Devo's "Whip It" with Gerald Casale and Mark Mothersbaugh

Devo's here, let's give him a cheer, talking to track, and it's none about that. Gonna talk about a song, you must whip it, and we hope you sing along. You must whip it, this is Jell, this is Vaughn, you must whip it. It's one song, and Devo, hey, we hope we get our facts straight, recorded at record plant. It's not old fashioned, it's new wave, it's whip it, whip it good. Let's get it going, don't go anywhere, we have a great show for you today with two very special guests, Jerry Casale and Mark Mothersbaugh from the legendary Bam Devo! I'm actor-writer director and sometimes DJ, Diallo Riddle. And I'm producer DJ, songwriter and musicologist luxury, aka the guy who whispers, Interpolation. And this is one song, the show where we break down the stems and stories behind iconic songs across genres and tell you why they deserve one more listen. You will hear these songs like you've never heard them before, and if you want to watch one song, please go to our YouTube channel and watch this full episode. And while you're there, please like and subscribe. Alright, so today's song is an iconic new wave track that had everyone on the dance floor in 1980. It's infectious disco beat, quirky melodies and delightfully bizarre lyrics, infiltrated the pop charts, peaking at number 14 on the Billboard Hot 100. But did any of them know what the song was really about? Spoiler alert, it's not about BDSM. 45 years since its release, we're here to talk about why this subversive pop anthem is so genius. So let's go forward, move ahead and try to detect it, we're talking one song and that song is Whip It by Devo. And to help us break down Whip It, we have not one but two special guests that know this story and song better than anyone else. That's right, they're groundbreaking musicians, songwriters and Devo co-founders Gerald Casali and Mark Mothersbaugh. Howdy. Welcome to the studio. I'm not going to pretend I'm not super freaking excited. Thank you guys for coming. This is amazing. We're pretty excited. You can tell. That's Mark at a 10. Thank you so much for being here. I actually should say I had the pleasure of seeing you guys perform very recently at San Adelaide 50, the concert. I worked on Fallon for many years and all of us came out from backstage and we were just blown away. I mean, like Uncontrolled Verge, already amazing stuff. I'd like to hear you guys just blast it out in that theater. It's Radio City Music Hall, in that old theater in New York. It was insane and it was just really powerful. What was it like doing that gig? Intense. The lead up was almost like a throwback to when we went there in 78 and you do things with the cast and you rehearse. And they keep running through it, running through it like a live play. And each time you pretend you're doing it live and then finally you do it live. Can I just say, the backstage area was insane. Like Mark, you bumped into me. I was standing by the elevator. You bumped into me. I was like, just this guy bumping into you. I looked at your face and I was just like, my gosh. That's really insane. And like some of the people that you've no doubt played with before, David Bernwood's backstage. Everybody was there. We shared a room with the B-5 twos. With Schneider? You were in there with Schneider? Yeah. Yeah. That's so fun. Are you guys all friends now? All these many years later? Has that always been? Yeah, we never weren't. We never weren't. We were just mostly surprised. We're still alive. I think Divo was probably my first favorite band growing up. And that was important. You guys were so important to me because you, I was only eight, but I understood that there were layers going on. Musically, it was amazing. Immediately it hits you like a jolt of adrenaline and sugar, but like it's what there's something bizarre that needs to be interpreted. And you don't know what the interpretation is. Maybe to this day, I'm not sure what the interpretation is. It is maybe we'll find out, but I've always been a huge fan. And I found that that's true for kids. My son, it was his first favorite band too. By the way, we'll notice there's a special guest there that's snowy behind you. My son insisted that his stuffed animal join us for today's episode. How old is he? My son is now 14, but when he was five, snowy would do the solo in this song. That one note solo that we'll be hearing later. Well, we definitely had kid appeal. Yes. Because I think we were appealing to the brain and the body together because of the imagination. Was that something that you kind of noticed at a certain point and like kind of went with or was it always kind of like a happy accident? Like, oh, wait a second. This is appealing to more, you know, we didn't, you thought maybe this was for 20 year olds and above, but it turned out to have broader appeal. I think we were looking for like a Fisher price kind of take on music anyhow. You know, like there was like guitar solos and drum solos were getting silly. And it was spinal tap before anybody knew it was spinal tap, except we knew it was spinal tap. So we were... There's also the lack of better terms, the costumes that you guys are wearing. I think it