Exactly 50 years ago at Kent State University in Ohio, the tear gas had barely cleared when a few scrawny, brilliant, sexually frustrated mandroids formed a hive mind of proto-new-wave brilliance with an urgent message: OUR SPECIES IS REVERTING BACK TO APES. They didn’t have a solution—hell, maybe it wasn’t even such a bad thing—but renegade art students Jerry Casale and Mark Mothersbaugh saw the trajectory and were driven to sound the alarms. Surprisingly, mankind was ready, and everyone from punks to critics to David Bowie embraced the starkly awkward band with open arms, as Devo became not only one of the eminent rock groups of the 20th century, but a legitimate cultural touchstone.

We sat down with Mothersbaugh and Casale upon the release of Art Devo, a multi-album set from Futurismo Inc. that spans the band’s unheard earliest, rawest, most ragged battle cries against humanity, to discuss the creation of the group and learn the truth about de-evolution.

You went to Kent State during a very tumultuous time—was it a positive or negative drive pushing you toward creation?

Casale: Well, justifiable anger is a very positive force. Throughout history, it has been—especially when you make creative use of it, rather than join the Weather Underground and start bombing government facilities.

I was this kind of, you know, egghead. I had gotten a scholarship to go to the university because I was blue-collar and that’s the only way I could get in. I got into this honors college and started reading voraciously.

You start off as an idealistic, liberal, inquisitive person who thinks that there’s some rotten apples spoiling the barrel, but that the barrel is essentially good. You think it can be fixed and you’re buying into “America: The Brand” because you grew up in a way that you weren’t aware of the dark side of America. And you don’t have the experience of a Native American or an African American or a Mexican immigrant. Like, I’m a lower-middle-class white guy who then suddenly—boom!—gets the red pill on May 4, 1970, the Kent State shootings.

You see everything, how it all goes down. You’re in the middle of it and part of it and you see how the gatekeepers and those who control history write about it and how they spin the perception of it and how more than 50 percent of the population wanted to see more students killed. They were disappointed that there were only four dead.

America: The Brand blows away. It’s the cliche: Everything you’ve been taught is wrong. And that opens the door to very dark humor and questioning thoughts. Those subsequent two years after the killings were a complete reeducation, and what I called it was de-evolution. It started out as a literary idea. Then I made a visual application of it with some of my friends. And then I met Mark and said, “What would de-evolutionary music sound like?” Before that, I thought I was going to be an art professor.

Ideas are always the fuel that gets something going, and then there’s the vehicle. You know, there’s the nuts and bolts, the dirty work. What’s an idea without proof? What songs would we write that were in fact—or in substance—de-evolutionary? That’s where we started...and it just exploded.

You were inspired by seeing the veneer crack.

Mothersbaugh: I was legally blind when I was born, and there were enough kids in my family that nobody knew. I actually wore a dunce cap for not answering questions properly. The teacher asked me to read something from the board and my answer would be, like, “Where?” or “What’s a board?” All the other kids would laugh and then I’d be in the corner. So I went to get my eyes checked, and I got these glasses that were like Coke-bottle bottoms. And although everything looked like a fish-eye lens, it was the first time I’d ever seen anything in focus. And that was amazing. But with the glasses and my head shaped like a lightbulb—as a little girl in second grade said—I felt like an alien. I fought with everybody all the way through 12th grade and totally hated school and thought everybody sucked.

So when you got into college, this huge shift is going on culturally, a questioning of the era’s standards—

Mothersbaugh: Always! There were 10,000 kids. As opposed to my graduating high school class which was less than 100, and they all wanted to see something bad happen to me. Every day was fucked up. My senior year in high school, my brother and I just kept thinking, which body part were we going to shoot off? How are we going to get out of going to Vietnam? Because I couldn’t think of one Vietnamese person I wanted to kill.

College changed everything. The art department was vibrant and they talked about the issues, things that they never talked about in high school. I found out about all these art movements and filmmakers and musicians. I only got in by accident because my parents were blue-collar and had no money, so there was no talk about anybody going to college. Nobody in our family ever had.

I met Jerry in my second year there because I used to print things. I’d wait for the other kids to leave school and then I’d have the whole building to myself, and I mean the whole art department. I’d burn a plate for printing. Wash it out, burn it again with another color. By 3 a.m., I’d have a four-color piece of art finished. My eyesight, the extreme myopia, distorted everything. Unless I took my glasses off, it’d be like a Monet painting, like stains.

Jerry sought me out when I was a sophomore and goes, “Hey, are you the guy printing pictures of astronauts holding potatoes on the moon?” I go, “Yeah, what of it?” When the shootings happened, my artwork was everywhere, all over campus at the time—on stop signs, fire extinguishers, the principal’s office—and the principal would get to work and say, “What the hell is that?” A week later, there’d be another one.

So Jerry asked, “What do potatoes mean to you?” We started this potato discussion and he asked me to help him do his grad student project. He wanted me to print potatoes for him and put them all over. We did art projects for a couple of years before we started working on music together.

