“Yes,” says Warner Bros, publicist Les Schwartz to the inquiring hostess, “there are more of us coming. We’ll wait for a larger table.” The efficient lady takes in my bright green T-shirt and its blank-generation inscription— “MARCUS WELBY D.O.”-and wonders for just an instant what brand new variety of eccentric “us” is about to descend on the coffee shop of the Cincinnati Holiday Inn (Downtown) this bright Indian summer afternoon. Professionalism unruffled, the hostess sets off to find an appropriate table for these obvious stragglers from last week’s Shriner-osteopaths’ convention.

Suddenly I notice that one of the resident aliens of that mysterious us we’re all anticipating is already inside the coffee shop; bouncing from table to table, with a purposeful Gyro Gearloose gleam in his eye, is Booji Boy himself, in the flesh (not rubber): Devo vocalizer and keyboard whiz Mark Mothersbaugh. Mark’s hair is short, but it’s trimmed more in the Beaver Cleaver style his parents visited on him in 195X than in the latest disco-bred fashion, and he’s still anchoring his semi-rimless glasses to his ape-fed skull with that trademark basketball-player’s strap. Below the neck, though, Mark exhibits signs of rapidly-devolving rockstardom;” he’s wearing a bright yellow Hawaiian-print shirt, over olive drab rubber pants that appear to be inflatable, that would probably send him floating right out of the coffee shop, toward the giant Pluto Pup mural on the old warehouse across the street, if we only found the right cord to pull.

Les Schwartz grabs Mark as he flashes past us, and I pump his hand to keep him earthbound, and to give him the good news that CREEM has caught up with "the rampaging Devo phenomenon here in the unlikely venue of the Queen City. It was just two weeks ago last night that Devo appeared on Saturday Night Live, and suddenly became a household curiosity to millions more people than had ever known of them through the admiring fanzine articles, or through the relatively slow start of their recentlyreleased Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo! album.

Even here in staid-rock Cincinnati, where bands like Pure Prairie League (the only major-league rock act to the city during the 70’s) still stand as some sort of progressiverock ideal, thanks to the ministrations of a certain vested-hip FM outlet, Devo have sold out both sets of their appearance at Bogart’s club tonight, and the album is beginning to overtake the Fuller-Kaz collaboration in the local record emporiums.

Apparently Cincinnati’s latter-day embrace of Devo has been a notuncommon phenomenon throughout the American heartland the last couple of weeks; the five Devos are cheerful and quietly proud when we assemble at our table, and are still fondly recalling Detroit’s enthusiastic turnout for them at the Punch & Judy Theatre on Friday night.

Jerry Casale and his brother Bob (“Bob 2”) are dressed in matchingsevere shirts that would test well for John T. Molloy, and narrow black ties with the D-E-V-O characters spilling down them; the Casale brothers suggest nothing so much as a pair of benign Nazis this pleasant afternoon. Beside me, drummer Alan Myers looks as though he abandoned his chemistry set for a complete set of tubs just a month or two back; I brush my devolving gray hairs behind my ear whenever the sight of Alan’s apparent youth jolts me upstairs again. Down at the end of the table, the previously-described Mark M. is ordering a sensibly-large glass of orange juice, and directly across from me, his brother Bob (“Bob 1”) is giving me the sarcastic eye. “A real Cincinnati Devo fan would have seen us when we played Athens [i.e., Ohio U.] two years ago,” challenges Bob 1. “Did you go to college?”

"Sex is outside the mongoloid's limited world-viwe. -Jerry Casale"

“Sure,” I retort, “but I’ve been devolving ever since.” Jerry Casale chuckles at my true-believer eagerness to jump into the Devo cosmology, and says, “So this is an interview, eh?”

“Well, so to speak. Okay, this is always a good question,” I press on regardless, “Where are you guys from in Akron?”

“Where are we from in Akron!?” responds Jerry, incredulously, forgetting for a moment that he’s off the Coasts now, and can relax and speak frankly to his fellow Buckeye. “Oh, the southwest part of Akron, Lower Akron, ‘L.A.’, you might even say.”

“Did any of you guys go to Kenmore High School?” I ask. “I drove by it once,” pipes up Mark from behind his orange juice, “but none of us went there.”

“Shoot. My wife’s cousins, Danielle and Milana Velemirov (couple cute Serbs) went to Kenmore. When we were up in Akron this summer, I quizzed Danielle about this band ‘Devo’

I kept hearing about everywhere, assuming that a committed Akronite rock ’n’ roller like her would have the real lowdown on the local scene, but •she told me she’d never heard of you guys! I figured later that if you’d gone to Kenmore High, and had never heard of Danielle Velemirov, we could get the interview off on an even footing.”