also makes it accessible to kids in a different way. Yeah. Devo was almost like in the superhero range because of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. And that's the way we presented ourselves like a drill team. And kids love that. You know, they're teenagers that are just breaking away from their parents and discovering things on their own and feeling different. Devo gave them some focus and some identity. It's so true. You gave it, it was simultaneously a club for the outcasts. And this just, we talk about this on the show a lot. This was an era before we kind of had like alt nation. And there was a sort of like commodified version of like the not mainstream, right? Maybe in the nineties with Nirvana and such. Now we take it for granted. There's the alt channel, but back when you guys were doing it, there really kind of was like the mainstream. And you were one of the first to come out, like to vocalize what the opposite of that could be, like to give a vision for it. That's part of your genes. We were really alt before they used the word. Definitely. And we were way outside. Before we get into it, we'd love to take a step back and talk about your early days as collaborators. You guys obviously met at Kin State, early seventies. And how'd you guys start making music together? They closed our campus down. Yeah. And so. There's after the shootings. We just hung out together after that. And I had a place where my brothers and I were playing music in a basement and Jerry would come over and we'd write music together and talk about it. I started driving to Akron. Yeah. Because they were there with equipment. And we didn't talk about music when we first met. We talked about art. We were both artists and that's, that was the draw. And I only find out after about a year that he's an accomplished musician and that he's got this band Flossy Bobbit. It was like a revelation. That's amazing. So you, the first year was sort of conceptual and visual. Yeah. And the concept was devolution, an early idea. Yeah. And then it was like, well, what would divo music sound like? And then that's why I was driving to Akron to try to make that come true. Like let's make divo music. Right. And you, I've heard you talk about how you are a reaction both to the shootings, but also the sort of post hippie. I mean, yeah, what would you call the valets? Like there's a sense of like it's hopeless to rebel or we need to rebel differently. Maybe is that a little bit of what it was? Maybe we kind of unconsciously identified more with beatniks than we did with hippies because beatniks were very cynical about what was happening with man on the planet. And the hippies came along and went, no, everything's going to be cool. Yeah. It's cool, man. We were kind of more, we burned out on a hippie thing because the hippie thing burned out on itself. After 1970, just look at Altamont and one great superstar dying after another in their 20s. And then the music gets really stale and there's this kind of like formulae stadium rock that starts to emerge and the way they behave and the way they dress for us were like a fantastic plus, were like offensively stupid. And we were anti-stupid. And we were artists first, musicians second. And we were experimenting, you know, and then we would openly experiment and not have some preconceived notion about here's a genre here, you change after eight bars and you go to this. In fact, we said, you know, specifically, we're not doing that. And we stripped it all down. As such huge inspirations with what you did, I'm so curious who would have been inspiring to you in that realm, like Mad Magazine, like were there sort of subversive elements that you cottoned on to? What would those have been maybe? Sun Ra. Sun Ra. That's so many times on this part. Captain Beefheart? Captain Beefheart, Terry Riley, Morton Sabatnik, TV commercials, classical music. We, our influences were way outside of the spirit of rock and roll, but did we also love the Rolling Stones when they wrote a great song? You bet. ["Satisfaction"] I can't get no satisfaction I can't get no satisfaction You know. You know, talking about this period at Kin State, I want to play for you guys a clip that we found online of you guys performing a song, Private Secretary at Kin State, 1973. I believe this is from when you guys were called Sex Ted Divo. Yeah. Let's play that clip. ["Satisfaction"] Hearing this, does this spring back, do you remember this gig? Was there some significance at the time? Was it, I think it was maybe one of your first gigs, right? It was first gig. The first time we ever played together in any configuration. Outside, yeah, of a basement. Okay. And are you on keyboards and you're on bass? Yeah, and Mark is not just on keyboards. He's wearing a, the Madagascar, Smock, and a chimpanzee mask. Yeah, I was going to ask who's behind the mask because obviously this is before the coats and the energy domes, but so you're wearing the mask. Yeah, he's wearing the mask. I'm wearing a Fireman's Rain Slicker, a yellow Rain Slicker. And again, we were just experimenting. It's very funny to hear. But the highlight of that performance is when Mark's mini-mode malfunctions and it gets caught