For a band that was occasionally dismissed as a joke or a fad when it began confusing mainstream listeners with their idiosyncratic art-punk more than a half century ago, Devo is sure having a big 2025.
After playing Radio City Music Hall for SNL 50: The Homecoming Concert in February, talks began with The B-52s — another conceptual, quirky band who was featured on the NBC special — for a co-headlining tour. That trek, the Cosmic De-Evolution Tour with opener Lene Lovich, kicked off Wednesday (Sept. 24) night in Toronto, and follows the Netflix premiere of the new documentary Devo, helmed by Chris Smith (director of the 1999 cult classic American Movie and the 2023 Netflix doc Wham!). Beyond its 2025 tour, it was recently announced that Devo will play both weekends of Coachella in 2026. “We’re going to be playing to some pretty big crowds,” muses Devo co-founder Gerald Casale.
In a nod to the title of Devo’s subversive, nine-minute art film In the Beginning Was the End: The Truth About De-Evolution (1976), I’ll start this article at the end of my interview with Casale, Bob Mothersbaugh and Mark Mothersbaugh, before moving on to the meat-and-spuds Q&A. Prior to signing off the Zoom call, Casale called attention to a poster of the 1920 horror classic The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari on my wall. “The story goes (the director) got in trouble with the authorities for it, and he had to edit the whole thing so it seemed like a dream,” he shares of a film which depicts authority as evil, or at least insane. “When it was real, that was unacceptable.”
Devo knows a thing or two about delivering uncompromising observations about human nature and unsettling predictions for our future under the guise of fantasy. Since the mid ‘70s, the Akron, Ohio rock band has explored conformity, capitalism and how it relates to what can sometimes seems like humanity’s race to the bottom – i.e., “de-evolution,” or Devo for short — alongside a colorful cast of characters while wearing matching suits, energy dome hats and plastic hairpieces.
Here, Casale and the Mothersbaugh brothers offer their candid thoughts about the Netflix documentary, artificial intelligence, FCC censorship and their tour with the B-52s.
Did you collaborate with Chris Smith on this documentary, or have any say in the final product?
Gerald Casale: I personally had none.
Mark Mothersbaugh: We let him do it, we kept arm’s length. That’s what a documentary is. Somebody putting together a story for you.
Bob Mothersbaugh: [deadpan] Yeah, he gave us a list of answers that he wanted us to read.
[Laughs.] Well, there are some documentaries where that’s not far from the truth — or at least docs where the subject and their team want approval on the final cut.
Casale: He had so much material that he could have done a limited TV series rather than an hour-and-a-half movie.
There’s so much vintage footage of you all in this documentary. Were there any parts you had little to no memory of?
Casale: Unfortunately, I remember a lot. It’s possible that what I did see I hadn’t thought of in a while.
M. Mothersbaugh: I don’t think, no. But you have to understand, Bob and I — General Boy [a character who appeared in many Devo films and videos], who was our father — he shot from the time we were baby infants. He shot film every couple of weeks, he’d shoot rolls of eight-millimeter, silent film back in those days. It was just little four-minute reels, so he collected all that stuff. Bob and I have both seen like four CD compilations of it. There is a lot of things that you go, “Everybody looked totally… look at the cars!” Stuff like that.
But there was some interesting footage that Bob and I both remember. General Boy was obsessed with driving from Akron, Ohio, down to Mexico in a station wagon with Bob and I, our brother and our two sisters and mom and a dog. He would make these maps where he would draw out the whole trip and we’d drive as far as we could to somewhere in Mexico. Maybe we’d all get tired, and we just stopped the car, pitch a tent and sleep in the tent. Then get up the next day and start driving again on to Taxco or Mexico City, wherever we were heading. We had a lot of interesting experiences doing that.
A lot of times, a music doc ends with an uplifting or sugarcoated finale, but this film acknowledges that the band fizzled a bit toward the end of its recording career — and, unfortunately, a lot of the cultural things you worried would happen did come to pass. What was your impression of the ending?
