Pranks, Punk and Industrial Culture from V. Vale

The marquee at the Warfield (Market/7th St) said DEVO: Concert 8pm, Doors Open 8pm (?!). We waited in line for a half hour with a parade of DEVOtees in rare DEVO T-shirts and other rare b(r)and spinoffs, like a chrome flowerpot hat. The crowd was mainly male geeks (sprinkled with attractive female sales personnel) who came from out of town for MacWorld, where the big news was the ultra-thin new Mac laptop, the “Air” (which lacks a DVD burner, but…)

DEVO had a battery of bright lights behind them and they delivered a thoroughly professional set of their classic songs — some of them idea time bombs which still carry a kind of intellectual depth charge. Hard to believe it’s been thirty years since I first saw them at the Mabuhay Gardens in San Francisco. For me, the highlights were G.V. Casale giving a small speech on “de-evolution” (remember the days BEFORE you first heard of the DEVO concept; the good old days when you thought life would progressively get better and better, toward the Space Age and Futurama and Tomorrowland? Now, de-evolution seems to have, almost unbelivably, come true — just look around you.

The finale was — why isn’t this little speech on YouTube? — Mark Mothersbaugh improvising an impromptu critique of contemporary life, no doubt facilitated by his donning of the Booji Boy mask. As we lacked a tape recorder (Warfield usually pats you down and seizes things like tape recorders and cameras) we can only quote from unreliable memory. Mark said something like, “We of DEVO haven’t played the Warfield since around 1981. But I remember back then, when 1984 [the book] was on our minds and computers were considered evil — because they made you do things you didn’t want to do, and Big Brother was watching your every move and word. But NOW, everybody has their computer and they love working on it, day and night. So I have an idea that would change the world: all of you, when you get back to your hotel room, open up your hotel window, unplug your laptop from the Internet, and just throw your laptop out the window! If everyone here did that, we could all be part of the epicenter for a real social change…” (Did Microsoft hear that, or Apple?) When Mark Mothersbaugh said that, I thought, “That was really Punk Rock!”…

Maybe you had to be there, but that felt like a living, unexpected, Punk Rock moment (and yes, you’re reading this on a computer, so…) Just giving people that thought, that mental image. Perhaps some day in the future, people will throw laptops out the window the way rock bands in the Seventies threw TV sets out of hotel windows — to make a kind of “statement.” Sometimes a (mental) picture really is worth at least a thousand words… — V. Vale