“Well, I’m not surprised someone from Akron doesn’t know about Devo,” says Jerry. “We had to get out of town, because Devo just wasn’t making it in Akron.”

“What was Akron into?”

“Oh, vans. That’s it, vans and quaaludes.”

“And pickups?” I interject, thinking of all the macho geeks in their 4x4’s roaming my own Ohio neighborhood.

“Yeah, pickups too.”

Around this time I notice that Mark has found small holes in the handles of his official Holiday Inn silverware, and is busily spinning his utensils on a toothpick axle, making a soothing clatter. “Hey,” says the bright-idea CREEM writer, “why don’t you put that sound on yer next album? I bet Eno would really go for it.”

“Yeah, he’d like it, it would fit right into his theories of the (de-) evolution of musical hardware,” responds one Devo or another. “The knife doesn’t have a hole.” “That’s because it’s male, it fits into the holes in the female fork and spoon.” “Actually, forks are ‘bi’, they can go either way ...”

Inspired by this contagious good fellowship, by these sounds of things falling apart, I warmly address Jerry: “We’ve got to thank you for writing ‘Mongoloid’, we’ve needed that song for years. My wife used to teach in a school for the retarded, overrun with mongoloids like some scene from Brave New World, and we know intimately that everything you wrote is 100% true.” £

“Yeah, my girlfriend worked in aj place like that,” says Jerry, “that’s how | 1 knew.”

“So you know too that mongoloids’ noses run constantly, for instance?”

“Oh, right!” answers Jerry, warming to the odd fortune of meeting another connoisseur of mental defectives right here in dear old Ohio.

“My wife taught there while she was pregnant,” I continue. “We were sure we’d have a retarded child ourselves, especially after one of the more psychotic kids butted her head into my wife’s stomach. But the regular mongoloids didn’t even realize that she was pregnant.”

“Yeah,” says Jerry, reflectively, “sex is outside the mongoloid’s limited world-view. Your wife’s stomach was just the nearest big, round, soft ball for those mongoloids, they didn’t know there was a baby in it . . I can’t become too complacent over this swapping of old-mongoloid-tales with the real rockstars of Devo, as I keep noticing that Bob 2, with his 50’s haircut, vaguely Jewish face, and neat dress shirt, looks almost exactly like golden-oldie novelist J. D. Salinger. I’m becoming paranoid that Devo have consulted the WarnerComm dossier on me beforehand, and have fixed up Bob

2 like Salinger just to spook me, so that I’ll break down and confess to all of my thirty-one years, including the damning biographical tidbit that I picked up (too) much of my sex education reading J. D.’s moldy Catcher in the Rye way back when. Too much paranoias!

Our luncheon is breaking up anyway, as Devo have to do a telephone interview or two before going over to Bogart’s for soundcheck. Bob 1 is still determined to make an honest critic of me. Looking me in the eye, he says, “I think you should call your story on us, ‘Devo: One Man’s Opinion’.” “I’ll think about it,” I promise, wondering just where this participatory journalism stuff got out of hand.

As I’m passing out of the Holiday Inn, I spot Mark Mothersbaugh engaged in one of those wanton acts of destruction today’s decadent rockstars are so inclined to indulge in within the walls of these shameless hostelries: he’s purchasing a coil of U.S. postage stamps from a vending machine in the hallway. “Carry it on, Mark” I conclude, “I’ll see ya at Bogart’s tonight.”

Do you want Booji Boy? •Mark Mothersbaugh

On the way home, I find Cincinnati regressing into the throes of de-evolution even faster than I’ve already suspected. When I stop at the friendly neighborhood record exchange, to finance another day or two of family existence on this planet, “Space Junk” is blasting out of the store’s sound system, and the ChiChi Rodriguez-like composite-Devo visage is sneering at me from the “Now Playing” rack. Cash in hand, I get back into my car, punch the radio button, and the knowing deejay is telling it like it is: “We’re giving away two Devo suits later tonight, 100% vinyl, wear one and be the hit of your Halloween party!”

