An Interview with Mark Mothersbaugh, the Devo Co-Founder, on Why the Devolution Might Not Be Streamed

Last year, before all of the amazing tumult of this year, I conducted an interview with Mark Mothersbaugh. whose surrealism extends from the circuit-bent synthesizers that helped make Devo famous to the ideas that helped make them important.

He is also a prolific composer of film and television scores, many of which are for children, and produced at the iconic Mutato Muzika studio on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, which he owns. Mark is also a visual artist, and hosts a drawing segment on Nick Jr’s television series, "Yo Gabba Gabba!" called Mark’s Magic Pictures, in which he teaches children how to draw simple pictures that often come alive at the end of the segment. We spoke by phone, I at the office in Brooklyn, he in Los Angeles at home.

• Watch our studio visit with Devo.

But none of that mattered, because before long, the recording of our conversation was lost to the gods of recorded conversations (ie, a failed hard drive). And then, recently, wonderfully, I found it again. It is a beautiful world. Since we are re-airing Electric Independence’s studio visit with him and the rest of Devo, this seemed like a good time to share our conversation.

Alex: Mark, how are you?

Mark: I'm good, how are you?

I'm alright. How are your energy levels?

They're okay, a little bit – feeling like – they've gotta be okay because tomorrow I'm going to Disneyland with my kids.

Oh really, what's happening? Just a visit?

They, for some reason, love the place.

You can't blame them. Or maybe you love the place.

They're young, they don't know any better.

You've had a lot of professional interaction with Disney over the years. How do they take to the music you've done for children's films and shows? And to the rest of your oeuvre?

Well it's funny that you say that. My kids are both adopted. The younger girl I got when she had just turned one, and there's so much red tape involved in that kind of stuff and I adopted her from China, so there was an extra amount of tape. The older one I adopted when she was five and a half already because we were having such a good experience with the lithe one that we got that we just continued the insanity. So they're six and nine, and they were learning English at about the same time. They watched a lot of videos and TV and there was this one one Devo video called Devo 2.0 that we did with Disney, and my daughters watched that to learn. My older one was learning English and I just remember when she finally saw Devo six or eight months later, I remember coming off stage and she said to me, "Dad why are you singing those little kid songs"? Like I'm Devo 1.0.

What did you say?

That was it. My kids don't really know what I do. They haven't figured it out.

You must see the world through their eyes now, looking at television and the internet and media in general…

It is interesting to have children. It does change the way you perceive things. I think it makes me censor my art. I think there was stuff I did ten years ago that I probably wouldn't still do today as a visual artist.

What kind of stuff?

I'm not sure it's 100% true, but I do know there's stuff I did ten years ago that I wouldn't show them.

Is that because you are sensitive to what they see?

Yeah. It's kind of crazy and scatological and sexual and complicated. There's enough when you're a little kid because of the availability of all this information. There's enough disturbing things [today] that I never had to see when I was growing up.

What do you hope your music inspires in kids? What sort of lessons do you hope to teach through your music?

Be anti-stupidity, pro information. I don't really vote a party line, but I will vote either side of the fence for someone that is a proponent for education. That is the single most important issue in our country as far as I'm concerned. I think that's where we've made our biggest blunders in the last 30 or 40 years. We've been whittling away at what an education is called.

What would you say is American education's biggest problem?

The amount of money that is dedicated to teaching, and what kids take away from public school systems or even private school systems. It's just – people talk like gangsters and license plates. People graduate from high school and they write like they're abbreviating for license plates. They don't know how to make sentences. I think that's too bad, I think it's a shame.

Have you ever thought of Devo as "educational"? Clearly you've been involved in educational media, if that's what you want to call it.

I think Devo is a better flavor than most. I think our viewpoint has more behind it than a lot of others in pop music and what's available out there. You can't say Devo is the new Discovery Channel, but at the same time I think Devo encourages people to use their brains.

Have there been any moments where you've experienced that?

Yeah, we get fan mail from people that say things like "I have decided to study recombinant DNA in college because of you guys." That's interesting. That's different from saying, "I decided to make methamphetamines in my bathtub because of you guys."