in a loop, it keeps going, burrrrrrr. No, I was doing that. No, I was doing it on purpose. I thought you guys were going to be done tuning longer. I thought you couldn't get out of it. No, I could have stopped anytime. I was waiting for you guys to come on stage. And people sort of gather around you to try to fix it, but you've got the mask on so you can't indicate to them that you're good. No, he was trying to fix anything, but they did start to, I think it's a little bit of a shame that he's not wearing the mask. I mean, I'm not wearing the mask. I'm wearing the mask. I'm wearing the mask. But they did start to look for their keys and start heading for the parking lot. You did excel in that sort of audience provocation thing. It was a headache solo that was inspired by a excedrin commercial where some woman was going like that and had a meh-meh-meh in her head, a synth sound. And like Jerry said, we were looking other places than in rock and roll for what the sounds of the 70s should be. You had found that sound in your head. In your mind, you were finding either the same exact mini-mogue or the same sound or something similar to that excedrin moment of excessive pain. Well, I think he was the only person in Ohio that had this equipment at the time. And pretty early. And he certainly, when we were hearing what, what groups like the progresso groups. Like Emerson, Legum, Palmer, Irrorma. They were trying to use synthesizers as fake, woodwinds and brass and pretty. Mark was searching for noise, pink noise and white noise. And that's what I loved. We were looking for V2 rockets, things that sounded like the news at night, which was the Vietnam War. Cause that was exciting. Now that's what made it exciting. Well, we were just talking about the supreme. We were talking about how you keep me hanging on. It sort of replicates the sound of the evening news and like, I gotta say, we talk about this a lot on the show. Commercials inspire so much. You know what I mean? Like back in the VHS days, I used to have a tape called like, the best of 70s commercials. And it was like a two hour thing of just all commercials. And I just think that that is one of the things that inspires us because even more than like TV shows from that period or movies, like they really are just a time capsule of like things that were acceptable sounds. And, you know, the stingers before, you know, a certain network shows, like those things can really take you back. Right. But what really, what first attracted us is when we were writing our music and like in this show here, where it's very, very extreme, the music, that was that was Devo at the most pure art extremes end of things. We were thinking, well, we chased everybody out of the room. And it wasn't, it was a few more years. We kept chasing people out of the room or they'd come up and fight with us or they'd pay us to quit. We had that happen a few times. So you succeeded in your art punt goals. We'd go, well, we've got a whole nother set of music. And they go, you know what, you can, we'll pay you the whole amount, just leave. You had to get that out of your system first. And we were never the type high-fiving, but we were conceptually high-fiving each other for getting the boot and getting paid so we could go to a diner and eat. But at the same time, we were thinking like, well, who are changing the way people think? Who are making people think other thoughts in their heads and influence? And we were thinking, well, TV commercials, they get people to buy terrible cars, eat shitty food and wear bad clothes and they're all happy about it. And we thought, well, what are their techniques? And it was like a subversion thing. And we thought, we're gonna incorporate that into what we do. We'll be giving people good information instead of bad information. Why not use it to a smart end rather than a dumb end? Absolutely. And so we didn't care about genre and at all, in fact, we were deconstructing genre and not even having a word for it. But what started to happen is we kind of developed a shorthand and a vocabulary between two sets of brothers that understood each other. And the pieces of music were all architectural. We were not four guys playing the same riff like a heavy metal band. Each person had a distinct, discrete sound and a part and they were polymorphic and they fit together. So part of the work, sort of interesting going back to your art and conceptual background is sort of, you have ideas, it's the arrangement of those ideas, different from a jam band. We made sure that every part was important. Now it's easy to get distracted by the fact that you can have hundreds of tracks. You've got so many options. Yeah, your limited bass doesn't sound right instead of like making it sound right and figuring out what's wrong with it. People just add another bass part on top and another sound and they just keep filling it up. And you're referring to the period sort of before your first record where you're gathering the sort of demos, you're writing those first 40-ish songs that become the first two records. That was completely in your control as a unit, as five people make them pieces. And we were excited and purely experimenting without any