Original subtitles

[whimsical music playing]

[jarring, hypnotic music playing]

[man 1] In the past, this information has been suppressed,

but now it can be told.

Every man, woman, and mutant on this planet

shall know the truth about de-evolution.

["Booji Boy's Funeral" by Devo playing]

-[man 2] Are we rolling? -[interviewer] Yeah.

[man 2] I don't know if we talked about this, so I'm gonna talk about it.

Want me to tell the whole story or...

-[interviewer] Yeah, the whole story. -Okay.

Um...

Well, a schoolteacher gave me this pamphlet from 1933.

It was called Jocko-Homo,

and the first page is a picture of a devil,

and he's got the word "d-evolu-tion" on his chest,

and he's pointing to a set of stairs that have all of the sins of man,

the staircase to de-evolution.

It was great information. I mean, we grew up in America.

We know about the insanity.

It was inflicted upon us.

Part of our message... a lot of people never got it.

They heard "Whip It," and they went dancing, and that was it.

And then there were the people

that wanted to know why we were saying the things we said

or asking the questions we asked.

["Whip It" by Devo playing]

[man] How do you think the perception of Devo is throughout America?

We have every kind of perception possible.

We've been accused of being fascists, clowns, of fascist clowns, stupid.

That's probably the most complimentary.

I think Devo may be the most misunderstood band

ever to show up on the face of the planet.

♪ Give the past the slip... ♪

[presenter] Here's those noted eccentrics called Devo.

Listen up, you spuds.

-This is Devo. -♪ Break your mama's back ♪

[woman] It's gonna take a little bit

of getting used to the bizarre music of Devo.

♪ You must whip it... ♪

[reporter] Is Devo the new wave of the future,

or are they just playing a big joke on just about everybody?

-♪ You must whip it... ♪ -[reporter] You decide.

Are we not men?

[crowd] We are Devo!

De-evolution is happening, and we have to be a part of it.

♪ Go forward, move ahead... ♪

[woman] They're all from outer space or something.

[man] We certainly are like the band that fell to Earth.

♪ Whip it good ♪

[journalist] They're one of the funniest, most innovative, non-punk, non-new wave,

not anything actually, but their own unique group.

You don't categorize them.

♪ Peek-a-boo! ♪

[journalist] You thought that was the beginning of an introduction?

You're wrong.

Greetings. Mark.

-I'm Jerry. -I'm Alan.

-Bob 1. -I'm Bob 2.

And this is Devo.

♪ We are Devo ♪

["Gut Feeling" by Devo playing]

[General Boy] Three billion years ago, there was no life on Earth.

After millions of years,

the first signs of life itself began to emerge.

As time passed, life passed,

and new life evolved.

[exhaling]

[doctor] It's a boy!

[commentator] Liftoff!

[John F. Kennedy] We choose to go to the moon.

This country rode the first waves of the Industrial Revolution,

the first waves of modern invention,

and the first wave of nuclear power.

If this history of our progress teaches us anything,

it is that man, in his quest for knowledge and progress,

is determined and cannot be deterred.

[Neil Armstrong] The Eagle has landed.

We were seeing a world that was the antithesis

of the idealized, promised future that was ginned up in the '50s and '60s.

Man continuing to progress and evolve and get smarter.

We saw none of that.

What we saw was regression.

People unable to think critically or think abstractly.

Especially in America.

[Jerry] We're here to reiterate the well-known fact

that America got immersed in its own ego.

It indulged itself for being great without proving to continue to be great.

And we think it's disgusting.

Aren't you awfully young to be so cynical about what's going on with all of us?

-I don't think we're cynical. -You're not?

-No. -We just watch the news.

-[man] A nation born... -[reporter] ...was shot and killed.

[journalist] Dr. Martin Luther King.

[man 1] America solves its problems by shooting.

[man 2] The sense of a nation destroying itself.

Devo pounds home an anti-message.

[man 1] Well, if a captain says the ship is sinking,

people don't call him a pessimist if it is.

You know, it's like that.

[electricity popping and crackling]

[evocative music playing]

[Jerry] I credit my time at Kent State University

as the defining era of my life.

And I have said in the past, and I mean it,

there would be no Devo without that.

At that time, I am an idealist.

Because we all grew up in post-World War II,

believing in endless progress,

the future, flying cars, domed cities.

But... none of it was real. None of it was happening. It wasn't true.

And my idealism is being attacked

because I'm learning about the war in Vietnam,

the US imperialism and the hypocrisy,

the dumbing down of the population.

It was just kind of overwhelming.

And at that point, sex and drugs weren't a big deal.

Learning was.

Politics was.

Art was.

I was a graduate student art teacher.

[Mark] When I grew up, I remember thinking,

"The world's kinda messed up,

but it's all gonna make sense when I get older."

And I just stumbled in a fog to school every day.

At the end of second grade, they found out I was legally blind,

and I had been legally blind my whole life.

I got glasses, and it was amazing

because I'd never seen anything in focus before.

And I saw the sky, and I saw clouds, and I saw birds.

And I went home and dreamt I was gonna be an artist.

And I drew constantly, even up through high school.

And I had won some local awards, which allowed me to go to Kent State.

[Jerry] I kept seeing these graffiti decals on campus,

like a guy with a potato and puking on the moon.

I wanted to know, "Who's doing that?"

"Oh, it's this guy named Mark."

And people just thought he was a strange guy,

but I saw real talent.

And then Jerry came up to me and he said, "What do potatoes mean to you?"

Then we started talking about potatoes.

We liked that they were dirty and asymmetric,

but they had eyes all around.

And we started calling each other "spud" from "comrade."

But it was also derogatory, like a "dumb spud," for instance.

And it's exactly what I was trying to find.

And so he screened my spud man for me.

[Mark] Little potato men that he could put on pictures from his high school yearbook

of people that he didn't like.

[chuckling] So that was his senior thesis at the time,

which I thought was funny.

It was all exciting and also really, really stressful.

There is a swelling tide of dissent among the young in America today.

[Mark] Jerry and I protested the war when we were at school.

I thought we had the ability to help change things.

And this protest stuff that was going on was getting more and more real.

[tense music playing]

[Mark] So I marched down with these people,

and we were standing in front of this army recruiting center.

I'm there like this, like, "Yeah!" You know? "Get out of Vietnam."

Then rocks started going from behind me, over my head, through windows.

So after that, I was kinda done with the stuff on campus.

And then the next day...

[reporter] On Saturday night,

demonstrators at Kent State University in Ohio

burned the ROTC building to the ground.

[Jerry] And then the governor declared martial law,

which suspends First Amendment rights.

And he brought in the National Guard.

It was hardcore times.

That led up to that big day, May 4th, 1970.

The protest where the stakes were high.

Nixon had expanded the Vietnam War into Cambodia without an act of Congress.

The president explained that the North Vietnamese

have been using sheltered sanctuaries in Cambodia to strike at South Vietnam.

The time has come for action.

Based on Nixon's actions,

the decision was made to hold the rally at noon on the commons,

ring the bell, and the speeches started.

[student] We want to get America out of all of Asia,

all of Latin America, all of Africa.

Out of Watts, out of the ghettos in every city, off this campus.

[Jerry] And the National Guard surrounded us on three sides.

Leave this area immediately.

[chanting] Strike, strike, strike, strike!

[Jerry] Within maybe, I don't know, ten minutes of the order to disperse,

then the tear gas started.

[shouting and chaotic scuffling]

[Jerry] They push us down towards the practice football field,

and then they circle around, and they come back up the hill.

[clamoring]

My friends and I are wondering, "What will they do now?"

"Now they're gonna come back down the hill and charge us with their bayonets?"

Because they were lowering their bayonets.

And then the next thing I know...

[gunshots]

[Jerry] I went into slow motion, like in a car crash.

[unsettling music playing]

["Ohio" by Neil Young playing]

[Mark] Found out later that there had been 30-some people shot

and four of them killed.

[Jerry] And I see two people I know

laying there with blood running from their bodies.

Allison Krause and Jeffrey Miller.

[Mark] After the Kent State shootings,

we thought things were going to be different.

But instead, it's like everybody had fallen asleep

and they forgot about what had happened.

And for us,

it changed our whole outlook about the world, really.

There's serious problems with humans.

[Jerry] And of course, what happens is the accounts were so upside down.

People they interviewed, "They should've shot more students."

[reporter 1] And at least some townspeople were saying

the National Guard troops were nice boys.

[reporter 2] Most felt the students had brought the trouble on themselves.

[reporter 3] Shortly after the shooting, the university's president

ordered the school closed.

[Jerry] I mean, for a lot of students,

you felt like you were a fugitive in the summer of 1970.

[reporter 4] At nightfall, a curfew went into effect on the entire town.

[Jerry] And so, I find myself stuck in Kent,

and I'm kind of zombified.

I had nothing less than what you could only call a nervous breakdown.

But that's when you gather yourself.

And I was discussing, debating,

philosophizing with my good friend,

Bob Lewis.

Jerry, after May 4th, was not the same.

He was more focused, more angry, and more determined.

And he and I start forming

the philosophical underpinnings of what becomes called "de-evolution."

Well, that was a word we used to start describing what we were seeing.

We thought de-evolution was closer to the truth than evolution.

It seemed like things were regressing all the time.

One thing we learned from Kent was that rebellion is obsolete.

So I wanted to do something new.

-I was looking for concepts. -[phone ringing]

[Jerry] So Bob Lewis and I start talking to Mark about de-evolution.

Because he was the real deal.

["Drosera Rotundifolia" by Mark Mothersbaugh playing]

And he was totally into it and went for it.

