New book highlights Devo’s early years in Akron

David Giffels remembers the moment he learned Devo was from Akron. In October 1978, less than two months after the release of the band’s debut album, “Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!,” the group was featured on “Saturday Night Live.” As Devo performed its cover of the Rolling Stones’ song “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” a young Giffels was hooked. “You hadn’t seen something like that, or I hadn’t anyway,” he said. As he watched, his mom mentioned that the band was from Akron.

“And even though it didn’t mean the same thing it means to me now, I was aware, these guys are from here,” Giffels said. “So they were definitely an early part not only of my excitement about rock ‘n’ roll, but also my interest in things that are connected to my place, which has become a much more evolved theme in the many, many years since then.”

That theme is the basis of “The Beginning Was the End: Devo in Ohio,” a new book co-authored by Giffels and Jade Dellinger. The book is a revised and abridged version of their 2003 book “Are We Not Men? We Are Devo!” This reissue focuses on the band members’ early days in Kent and Akron from the late 1960s through the 1970s and is chock full of photos from that period.

The band, which formed in 1973, changed members throughout its decades-long history, but its most famous lineup included brothers Gerald (Jerry) and Bob Casale, brothers Mark and Bob Mothersbaugh, and Alan Myers. The band came to fame with its 1980 album “Freedom of Choice” and its single “Whip It.”

Signal Akron’s Brittany Moseley Brown spoke with Giffels about Devo’s early days and Akron’s influence on the band. The conversation has been lightly edited for clarity. 

In Devo’s early days their music was written off by most people. What kept them going?

At the beginning and for a long time, the idea of this just as a rock band was not primary. The idea was this multimedia, conceptual project about the concept of devolution, this political and cultural and social notion that humans are evolving in reverse. And so they were writing poetry and manifestos, and they were doing performance-art kinds of things, and the stuff they were doing in the first half of those Ohio years, at least, was deconstructing the idea of a rock band and tuneful music.

They were intentionally messing with the mechanics in a way that, maybe somebody else who saw the Beatles on “Ed Sullivan” [and] just went into a straightforward blues-based power chord rock ‘n’ roll band and wanted to become rock stars, they were almost thinking in the opposite direction of that.

So some of it was just their own sort of sprawling ambition for artistic expression that wasn’t tied to a strong commercial intent. And then part of it was just that nobody was paying attention to them. There was no pressure. … They were almost doing it in a void.

You write about the effect the May 4, 1970, shootings at Kent State had on the future members of Devo. How did that event influence the band?

The two key band members, Mark Mothersbaugh and Jerry Casale, were students at Kent State in 1970. As Jerry Casale says, “May 4 was the most Devo day of my life.” These people who had been thinking about art in a conceptual way and thinking about this notion of human  devolution in a conceptual way and thinking about political action in a conceptual way, and then to be there and witness, up close in Jerry’s case, not only a fellow student but two close friends of his murdered by his own government was obviously not only life changing, but also changed just the way he thought about art and action.

I think many of the musicians and artists who were influenced that day beyond just Devo have said in one way or another not only did it inspire them to pursue their art, but it also inspired them not to follow the traditional American path for a young person.

For Jerry, he was always the energy that kept everything moving forward. I think [for] the rest of the members of the band who were somewhat in flux throughout those years, he was the thing that galvanized them, and I think it was very much driven by the aura and dark energy of what he saw that day.

What about Devo’s early years made you want to focus on that part of the band’s history?

I would say, for readers outside of Ohio, there’s the long cliché but true cliché [that] the people who saw the Beatles on [“The Ed Sullivan Show”] and were this first generation of American kids inspired to make rock ‘n’ roll bands, [Devo] exactly fit that model.

But also, I think [Devo was] one of the first and one of the most profound groups of that movement to make something that sounded completely new. They literally took the example—”Satisfaction,” that iconic Rolling Stones song, the cornerstone of rock ‘n’ roll—and they turned it completely inside out.

Their cover of that song is a brilliant manipulation of a great song that makes it something completely new and also challenges the prevailing tradition of rock ‘n’ roll. To be more rock ‘n’ roll than rock ‘n’ roll and sound like robots is what makes them so interesting. 

As a lifelong resident of Akron, they’re super interesting in the way they connect to our legacy. In part because of the way they used very joyfully and freely the industrial atmosphere of Akron and artifacts of industry. The yellow Tyvek suits that are their trademark look of the early years, they got them in a janitorial supply house in Akron.

They really relate to the aesthetic of Akron. Even their sound has an industrial influence that came from here. Jerry [Casale] has a really great quote that Akron acted as an art-directed backdrop for the music they were trying to make.

If somebody asked you, why should I care about Devo in 2023, what’s your response?

Devo is a prime mover in what we came to know as the music video. The first thing that got them noticed wasn’t a single or an album. It was a film. They worked with this guy Chuck Statler, who had been part of their cohort at Kent State. He had gone off to Minneapolis, but he was from here, and he was working as a filmmaker. They joined forces with him to make this short film called “The Truth About Devolution.” It was a film, but the only noise in the film is their music, so it’s essentially a long-form music video.

That showed at the Ann Arbor Film Festival in 1977, and it won a prize, and that was the beginning of their breakout. And that was before there was any such thing as a music video. 

And so when MTV dawned just a couple of years later, they were actively making a video as a separate art form—not just making commercials for their songs, but making art-directed short films that were their songs. They were one of the first bands to have really artful and well-produced and interesting videos on MTV. So they’re certainly pioneers.

They, either on purpose or by accident, invented one of the first electronic drum kits. Before they had a proper drummer, they were messing around with different ways of making rhythm. That was the beginning of a long fascination for and pioneering of technology in their music. 

They were using the newest synthesizers and the newest drum machines in cutting-edge ways. They changed their whole look and choreography with every album. The idea of packaging and presenting an entire experience, not just on the concert stage but in video and in their album artwork and so forth, is a model that others have followed.

Editor’s note: David Giffels is a member of Signal Akron’s Local Advisory Board.