preconceptions, but we got better at that. So the hardcore divo compilation that Raiko put out years ago that represented the early attempts that are pure art, right? And then we get a little better at it and somewhere between 76 and 77, we just really hit a high mark and started putting out like at least 25, 30 songs in one year. And we ended up taking those songs, our best ones, and consciously dividing them up for the first record, Are We Not Men? And then the rest for... Dutino. Dutino for the future. And then so that kind of became a period because after that, we're in LA. And now we've moved on as artists, we're not interested in just keep repeating ourselves. We've toured the world a couple of times now and we've put out a number, quite enough videos for a long form actually, enough films. Yeah. That first chapter felt like it was coming to a natural conclusion. It just did. It's like we didn't feel the same. And as people that were excited by new ideas, both musical and visual, we wanted to move on and we were living in LA and we were being very influenced by new things. And we jokingly, when we got together to start writing What Would Become Freedom of Choice in late in 79, we talked about robot R&B. Like, Devo would meet R&B. And that's why we worked with Bob Margilof as producer because he had done these really cool records with Stevie Wonder and he kept talking about the foot and the mama and the papa between the bass and the kick turned out to be a good fit because he helped get us a sound that was totally appropriate for the kind of music we were writing. Bob Margilof was very, very sympathica with synthesizers and he loved what we were doing and he liked the fact that I was gonna play synth bass and Mark was using a mini-mogue and an arp odyssey for all these new kinds of sounds where the songs weren't guitar driven like the first two records. I was just gonna ask you about that. Was there a moment because those first two records are cut out since as kind of interesting or avant-garde sounds as we were talking about? Yeah, this was a shift. This was a shift. And it was a new kind of beat and a new kind of relationship between the bass and drums. And we were excited by that. And Alan Myers was perfect for it. He was happy to move away from punky beats and pounding. Was there a moment or an album or an artist that kind of influenced you? They were like, let's shift the balance a little bit less guitar, more synth or more drum machine or something like that. No, I mean, it was like paying attention to what people like Bob was doing with Stevian people that were using electronics more aggressively. And more and more people did by the time in 79. Gary Newman did the pleasure principle. David Bowie had done two amazing records and they were really good. And there was a previous to that that we revered as artists. And Roxy Music with Brian Eno. Oh, yeah. Now that's actually a really good point. Roxy Music, their first album was, I think that's the best lyrics. They're my favorite lyrics that Ryan never wrote. Love that. But there's one song that was kind of a throwaway called Editions of You. Oh, right. And it just sounded like everybody got to do a solo and that's what it was like. So they were just, it was like a filler song or something. But then, you know, different members of the band did solos and then it came to a synth solo. And Brian Eno did. Noise. The most amazing synth solo ever. I'd ever heard at that point. And I just remember I went, that's it. Yeah, it was so exciting. That's really it. And by the way, it's Brian Eno who produced our first record. And that kind of came about in an interesting way. It was at one of these Max's Kansas City shows. And David Bowie goes on stage and introduces you guys. We're a founding counselor with a new audience. And they're the team evolution by Divo. That must have felt like a dream come true. I mean, I'm sure you guys were. Absolutely. Bowie fans. And then he sees you play. He wants to work with you. But it's actually Brian who ends up. How did Brian come on to produce that first album? Because David Bowie kept delaying going into the studio with Divo because he had all these projects, a film, and then another record. And we felt antsy about it. Like, it's time. It's really time. None of us had apartments anymore or places to stay. And so he says, OK, Brian can do it. Wow. He'll be doing it with Connie Plank like I would have in the same studio as I would have. And I'll come see you guys. So he did take a train across Germany. He was in Berlin filming Jigolo. And he came over and he'd hang out with us for like three days a week. So he was part of the atmosphere. Yeah. Didn't get to produce. So he was actually, him and Ina, both sang and played instruments on tracks on the album. And we were so obsessed with just trying to reproduce what our demos sound like that I remember, like, Brian's sitting in the middle of the engineer, the producer, and between the two speakers. And everybody's all kind of like in a semi-circle behind him. We're listening to the 24-tron. He goes, OK, let's put it down on a mix. So he's staring a mix. And so he'd hit the button. They'd start the recording. And I wouldn't look