[Mark] They needed me, and I needed them,

and somehow we're gonna make something really great.

[Jerry] And now we're bonded.

Now it's like we can't wait to see each other, we can't wait to talk.

And it started as a literary and an art movement.

It was always high energy. There was rapid idea exchange.

And we were excited by the concept.

It's a completely new Spud.

At first we didn't even talk about music, we just talked about art.

[explosion]

[Lewis] We wanted to combine the lofty ideas of art history

with the crassest expressions of pop culture.

And that was our inspiration.

[loud crash]

[Mark] One of the things we had in common,

we loved all the art movements in Europe between World War I and World War II.

So we were fascinated with the Dadaists.

[man] The beginnings of Dada were not the beginnings of art,

but of disgust.

[Mark] We were also influenced by the artists

who were current at that time. Especially like Andy Warhol,

'cause he was a painter,

and he was a print maker, and made movies.

We're sponsoring a new band, it's called The Velvet Underground.

We have this chance to combine music, art, and films all together.

[Mark] We liked that your art could be an idea,

and you could use whatever medium was out there.

["Heroin" by The Velvet Underground & Nico]

[Mark] The idea was the most important part of Devo for us.

[Jerry] We drew from a book called The Beginning Was the End,

or Knowledge Can Be Eaten by Oscar Kiss Maerth,

who promoted the theory of de-evolution.

He says that indeed man came from cannibalistic apes,

who, by eating the brains of other apes, became insane,

because their physical brains grew faster.

So that what we are is insane mutant apes that lost our connection to nature,

which sets us on an increasingly insane spiraling path.

And soon, Your Honor, we'll be marching backward!

Backward!

[Mark] We'd found different references. There was Inherit the Wind.

Devolution is not a theory, but a proven fact.

[Mark] A chimp's sitting there, and on one side it says "devo,"

and then on the other side of him it has "man."

It's like, awesome, I love that movie.

[Jerry] And we started proselytizing de-evolution to anyone who listened.

And we were quite fond of anything related to monkeys,

cannibalism, things falling apart.

Boom! It was dumped in our laps.

And Professor finds Jocko-Homo, and then we see Island of Lost Souls.

And it's all coming together.

Are we not men?

[Jerry] We saw people as those half-mutant beasts.

Irrational, frightened,

ready to kill, and living in pain.

And then we wanted to turn it into whatever our art was going to be.

[Jerry] Ideas are easy,

but can you produce anything that lives up to it?

And so we quit talking so much, and we started doing.

So let's see if it hits.

[cheering]

Let's see if we're accepted or rejected.

[Mark] I think a lot of people that came to see Devo in the early days

had absolutely no idea what they were gonna see,

and it wasn't anything that they wanted to see when they saw it.

[guitars tuning]

Everybody was gonna go on stage and tune their guitars,

and I was gonna do something that we called a "headache solo."

[piercing, pitch-shifting synth wails]

[Mark] Well, because it was so loud, you could tell they didn't like it.

[synth wail continues]

[Mark] Out of the 20-some people, now there's 12,

and now there's six, and now there's two people, you know.

And the headache solo just kept going on and on.

[synth wail continues]

It wasn't our intention

to make it that punishing, but...

[synth wail continues]

[Mark] It wasn't that bad.

-That's only half of it. -[chuckling]

[Mark] And what we were doing, actually, in retrospect, was performance art.

And we wanted to take it one step further,

so it became Jerry, my two brothers, and me.

[interviewer] Did you aspire to be in Devo?

[Mark] Ready, Bob?

No, I did not aspire to be in Devo,

but, uh, it was funny and it was odd,

so of course I said, "Sure."

[Mark] And then Jim, I don't know what else to say,

other than he was a pioneer in sound.

[bass drum thumps]

[Mark] Jim invented maybe the first electronic drum set,

and he made that at a muffler shop.

So nothing was really off the shelf,

because that's what we had to do originally.

[Jerry] We were forced into that DIY aesthetic because we had no money.

[Mark] We thought of ourselves as common stock,

and everybody had different kinds of menial jobs

while we were building up to be a band.

[Bob M.] Jerry and I took turns delivering meat.

I was a maintenance man at an apartment building.

[Bob M.] And we would spend night and day just recording.

[Mark] We would do everything we could

to not sound like a typical rock 'n' roll band.

[Jerry] So we said, "Okay, let's experiment."

Like, what would Devo music sound like?

And we thought we had found it in brutalism, in minimalism.

When you hear those early basement tapes, that's what's going on.

♪ I think I'm only a spudboy ♪

♪ Looking for a real tomato ♪

I think we were just trying to figure out what we were.

So when we were creating what we wanted it to be,

we were paying attention to what was happening all around us.

[interviewer] ...where you got the inspiration for your music?

[Mark] Akron, Ohio.

[interviewer] Ohio? Must be a weird place.

[Mark] It's horrible. It's very ugly. It's kinda like Liverpool. [chuckles]

At one time, Akron was considered the rubber capital of the world.

We were vulcanizing tires

and sending them up to Detroit to go on their cars.

[reporter] On the assembly lines, the average worker earns $5.

-[interviewer] Did you work in a factory? -No, but we felt like it.

We were surrounded by the factories and factory reality,

and people that actually live like machines.

We were reacting to that.

We bought these gray work suits and clear plastic face masks.

We put those on, looked at it together, and said, "That looks good."

[Mark] We wanted to look like cogs in a machine,

like that scene in Metropolis

where guys controlling this gigantic machine,

but they're just part of the machine too, really.

We even considered, like, getting plastic surgery

and... and, like, so we'd all look more alike.

I don't know, luckily we didn't do that.

["Mechanical Man" by Devo playing]

[Mark] Many years go by, and for me,

I wanted to keep experimenting with sounds.

My brother Jim started circuit bending all of our synths and everything.

He would make it do things it wasn't supposed to do.

[heavy distortion]

[Jerry] But I even knew

that nothing that sounded or looked like what we were doing

was going to have a chance.

You know, how do you make this digestible to people without compromising it?

[Mark] We had no idea what "commercial" meant

or how important it was to be commercial

or how you became commercial.

So we were curious who was doing things that were successful.

["Space Oddity" by David Bowie playing]

[Mark] And Bowie was able to turn from being a pure artist to a pop artist.

That's success.

♪ This is Major Tom to ground control ♪

♪ I'm stepping through the door... ♪

[Jerry] David Bowie gave us hope we could get a voice in the marketplace,

we could be seen and heard.

[cheering]

So we decided that the only way we could crack the music business

was to put the whole vision together.

The marriage of music, theatrics, and the philosophy

as an entire package.

[Mark] And my good friend Chuck Statler

was instrumental to starting the whole Devo video process.

[Statler] I was intrigued by what Devo was all about,

and got together with Jerry and pitched him on the idea

of doing some kind of a music film.

He knew that we were gonna kinda change

and maybe try to make it not quite as radical,

and he loved what we were doing.

He wanted to archive the sound of the four-piece band.

So Jerry and I opened a graphic design company

just long enough to make the $3,000

so Chuck could put this together.

Chuck said at the time, "Let's make something that lasts."

["Secret Agent Man" by Devo playing]

We shot In The Beginning Was the End: The Truth About De-Evolution.

♪ You know I live a life of danger For the FBI ♪

[Mark] The music was very abstract, and in a way,

that band was the most pure-art Devo band.

It's really a shared vision, because it wasn't a music video,

and we were basing it within our thinking about a longer piece.

♪ I don't get up off my... ♪

We had two songs, a whacked-out version of "Secret Agent Man."

♪ I'm a secret agent man ♪

And, um... "Jocko Homo."

["Jocko Homo" by Devo playing]

[Jerry] So Mark reconfigured the book, the pamphlet,

and Island of Lost Souls, then came in with the music,

and "Jocko Homo" was one of the first true Devo songs.

♪ Monkey men all ♪

♪ In business suits ♪

♪ Teachers and critics ♪

♪ All dance the poot ♪

♪ Are we not men? ♪

♪ We are Devo ♪

♪ Are we not men? ♪

♪ D-E-V-O ♪

[Mark] When I got into something, I just didn't stop.

Everything that had been stuffed inside my head

just went... [boom] ...like a volcano.

[Jerry] That's what's interesting about it all,

is that this philosophical point of view about the world

informed the body of work.

[Mark] We already had felt like humans were insane,

and so to become enlightened, something had to happen.

♪ All together now ♪

[Mark singing]

[tuning]

[Mark] What we were trying to do

was expand the way people thought about the world around them

and who they were.

But we would sometimes wonder how long it would take

before we'd drive people crazy.

-♪ Are we not men? ♪ -♪ We are Devo ♪

-♪ We must repeat ♪ -♪ D-E-V-O ♪

♪ We must repeat Okay! Let's go ♪

[crowd cheering]

[music fades]

[Jerry] We shot this film in 1976, and there was no such thing as MTV yet,

that was a long ways away,

but we were like, "What do we do with this?"

And nothing happened whatsoever, nothing.

We were struggling, so I pretty much left the band.

[Jerry] Our first experimental pro to-Devo period had run its course,

but I just was not going to give up.

When my brother dropped out,

we were trying to reinvent the band, you know. I said, "Well, let's get Alan."

We found Alan putting up aluminum siding,

and he agreed with Devo's particular vision.

And then the concepts of Devo's started replacing my other ideas.

Uh...

[Jerry] Then we added my brother, because we needed to fill it out.

I just want to make it real clear that I should always do

what my brother wants me to do.

We wanted the band to be a band that had committed to the same thing.

The individuals could come out later.

[Jerry] My brother Bob worked with radiologists.

He was making good money.

He quit that job for Devo.