Casale: Just that it kind of ended. That he’s trying to put us in a put us in a historical box, rather than take the opportunity to basically state the obvious — because you have this documentary of Devo now. That turns out we are relevant, that there is something still vital and substantive about Devo that has withstood the test of time and speaks to kids now. But that doesn’t come through in this documentary at all. It’s like a lock box and “the past.”
M. Mothersbaugh: Well, I don’t know. I have a lot of people tell me that that they did see that, and that they did get that feeling from it.
I certainly saw both. Like I said, there was a dourness to it, but there was also a sense that this band was ahead of its time and in that way remains as relevant as ever.
Casale: You don’t really want to be ahead of your time. You know the cliché that pioneers get scalped? True.
Fair. But looking back, it has to feel good to know you were ahead of the trend, that you saw things happening that others didn’t.
Casale: Well, we were right and didn’t want to be.
One thing that occurred to me watching this was that the band started in 1973 and then The Truth About De-Evolution movie comes out in 1976. You self-release some music in ’77 and the debut album comes in ’78. It didn’t happen fast. This is a big “what if” question, but do you think that if Devo had come up in the social media era, you might have found your people sooner?
Casale: Well, yes — but then you might have been gone in a flash as well, because you didn’t have time to really work out what your aesthetic was and what you were really doing. You didn’t get to marinate. And a lot of times you get disposed of.
True. And Devo might have been a completely different band. So you have the Cosmic De-Evolution Tour with The B-52s, your first trek together. How well do you know them?
Casale: We know them, not that well. I met Kate [Pierson] at the Mudd Club early ‘79 and hung out there. I saw her more than once there and danced with her there and knew Fred [Schneider] and ate with him out here in Los Angeles in the ‘80s.
M. Mothersbaugh: Our first drummer, Jim Mothersbaugh, he worked for Devo after he stopped playing drums, but then he moved on to Roland. While he was at Roland, he was assigned to go out and work with different artists that were trying to figure out how to use a synthesizer, a “modern” synthesizer, with MIDI in it. He spent a couple weeks with the B-52s back in those days.
Lene Lovich, another brilliant oddball, is a perfect opener for the tour. Was that your idea?
M. Mothersbaugh: We had nothing to do with it, but we loved the idea. She’s got a great voice and it makes for an interesting third piece.
Casale: I wasn’t [initially] aware that she was performing these days. It was a surprise.
Might there be some collaborations, onstage crossovers between you and the B-52s on this tour?
Casale: It’s not out of the question.
B. Mothersbaugh: Nothing’s planned yet. But sure.
Casale: We’ll have to get it okayed by the Ministry of Truth in Washington, D.C. I mean, Kimmel being canceled was the kill shot of the First Amendment. So that’s over. [Ed. note: This interview took place before Jimmy Kimmel’s return to air on some stations was announced; Sinclair, the second-largest TV station operator in the U.S., is continuing to keep Kimmel off the air in some markets.]
M. Mothersbaugh: It could end up that we could be doing “Jocko Lobster.” We don’t know yet.
As long as you don’t need FCC approval on any of this.
Casale: Yeah, if they start looking at the lyrics to “Jocko Homo,” we could be in trouble.
That brings me to one of the things I wanted to ask about. In the movie you talk about hoping you’d be wrong about a lot of things, but not we’re in a place where we’re not seeing a lot of evidence to the contrary. In your view, do you have a hope it will swing back or is the de-evolution turn gonna keep doing its thing?
Casale: Well, predictably, with human nature and history, this is on a crash-and-burn course. It can’t last. It’s going to go where it goes, get as ugly as it can get, and then crash and burn. And we’ll see what happens next.
M. Mothersbaugh: Yeah, Booji Boy [a recurring character in Devo videos and stage performances] is the optimist. He just thinks that kids, younger people, are going to take control and push the older folks out of the out of the pilot seat.
What do you think General Boy would think?
M. Mothersbaugh: I think the General would be like the song “Enough Said” [from 1981’s New Traditionalists]. He’d say, “put all the leaders in a circle and let them fight it out.”
