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Devo Wear Many Hats — But No Yellow Buckets — For Spirited, Deep-Cut NPR Tiny Desk Concert

Devo dropped in to NPR's Tiny Desk studio to play a frenetic 4-song, 17-minute set of deep cuts and fan-favorite songs from their debut album: watch.

With founding singer/keyboardist Mark Mothersbaugh leading the charge alongside brother and longtime guitarist Bob Mothersbaugh and original bassist Gerald Casale, the group bounded out of the gate with the bluesy, bouncing rarity “It Takes a Worried Man.” The song — inspired by the folk/roots classic “Worried Man Blues” — was originally recorded for the little-seen 1982 nuclear panic comedy Human Highway, which was directed by Neil Young, who also co-starred alongside Dean Stockwell, co-writer Dennis Hopper and Devo, who played radioactive waste garbage men in orange outfits and hard hats accented by plastic tubes that snaked down into the band member’s noses. In addition to Mothersbaugh’s sermon-like breakdown about how everyone is just going for that “big ice cream cone in the sky,” the song featured a wiggy keyboard solo from the frontman, who ,alas, was not wearing the band’s signature yellow flower bucket hat. After rummaging around in the Tiny Desk closet to find some alternate headgear for the 17-minute show, Devo ended the set with another song from their debut, the galloping, herky jerky “Come Back Jonee.” During that one, Mothersbaugh swiped through a series of other hats he pilfered from the public radio storeroom, but, alas, none of them in the shape of the band’s iconic yellow bucket chapeaus.

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