At that point, there is no question in anyone's mind

that this is what we're doing.

And we were like, "Wow."

"We gotta... We gotta figure out how to get somewhere soon."

-[applause] -Okay, thank you very much.

[Jerry] We first started getting hired at this place called The Crypt,

which was right between Firestone and Goodrich.

We were playing this place, there was like 20 people,

half of which mistakenly wandered in after their shift.

And they came in there, damn it, to hear stuff they wanted to hear.

[bar patron] Play some rock 'n' roll!

[all] Let's go!

[Bob M.] So we would lie to these club owners

and tell them we could do covers of Bad Company.

[music starts]

[Bob M.] We'd get about three songs into the set, and they'd throw us out.

[bar patron] Fuck you!

[man] Fuck yourself!

I'd go, "No, we got two more sets. We can keep going if you want."

And they'd be like, "No, no, no, that's okay."

"Look, I'll pay you the full amount. Just leave now."

[laughs]

[Mark] It kind of energized us when we were rejected that way.

It made us stronger.

We thought, "If those assholes don't like us,

we know we're doing the right thing."

[bar patron] Fuck you!

Here's some more hippie music.

[interviewer] How long did you play in Akron

before you started venturing to other cities?

I think we played about maybe five.

-[interviewer] Years? -No, times.

[laughter]

[Mark] Once we started playing shows, though,

we had nowhere to stay anymore.

Just about everybody

was staying in Bobbie Watson and Sue Massaro's living room.

It was a tight fit.

There was no central place for them,

so it was kind of the headquarters.

There was a lot of support.

And the only joyful thing in our life was to help make them happen

and see the following that Devo had built.

[Jerry] Usually our audiences were about 25 Devo cult followers

that helped us exist on a day-to-day basis.

There was discussion

that we need to do this in a bigger, grassroots kind of a way.

[Jerry] We had written a lot of songs

and decided, for $2,000, we made our own record

on Booji Boy Records,

our own record label.

We folded the album covers ourselves, then put the stickers on,

and we put a fake barcode on it

so anybody that would have scanned that,

it would have cost them the price of a box of tampons.

I just remember how amazing it felt to have a record.

"We're on the map."

But we had no distribution, so I'd get in a car with Bob Lewis

and we'd drive up to Cleveland and we'd go into a record store,

and we'd go, "Hey, need any more Devo records?"

And the guy would go,

"Nope, I still have the one you brought in two weeks ago."

And we'd go, "Okay."

[Jerry] I sent it to all record companies along with our first video,

and nobody responded.

♪ D-E-V-O ♪

But then the film won an award for best film short

in the Ann Arbor Film Festival.

People either were horrified by it or laughed at it,

which is the perfect response that we wanted.

[Mark] That was kind of, in some ways,

the start of recognition for Devo,

because that film then got added into a circuit,

and it toured.

[Jerry] Kip Cohen of A&M Records saw it

and offered us $2,000 if we'd drive out in a van

and play at the Starwood Theater in Hollywood.

[crowd chanting] Devo!

[Mark] Slash magazine printed stills from the film right before we hit town,

and the place was packed.

[Jerry] And now a special song!

We've never sang this except in Ohio.

"I Am a Potato,"

And I'm so hip!

So we thought, "Oh, okay, we've got a record deal now."

[Jerry] And Devo filed into his offices at A&M.

He goes, "Guys, guys, guys."

Hey, are we not men?

[Jerry] "Here's what I want to say."

"You guys, you're just not my kind of girl."

[both] We're just not your kind of girl?

You got it, wise guys.

"That's it exactly."

[laughs]

We walked out of there and Alan Myers,

who had been in the band for five weeks, goes,

"Well, I feel like maybe we don't really deserve a record deal."

And we both said, "Don't ever talk again." [chuckles]

[Jerry] We decided, well, look, we could always stay in Akron

and make tons of little tiny records and nobody could be influenced by it.

But instead we said, "Let's really give Devo the acid test."

I believe in it so much that I think we could actually survive the industry.

[man] Another thing, those older songs, they seem a lot slower and stuff.

[Mark] Yeah.

♪ Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah Yeah-yeah-yeah-yeah-yeah-yeah! ♪

[Jerry] We were playing at Akron speed and suddenly,

the world took off.

[Mark] About that time,

we started finding out about things like the Ramones.

♪ Hey ho, let′s go! ♪

♪ Hey ho! ♪

♪ Let′s go! They're forming in a straight line... ♪

[Mark] We loved the Ramones when we heard them.

Their songs are so succinct.

And we were really impressed

that they had done this reductive synthesis.

Reductive synthesis, that's the spirit of de-evolution,

and Devo has plenty of it.

Watch carefully.

[Mark] And we started trying playing our songs faster.

[music tempo increases]

[Mark] And we thought, "Wait a minute,

these songs are better when we play them fast."

[Jerry] I had booked us into CBGB's

and Max's Kansas City in New York.

So when we first played, the Dead Boys hated us.

[Mark] Dead Boys were from Cleveland and they were punk,

and they were anti-intellectual.

"We're not that, we're not punk like you guys."

-[Jerry] And they attacked us. -[clamoring]

We had a full fight on the stage,

which then made us okay.

[Mark] After the first show we played in New York,

people would go, "Okay, you gotta go see this band."

♪ Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah Yeah-yeah-yeah-yeah-yeah-yeah ♪

["Uncontrollable Urge" playing]

♪ Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah Yeah-yeah-yeah-yeah-yeah-yeah ♪

♪ Got an urge, got a surge And it's out of control now ♪

♪ Got an urge, I wanna purge 'Cause I'm losing control ♪

♪ Uncontrollable urge I wanna tell you all about it ♪

♪ Got an uncontrollable urge It makes me scream and shout it ♪

♪ That's right! ♪

[Jerry] We didn't like being called punk simply because it wasn't just nihilism,

which we thought were simple-minded and silly to look at,

but that's what Devo was making fun of.

That's what the irony was about.

Yeah, we're the fluid in the punk enema bag.

♪ So strong, I can't let it pass! ♪

♪ I gotta tell you all about it ♪

♪ I gotta scream and shout it ♪

♪ Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah Yeah-yeah-yeah-yeah-yeah-yeah ♪

["Uncontrollable Urge" ends]

[Mark] This one night, when the show was over,

John Lennon looks at me...

[ding]

...and he stuck his head right in front of mine, and he went...

♪ Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah Yeah-yeah-yeah-yeah-yeah-yeah! ♪

[chuckles]

And took off.

It was my first encounter with a celebrity,

and "Uncontrollable Urge" was a deconstructed version

of "She Loves You,"

and an intro that's almost the same as "I Want to Hold Your Hand."

So I'm sure he knew what I was up to with it.

[Jerry] I kept finding ways for us to just skirt the poverty line, you know,

couches to stay on, whatever, spread the word, and it starts to build.

And it just mushroomed.

[Bob M.] Our guest list would be all these stars,

Jack Nicholson, Dennis Hopper.

[Mark] John Waters, Iggy Pop.

When people are this good,

you're not gonna be the only one that's heard about it.

Musically, what they were doing was better than anyone.

[Mark] And Bruce Conner called up.

[phone ringing]

He was an artist,

and he asked if he could have a copy of the song "Mongoloid."

He wanted to make a movie to it. We're like, "Yeah, that's a great idea."

♪ Mongoloid, mongoloid ♪

♪ Happier than you and me ♪

[Mark] It's like a film collage of educational film footage

mixed with really great TV commercials.

Like at one point, there's a housewife,

and she's on top of a gigantic roll-on deodorant ball,

and she's going like this, because it's sticking to her.

["Mongoloid" by Devo playing]

[Bob M.] It was just a great period where most of the people that saw us

didn't hate us anymore.

Celebrities, famous musicians were coming to see us play.

For a kid from Ohio, it was amazing.

[chuckles] It was more than I could've hoped for.

[music fades]

Very good evening.

My name is David Bowie,

and it gives me great pleasure to introduce a band

that I believe may well become a focus point

for American new wave music.

They're from Akron, Ohio.

[cheering]

This is their third encounter with a New York audience,

and they're the de-evolution band,

Devo.

[cheering]

[Bob M.] Did the whole career just change after that moment?

Yeah.

["Mr. DNA" by Devo playing]

[Mark] And after the set was over, Bowie came backstage,

and he said he'd like to produce us.

We're like, "Sounds good to us,

because we're sleeping in an Econoline van tonight."

♪ Wait a minute, something's wrong ♪

♪ He's the man from the past ♪

♪ He's here to do us a favor ♪

♪ A little human sacrifice ♪

♪ It's just supply and demand ♪

-♪ Mr. Kamikaze ♪ -♪ Mr. DNA ♪

♪ He's an altruistic pervert ♪

-♪ Mr. DNA ♪ -♪ Mr. Kamikaze ♪

♪ Here to spread some genes ♪

♪ Wait a minute, something's wrong ♪

♪ He's a man with a plan ♪

♪ His finger's pointed at Devo ♪

♪ Now we must sacrifice ourselves ♪

♪ That many others may live ♪

♪ Okay, we've got a lot to give ♪

♪ This monkey wants a word with you ♪

[intense synth playing]

♪ One, two, three, four ♪

-[music fades] -[crowd cheering]

[Mark] That all happened, and so we went back to Akron waiting to record.

But Bowie kept delaying it, and he kept taking on more projects.

And he said,

"You know what? I don't know when I'm gonna produce you guys."

"I want you to meet Brian Eno."

"Let Brian produce you, and I'll come by the studio when I can."

We loved everything David and Brian did together on that album Low.

Brian had moved on from his wild Roxy Music persona.