I also wanted to ask about AI, in general and as it fits into the Devo ethos. Do you see this as a de-evolution thing or are there real creative possibilities for it?
Casale: Both. Every creative tool can be used in nefarious ways. I mean, when they split the atom, it could have been a new source of energy for no money, or it could have been a bomb. And guess what happened first?
Well, hopefully I won’t be quite that cataclysmic.
Casale: We don’t know.
Mark, if you’re doing a movie score, is AI a complete no for you? Or would you consider using it to cut out some busy work?
M. Mothersbaugh: I’ve experimented with it a little bit. It’s too infantile right now to be able to use it in any way, it’s much easier to just to do it out of your brain. So, I don’t know. Let’s see what happens when it when it grows up.
When I’ve experimented with it in writing – not for published work, but out of curiosity – it seems to me that AI can do the job of a writer who isn’t that good at their job.
Casale: So far, the results have been totally cliché. Plastic in a bad way, where it almost sounds like parody.
M. Mothersbaugh: In some cases, in the world, maybe if it’s for Muzak in the background, or your restaurant or something and that’s all you need. It’ll be interesting to see who is able to put it to creative use in ways where we all go, “Oh, that’s great. That hasn’t happened yet.”
Casale: I think somebody 18 will make something good.
M. Mothersbaugh: Yeah, it’ll be somebody we’ve never heard of.
That’s a great point. Going back to the documentary, was there anything in there where you wondered why it was included, or thought it wasn’t relevant to the story?
Casale: I can’t say offhand what that might be. I just know it was the CliffsNotes of Devo, where things were glossed over. The timeline was distorted. Connections were implied that aren’t true. It’s inevitable that somebody that did not really grow up with Devo would just have their own point of view of what they want to say and what they want to do. And how do you trim it down out of 100 hours’ worth of material to an hour and a half?
M. Mothersbaugh: Yeah, that’s a documentary, though — it’s always that the documentarian is always taking all the elements and making that. What I like the best about the documentary was Bob talked, and he doesn’t talk in these interviews that much, and I really liked what he had to say.
I enjoyed that as well. What about you, Bob, what did you think?
B. Mothersbaugh: [deadpan] Oh, yeah. It was great.
M. Mothersbaugh: Economy of words.
Brevity is the soul of wit. You mentioned some distortions in the movie. What things do you wish would have been made clearer?
Casale: Well, Richard Branson got off clean, and he shouldn’t have been.
There could be fear of riling—
Casale: Clearly.
When you look out into a Devo crowd now, what are you seeing? How different is it from back in the day?
Casale: We’re seeing more folks because of social media, and we’re seeing three generations of people in these festival crowds that all relate to us in different ways. It’s amazing.
And next year you’ll be playing Coachella, which is an enormous crowd. During any of these upcoming appearances, might we see a return of Devo’s alter-ego band, Dove, the Band of Love, the “Born Again” version of Devo?
Casale: God. I’d love to do that again. There is a great sequence of us as Dove the Band of Love at M-80, a festival that happened at the Walker in Minneapolis. It was sponsored by them but we were in an industrial building. Our performance is fantastic.
M. Mothersbaugh: And that’s on film. I’d love to see that come out. With all the resurgence of Christianity these days, there could be one of those groups that embraces Dove and invites them on. You never can tell.
Casale: Especially since the new Christians apparently never read the teachings of Jesus, we got a good chance. Christianity, it got twisted into some kind of–
M. Mothersbaugh: They’ve become very creative.
Certainly the idea that having a bunch of wealth will prevent you from getting into heaven has been conveniently ignored by many adherents.
Casale: Well, now wealth will prevent you from dying. Apparently, the tech bros have ways to live 200 years now they think.
There’s that anti-aging guy, Bryan Johnson, whom Chris Smith also made a film about. He’s spent God knows how much on trying to look younger; he does look good, though I would say he still looks about his age. Apparently he intends to live forever. Good luck to him, I guess.
Casale: Oh yeah. Karmically, you just know he’s going to go unexpectedly.
