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Devo and Filmmaker Chris Smith on Their Sundance Doc: How the Band’s ‘Transgressive, Naughty’ Performance Art Infiltrated the Pop Mainstream
'Devo,' a documentary about the band of that name, premieres at Sundance. The group and filmmaker recount Devo's shift from the fringe to mainstream.
But from their origins as Kent State students in Akron in 1973 through their earliest recordings, there was something a little bit scarier about Devo, with their use of masks and off-center riffs and evangelizing for the theory of “de-evolution.” Those were elements that never completely went away, even as they graduated from a bizarre theatricality to vying for a place on the top 40. The doc captures the time at the turn of the ‘70s and ‘80s when the band found a philosophical partner of sorts in Neil Young, who used Devo at length as actors and musicians in his own experimental film, “Human Highway” (and was obviously influenced by them in making his synth-heavy “Trans” album). The others are more verbose, with Casale saying, “Since so much concentrates on the early days, in an origin-story kind of way, it is nice to see the crudity of all the things that inspired us, including all the imagery that we would appropriate from terrible ads and comic books and low men’s magazines, just to see it all together go by in a collage.
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