He was short-haired, conservatively dressed, zen kind of guy.

[Jerry] Eno said, "You know what, guys? We're gonna get a record deal."

"I can take you to the studio in Germany,

and I'll make sure all expenses are covered."

That sounded incredible to us.

When we finally made that first record, we'd had the benefit of weeding out

three years' worth of basement tapes down to the songs we liked best.

So we were flown to Germany,

were picked up by Conny Plank, Brian Eno's engineer.

We went down the Autobahn at about 90 miles an hour

to a little place called Neunkirchen,

where we were on a farm with nowhere to go

and nothing else to do but record.

♪ Slap your mammy down... ♪

[Mark] This recording studio was actually, you know, converted.

A pigsty and then there was a big barn.

He said, "Never go in there."

At the time, it was very strange.

We would get up every morning and have bizarre German breakfast

with breads and strange party meats that looked like Monsanto tiles,

and we were all getting sick

and going in around eleven o'clock and staying there till 11, 12 at night.

[Eno] I liked them tremendously as a band,

but, um...

Well, Devo were...

the... the most tense people in the studio I've ever worked with. [laughs]

As time goes on, when we think about working with Brian Eno,

we like it better and better.

He was really patient with us,

and he was a facilitator,

and he wanted to have more input than he got.

He was dealing with some hardcore spud-American devolved radicals,

and we were dealing with an esoteric Englishman.

[Eno] It was a very difficult experience

because they had demoed all of the songs beforehand.

So what we were doing in the studio was trying to remake these demos.

And trying to recreate something that somebody else has done

is even more impossible for me.

[Mark] We were so certain of what our album was gonna sound like,

and we were so protective about it.

This was our first chance to put on record what we'd been playing and living with,

and we didn't want to change it.

But David did come by a couple times and would offer ideas.

Brian would put down tracks.

They wanted to add stuff. [chuckles]

And so they'd wait till we were gone,

and then him and David would record extra vocals and synthesizer parts.

Then when we were mixing, he'd start playing them and mixing them in.

[Eno] They would stand behind me.

I'd reach out to change something,

and I'd feel all these eyes on me.

[sucks teeth] Like that.

All the flowerpot men. [chuckles]

[Mark] So when you get the mix and you agree on it,

you're recording onto the 2-track.

Then Jerry or I would pull his tracks down like this,

and I'd see Eno's head snap,

looking at me like, "What the fuck?" [chuckles]

And he didn't say anything, and we did the whole album like that.

[Eno] It wasn't their fault.

I was as unskilled a producer

as they were at being in studios, I think.

[Jerry] The day we were finishing, somebody comes in and they go,

"Look at this," and we're on the cover of Melody Maker.

What happened is,

Stiff Records distributed three singles and they charted all over Europe.

[Mark] Now, representatives from every record company were coming.

[Jerry] Somebody from Warner Bros. showed up and said,

"Hey, would you boys like to have some money?"

"Sounds great."

I kept a chart of what each label was offering.

[Mark] For us, it was all in dollar numbers that were abstract.

And we're like...

♪ You know my baby said, "Sloppy" ♪

[Jerry] Then we negotiated a Warner Bros. deal

that was really good, but it was a right of first refusal.

They wanted to wait till the record was done and they could accept it,

and if they accepted it, we all knew what the deal was.

If they rejected it, we were free to do any deal we wanted.

[Mark] Right before we signed a record deal,

I remember laying in bed going,

"I gotta remember this moment

because this is probably as good as it gets,

'cause things will go wrong."

And they did.

Bands in the business, they all have horror stories.

We're certainly not unique there.

[Jerry] Richard Branson shows up with a huge Cheshire Cat grin and he says,

"Listen, I want to sign you guys. I'm gonna make you big stars."

I'm like, "I want to sign with him."

He signed the Sex Pistols. That's the coolest band around.

I said, "Well, Richard, there's a little problem."

"We have a right of first refusal,

and Warner Bros., today, heard the mastered record."

"They like it."

He goes,

"Fuck that."

"Don't worry about that. I'll work all that out."

And Richard is offering us twice as much money.

[Bob M.] We all got dollar signs in our eyes and went, "Okay!"

Sure enough... [chuckles]

...as soon as we signed,

Warners injuncted the record and sued Virgin, sued Devo.

And, uh...

yeah.

Do you go out and poach groups off other record companies?

Generally not.

The only time we ever came into anything like that was with Devo,

we signed them the day before Warners were due to sign them,

and Warners were most upset

on the grounds that they had a verbal agreement.

So then, of course, this goes into court for eight months, without us.

We don't get to be involved. It's between him and them.

[Mark] And the two sides just hacked out a deal for the world,

each with their own territories.

The total deal equaled exactly what Warners was gonna give us anyway.

So Richard got us for half the world for hardly anything.

[Jerry] Unfortunately, we had no manager, we had no agents.

It never dawned on us that you hire somebody outside of the band

to protect you in a record contract.

So anyway,

we should talk about what did happen right

and what did go well.

[interviewer] Does your Virgin deal conflict with your Warner deal?

We went into it for the purposes of cooperation

between big competing corporations.

We got ideas.

Here, relate to this.

Devo dolls.

At our first marketing meeting we went to, someone said, "Okay, here's our plan."

"We're gonna do life-size cutouts of you guys

and put them in all the important record stores."

And we're like, "Well, how much does that cost?"

And they go, "Well, around $5,000."

And, uh, Jerry said, "Could we have that money to make a video instead?"

["(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" by Devo playing]

And they looked at us and they went, "What would we do with that?"

They didn't know what to do with it. [chuckles]

It was still years before MTV came along.

♪ I can't get no ♪

♪ Satisfaction ♪

♪ I can't get me no ♪

♪ Satisfaction ♪

♪ And I try ♪

♪ And I try-try-try-try-try-try-try-try ♪

♪ I can't get no... ♪

[Mark] "Satisfaction" was the first one that Jerry got credit for directing.

And we worked with the same team we worked with before on the first film.

And we all worked together. It was kind of like The Little Rascals.

[man] Mark, can I see you look at the camera?

I just wanna see if there's reflections in the glasses.

My glasses aren't supposed to be on. Do you wanna see my goggles?

[man] Yeah, looks good.

Right. Okay.

♪ Ba-ba-ba-ba-bum-bum-ba-ba-ba ♪

[Bob M.] "Satisfaction" was important because it was a way for people to see

what we were doing.

[Jerry] We had to play it for Mick Jagger to get permission to put it on the record.

And for about 30 seconds, it looked bad.

Um...

Pretty soon he jumped out of his chair and started dancing around.

Hopping to the back beat up like a chicken on one foot.

[laughing] We were... We were relieved and amused.

And we were glad.

♪ I can't get me no... ♪

[Jerry] Warners put their machine into action for our debut record.

It was well advertised.

Are we not men?

But also, they said, "Dude, you gotta get a manager."

So Elliot Roberts offered.

[Roberts] I saw "Satisfaction," and I loved it.

Then I ended up getting phone numbers and tracking them down.

[Mark] I remember we said,

"If you can get us on Saturday Night Live, we'll sign with you."

Because that was, like, the most popular show on TV at the time.

And he went... [scoffs] "Done."

And we were going to start a tour on the East Coast.

So Warners figured it would make a lot of sense

to play Saturday Night Live and then keep going.

[Mark] And we'd never been on TV, and we were like,

"Ooh, this is pretty crazy."

[Bob C.] What people don't realize is how stressful that experience is.

Lorne Michaels comes over in the dark,

turns on a flashlight like a horror movie, and he goes,

"15 million people are gonna see this, so don't fucking blow it."

And we're all like, "Okay."

[Jerry] Now you're almost shitting your pants.

And then they go, "Two, one, go."

[applause]

[Fred Willard] Ladies and gentlemen,

Devo.

[Jerry] Obviously, we played that song faster than we ever had played it.

The adrenaline alone.

-♪ Satisfaction ♪ -♪ I can't get me no ♪

-♪ Satisfaction ♪ -♪ I can't get no ♪

-♪ Satisfaction ♪ -♪ I can't get me no ♪

-♪ Satisfaction ♪ -♪ No-no-no-no-no-no-no-no ♪

-♪ Satisfaction ♪ -♪ No-no-no-no-no ♪

♪ Satisfaction ♪

-♪ I can't get no ♪ -♪ Satisfaction ♪

[music ends]

[cheering]

[Mark] Being on Saturday Night Live, for us,

it was like coming out of the shadows.

We were incrementally getting a little more notoriety.

And just the fact that it was part of that show

gave it a certain amount of credibility.

It made a big difference.

[Jerry] Fifteen million people had seen that,

and suddenly we had to change venues to larger places.

[tuning]

[interviewer] Do you think rock 'n' roll itself

is doing anything to wake people up?

[Mark] When things were just too screwed up and too repressive,

there was always really good rock 'n' roll there to divert people.

[Jerry] We thought rock 'n' roll was over because music came back as corporate rock.

Bands like Boston.

Rock 'n' roll, y'all!

[Mark] For the last ten years,

what we saw is that it just became straight big business

and became establishment, like everything does.

Rock 'n' roll wasn't effective anymore. For once, there was no form to replace it.

[Jerry] And we thought we were musical reporters.

Rise for the anthem.

[Mark] Bands have politics, whether they admit it or not,

and the kind of attitudes that you present, people absorb them.

[Jerry] So we should quit being treated like a rock 'n' roll band,

and sit down and do press conferences.

We felt like we could change things in our country.

[interviewer] What kind of changes for the United States?

We'd eliminate political parties as the major force of decision-making.

We'd try to base it more closely on information.

We were taking a position on the culture,

and we were talking about things.