down, but I'd reach and pull down Brian Ina's synth part. What? You muted, Bowie. And I could see him go, look over at me. And he, as later said, well, I didn't know enough about production to figure out how to talk you guys into letting me do some of this stuff. The problem was he was playing pretty stuff. We were in love with Ina that played in Roxy Music, but he had become this zen guy. He was playing pretty. He was in his ambient. There are some things on it that we used on the album. Yeah, there were. There are some synth parts he did. And then there's a Brian and David did sing backups on. And we used that point. Control the blues. Brian did two great things. He he created the sound of the only sequencer line that we used on that record would shrivel up. OK. Oh. He did that. And he brought us the Buddhist monks. Yeah, we put the monkey chants in Jocohomo. Oh, I see. I'm in there. Not not as a sample, but just as an idea to bring to it. No, he put it. He put a sample. There is a literally it's a sample in. Oh, wow. It should have gone. It should. Well, we played it on stage. Yeah. Yeah. The technology back then there wasn't MIDI yet. And no, it was really difficult to to sync something up. Yeah. You know, like sound with live sound. We couldn't speed shift it. So things would happen is like we'd be all excited on stage and we play faster than we did. Yes, I've noticed that. I've noticed that, you know, like to catch up sometimes in my head, like certain songs like Be Stiff are so fast. And I go back and I listen to the album version. It's not nearly as fast because I've seen the, you know, you go on YouTube and you see these amazing performances. In fact, from your Max's County, Kansas City days, we have a clip from one of those performances. Such good. I love that there's like footage of this stuff on the Internet. Can we play a clip of gut feeling? That is just infectious. I'm sorry. It gets kind of chaotic about part of the film. Alan Myers was the best, though. The drummer. Yeah, he was a human mentor. In 1979, you guys had two albums on Warner Brothers under your belt. You already have the credibility of the underground scene, so to speak. So how were you feeling going into recording for much choice? We thought it'd be our last record. We were told, and unless you guys have a hit, this is your last record because they were so pissed at us for duty now for the future. Yeah. And Devo was the wrong kind of personality to threaten that way. So it was like, OK, we're just going to do exactly what we want. Then who gives a shit, right? And so we were proceeding with that frame of mind. But it was exciting because we were just going for it. The anger fueled the creativity. And again, the collaboration was wide open back then. Mark would keep notebooks. I would keep notebooks. He would bring in recordings on cassette from his bedroom drawings. I would do the same. We'd play together in the studio with everybody there coming up with things. So these songs were coming together in a very collaborative, developmental way. We didn't we didn't concentrate on whip it or give that some, you know, high position over other songs. He didn't feel like this is the hit. It was just one of the songs that we were excited about, you know? We were no more excited about that than Girl You Want or Freedom of Choice. Right. Which, by the way, I just had to say right now, because you brought it up. Girl You Want first single off the album. I feel like it is a song that hip hop should have sampled by now. Like, I don't I don't know if you guys are in the habit of maybe people have come to you asking to clear that sample or something like that. But I feel like for all the one song nation listeners who might be in production in the hip hop field, don't sleep on Girl You Want. It's an amazing song. And I do feel like it's got all the makings of a hip hop hit. But that said, somebody did it, but they didn't do it well. OK, they didn't do it well. Never we were presented with it and they didn't do a good job on. Who wasn't you don't have to say. I don't even remember. It was a bunch of park rangers from Wyoming and they had some free time. That's where half the good hip hop comes from. People don't realize that all that time staring at the national parks. Between Girl You Want, by the way, freedom of choice. And there is this part of your songwriting process, which is the surprise, the element of surprise. There's almost little proggy things, a thing that, yes, her Genesis might do with that fifth bar in the loop or in this, in the case of the songs, the surprise of where the time signature. Yeah. Yeah. Is that clearly that was a conscious choice in terms of deconstructing pop? But did that have an origin? Was there? I mean, in the case of freedom of choice, the choice of that, that dun dun dun dun dun dun. That was a factory. Yeah. We were making a factory sound, you know, we were some acronym. On EML, right? It was on EML. It wasn't good for a lot of other things, but it did whip cracks and, and, and factory noise really well. Yeah. So we finally found a use for that sense. Yeah. The pounding and that kind of metallic echoey thing was so cool to us. It was like some kind of like