In 1970, I felt that what I thought made a difference. I loved Kent State. A couple of days before the shootings, I was at the Student Union and they said, “We’re marching down to the Army recruiting station.” I’m at the front feeling really proud that we’re telling recruiters that we want America out of Cambodia. Then rocks start coming over my head, shattering the windows, and I'm like, you know what, I don’t think violence is the way to change things. Casale: We were in the right place at the right time. Or the very wrong place at the very right time? I’d lost my scholarship to graduate school as a result of being a member of Students for a Democratic Society. There I was with my tail between my legs. I had to go to graduate school at Kent, which oddly enough was experiencing an influx of really interesting visiting professors from Berkeley, Black Mountain [College], people who’d been connected with the Bauhaus movement. We suddenly had amazing professors giving us these radical reading lists.

Eric Mottram, a professor at King’s College in England, had a visiting professorship at KSU, and his friend Jeff Nuttall had written this book, Bomb Culture, in 1968. It was about what had happened to those who grew up in the shadow of the end of World War II and the atomic bomb, and how the world was flipped upside down. What he was describing was the beginnings of where things have gone.

You’re reading it and suddenly...everything comes into focus. You walk out your door and everything is different. Once I partnered up with Mark and started collaborating, we were seeing these things together. It was amazing. We were questioning the basis of everything we had been taught.

Was that a freeing feeling? Or terrifying, or both?

Casale: It was...hopeful. We were devastated by the right-wing bent of culture, how it had dipped into fascist control with Nixon and the Vietnam War. It felt hopeless. But suddenly we had hope because we had this creative way of looking at what had happened and finding dark humor in it.

And inspiration?

Casale: We were on fire, we were fueled. We knew what we wanted to do.

Mothersbaugh: My little brother Bob had hitchhiked from where we lived, the rural part of Akron outside the city. I didn’t have a driver’s license. We hitchhiked all the way into Kent State and were there that night. The FBI has shown great photos of him burning an American flag. The next day the governor said, “Okay, we’re going to teach these kids a lesson. Load your guns with real ammo.” And they shot at everybody. Jerry was up on campus that day, when they shut down the school.

My cynical attitude toward humans started in ’69, a little before the shooting. I read this book called The Population Bomb. This sociologist got so much hate mail for it, but he said, “Look at the math on how humans have multiplied. There’ll be so many people on Earth that by the year 2050, there’ll be a virus that will be attacking humans to save the planet.”

Anyway, after Jerry and I had done visual-art projects together, I said, “Hey, I got a setup in the basement where I’m writing music.” He came over and we talked about how everything was really fucked up. That the U.S. government would kill kids who didn’t believe in a war in Vietnam...we thought that was not such a good sign.

All summer, we jammed and were still doing music when school started again. It was a night-and-day difference. It was like nobody remembered what had happened in May. Everybody had gone to sleep and were like, “This is too real for us. Let’s just forget politics altogether.” We felt like, wait a minute, there are some unanswered questions here. That was the start of Devo, in a way.

So you’re forming this group, you two at the core. But finding like-minded people is the challenge. Did you look toward your brothers because you could communicate with them in some kind of shorthand?

Casale: Yeah, sure. To be flippant about it, it’s low-hanging fruit because you know each other so well. They get it. And of course we were the older brothers, so we were browbeating them and manipulating them without thinking. What was great is they were musically talented and willing to do this kind of experimentation that no right-minded guitar player would do. He’d feel embarrassed, like he was a clown. But our brothers got it and ran with it.

Like on your song “Uglatto.” There’s a guitar solo where it just goes up the neck one note at a time, which is maybe the least cool guitar solo ever.

Casale: [Laughs] Right! Well, we weren’t afraid to be stupid, obviously. We laughed our asses off. It was like, “Oh, that’s great. Do that again, now a little faster, now more precise...” We perfected stupidity and transcended.

Mothersbaugh: That was my brother Bob, and my brother Jim was around too. Actually, they had a band at that time, and it was more like a Rolling Stones cover band. But they did write original songs and were a little more wild than Jerry and I, who were more the college type, them being the maniac high school kids. But they loved the idea of experimenting with sound and music, going beyond. Jim was a circuit bender before that term existed. He worked at a muffler factory shop. He took these muffler pipes and bent them into a stand that held four or five drum pads. He hooked guitar pickups to each of the pads and two cymbals and he ran them through Fuzz-Tones. It was like a very bizarre-sounding oil can reverb tremolo unit. He had wah-wah pedals and an Echoplex and an amp on stage, and he ran his drums through all the stuff. If you listen to the drums on “Jocko Homo” or “Secret Agent Man,” they sound like nothing you’ve ever heard.

And Bob, I always thought of his sound as Keith Richards meets an Italian sci-fi monster film. I went back and listened to a bunch of tapes from ’72 and ’73 recently...the musical timing is crazy. The song “Blockhead,” if you’re moving to it, trying to dance every other measure, you end up going the opposite direction, like you’re on a rocking boat and it doesn’t level out until it gets to the chorus.