[interviewer] But do you think the package itself is workable?

I don't know.

I mean, people really protect their freedom to be fat,

and make themselves sick with bad food and cigarettes,

and buy huge gas-eating cars.

They can't imagine it any other way.

-[oven bell dings] -[in high-pitched voice] Here. It's good!

[Jerry] What we're attacking is the type of traditions we had,

where they took us, and the fact that they're still going on.

Basically ravaging the land,

work, the machine,

the whole tradition of Western Christian society.

We don't like it.

[electronic music playing]

Akron was one of the centers of televangelism.

[evangelist] Say, "Oh, God!"

[Mark] One was Ernest Ainsley.

The healing virtue of Jesus is flowing to you.

We were surrounded by ridiculous beliefs

and values and systems of behavior

that we didn't feel part of or didn't agree with.

And we set about using music to restructure things

and report on what we were looking at.

So we created Dove, the Band of Love,

this house band for the religious station.

♪ Well, it's a God-given fact ♪

♪ That you can't go back ♪

[Jerry] We hated opening acts,

and so we were gonna open for ourselves as Dove, the Band of Love,

and people started getting really pissed off.

-[crowd cheering] -Oh, brothers and sisters, praise Jesus!

[Mark] I remember people saying,

"Get the fuck off the stage, we want Devo!"

"Fuck you, Dove!"

We loved it. [chuckles]

[woman] What's your mother think about what you're doing?

[Mark] She just wants to know if I'm eating all right.

[woman] So she's not worried about you?

No, her brain was stolen by Christ a long time ago,

so she has no idea what I'm doing.

My grandparents were from coal mining families.

And they made fun of my dad and mom when they joined the church.

They thought that churches were a trick against poor people.

My parents were blue-collar Catholics,

strict authoritarians.

I went to a hideous Catholic school.

So that's the atmosphere we were growing up in.

♪ You've got praying hands ♪

♪ You've got praying hands ♪

[interviewer] Did you play at the church?

I did do it a few times. I really didn't care for it.

That's my Holy Communion picture.

I had fallen off a skateboard, so I have two black eyes,

and I was loving it that I looked like a monster.

We went to church until we were old enough to say no.

[chuckling]

My dad, I don't think he really bought into it too much.

[Mark] I think he had a part of him that could've been an artist.

[Bob M.] So when we gave my dad a job acting,

oh, my God, he loved that.

He speaks the truth, and here is more.

Of course, then there was no stopping him. [laughs]

General Boy is like an anchorman. He's like, um, Walter Cronkite.

The Devo provides the musical calisthenics needed to toughen up a world gone soft.

[Mark] Anyhow, he loved getting to be part of it.

I'm sure it'll help everyone understand we're all Devo.

Frankly, the band never said that they didn't like religion

or didn't care for Christianity.

They just said they'd rather have cancer.

♪ Wash your hands three times a day Always do what your mom and dad say ♪

♪ Brush your teeth in the following way Wash your hands three times a day ♪

[music ends]

That's one young lad with a chip on his shoulder.

[Mark] We were just trying to figure out

how do you get people to change their minds about things.

Pachelbel's "Canon" came on, and I'm hearing...

[humming tune of Pachelbel's "Canon"]

Then lyrics come in, and they go...

♪ Hold the pickle Hold the lettuce ♪

♪ Special orders don't upset us ♪

♪ All we ask is that you let us Serve it your way ♪

[Mark] And I realized that Burger King had taken

one of the most beautiful pieces of music ever written

and turned it into an ad to sell hamburgers.

And... it made me stop for a second.

"Wow, that's incredible."

[Jerry] We were thinking, like, "Who does change things in this country?"

"Oh, it's Madison Avenue. That's who changes things."

And they do it through subversion. They enter your DNA from inside.

So the idea of subversion, that's how we're gonna change things.

We want to go out to Hollywood and exist in that toxic scenario.

First, how to dress.

[woman] What new gimmicks can we expect from the band?

[Jerry] Our gimmick was going to be wearing blue jeans.

We were looking at the Camel ad for the Camel smoker.

[announcer] In this fancy, frilly, you-gotta-have-a-gimmick world,

there's one cigarette that doesn't go along.

[Jerry] He's the no-nonsense guy with no gimmick.

-[Mark] No gimmicks. -[Jerry] That was gonna be our gimmick.

["Come Back Jonee" by Devo playing]

♪ Hey, come back, Jonee ♪

♪ Gotta come back now, Jonee ♪

♪ Well, come back, Jonee ♪

♪ Jonee, be good ♪

[interviewer] You're living in Los Angeles now?

We moved to Los Angeles to be close to Dad... Warner Bros.

When we came to Los Angeles, I hated it.

It was all just corporate record company offices,

and just the physical surroundings are not stimulating.

But in those days, all the shows were a lot of fun.

And I just want to play good.

["Come Back Jonee" continues playing]

♪ Hey, come back, Jonee... ♪

[Jerry] Things always change.

The business is changing. What people want is changing.

And you're going to your next set of ideas.

The next thing that'll excite you.

That's when we find out Neil Young liked us,

and he was so excited about Devo and wanted to meet us.

[Mark] Jerry nicknamed him Grandpa Granola.

I mean, I was like the old timer.

["Hey Hey, My My" playing]

But once I found them, I glommed right onto them.

We just thought that was really funny,

because our impression of Neil Young was all that nature stuff,

and taking pictures with trees.

We're thinking, "This has nothing to do with our aesthetic and our world."

And then it's like, "Oh, well, this is Devo."

♪ It's better to burn out ♪

♪ Than to fade away ♪

♪ My, my, hey, hey ♪

[Mark] And he wanted us to be in some early scenes in his movie.

[Jerry] A film called Human Highway.

So Neil wrote them into a number of scenes,

but frankly, he left it in the hands of Jerry and Mark

to develop their own characters, and it was very Devo.

[Jerry] We would be employees in a nuclear waste plant.

And we're just complaining about our jobs.

That place is already a goddamn nuclear garden.

Ha! Time to fortify the old water supply.

[Jerry] And like a typical musical, we break into song.

["It Takes a Worried Man" by Devo playing]

♪ It takes a worried man ♪

♪ To sing a worried song ♪

♪ I may be worried now ♪

♪ But I won't be worried long ♪

♪ It takes a worried man ♪

♪ To sing a worried song ♪

♪ I may be worried now ♪

♪ But I won't be worried long ♪

[man] What do you think of the "No Nukes" thing going on?

[Mark] In the case of nuclear power, problems are obvious.

But I've also been against the anti-nuclear people

for their methodology and their wimpiness.

Because it's, like, hippies sitting down in front of a power plant

and being carted off to prison, and then they're released the next day

and they go back to their granola stores, and nothing happens.

Do you feel it, comrades?

They were so intuitive on where the country was going

and how they fit in.

But one thing about Devo is they did not play the corporate game.

And they didn't with a vengeance.

And that was a problem with the label.

♪ Got a surprise from my honey ♪

Hello? What's this trash I hear?

[Jerry] Warners didn't know what to do with us,

and nothing caught radio's attention on the second record.

And the people that run things don't like that.

I'll straighten them out.

Okay, or I'm gonna have to clean house.

[receiver clunks]

[Mark] And they said, "Hey, we don't care about your fucking five-album deal."

"If this next record doesn't have a hit on it, it's your last record."

So when we went back into the studio, we thought, "Screw that."

Our plan was,

"What if we tried to make a funk album?"

Somebody brought up Bob Margouleff.

He'd produced Stevie Wonder stuff with Malcolm Cecil.

I thought, "That's about as funky as it gets."

We called him up, and he was interested in working with us.

I've always gravitated towards music that has some powerful message.

And Devo was that.

[reporter] The thing about Devo is it's a totally unique artistic discovery.

All these weird sounds, you've gotta explain all this.

We're using technology to make caveman sounds.

I mean, everyone thought, "Ha, ha, ha, how funny they are."

But the subject matter was far from funny.

They really had something to say.

[Jerry] And we didn't think in terms of hits.

We didn't put a song on a record unless we liked it.

[Mark] I think the album came out pretty good.

And even Warner Bros. knew.

They go, "'Girl U Want, ' that's the single."

And we're like, "Well, okay."

[Jerry] So they put out "Girl U Want," and it tanked.

Their attitude was, "Oh, shit, the song we chose went nowhere."

"What are we gonna do with these guys?" Warners had one foot out the door.

That was pretty much gonna be it.

You should tell those spudboys not to be in a hurry to quit their day jobs.

[continuous monitor beep]

[sustained beep rises in pitch]

["Whip It" by Devo playing]

[man] I would never have guessed that "Whip It" would be the song.

[Mark] This guy named Kal Rudman, on his own,

started playing "Whip It" down in Florida.

[Rudman] People just get tired of the same kind of music all the time.

You've gotta have new sounds, something different.

And American industry has gotten a message.

[Mark] It caught the ear of several DJs.

[overlapping voices] Devo. Devo.

[Mark] And they put it on, and it became a hit in dance clubs.

So it's moving up the charts.

And within three weeks, it was in New York City.

This is Mark from Devo.

Hi, this is Mark from Devo.

-I'm Jerry from Devo. -[DJ] We're back now with Devo.

[Jerry] And that was that. Devo exploded.

[reporter 1] The hit single "Whip It" has snapped America awake.

[reporter 2] It was the highlight of the summer

because the group Devo was in town.

[Jerry] All of a sudden, we made this record company millions of dollars.

[cash register dings]

[reporter 3] Warner Bros. executives have gathered here today

to present them with an American gold record.

[Mark] People there were like,

"Oh, I didn't even know they were on our label."