Has the message of Devo evolved alongside the media's own evolution over the past few decades? Or rather, devolution.

What I think Devo was about is fairly intact. We still talk about the same things. If Devo sings a love song, we don't sing, "I want to hold your hand," or "She loves you, yeah yeah yeah." We'll sing the psychology of desire. We have our own take on it. We do sing love songs, but we talk about relationships in a different way and I think it makes people think about – I don't think it makes everyone think, but some people get more out if it than just, "'Whip It' as a good song to dance to." Some people don't get why we have energy domes and plastic hairstyles. In an ideal world, this stuff makes people curious and interested. They actually wonder what the lyrics are about, and I'm sure there's some percentage of Devo fans that ask questions that they wouldn't have asked without our influence. I would love it if people were more proactive in their own lives. I feel like the dumbing down of the American population has wreaked the liability of humans who are complacent and don't ask questions.

It's a moment where we have all these tools to be unique and express ourselves – I'm thinking of the Internet and its educational promise – but at the same time the Internet is a place to —

…beat off to porn…

…well yeah, and a place to get lost and to become the very thing that Devo was at the beginning.

The Internet is benign, it's how you use it that makes a difference. There's a lot of incredible information and even just touring this year, we do these meet and greets where we hang out after the show, we meet the fans, sign stuff, and just talk. You hear the story "I was too young to see you last time, I missed you in Toronto, but I'm here now." You get different variations of those stories. To me, I find that there's a lot of younger kids that are actually pretty knowledgeable and have more sophisticated musical tastes than I do. From a musical point of view, there are still a lot of things that disappoint me about the Internet. If you go on the Internet and say, "I want to hear some pygmy death metal clog dancing music," you put those terms in a search engine, you're probably going to find a band that that describes.

It's pretty incredible that that information is available and that there are people doing that and posting it. They didn't need the help of a record company or a recording studio most likely. Who knows, maybe they did it on their phones. Telephones these days have more power than the Beatles did when they recorded their first album. It's awesome. It's impressive. I think now is actually a great time to be 20 years old and be an artist.

The Internet has actually done some really great favors for all of us in the art world. It's definitely changed the way artists create music and visuals, but it's also changed the way people view it and what you can take away from it. The Internet has allowed for stuff like YouTube which is so much closer to what I expected MTV to be. I remember thinking in the early '70s, "Sound and Vision" – that's going to be great, just imagine a fifth television station that just had all the interesting things I wanted to know about! Imagine if there was a Devo-vision television station – Station 5 – mind boggling that there could be that many stations on TV!

MTV was pretty disappointing, and YouTube actually is pretty interesting. It's an incredible archive of all sorts of things – both trivial and large.

You guys in some ways predicted a lot of the possibilities of the internet before it was really there.

Well we were hoping for that. I wouldn't say that Devo had a crystal ball, but when we made our first films we thought we were making them for laser discs. We believed Popular Science magazine in 1974 when it said that, "By Christmas-time, everybody will have laser discs!" It was the same size as a vinyl LP album, it just made sense – just add pictures to it too.

It's funny though the Internet and technology does present a lot of possibilities but there's also a lot more marketing now than ever, a lot more versions of MTV out there.

Is that good or bad?

Some might say that's just the way media is created now. A lot of media entities and companies like Facebook rely on advertising. There's a lot of opportunities for creativity, but there's also a persistent element of marketing. It turns all of us into marketers.

That is my least favorite part of YouTube – when you get tricked into something and you think you're about to see something that is interesting to you and then you have to sit through the commercial. There's nothing you can do about that though. We're an insane species on this planet that somehow values capitalism and democracy. Marketing is revered in some quarters.

Was there a point in time where you believed that things didn't have to be that way?

Well … sure. Back in those days I used to protest wars, Vietnam, things like that. And then they shot kids at my school, and I realized that rebellion doesn't work. There is a glass ceiling that you're going to bump up against in a capitalist structure. You can be free, in quotation marks, to a certain extent, and then you need to stop trying. This is something that Devo took very seriously. That was our time period and we were emotionally and intellectually connected to this. We didn't want to be napalming people in Cambodia, so God dammit stop napalming people in my name and don't take my tax dollars and spend it on that.

