From the first notes of ‘Uncontrollable Urge’ emitted from my ‘Are We Not Men?’ vinyl picturedisc spinning on a decrepit turntable, I was hooked on DEVO. Post-punk new-wave nerd-rock was in my blood, and the record was inherited from a slightly-previous generation of aficionados of the unusual.

I presume that it would have been difficult to grow up in the 1980s without getting sucked into DEVO at least in some small way, especially when the rest of your life was already saturated with Pee Wee’s Playhouse and Oingo Boingo, all of which form the strangest entangled trifecta of my childhood. Even beyond DEVO’s ‘Whip It’ and ‘Satisfaction’ videos being a very important part of early MTV, the inherent fun of the music kept me addicted. So, scoured from tag sales and cassette tapes at the old Camelot Music store at the mall, I began to understand DEVO. The very first CD that I ever bought, days after I got my first CD player, was ‘DEVO’s Greatest Hits‘.

DEVO, in their heyday, was a band that was almost entirely, unflinchingly conceptual. Sure, bands come and go and make concept albums based around strange ideas like Pink Floyd’s ‘The Wall’ or ‘Numbers’ by Cat Stevens, but DEVO’s whole existence was based around a pseudo-cult, and your personal indoctrination was through robotic, synthesized song. Outwardly expressing their melodic disdain for general society and the paths that human evolution was taking, they preached (with half-seriousness) the theory of de-evolution, hence their name. Forever calling the general populace ‘spuds’ or ‘mutants’, we loved them anyhow, most likely because we all envisioned ourselves as partially exempt from being a contributing factor to the declining state of the world. If you listen carefully, a fair number of their hit songs, from ‘Jocko Homo’ to ‘Mongoloid’ to ‘Smart Patrol’ all follow the ideas of how mankind isn’t exactly living up to its potential and falling victim to a serious backslide. The song ‘Smart Patrol’ is pretty much about how DEVO themselves must sleep with a lot of women to save the human race, and floppy-haired, spastic front man Mark Mothersbaugh couldn’t have been more convincing. Their secret vitriol almost matched my own, myself entering my ‘grunge’ years, which perched like a grotesque gargoyle on the precipice of my storied ‘goth’ years.

So, along with Jethro Tull, DEVO formed a crucial part of my self, and it’s only been a couple of weeks that I’ve regressed (some might say de-evolved) into my passion for DEVO again, and with that realization came the further realization that I was missing some very important CDs and tapes that were once part of my collection. Even stranger, two particular volumes entitled ‘Hardcore DEVO Volumes 1&2’ from Rykodisc had become tremendously scarce and were nearly impossible to find. If you could find them, you could expect to pay upwards of eighty dollars per volume. Until this point, I was completely unaware that a music CD could fetch such an exorbitant price. Early recordings and demos from any band are usually hot items among the more devoted and inspired collectors, but this brought to light the strange culture of DEVO and how totally collectible it was.

I’ve grown up in a culture in which CDs are dispensable, replicatable and indestructible objects, made even less desirable with the advent of the MP3. Why carry around a disc of plastic with 12 songs on it when you could carry around a credit-card sized device with thousands of songs? Ergo, it was wholly surreal to imagine that a CD could be worth such a fortune.

DEVO themselves have offered strange cult-like collectibles over the years, from the energy dome hats used in the ‘Whip It’ video and in stage performances, to lenticular wiggle discs and propaganda-like posters, all vital elements to the subculture that the band, and only the band, was. While most of this stuff surfaced and vanished before I was of age to be making a disposable income, the one keen collectible that I managed to inherit later was a 1980 Central Park Music Festival pin, from the ‘Freedom of Choice’ era. There are some wild collectors out there, though, especially Michael Pilmer, who has received personal donations from DEVO themselves to his obsessive collection, which includes everything from tour memorabilia to signed checks from the DEVO guys.

I found ‘Hardcore DEVO’ in my garage after an exhaustive search, the sweat and scratches and more than a few scares by fist-sized spiders well worth the $160 I didn’t have to re-spend to complete my collection, and thus, my soul. I respectfully refrain from showing you the covers of these CDs within this article due to the explicit nature of them (perhaps also truncating their lives in CD stores of the time), but man, it’s good stuff. You totally need it. DEVO’s MySpace page has a sample song from it, as well as some early live performances, so go forth and spread the DEVO.

Excelsior, spuds!

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