We congratulate you on this incredible feat.

Not only a gold album...

Against all odds.

-No. -[laughter]

Not against all odds.

Our congratulations.

Thank you.

[applause]

[Mark] The record company took an interest in us after that.

They go, "Do whatever you want to do, just make sure you do another 'Whip It.'"

[interviewer] You want to ask a question about "Whip It"?

[man] Some people say it's about sex.

Some people say it's anti-drugs.

What is it about?

[Jerry] I think the explanations of the people are much more interesting

than our own reason for writing the song.

I think we should leave it like that.

[Jerry] Back then, everybody thought "Whip It"

was either about sadomasochism or jacking off.

Everybody wants to whip it. Old men want to whip it.

-Dogs want to whip it. -[laughter]

-Especially young people. -I know that.

They want to whip it.

[Jerry] I thought, "Okay."

And now suddenly, MTV had popped up in three cities.

Welcome to MTV,

the world's first 24-hour stereo video music channel.

And Warners said, "Do a video."

[chuckling] It was suddenly their idea.

We've always thought in audiovisual terms,

and so, you know, things like MTV are getting people excited

about seeing the image and about ideas behind the music.

And I thought, "You know, if we're gonna do a video,

we might as well, this time,

do exactly what people think this song is about."

♪ Now whip it ♪

♪ Into shape ♪

[Jerry] So we made a cheap, exploitive video,

and it's terrible taste.

It's offensive. It's devolved.

And everybody loved it. [laughs]

The inspiration actually came from a cheesy men's magazine

about this cowboy that whipped his wife's clothes off

as entertainment at the dude ranch.

[Mark] We were making fun of white guys going,

"I'm a misogynist, I'm stupid,

I'm a conspicuous consumer, and I'm proud of it."

And to be totally frank,

we would have loved it if everybody got what we were doing.

Unfortunately, that wasn't the case.

-The song "Whip It" was misunderstood. -[Jerry] That's why it was big.

-[host] That's why it was big? -[Jerry] Right.

People thought it was a song with certain sexual innuendos

and could interpret it as being convoluted and sick.

[host] That's why they went out and bought it, you think?

Everything that sells usually is,

when really it was a song of moral uplifting value.

Well, it's kind of like a message to Jimmy Carter,

like a, "You can do it, Mr. Carter," kind of thing.

I am a candidate for re-election as president.

Of course he got voted out.

-[cheering] -[man] Reagan is our projected winner.

[Jerry] Seems like America can't get enough of cowboys,

genetic defectives with guns who go around shooting up the landscape

and refusing to pay taxes.

-You know, Ronnie. -[gunshot]

You wanted law and order in this town, you've got it.

[Mark] Reagan may have already moved into office

and we were mildly alarmed

with America becoming more lopsided.

And so the video just represented our take on where America was at the time.

[radio DJ] If I get five calls for "Whip It,"

I will get five calls asking me, "Why in the f♪♪♪ are you playing Devo?"

[Mark] We expected that. We exist for that reason.

Do you think there's limits

on what a person should be able to say in art?

Well, the problem is, who's establishing the limits?

I mean, no one objects to The Love Boat.

No one objects to promo films of Rod Stewart

singing between a girl's legs,

or Meat Loaf grinding up against a girl in a slit gown.

Because that's all part of the American experience.

That's their kind of sex, so they say, "Yay."

But we come on with a parody of their values,

and I suppose we're asking to be attacked, because that doesn't please them.

It doesn't reinforce what they already think.

[Mark] We went on those shows because we thought

what we want to talk about in music could be interesting to people.

But it was also as bizarre as you would imagine.

What are you trying to get across with your music? Doing rock music.

We're basically a musical laxative for a constipated society.

[host laughs]

I like that.

-Thank you. -Thanks, Jack.

-Nice to have you with us. -Duty now.

Right. Susan?

Okay, as we, uh, continue today...

[screen shatters]

[Mark] When MTV started off, they were looking for content

because they wanted to run 24 hours a day.

They said, "Listen, we can't pay you for this,

but we're gonna make you guys big stars."

[Mark] They said, "We're doing you a favor,

so, you know, if we like your film enough,

we'll put it on our show."

We were like, "Yeah, this is gonna be something great,"

because we thought our films were art films.

And so we thought,

this is gonna make pop culture more about art.

[Jerry] Sure enough, they showed all of our videos.

[Mark] We were probably on every hour because we had the most films of anybody.

And it did pump up our profile quite a bit.

We got Devo with "Whip It."

-Here's Devo. -We're Devo.

[Bob M.] Everything was blowing up

and a lot of people knew Devo because of MTV.

I think we here at MTV have discovered perhaps the most outrageous,

if not the most unexpected, Devo fans.

We are not men, we are Devo.

["Gates of Steel" playing]

[Mark] If you really wanna be in the entertainment industry,

you have to play the game.

And so we were doing our best

to do that and still be Devo.

Devo is what we have been and what we will become.

Devo is just the way it goes.

And the way it will be. The way it always will be.

Well, it's a new thing. I'm sick of the old stuff.

[interviewer] What is it?

Money. Money. A lot of money.

[interviewer] Is that right? Do you think it's just another fad?

Uh, yes, I do.

[interviewer] There's a worry that your music may be coming commercial

to the point that everyone likes it?

No, it deserves to become commercial. It deserves to become huge.

It deserves to become the next thing

because we represent the way a lot of kids feel,

and we represent the next force.

And it's our duty to be as big as we can be

and still be viable, you know?

It's the challenge.

How soon will you become ridiculous?

How soon will you become the people that you hated?

We knew that we would follow

the same inevitable arc as any corporation.

We knew that. That's why we said the beginning was the end.

We knew it. It's inevitable.

But we didn't get the total picture yet.

That was to come later.

♪ The beginning was the end ♪

♪ Of everything now ♪

♪ The ape regards his tail ♪

♪ He's stuck on it ♪

♪ Repeats until he fails ♪

♪ Half a goon and half a god ♪

♪ A man's not made of steel ♪

[music ends]

[Jerry] It's the abridged version.

It's Hollywood. Nothing ever gets finished.

[producer] All right. Applaud, c'mon!

Whoo!

[Bob M.] Of course, everybody in the band wanted to promote the band.

Whatever it took.

Didn't matter what situation it was in.

Our management assured us that we had to go on Merv Griffin.

The whole idea was very Devo.

It's like Dada.

Devo!

I kind of liked it just because it was so absurd.

And it must be a thrill to have a big commercial hit now, huh?

Oh, it is a thrill, Merv.

[laughing]

[Mark] It didn't matter that we didn't like the shows.

We are talking to Devo, ladies and gentlemen.

[crowd cheering]

[Mark] Because we were accomplishing what we had talked about doing

when we said we wanted to infiltrate subversively into the culture.

We thought, "That's great."

"Housewives are gonna get subjected to Devo today."

[Jerry] I mean, when you have Dick Clark asking you about de-evolution,

it's working.

[host] Has this been going on a long time?

Ever since man began.

"Ever since..." I know what kind of an interview I'm in for now.

Uh...

[Jerry] And you just look at us together,

and it really looks like two different planets.

That's what it's really about, is like,

what would an alien see if he spent a few days

hovering just above the surface, observing human behavior?

You know, people at weenie roasts and doing all the things they believe in

and the rituals that they take seriously.

[interviewer] Are you guys really

out-of-the-world beings that have been sent down to Earth?

And if so, are you gonna work within our political system?

[Jerry] The answer is mutation, not rebellion.

We are anti-stupidity,

but profit motive overrules information.

And so, wherever any kind of thing

like profit, ignorance, stupidity,

fear, greed, is the deciding factor,

we're against it.

♪ Use your freedom of choice Your freedom of choice ♪

♪ In ancient Rome... ♪

[Mark] "Freedom from choice" is the Carl's Jr. billboard

with four hamburgers that are identical except for a slab of cheese or lettuce.

[Jerry] And it says, "Freedom of Choice, Carl's Jr."

It's de-evolution.

Because Carl's Jr. were a staunch,

fundamentalist, right-wing, anti-choice organization.

That juxtaposition is surreal.

♪ Freedom of choice! ♪

"Freedom of Choice" video featured some of the top pro skaters at the time.

But I was into them because you would see them in the magazines

and wearing skate gear.

[Jerry] We loved skating, and skating was already embracing Devo.

I always liked that skaters, they were in this whole other world.

It was kinda like how Devo felt.

♪ Freedom of choice ♪

[Bob M.] The idea of "Freedom of Choice" is you don't want freedom of choice.

You wanna be told what to do.

♪ Freedom from choice ♪

[Bob M.] Freedom from choice is what you want.

♪ Is what you want ♪

[Jerry] There is a very organized absurdity to all of it.

It is the junk of the culture

that is an extension of what Devo is.

[Mark] We like ironic humor.

The Honda commercial was a great example.

[all] Then choose a scooter that best expresses your individuality.

[announcer] Honda scooters, they're everything but ordinary.

[Bob M.] That was weird

to be promoting a motorbike.

So it was just like, let's see what the next thing is.

That was the old Devo.

The new Devo is much more traditional.

They no longer wear cereal bowls on their heads.

[interviewer] The plastic hairdos now that you wear,

does that attract the opposite sex?

-[Jerry] Democrats usually. -[interviewer laughs]

[Jerry] We designed them after the JFK hairdo.

We feel that nowadays, the circumstances call for pomp.

True enough, and being the entrepreneurs that the guys were,

they decided to merchandise their own Devo material.

Right here.

[Mark] I remember Neil Young saw it and going,

"Why are you selling merchandise in your album?"

"That's not cool, man."

I was like, "That sounds good to me."