All we have to do is say that, and if enough of us say it then they won't do it. Look, even Obama is escalating war. Who would have guessed that? I didn't think that's what we were in store for.

We looked and we saw rebellion was obsolete and we watched the punks with anarchy shirts and we said, "Well, who does effect change in this world." We decided it wasn't something you could butt your head against because capitalism is too strong, it just eats you up. The punks got turned into Vivianne Westwood mindless fashion – an ugly, stupid, and cheap fashion statement that they could sell to kids all over the world.

Kids bought T-shirts that said "Never Mind the Bollocks." The adventurous ones got a safety pin put in their ear or their nose. They wore plaid pants with zippers and butt straps, and it was all very safe and silly and mildly an eyesore but nothing more important than that. We were looking around and it was television and radio commercials that caught our eye. It was Madison Avenue that manipulated people and got people to do what they wanted. Usually it was horrible things, too. Usually it was mindless consumption and conspicuous stupidity. They would market these things and people would gladly buy this shit that Madison Avenue was selling.

We took it to heart and became Devo Inc. the moment we got a record deal. We paid attention to what was going on in advertising.

Are you still paying attention?

Yeah, I think so. I mean I'm old, I'm not new. There's nothing shocking about Devo right now. At one time, to have this discussion that we're having with someone who's in
a band would seem insane and unbelievable because that's not the way people talk, except for Devo and a couple of other artists. It was more in the visual world where people were blurring the lines between fine art and commercial art. People like Andy Warhol. We were inspired by him. We love his ideas.

It's interesting that it's really hard to keep track anymore of where the lines even were. It's exciting and delectable but it's also scary.

I wish Andy was alive right now. I think he would love it.

I don't really see, despite how things may have changed, many of Devo's ideas in the world of music. Maybe it's because it's passé and Devo already did it.

Yeah, well, we were willing to play without an audience and voice an unpopular point of view.

What was your most, um, awkward audience?

I would say Knebworth in 1978 (video), playing in between the Atlanta Rhythm Section and Jefferson Starship. Almost as a joke – I don't remember if it was Dave Robinson from Stiff Records or Richard Branson from Virgin – one of them talked us into playing at this festival called the Knebworth Festival, outside of London. I don't know if it still goes on but it was a big hippie festival. Devo had never played on a big stage and there was something like 70,000 people there. We didn't have roadies and we used to wear these firemen leisure suits – these bluish grey one-piece suits. We hung out with all the roadies on stage in our suits. We were on the stage while Atlanta Rhythm Section was finishing up their set and whoever their drummer was – this big fat guy – stands up and waves a rebel flag for the last minute of the song. That's all I remember.

We were up next, and after setting up our equipment we ran off stage to our trailer in the mud, put on our yellow jumpsuits, and played our set. There were Devo fans down in front, but it was one of those 20 foot high stages in a field, and all the hippies couldn't believe they had to listen to whatever that noise was on stage. "What did they do to the Rolling Stone's 'Satisfaction'?" They started throwing things. Unfortunately, most of it didn't reach the stage. Some of it did, and we were able to use some of it. I think Jerry [Casale] was pretty good about taking his bass off and using it like a racket without missing too many notes, and he knocked a few bottles back into the crowd, shouting, "Don't you have anything we can use?"

Unfortunately a bunch of our fans ended up getting pelted in the back of the head because they had moved up to the front at that point. After the show we ran off stage, put our blue suits back on, and went back to the stage and all these roadies were saying "Wait, weren't you just on stage playing a show?"

Were you wearing your hats?

Fortunately we did. Not the energy domes – this was a few years prior to that. We had this guy Mark Rector who had one of the first skateboard safety gear companies out here on the West Coast, in California. He'd showed up backstage at a punk club in San Francisco. We were playing there and I'd split my knee from jumping off stage and was soaking the blood up with paper towels. He came up to me and said, "You know, you won't be able to do that forever." "Yeah, I know." "Why don't you guys get some safety gear?" so he gave us a set of knee and elbow pads and helmets. We went out to his place and he measured us and designed us up a custom set which we wore on our second album cover and on tour.