dangerous like night train was coming for you. You know, yeah. Yeah. Those were the kind of things we got off on. Well, we're going to take a quick break. But when we come back, you are going to feel like you're in the studio while Whippet is being recorded. We have the stems. We're going to play them. We're going to talk to these men about what song they think, other than Whippet, to find the 80s. Stick around. We'll be right back. All right. Welcome back to one song. And without any further delay, let's dive into the stems of the song. My man, Luxury. Absolutely. Well, before we get into it, I have a quick question. When was the last time you would have heard the multi tracks? Was it recently or many years ago? Not that long ago. OK. And I'll tell you why, because we, that song's been used in a lot of commercials. And Whippet has turned into flippant. And Whippet has turned into flippant, strip it, tip it, swift it, swift it. What does that mean? Swift it for Swiffer. Oh, Swiffer. You got a dirty floor. You're the stripper. Under table, stove and door. You're the stripper. Never is a chore. You're the stripper. Yeah. In fact, we sang the lyrics ourselves, their parody lyrics. We sang them just to mess people up going, wait, that's really them. Oh, I see, because it's even more so when it's the original multi tracks plus the new vocals. Yeah. So it's like we almost changed our name to D. Ho. But I have to ask you, any regrets about that? Or are you like, no, it's fine. It's part of the culture. I think the song was made for parody and we have enough soap, a facing humor to lend ourselves to it. Kind of. And, you know, my feeling always was that if one of our songs is more commercial and does get played somewhere, you know, it's then that there's a chance it's going to, you know, kids are going to go. Where did that come from? And then they go, check out the album, they'll check out the band and they'll find out more about the truth about the evolution. Well, without further ado, let's listen to Alan Meyers playing drums. I have a question right out of the gate. The drums are separated and a question, was it recorded kick and snare separately from the hi hats? Well, listen first and then I want to hear what you guys, what the answer is. So here is the kick and snare. And as you can hear coming up right now, there's bleed starting now. Very subtle. So the bleed indicating that like, yeah, they're probably in a room playing kick and snare. I'm playing the bass from the control room. OK. And it's going to Alan's phones. Let me just say what a fricking honor it is that you guys are here to tell us what happened. There's no speculation anymore. You'll let us know the answers to these questions. I don't remember him playing the hi hats separately. I don't even. Well, let's listen. But listen, he sounded, it didn't sound like it was. Possibly the way they were mic'd. OK. That's what I was wondering until I noticed the lack of bleed, but they'll just listen. And I also hear two recordings that are hard panned. But anyway, hi hats. That's true. Certainly sounds isolated. That really sounds isolated. Yeah. And here comes no bleed where the bleed was in the kick and snare. I'll put it all together. And now just the hi hats. Seems like he did do it that way. Yeah. With two takes because it sounds like there's one in each. I think what happens is he did it the normal way and then Bob Margo. I've said, try this out. It's too mushy. OK. So we need more precision and more definition. Interesting. Yeah. I mean, we weren't alien to that idea. The album we'd done before that was extremely torn apart, even though there was all songs that we'd written while we were playing in clubs and they were all based on us playing live. It's like a duty now for the future. He stripped all the instruments. He had us all play separate. Ken Scott. Yeah, Ken Scott. He did it in a bad way. It was like the most. It was like robotic without. Not good. He managed to de-ball rock and roll. Yeah. I was really unhappy with that record until I heard it on an eight track recording that Warner's put out. And in my girlfriend's shitty Volvo, and in my girlfriend's shitty Volvo that had a shitty sound system in it. And I went, that's what it was supposed to sound like. Because it was enough distortion was added to it that it sounded pretty good. It was too pristine and clean. Otherwise, you didn't have the grit that you had intended or wanted to have in it. Mark had hung out with the drummer of Captain Beefheart, Robert Williams. And Robert Williams put down this drum beat on tape with Mark. And Mark played it for us in the studio. And it's a wilder, kind of jazzy version of what you're hearing here. But it had that trippy gallop in it in the hi-hat pattern. I used to go over to this house where Captain Beefheart and Go-Go's at. Right, Gina Shock, right? Yeah, they rehearsed in the basement. It was in Hancock Park somewhere. And because I didn't have a drum machine, I mean, the drum machine I had had like Waltz and Basanova. And it sounds like that. I'd go over and I would tell him what I wanted him to play. And he'd put stuff together for me. Do you remember what you might have suggested to get him to