When Teresa and I arrive at Bogart’s that evening, it really does look as though Halloween has come to the Queen City early this year. Thanks to the pernicious influence of Steve Martin and his legions of false-nosed, balloon-fettered camp followers, hipper-than-hip Cincinnati trendies are into dressing up like their newfound media heroes (such heroes generally having just been discovered on last week’s Saturday Night Live broadcast), and people in Devo-inspired jumpsuits are converging on Bogart’s from all directions. A VW Beetle cruises by, and the driver yells out the instant catechism: “Are we not men?” “We are Devo!” the excited crowd shouts back. This is the most enthusiastic crowd I’ve ever seen for any vaguely New Waverelated concert in Cincinnati, even though Patti Smith, the Ramones, and Elvis Costello have managed to pack Bogart’s in the past.

Within the 1930’s movie-theatre shell of Bogart’s, seats are going fast. We sit down behind some people from Akron who have driven the 200-plus miles to Cincinnati to catch their late-blooming townsmen, even though Devo will be playing in their own backyard, at Cleveland’s Agora, tomorrow night. I make a mental note to check after the show whether these Akronites leave in a van.

The deposed king and dowager queen of Cincinnati hip society (a couple who ran a now-defunct bookstore, which for years was absolutely the only outlet for avant-garde records and underground journals in the Queen City) mak6 their customary appearance at this progressive-music function, and even their seen-it-all faces display some emotion over this eager turnout for Devo.

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CONTINUED FROM PAGE 45

Local illusionist Steve Faris warms up the crowd with his impressive bag of tricks, but the moldy drug jokes with which he ordinarily wows the nodding Hippies in the audience aren’t working tonight, and he has to exit early, scarves and stooges dangling, so that Bogart’s can drop the screen for Devo’s film Satisfaction. This is my first time viewing the movie, too, and I’m sincerely pleased with its accurate summation of daily life out here in Ohio. But the crowd is even more ecstatic, and they cheer uproariously for each newly-learned article of the Devo faith, from General Boy’s cool buffoonery, to the call & response of “Jocko Homo”

By the time fhe real-life Devo chase their film off the stage, Bogart’s is in a truly electric mood. Devo are wearing their Saturday Night Live-validated yellow suits, and their goggle shades, causing conditioned responses to hang heavy in everybody’s salivary glands. It’s a wiggly world, indeed, and Devo’s robot, music-box-like steps to “Satisfaction” are giving the Stones’ musty lyrics new shadings of vitality, here in the waning 70’s.

With their keyboard-swirled chop rhythms, Devo’s songs are the logical, de-evolutionary consequence of such primordial slices of Ohio punk as the Music Explosion’s long-lost “Little Bit O’ Soul”. Devo’ sound sprang from that same punk impulse, but came out of the Ohio closet with eons of acquired avant-garde culture layered over the punk. Compulsive Comrade Eno took to the insistent Protestant ethic of Devo’s music like D. Duck to a shower massage unit, and the matchup couldn’t have worked better.

But that was back in Koln. Tonight, in similarly Kraut-heavy Cincinnati, Devo are running through a particularly incandescent version of “Uncontrollable Urge”. Devo display a real command of less-is-more musicianship, on top of all the conceptual pizzazz of their satirical lyrics. When Devo invoke their trademark “Praying Hands”, the Akron-escapee sitting by me follows right along with Mark Mothersbaugh’s hand motions.

The crowd goes into a new paroxysm of recognition and glee when Devo shed their yellow suits and toss them into the audience at the end of “Mongoloid”; again, it’s one of those rites of passage the troops picked up from that crucial Saturday Night Live appearance. Trim and streamlined in their gym suits and skateboard pads & helmets, Devo churn on down their playlist.

Mark Mothersbaugh’s extroverted stage behavior elicits new wonderment from me with each new song, as it’s such a contrast to his modest demeanor at the interview. He stalks from side to side of the stage during the rhetorical segment of “Jocko Homo”, running his hand through his hair in mock angst, as he bawls out the “Are we not men?” query to the expectant spuds clustered inches from his feet. As he passes his synthesizer, he claws a huge loop of sound off the keyboard, and sends it reverberating through the 2 Bobs’ guitar waves. Jerry and Alan are stroking away at their bass and drums with equal devolvement.

By the time he’s shouting out his “I’m just a spud boy/Looking for a real tomato” mating call, Mark is appropriately enough coming out of his gym shorts; Ted Nugent’s got nothing on these guys. In another first for Bogart’s, Devo blow the house power with their electroconceptual overload, as first the lights, and then all the amps shut off. Everybody assumes that this is all part of some new acid-rock revival shtick, on ever-clever Devo’s part, until we see a stagehand with a flashlight climbing through the false ceiling to flip the breakers back on. Power restored, Mark shouts out, “Now that’s real Devo!”