Amazing. How was Jefferson Starship?

Well, I didn't appreciate them at all. I was at an age where there wasn't one band in the whole thing that I was interested in. We didn't know what Knebworth was, we just said "Okay, we'll do it." On the way back from Germany – we were recording our first album – we stopped to do it. I can't remember how we got there actually, but I think it was right after our first album.

It's hard to imagine a violent scene at a Devo concert.

That was as close as it got, really. Our fans were basically fairly human.

Well. Are they not men?

They seem to be. They seem to have a good portion of humanness to them.

I know from our little video about you guys, you rescued a synth from Pink Floyd. How many synths do you own?

A million. I don't know. I'm an old man. I started collecting as soon as they released consumer electronics. I built a modular synth from a company that sends you pieces in the mail. That was the first synth I ever played. Then I got a Minimoog with a low serial number.

In Devo, even when we had a hit record, we just paid ourselves the equivalent of what California middle school teachers were getting paid. The rest of the money was reinvested into electronics and video stuff because people didn't believe in video yet. We put it into making our live shows even cooler. A bunch of that stuff just never got thrown out, though a lot of it did disappear for various reasons.

You are a circuit bending connoisseur.

I am. I have about 25 circuit bent instruments that came from all over the place. That goes back to a very warm place in my heart: my younger brother Jim used to do circuit bending for Devo when we didn't even know what it was.

How did he get started?

I think it was because we were building those synth kits. It was also because we were trying to figure out what to make Devo sound like, and I told Jim I wanted our drums to sound like V-2 rockets and mortar blasts. He decided he wanted to make the first electronic drum kit and he started off by taking acoustic guitar pickups and sticking them to his acoustic drum setup with chewing gum. He ran this though wah-wah pedals and Echoplexes and then into an amplifier on stage. It was very impractical, but it sounded amazing. From there he went into practice pads to trigger other things. He did a lot of modification on gear. We were the recipients of all of this energy he was investing.

It's impressive how big circuit bending seems to be getting now.

Yeah, I think it really scratches an itch for a certain disenfranchised section of the population.

You mean the population that doesn't have a strong enough connection to its tools? Wait — can you explain circuit bending?

There's so many satisfying aspects of circuit bending. Some people really like it to look like a Radioshack project, but others really like to take something that really exists, and that's where the term circuit bending comes from. They take an instrument or a toy – something that already exists – and they go in and modify it. Stuff like Speak-and-Spells. It's anti-musical for sure. They take something that normally says something very plainly but after being worked on, it makes crazy noises [Mark makes crazy noises].

A lot of circuit bending is the kind of stuff that would frustrate people, but I think that it adds pleasure to the chaos level and the unpredictability level. Different people prefer to do different kinds of circuit bending. There's a range of discipline and style even within this little world. Some people are looking for something that is one step nastier than Nine Inch Nails. I got a Yamaha drum toy from the 80s that I circuit bent and now it has switches that make every set of drum beats sound incredible. Or maybe what they're looking for is something that spews alien obscenities, or something that has no resemblance to pop music. I think often times it's a total rejection of radio music that makes people attracted to circuit bending sounds. I think it's therapeutic. I love the pieces I have.

I think it sounds otherworldly. It's also beautiful to be able to say that you are really making your own music. [Aside: to see more, look at the documentary I produced about the Bent Festival]

Well, yeah, definitely. One of the things about musical instruments – especially computers – is that they're pseudo-transparent. But they're not really transparent at all. Same with synths and computer software. They were built in a fashion that compels you to do certain things. The black and white keys that are arranged in the twelve tone setup is the biggest example of a pre-programmed instrument. Even just having a keyboard. Circuit bent instruments often just totally defy all those laws and assumptions that come with a Roland or Korg synthesizer.