♪ We're through being cool... ♪

[Jerry] "Through Being Cool" was just enjoining

all the disenfranchised kids to fight back.

And they have laser guns. [laughs]

[Mark] Part of what our duty was,

was to activate younger minds.

"Hey, my parents screwed up, but we can fix it."

While we were putting together the next album,

Warner Bros. would go peering around corners,

they'd show up unannounced at rehearsals and go,

"Hey, how are you guys doing, man?"

"You got another 'Whip It' coming out?"

To me, trying to do another "Whip It" was fake,

and I thought we had strong enough aesthetic

that we didn't need to do it.

Give the past a slip.

It's time to look for new traditions.

[reporter] Today, at Shirley's Diner on Lake Street,

they staged their own media event to start a national concert tour.

-Sherman's Diner? -[crew member] Shirley's.

Shirley's Diner?

I kept trying to talk Warners into it, they didn't get it.

[interviewer] Do you have any memory of why

you would've chosen to do your media event at Shirley's Diner?

Oh, my God, I really don't remember why we were there.

We did some absurd things, you know.

Can we take some orders?

Burger.

So we named our album New Traditionalists.

We thought, "That's a great concept, that's Devo."

"We want to start new traditions."

I mean, you could see how this could work.

We need new traditions, not this Reagan crap.

For those who've abandoned hope, we'll restore hope

and we'll welcome them into a great national crusade

to make America great again.

There seems to be just a regressive move

back towards bankrupt ideas of the past

and romantic notions of the past that never, in fact, existed.

["Jerkin' Back and Forth" playing]

♪ I know I let you tell me what to do ♪

♪ You were confident you knew best ♪

♪ Now things aren't working Like you want them to ♪

♪ Your confidence is what I detest ♪

[Mark] And we want people to think first.

We think once people become honest with theirs elves,

look around and realize we aren't all created equal,

and that things on this planet aren't that great,

they can make effective changes

that are based on conscious choices

rather than mindlessly following the wad around.

[interviewer] Do you think they understand what you're talking about?

Well, it'd be kind of foolish to answer that question.

[reporter] The many levels of meaning the band projects

goes well over the heads of many rock fans.

[Mark] And the difference between asking Bob Seger that question

and asking Devo is,

of course they understand it for Bob Seger because there's no content anyhow.

[Jerry] You can have REO Speedwagon and all that when you want it,

but if you want something else, here's Devo.

Devo has often been criticized for just pointing things out.

-Not offering anything... -I never criticized, never did.

-I never criticized. -Didn't say you did.

-Oh! -[laughter]

[Mark] It wasn't really going all that successfully,

but the big shock was when people started asking us,

"Why are you guys wearing Ronald Reagan hairdos?"

[interviewer] You're wearing Reagan haircuts,

do they understand the message at all?

And we're like, "They're not Ronald Reagan hairdos!" [chuckles]

"They're JFK hairdos."

You can always point to reasons why things aren't successful.

Well, it's not marketed correctly.

They didn't really give a shit.

But the one thing that is true

is that no one goes on an ascending plane forever.

[music ends]

I was happy to be an art band,

but I don't think Warner Bros. was happy for us to be an art band.

I can forgive you guys for being artists,

but I can't forgive you for being stupid.

Yeah!

[Jerry] They'd rather have the artists be a child that they can help and mold.

Why can't you guys cut stuff like that?

Well, I guess we like ideas.

[Jerry] And so, Devo, the big idea got whittled down

to something that a record company could deal with.

[interviewer] Do you find that the group has devolved into something much different

than it was in the initial stages?

In one word, yes.

We predicted that. I mean, it's safe to predict that.

And we invited everybody to watch it happen,

and it's happening.

[interviewer] Would you guys talk about what's going on with the band, or was it...

No.

Like, we were from the Midwest.

You didn't talk about feelings or anything like that, or...

You just shut up and do it.

[Mark] The reality was that being in a band was just like being on a job.

And you were on an endless treadmill that never stopped.

I think "Working in a Coal Mine" became emblematic of that for us.

[Jerry] It seems so right for Devo, you know, still working. [chuckles]

♪ Well, I've been working in a coal mine Going down, down ♪

♪ Working in a coal mine, whoo! ♪

♪ About to slip down ♪

[Mark] I think we all started feeling that, "How long can this go on?"

♪ Lord! ♪

♪ I am so tired! ♪

♪ How long can this go on? ♪

♪ Well, I've been working in a coal mine Going down... ♪

[man] With Devo, when do you have a holiday? When do you take a break?

[Jerry] Well, we really don't. I can't remember the last break we had.

[Mark] You know, write an album, record it, plan the videos,

shoot the videos, plan the tour,

rehearse the tour, go out on tour, and start over again.

♪ When my workday is over ♪

♪ I'm too tired for having fun ♪

[Mark] It's not as easy to be in a band as you think.

Everybody in the band was exhausted,

and it kind of becomes more like Groundhog Day.

[Jerry] Because it's about doing something over and over,

and we felt like we were working for the man.

[Mark] I remember when cassettes came out,

it cost Warner Bros. less to make an audio cassette

as opposed to make a vinyl record, so they made a bigger profit off of them.

But we made 20% less if somebody buys a cassette.

I walked into the president's office at Warner Bros. and I said,

"Why is it that I make less money when you make more money?"

And he goes,

"Because that's the way it is."

[Jerry] It's a tough position to be in

because we actually know what keeps us going.

We know what's chasing us, and we can talk about it.

It doesn't make us any less real. It doesn't make what we do any less real.

It's just that being self-aware puts you in a strange position.

[interviewer] But I mean, are you guys serious?

That'd be the question that would come up.

Obviously, you have tremendous sense of humor in your music,

but are you really serious or not?

[Mark] Damn serious.

There's no doubt about it.

-[interviewer] Right. So what... -This isn't... Excuse me.

This isn't the kind of thing you do for the fun of it.

I'm sure everyone here would attest to that.

Nobody's having any fun right now, isn't that right?

That's right.

Are you?

He's right, he hit the nail right on the head.

[Mark] As much as we all wanted to sell records,

some of us also really just wanted

to keep working in territory that hadn't been explored before.

[interviewer] Could you tell us about the movie?

[Mark] I think we had the first feature-length version

of a collection of films.

[Jerry] And We're All Devo was nominated for a Grammy,

for best long-form.

But that was the year

that the Making Michael Jackson's Thriller came out...

That's another money thing, nobody's gonna win but him.

[Mark] You know, we spent $5,000 making Satisfaction.

When Michael Jackson did Beat It, they spent $100,000

and he had a totally different setup going on,

and the production values looked different.

But we're not against trying,

you know, we did what we could.

But then there was also just hundreds of bands

that were trying to do it.

People watch MTV and they see Billy Joel and they see all these people

that may sell a lot of records, but they make terrible videos.

Record companies hired directors to come in and make films for them.

And Jerry actually directs our films for us.

[interviewer] Are you still working with Chuck Statler on the...

[Jerry] Yeah, on the last two, I directed them, he produced them.

[Mark] If there's one thing that's really succeeded,

it's making people understand that Devo is a visual band with something to say,

and that our music is conceived in terms of visual images.

We're just here to tell the happy news

that Devo is not ready to gasp its last breath of air yet.

We're still going down for the count, and we're fighting all the way down.

Welcome back to the program, ladies and gentlemen.

Lemme ask you about the potatoes on the album cover.

Pretty literal.

[Letterman] So pretty much what it looks like is what it means.

[Jerry] So we come up with album five and it's Oh, No! It's Devo.

"Not these guys again, I thought they'd go away."

[interviewer] Is the video as important a part of the show as the music?

[Jerry] It's integral to Devo to be visual.

We were a video entity before we were a working band.

♪ Hello ♪

♪ This is Devo ♪

[Mark] At this point, everybody's doing videos.

What can we do different?

What about doing a video live?

We have a rear screen projection that's, like, over 20 feet wide

and about 15 feet high,

of images and storylines in sync with the music

so that even characters come out on film and interact with Devo

and sing backup vocals and so on.

♪ Peekaboo! ♪

♪ I can see you ♪

It took a while to get that together so that it actually worked.

[Mark] That was something that nobody had done before.

I could point to something, and a robot would explode.

It was all timed perfectly.

[Jerry] But of course, the press slagged us off,

said, "If we wanted to see a damn video game,

we would've gone to a video arcade."

"What is this? Give us rock 'n' roll."

It's unfortunate because we were once again just a little ahead,

so we got misunderstood.

We were always misunderstood as trying to cause trouble,

and we just ended up not being embraced

by the insiders that ran the business.

So we became kind of the pioneers who got scalped.

["Peek-A-Boo!" playing]

A lot of people didn't have a good experience working with Devo.

They were doing things that were so different.

That was a tremendous asset, then at some point that very same asset

became a tremendous liability.

[Jerry] Yes, Warners was inept, but were they worst label? No.

After all, they had given us a lot of rope where we could hang ourselves.

This is where the wheels start to come off the tracks.

[train whistle blowing]

You've got to be a little bit disappointed that MTV no longer plays your videos.

Well, um, once they went to a new format,

we really became on the back burner.

[Mark] It became just like another radio station,

but bigger and more powerful.

[Jerry] Within one year's time, experimental, low-budget, and fresh videos

are being driven right back off the air.

And as soon as they went national, we couldn't get arrested on MTV.

They'd refer to the charts and say, "Look, man, your song isn't happening."

♪ Everybody It's a good thing ♪

♪ Everybody Wants a good thing ♪

♪ Everybody Ain't it true that ♪

♪ Everybody's looking For the same thing? ♪

[Jerry] Every video we'd turn in to them got censored

until finally it came to a showdown

where we turned in the video to "That's Good..."