After a thunderous finish with “Sloppy”, Devo rush for the dressing room, but the part-ecstatic, part-comparison shopper Cincinnati crowd is demanding more for their entertainment dollar. With studied spontaneity, Devo trek back to the stage, toting a rather well-known playpen (yet another fetish of that triumphant Saturday Night Live appearance), and Mark hollers out, “Do you want Booji Boy?!?”, simultaneously suiting up as the band’s beloved incarnation of infantilism. Mark takes us through a day in the life of the hapless Booji Boy, and, still safely masked, whines out a closing “Now, Cincinnati, we love you! We know [voice breaking] where your heads are at!” The grateful rubes thronged by the stage cheer even this sarcastic blessing, overjoyed that Devo have condescended to sneer at their own humdrum Cincinnati lives.

As Devo are making their final exit, a nondescript figure runs up to our table, tosses some pamphlets onto it, and rushes away again. Thinking that this visitor is one further yuk-element in Devo’s package presentation, I pick up a pamphlet entitled “We’re All Devo”, and begin reading a quote from “Jocko Homo” ’s lyrics, but find that the lyrics quickly devolve into a pitch for the original Booji Boy, ol’ J.C. hisself, brought to us by some Maranathan crackpots trading on Devo’s good name. Included is the fascinating revelation that God “didn’t make us robots, we are our own decisionmaking, self-determining entities . .

Personal decision-making and journalistic self-determination appear to carry little weight with Bogart’s bouncer, however, as he begins rolling up his sleeves and clenching his fists in preparation for pounding me, when I attempt to saunter into the press party with the shameless cool of one lately returned from such bashes in the world capitals of rock ’n’ roll. Fortunately Devo’s road manager happens by then, and identifies us as mortals worthy of admission.

By now, the sated fans have realized that the retiring fellow over there in the gloom really is Booji Boy, and they’re beginning to move in with their tokens of esteem. In place of such immemorial scenemongers as David Blue or Leonard Cohen, humble Ohio is offering Devo some refreshing emissaries of local color.

“Hi, we’re from the Fabrique Fucking Alliance,” says the leader of a guerilla-theatre cadre dressed in stylized dancers’ costumes complete with fashionably-bandaged legs, simultaneously thrusting an electrical cord into Mark’s hands. The F.F.A. chieftan shows Mark how to cinch the cord around his waist, and then to plug the male end into the female end “when you -feel like fucking yourself.”Mark gratefully accepts the cord, and turns ter an enthusiastically punky guy who’s flashing a 45 record in his face. “Really enjoyed your show! I’m in ‘Twist & Shout’. You seen us?” gushes the young fan.

A dark-haired girl beams at Mark with new affection born of her discovery of their shared origins: “Hi, I’m from Kent State, too!”

“Ah,” says Mark, indulgently, “ ‘Four dead in O-hi-o.’ I was supposed to graduate from there, but I lacked seven credit hours.”

“Who cares!?” cries the Kent State alumna, gleeful with the devil-maycare spirit of the evening.

“My mom did,” explains Mark, patient with this bright student of deevolution, “She was upset about it.” Along the way, Mark has acquired an ear of Indian corn from the harvestmotif table decorations, and is briskly brushing Ms. Kent State’s knees with the cornhusk as he talks to her. She looks a bit uneasy now, uncertain whether she’s being courted in some bizarre, cob-in-my-pocket rockstar ritual, or whether Mark is administering a good old dose of de-evo putdown.

Mark seems satisfied either way, as he drops the corn and the conversation, and begins sniffing the leftover lobster claws. I accost the opening magician, to see if I can get introduced to his rabbit, and when I next notice Mark, he’s crawled under a pinball machine, and is lifting the leg of his jumpsuit to examine the ankle injury he suffered in Detroit.

The ambience is beginning to get to me, too, so Teresa and I grab our coats and make for the exit. On the way out, I put the keystone interview query to Mark M.: “How come Bob 2 looks just like J. D. Salinger?” 4

“Oh, really, he looks like Salinger?” says Mark, beginning to see the light. “He just got his hair cut because people told him he looked like John Travolta.” (Grinding crash of male-menopausal rock critic smashing head-on into some generation gap or other.)

Outside, on nearly-deserted Vine Street, it’s less than 48 hours until Halloween ’78, and trick & treating Devo have given me a revivifying dose of holiday spirit. I’m ready for any breed of goblins this year. Q: Are we not men? A: Whatta ya got?