where he played this beat as a result? Yeah, I told him I was looking for dance beats for to write to. That didn't sound like, you know, the most obvious disco. So we kept doing things until I said, OK, do that for me for three minutes. And he'd do it for three minutes on a cassette. And then I'd take it back to my... Three minutes, he could write something over it because there's no way to do that. And it isn't like any other dance beat. It's really freaking fast. It's really fast. I think the hi-hat shows a little disco, but it's a very fast tempo. But it has, as you pointed out, sort of a jazz... Skip, yeah, skip gallop thing was the cool thing. If it were half time, it would be kind of a jazz... Have that swing thing to it. Also here, Alan's so good. He's not playing to a click. That's insane. Him and Metronome. He plays the drums, then he goes back and plays his hi-hat to his drums. Yeah, that we did eliminate from the process. And when we went back to the original tracks because they were going to use it in a commercial and they needed the BPMs to be mapped, Mark has a piece of equipment that maps those. The BPMs only drifted to BPM from the beginning to the end and only during the bridge. And went right back to the same BPMs as you begin. He was just a robot. Honestly, that's what a robot he was. That's incredible. Incredible rhythm. What an incredible part, too. And listening, it's funny to remember that in the 80s, like, dance music, this is a 160 BPM song. This was dancing like Molly Ringwaltz's. Because you're really focused on that backbeat, the two and the four. It's hard to... It was perfect for the white powder. I was going to say, people were very caffeinated back then. Coffee was very popular. I wasn't going to ask about that, but it was implied. Here, I mean, it was ubiquitous. You know, your record company, A&R Man would offer it to you at the end of the day. At the beginning of the day. Oh, coming in for meetings. And then they poured out... Being like 3PM. Like, now they bring you a cup of coffee or they go take an order at Starbucks. But back in those days... When we'd eat at Roy's with our manager and then he'd close the curtain and the waiter would come over with a little white plate with six lines on it. It would not be whip it, if I can use your famous line. It would not be whip it without the whip sound to complete the beat. And here it is. That sounds like something reversed. That's part of the sound. There's more to it? Yeah. There was white noise from one year since. I think I hear that in there. That is what you're hearing. Maybe merged together. Well, here it is with a completely... I'm only hearing the reverse... Well, it's a reverse reverb on an EML hip. On it. Electro Comp 500, is that correct? Electro Comp 500. Well, here it is with the entirety of the beat, so we can hear it all together. Who's idea or where did this idea maybe come? Or was it just you had to do it because it was the title of the song? Well, at that point, several kind of techno, new wave influenced bands starting with Gary Newman were using white noise. We loved that. But Divo didn't just want to start putting white noise on every other snare beat to do it because other people did it. But it was like, wait a minute, now we have these lyrics, whip it. We'll use white noise as a whip crack. Right? In other words, there is an actual real reason to put that sound in the song to punctuate the lyric. Right. And you obviously had to get rather creative to create the sound, to synthesize the sound and then to reverse it in everything that you did to process it. In 1979, it wasn't just a 10 cent splice sample, like type in the word whip. Was that a process that took a fair amount of time or were you able to dial in? I think so. Yeah. I mean, I think we worked on that a while. Some large percentage of the total time it took to make the song. Well, we recorded the album in just a few weeks, so a large percentage of the time might have been from breakfast to lunch or something. It was pretty fast by today's standards. Right. So let's move on to Jerry. I believe this is you playing not just any Moog, but is it not the devo box? Is that what this was? Is that information? Right. Two Moogs. Oh, I don't think we ganged them at this point. Have we? Let's hear what it sounds like because to my ear, let's just listen. Maybe we can tell from the sound. I'm not going to speculate because you guys are here to tell me. No, we'll know if there's like six oscillators rather than three. Okay. Yeah. Jerry Casale on bass. Moog, maybe one, maybe two. And I'll bring in the call and response because you just need to hear it. So might be the devo box might not. It sounds like it must be the devo box. It doesn't sound like you're playing two separate parts. And again, for the listeners, it's just one performance. Who may not understand the significance back in the day before there's MIDI to get multiple machines to play nice together, to sync together. You had to do clever things that required some engineering knowledge. It was pre-MIDI was a whole different world for electronics. Yeah. And his tech genius brother, Jim, had started working for Roland and he did at some point gang too many