"How I Fell In Love With:" Devo

Welcome to the first "How I Fell In Love With" post of 2010! For those not familiar, this is my series where I detail my various obsessions, which are mainly 80's bands but can also encompass other pop culture figures and phenomenons.

Devo is a band that I have been a fan of for the better part of my life. My earliest recollection of them is seeing them in this paperback book I had bought at school through a book fair or one of those flyer things that kids get. It was a book about Music Videos, which were pretty new and all the rage at the time when I was in grade school, with MTV being pretty new but getting very popular. I remember there was a photo of Devo, I think from the inside of the "Shout" album, and it called them "music video pioneers" which I thought was cool. It also gave them impression that they were rather strange, a notion that seemed to pop up in any given reference to the band. As a weird kid myself, this attracted me to them more.

I'm not sure what my first Devo purchase was, but I do remember getting a 7" single of "Whip It" at the ARC Thrift Store in Hays pretty early on, and I remember being intrigued and scared at the same time of the video for their cover of "Satisfaction" which would get played on MTV randomly sometimes. I'm pretty sure the first full album I got was "Shout" on vinyl, in Wichita, sometime when my cousin Travis was in the hospital after his car wreck. I remember that I took it home and played it, thinking it sounded very strange and robotic. It was only after listening to the whole thing several times that I realized my record player was on 45 speed instead of 33 1/3, so once I fixed that and played it again it sound surprisingly normal. This is around the time I really started becoming interested in them. The next album of theirs I got was "Now It Can Be Told" which was a live album on cassette that I also got in Wichita on one of our trips to visit Travis in the hospital.
From there, I think next I got a 12" single of "Peek-a-boo" and I also got "New Traditionalists" used on cassette from GB Records in Hays. By this time, I was pretty much a big fan and I really wanted to see the videos. I remember borrowing some videos from my Uncle Ronnie, and I was very nervous to ask him for them. I think I told my mom to ask him for me, but she told me I should ask him. Finally, I did and I think he probably thought I was a strange little kid but I also think he was impressed that I would want to borrow something from his music collection. I had to have been around 10 years old at this time. At some point I also joined some VHS mail order club and got the Devo Videos VHS tape from there, which my classmates really though made me a weirdo (for some reason, despite the fact that everything I liked or bought seemed to elicit taunting or outright disgust from my schoolmates, I still had some compulsive urge to tell them about everything, even bringing my Culture Club picture book to school knowing full well that I'd be accused of being a big ol' f@ggot)!
So now, we're at the beginning of the 90's and I somehow learned that Devo was about to release a new album, probably through some magazine or advertisement. I wrote to their record label, which was something I did back then when I liked a band. Before the internet, this was one of the only ways to get information about an album before it came out. I also had joined some fan club through the mail around this time. Even at this point, I was still a little scared of Devo despite being a fan. They were definitely the most subversive thing that I was into back then. Anyway, the label - Enigma Records - sent me a press release about the new album which was "Smooth Noodle Maps" and it was actually the 3rd CD I ever owned (I had bought Thompson Twins "Big Trash" and the B-52's debut album before I had a CD player).
I was a big fan of "Smooth Noodle Maps" because it was the first album of theirs that actually came out since I had become a fan, and it sounded very modern and exciting to my ears. It also was pretty mainstream so I wasn't worried about it freaking anyone out. Looking back, that's probably why it wasn't that popular and hasn't really stood the test of time (I just listened to it in the car yesterday).
I remained a Devo fan through high school and oddly enough I also somehow got the nickname "Devo" around that time, which has somehow transferred between people and I still get called that to this day, although I don't think it ever had anything to do with me being a fan of the band. Just because of my name being similar.
When I moved to LA and was in record collecting heaven, I got into Devo even more by finding a lot of their albums on vinyl and CD for cheap, so now I have all their studio albums on some format, and quite a few singles, live albums, videos, etc. I also got the book "We're All Devo" which is an amazing biography of the band, from my brother, and I read it on my trip to the UK in 2003.
I finally saw Devo live in 2004 at the KROQ Inland Invasion, which was an outdoor festival way out near San Bernadino (at what Dylan calls "Glen Hell-to-get-in Pavilion but is actually called Glen Helen Pavilion). Despite my not being very good at large, outdoor festivals in the sun, I did pretty good and thoroughly enjoyed myself while Devo played. It was very fun! Everyone there really seemed to be into it, and they put on a tremendous performance.
Recently, Devo released a song "Watch Us Work It" about a year or two ago which I guess was from a Dell Computer Commercial, but I bought it on iTunes. Then, they released a video for "Don't Shoot (I'm a Man)" which is a great tune with the classic Devo sound; this is going to be on their new album which has been announced for awhile. Its working title is "Fresh" and apparently it's pretty much done but they are having it "radically remixed" so that's why it hasn't come out yet; it was supposed to be out last year but is now slated for this Spring. So, that's why it was high time I wrote this blog since hopefully they will be coming back soon in a big way.