated activity will fill the 2nd half of the book. I’ll not take you through a play by play of their seemingly quick rise in popularity once the right people saw them performing, such as David Bowie, Iggy Pop, and Brian Eno, but suffice it to say that the 2nd half of the book reads more like the usual rock band biography, with the band finally bouncing from success to success, building a significant fan base, and finding themselves in the middle of a record label bidding war. It’s all a little paradoxical for a band whose underlying philosophy is largely anti-commercial, an elaborate satire of conspicuous consumption, but they found a way to balance everything. It’s a dance their fans have had to navigate forever, too, the idea of buying lots of recordings and t-shirts and novelty items from a favorite band whose message in general speaks to the frivolity of such things.

 

As mentioned earlier, the relatively brief epilogue of the book addresses the 1980s, the decade where Devo briefly enjoyed commercial success and were certainly an influence on a lot of the New Wave music that filled the airwaves, as well as being pioneers in music video production which drove the music industry in that era. In their way, they inspired some of the slick, colorful crass commercialism typical of most popular music of the era, even though they had been creating that kind of look and feel for satirical purposes. Although this book was first published in 2013, and could have included some of the latter-day Devo moments, such as their Dev2.o collaboration with Disney in 2006, or their 2010 album “Something for Everybody,” author Smith leaves the story there. Few bands would merit a biography of this nature, but for Devo, this works very well, and it explains the interest in their early demo work that persists to this day—there is yet another retrospective triple LP album of their early demos spanning the era between 1973 and 1977 slated for release later this year (their 50th anniversary). If you’re a fan and you end up pursuing that new release, this book is a great companion for shedding more light on the early days of de-evolution.

 

(If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try Rebels and Underdogs: The Story of Ohio Rock and Roll by Garin Pirnia, Hardcore Devo Vol. 1 and Hardcore Devo Vol. 2 by Devo on Hoopla Music.)

 

( official www.clubdevo.com web site )

 

Recommended by Scott S.
Polley Music Library

 

Have you read or listened to this one? What did you think? Did you find this review helpful?

New reviews appear every month on the Staff Recommendations page of the BookGuide website. You can visit that page to see them all, or watch them appear here in the BookGuide Blog individually over the course of the entire month. Click the tag for the reviewer's name to see more of this reviewer’s recommendations!

Check out this, and all the other great music resources, at the Polley Music Library, located on the 2nd floor of the Bennett Martin Public Library at 14th & "N" St. in downtown Lincoln. You'll find biographies of musicians, books about music history, instructional books, sheet music, CDs, music-related magazines, and much more. Also check out Polley Music Library Picks, the Polley Music Library's e-mail newsletter, and follow them on Facebook!