You buy something that has been stuffed into a cigar box, that has been painted with day-glo colors and has switches that are mismatched and that may have come off of anything, from a Sharper Image stupid toothbrush warmer to things you find at Salvation Army – old TVs whose knobs you stole or something. I love that community, I find it very interesting. That's a book just waiting to be written – the circuit bent encyclopedia. These kids make this stuff and sell it on eBay but they do these very specific videos to show them demonstrating how to use it because there's no way of making a succinct manual for these things. Even the process of making it is such that there's no way to know what you're going to get.

Are you circuit bending yourself?

In the past I've modified things and circuit bent a little myself on a modest level. I admit that in my older age with time being a premium to me – and mom and dad let me use the car – so I don't have to lock myself in the basement and entertain myself. Circuit bending as a way of life and as a tool of saving my sanity isn't as necessary to me as circuit bending as a way of deprogramming things that you just have drilled into you when you write music on the same keyboard over and over again for days and months and years. You start unconsciously doing the same cliché little riffs, stupid clichés. I think circuit bending for me helps deprogram and clear my system.

How busy are you these days?

I've got a slew of TV things on all at once. Something on Cartoon Network called "The Regular Show." I probably shouldn't tell you about the HBO show but I'm probably going to do it. It's a Laura Dern series called "Enlightened," and she's anything but. It could be good. I'm doing a show on Spike called "Blue Mountain State." It was very pleasurable, kind of teen and college boy fodder but it's fun. Starting one called "Glory Days" this week. I'm just finishing the last touches on Saving Private Perez, a Mexican independent film from an unknown director, Beto Gomez. He directed it in a Cohen-brothers-meets-Wes-Anderson-in-Mexico-style. He's not very well known but he will be after this. I just finished something with Warner Brothers about how Linus from Charlie Brown loses his blanket. Lucy steals it. It's kind of jazzy – sounds like '60s jazz at first and then moves into Wes Anderson film style. There's a film I can't talk about cause I jinx it. I had a meeting with the producer yesterday and he promised me it was fine but in this town everybody lies.

What makes projects for film or TV enjoyable for you?

Hardly anything anymore! I'm kidding. Music's a great part of a show. Even if a movie or show sucks – and this happens a lot because there are so many people involved, even if the script is really good – and I can't believe I'm doing it, but even if I hate the entire thing, I can usually find a way to write a theme I really like or something that makes the film a little better even if it's still crap. When you're in music you can ignore everything else and just focus on making the music really good. It's much better than being an editor of something that stinks and you're just cutting stinkers together. That's no fun at all.

I imagine working with someone like Wes Anderson would be the opposite of that.

Yeah, I'm trying to find more people like him. There are some but very few.

Is it just an appreciation for music that makes that kind of work different for a director?

I like his stories and he's also a true artist. He trades his royalties and stuff to have artistic control. He wants his vision to come through, which I appreciate. It shows in his films, too. For what they are, most of them have not made a lot of money – or at least not until DVD, none of them were big in the box office. He has something that is definitely him. The thing about film that is so weird – I had someone tell me not that long ago – film is just a one-generation art form, like cubism painting. There were 20 or 30 years where films were good, and then it just became a form of entertainment, like rollercoasters, hot fudge sundaes, and beer and pretzels. He made me think about it that way and it kind of bummed me out because I was working on a film I didn't really like at the time.

Do you think that's true?

Well … sometimes I think so because money is definitely the most important thing in the world. It's all about money. You can do crappy music, but if your film was a hit, you'll get another job next month. You can do the best music that anyone wrote for a film all year and if your movie didn't do big box office then your music was a failure. No one wants to hire you.

Can you offer any advice to artists on how to make art?

You know what? Do something that only you can do, and do something so good that nobody can deny it. That's probably not helpful. That sounds like something my dad would say and I would go, "Thanks for that Dad, glad I asked for your advice." That's what you're getting from me now – a truism.

Thanks a lot for talking, hope to speak to you again sometime. Good luck with your work.

Thanks, same to you.

Enjoy Disneyland.

I can't promise that.

• Motherboard TV: Hypnotizing Electronics: The Bent Festival
• Motherboard TV: Oscar Niemeyer

Top image: Mr Bonzai /

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