It was the four of us. Then there was a guy named Bob Lewis who lived in a camp close to where Jerry lived. He was a human encyclopedia/dictionary. He always had such good information, and he was so inspirational to me. We wrote manifestos. Jerry wrote one called Polymer Love, then Bob wrote Readers vs. Breeders, both really good. I got inspired and wrote a book called My Struggle by Booji Boy. It was 400 pages and subtitled “The Spiritual Rubberized Action of a Spud Boy from Ohio by Noted Social Scientist Mark Mothersbaugh,” but I was not noted, or a social scientist.

So, Booji Boy being both your alter ego and Devo’s quasi-official mascot. Did he precede the musical incarnation of Devo in any way?

Mothersbaugh: No, not really. He was...sort of. It was all happening at the same time, but not overnight. It started in the early ’70s when I wanted to make sounds that nobody’d ever heard. I’m thinking, “The song ‘Satisfaction’ is, like, eight or nine years old now. Rock ’n’ roll is probably going to be over soon.” I still think of that song as the most perfect of all rock songs. The music and the lyrics paved the way for a whole new way to think about culture and art and life in general. The riffs fight, bass and guitar against one another. It’s like a crash every time they play it. And sounds so good. It’s a very aggressive, amazing beatnik thing that must have happened by accident. If I could have been anywhere for any piece of music written, that’s the one I would have most loved to have been in the room for.

Did you ever hear their take on your cover of it?

Mothersbaugh: Yeah, I did. Back in those days, we had to get clearance to put a cover song on an album. Jerry and I had to drive to New York and meet with Peter Rudge, the Stones’ manager at the time. He also managed Lynyrd Skynyrd, who’d just died in a plane crash. We sat in a room and played the single, which we had released already ourselves. When Mick Jagger heard it, he listened to it for a few seconds, then got up and started dancing around the room, and he goes, “I like it. I like it.” That’s about as amazing as it gets, to have your hero legitimize your homage to him.

There were a couple of years of gestation, then your debut show was at the school?

Casale: Yeah, in 1973, we tried to play live.

At the very place where the inspiration had come from during the riots, you’re there performing this music that’s a comedic counter to that. What was that first show like?

Casale: Well, you’re a fledgling act just finding your feet. And it’s not ready for prime time. You look back on it and it’s pretty foolish and half-baked, but we were already committed to thinking that we should get on stage and subject other people to this, because that’s the conceit. Every artist who says they don’t care about an audience is a liar. Because there’s a part of them that is an exhibitionist or a narcissist. I really think that’s what they’re doing.

It’s kind of ridiculous. Why do we think we should get up in front of people and do this? As I got older, it got harder to answer. In the beginning, you’re so passionate about the work that you don’t question it. But it is kind of absurd. Like, “Look at us! Look at us!” It almost feels imperative, some kind of destiny. Like you really didn’t have a choice. We were going to do this.

Did you feel a responsibility as maybe part of a youth movement, or because you were so excited about the de-evolution concept?

Casale: That’s where we got the phrase “Duty now for the future.” I mean, we need to share this information, right?

And that perpetuated itself because people latched on to the de-evolution concept pretty well.

Casale: True. At that time, we were more of an art cult band with no commercial success. The ideas mattered more because the core audience were disenfranchised and artsy people who bought into the concepts. Then you develop to where you’re entertaining at the same time you’re educating. People have the option to ignore the substance and get off on the entertainment value. Somebody asked Bob Dylan way back when, “Don’t you feel bad that most people who listen to ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ don’t get it; they don’t even understand what you’re saying?” And he goes, “No, I don’t care at all, because if they understood it, it wouldn’t be a hit.”

Mothersbaugh: Our dad had always said, "This is America. You can do anything you want.” But when he found out my brothers were in the band, I remember him saying, “It’s bad enough you’re going to ruin your life. But you’re ruining your brothers’ lives, too.” He was really upset for about a year.

Then director Chuck Statler made the first Devo film. We had cast somebody to be General Boy. At the last minute, this guy said, “I’m not going to be in your film, you guys. It’s the kind of thing people will make fun of later.” We were a day or two from shooting, and I asked my dad if he’d be in this thing. He goes, “What? Sure.” The next day he had an Army uniform on, talking about mutants and de-evolution. After he saw himself on film, dad lost it. He wanted to be part of Devo permanently.

What were the audiences like? You started to play more traditional music venues...

Casale: Yeah, our early performances in ’75 and ’76, we got threatened and beer bottles thrown at us. Once we got $50 to NOT play a second set.

Bookers in Ohio couldn’t make sense of you guys.

Casale: Yeah, they were bars, clubs, dives. A big night was 40 or 50 people. But to get paid 50 bucks to go away...we took it and had a beer and burgers. We thought we really won.