♪ That's good ♪

[Jerry] And I get a call from MTV,

"Okay, Casale. I know what you're trying to do."

"I saw the french fry going through the donut."

And I go, "Well, what's so bad about it?"

And he goes, "Come on."

And I said, "You come on. What about the Billy Idol video you just had on?"

And he says, "That's different." [laughs]

I thought, "Yeah, that is different."

I felt like it was a moment out of Spinal Tap or something.

They go, "Well, it's just too suggestive."

There's a girl, and she just goes...

Like this, and she's smiling.

They actually rejected the film for that reason.

[Jerry] But I think the difference was that in those videos,

the mainstream view of sex without humor.

It was like as long as everybody looked like they were having a bad time,

okay, but when a french fry goes through a donut,

then you got something, then you're a smart ass.

So after that, MTV turned their backs on Devo.

I just think the impetus to combine vision with sound

is always going to be there, it's an inevitable marriage.

It's responsible for the most important art form we have,

which is film.

And it will only continue to be used and developed

in more and more diverse and sophisticated ways on that level.

And that, no matter what anybody tries to do to it,

somebody will manage to sneak through despite the odds,

just as we did for a while.

♪ Everybody It's a good thing ♪

♪ Ain't it true ♪

♪ It's a monumental good thing ♪

[music ends]

[Mark] By the time we got to Shout,

it was just dissipating, with the record company.

[Jerry] We turned in the record, and they hated it.

And then that was that.

Warners said, uh,

"Okay, guys,

you tried,

"but we're going."

So they made us a money offer if we would not hand in a record.

And they were willing to take a lawsuit with us,

which again, they knew they would have lost,

but it probably could have kept us in court against them

for a number of years.

And Elliot said, "Listen, take the money."

You know, "I'll get you guys a deal at another company."

And we took the money and then

Elliot didn't get us a deal at another company. [chuckles]

[faint buzzing]

["Jocko Homo" playing]

[Jerry] It was just not time for Devo anymore.

It was like somebody decided Devo must die.

And no matter what we did, it didn't matter.

We were operating in a vacuum.

[Mark] Nobody knew what to do next, so we went to Enigma.

[Jerry] Once we signed with Enigma Records,

we basically signed our passage onto the Titanic.

They squandered any and all money they had and any and all acts they signed,

and we went down with the ship.

[Mark] We thought, "Okay, here we go."

We were...

done.

♪ Are we not men? ♪

♪ We are Devo! ♪

♪ Whoa! ♪

[Jerry] And again, we didn't excuse ourselves from the quotient,

we said we're all Devo.

And on one level, it's not surprising at all.

But it's just depressing that, you know,

you succumb to the same reality that you were, um, satirizing.

To add to what Jerry said, I think that by the time this comes about,

they will have eliminated us one way or another.

[Mark] Devo will be taken care of in the...

Oh, yeah.

[interviewer] What did happen with Alan Myers?

[Mark] We had lost our deal at Warner Bros.,

he decided he didn't want to play drums with us anymore.

He didn't want to wear that stupid red hat anymore.

He wanted to be an adult.

Well, I had a daughter, and at some point you go,

"Well, I'm gonna need to make a living."

This doesn't seem to be coming together anymore,

for several years, financially.

But prior to that,

I enjoyed the mechanical meets the organic.

But then when it became more digital, then it lost me.

[Mark] We kept trying things,

but we never, as a band, really became cohesive again.

[Bob M.] For me, it was just like the band was already dead.

I didn't really like the direction

that everything was going and how it was being written.

[Jerry] So suddenly there are creative differences

where there had been none.

It didn't officially end,

but you know, in my heart it did.

I... It felt like we would never play again.

You know, I mean, we really kind of separated at that point.

[interviewer] How did you feel at that time?

[sighs]

Now you, now you...

You know, it's like you're talking about, now,

what happens to every band.

You're like bacteria in a Petri dish.

If you watch them, they start growing, growing, growing,

and then they shrink down again and they're gone.

♪ Are we not men? ♪

There was nothing going on, so we started looking for projects.

♪ We must repeat ♪

[Jerry] As a creative person, you can't stay where you are,

so I started going into directing.

Hey, look! It's good old wholesome milk!

When I directed commercials, I tried to maintain a real Devo spirit.

Tang, baby!

[yells]

[announcer] This is a demonstration of how people view you at MillerCon.

Results based on studies using

Sports Illustrated swimsuit model Rebecca Romijn.

[Jerry] I had a long commercial run, but the clients and the agency,

they don't want you to direct.

You realize that you just have to, like, suffer the fools gladly,

and I was not the right guy for that.

[interviewer] You had put your whole life into this thing?

I sure did.

Sure did.

[phone ringing]

Pee-wee's Playhouse! Pee-wee speaking!

[Mark] I was lucky that Paul Reubens and I were friends.

He asked me to score Pee-wee's Playhouse,

and it was the perfect introduction to being a composer,

and it just started me down another path.

Ah!

["Rugrats Theme" by Mark Mothersbaugh playing]

The two Bobs came and worked with me doing Mutato Muzika.

It started off in the living room of his house,

a little corner, until we started having to have clients in.

"Can we move this out of here?" [chuckles]

I just remember feeling like, "Wow, count me in on this."

"This is amazing."

Because it was all about writing music.

I did something like 200 commercials, films, TV shows.

One day it's Life Aquatic, and the next day it's Cocaine Bear.

And since we'd always been about subversion,

I put all sorts of subliminal messages in it.

I came up with this.

We smell sausage.

...smell sausage.

We smell sausage.

Jesus loves you.

Jesus loves you.

-Jesus loves you. -[laughs]

So I started putting that in everything I did.

I put it in Rugrats, I put it in, uh, TV commercials,

I put it in Devo songs.

Any time I had a chance, I put "We smell sausage" in reverse.

[Max Ernst] I was born with a very strong feeling of freedom.

That means also with a very strong feeling of revolt.

Revolt and revolution is not the same thing.

But when you are born into a period

where so many events invite you to get revolted,

it is absolutely natural that the work you produce

is a revolutionary work.

["Beautiful World" by Devo playing]

[Jerry] We're sure ending this on a very depressing note, aren't we?

[groans]

[laughter]

♪ It's a beautiful world we live in ♪

[Jerry] It's frightening that the things we talked about,

about de-evolution and people getting dumber

seems to be true.

When a problem comes along, you must whip it.

[Jerry] I mean, Beavis and Butthead are just the mass marketing of idiocy,

but it plays so well.

This is not how we wanted to be right at all. [chuckles]

Not at all.

We sure wish we had been wrong.

[Mark] You know, the funny thing is,

is we always had this optimistic side to us where we thought,

"You know what? People are gonna get it."

"We're not gonna drive the car off the road."

And now it's kinda like, I don't know.

♪ It's a wonderful time to be here... ♪

We're doing this because it's our duty.

When we say "Duty now for the future," we really mean it.

It's our responsibility to communicate.

There's a few things you must know before this evening's event ends.

Protect yourself from the ninnies and the twits.

The enemy is at the gate.

And the enemy is the human mind itself,

or lack of it, on this planet.

[Mark] But just the fact that Devo is a part of the culture

tells me that we did do something right.

Doc, uh, is that a Devo...

Never mind that now, never mind that now.

[Mark] There was substance to what we did that withstood the test of time.

This is a Devo song.

♪ It's a beautiful world we live in ♪

♪ A sweet romantic place ♪

♪ Beautiful people everywhere ♪

♪ The way they show they care ♪

♪ Makes me want to say ♪

♪ It's a beautiful world ♪

♪ It's a beautiful world ♪

♪ It's a beautiful world ♪

♪ For you ♪

♪ For you ♪

♪ For you ♪

♪ It's not for me ♪

[interviewer] What would make you all happy?

[chuckles]

We want people movers.

[interviewer] Like they have at Disneyland?

[Mark] Yeah.

[interviewer] Do you think things are ever gonna get any better?

They get better because people believe they get better.

People have pretty much allowed things to happen to them for a long time,

and so we've gotten to here where we are now.

[Mark] Part of our message, the first 50 years,

were that humans are the unnatural species.

I think the next 50,

our message might be mutate, don't stagnate.

It's gonna be about thinking positively

on how to move forward.

-♪ It's a beautiful world ♪ -♪ For you ♪

-♪ It's a beautiful world ♪ -♪ For you ♪

-♪ It's a beautiful world ♪ -♪ Not me ♪

♪ It's a beautiful world ♪

♪ It's a beautiful world ♪

♪ It's a beautiful world ♪

♪ It's a beautiful world... ♪

♪ One dumb thing is how it starts ♪

♪ One dumb thing is all it takes ♪

♪ One dumb thing leads to another ♪

♪ One dumb thing is how it started ♪

♪ One dumb thing is all he says ♪

♪ One dumb thing led to another ♪

♪ Now it's over 'cause of one dumb thing ♪

♪ A glance, a stance, a broken romance ♪

♪ A disconnected telephone ♪

♪ What's behind it? How to define it? ♪

♪ Makes the world go round And around and around ♪

♪ One dumb thing is how it started ♪

♪ One dumb thing is all she did ♪

♪ One dumb thing led to another ♪

♪ One dumb thing is the beginning ♪

♪ One dumb thing It never ends ♪

♪ One dumb thing goes right on making ♪

♪ More and more of one dumb thing ♪

♪ A glance, a stance, a broken romance ♪

♪ A disconnected telephone ♪

♪ What's behind it? How to define it? ♪

♪ Makes the world go round And around and around ♪

[music fades]