moogs together, one slave to the other and then sent them to a controller. So I just played a controller and I was playing six oscillators at once so we could get like a bigger beefy. Yeah. Big, thicker, wider, two kind of a winch. Not just your three oscillator. No, it was six oscillators. It was huge. Well, in general, one of the big changes on this album is the move from Electric to You know what I remember also is one of the things that Bob Margoloff taught us that we had never done before. I don't know why it never occurred to us, but he ran from like the base, he ran into two different amps in different rooms. Right. That might be what we're hearing. That's what we're hearing. And then he ran one just a direct in because we would because there was no memory on any of the synths back in those days, we'd be writing a song and then we'd come back the next day and try to duplicate what we had just played the day before and we'd be going, you could that doesn't sound right. And be chasing the same time forever. And then he taught us how to split it out like that and it made it so we could dial things in easier the next day. It really, these are literally innovations that we changed our way of writing. Actually, was there a conscious decision on your part to move to the moog from the bass guitar for this record? It was kind of shocking, but I really, the time I had the right frame of mind, I was excited to do it and learn it. I loved it because the music demanded this is what we do. The music demanded something maybe more uniform. You didn't want a bass guitar in this song. Yeah, it wouldn't have worked the same. But you did keep the live drums. I suppose the drum machines weren't quite. Thankfully. Yeah. Thankfully because Alan Myers is incredible. Because they sound so good. Yeah, they sound really good. That balance that you have here in this song, which is you have live drums, you have synths that are not sequenced. They're all performed, right? Right. And then you still had real guitar. And real guitar, right? So this isn't necessarily the synth pop era that's about to happen. It's the Goldilocks spot between technology and rock. Yes. It's a sweet spot. It's just got the right combo where machines don't take over and make something sound sterile. So going back to the synths that we just heard, the call and response that ding, ding, ding. Who's playing that? Is that Bob too? Or do we know who's playing that? It's probably me. It might be you. Bob was a utility player that would go between guitar and keyboard depending on where we needed him per song. More like in the live setting as opposed to recording. In the live setting. Yeah. So he'd go back and forth. But probably I played the synth parts on all of this. The bass part is doubled by your brother by Bob one. I believe, is that correct? Is Bob one playing the guitar part here? Correct. Okay. Well, let's listen to him isolated and then I'll bring in to the context of what he played. Mark had in his bedroom, which I think a guitar and a synth played. And brought that in and it was that over and over and over. And it was really infectious and it's that kind of thing where it doesn't really, it revolves. And I said something about, what is that? It almost sounds like something goes, oh, it's pretty woman. But I added two beats. He's pulled it apart. He pulled it apart. To find its component elements that individually separated, we can recombine in different ways. So then I started playing the bass part on it, but I thought it was too busy to, when I heard me imitating the whole line. So I left a space in it where you could hear the snare drum. Right? So it's a bop bop bop bop bop. Right? A little space. So that's our intro or your intro, the intro to whip it. And at this point, we get the introduction of your call and response speaking of vocals, which starts with you with the initial crack. Crack in the whip. Crack in that whip. He gives the pass to slip. Let's listen. Correct that whip. That guy. Give the pass a slip. Back to Jerry. Back on the crack. Break your mama's back. This is Mark again. Yeah. When our problem comes along, you must whip it before the cream sets out too long. You must whip it when something's going wrong. You must whip it. So cool. That call and response is epic. It's so epic and it's so fun that you guys are sitting here. Sorry. I will get over myself and the fact that you are here and that we're hearing this. But listening back, what do you remember about this recording? Recording it. We were talk singers and character singers. That's what we were doing. You know, we weren't crooners and we weren't trying to write crooner kind of songs. And we were using our strings. This is not why Roboctetty Pinnagras. This is something different than that. That's right. I mean, before we move on, I'd love to talk about the lyrics because, you know, you guys know everybody thought it had this, this BDSM, you know, thing going on. What for the record and for the record, what is the song about? I had just been reading Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pingeon and in that he makes a bunch of parodies of limericks that kind of like go after the Horatio Alger kind of your number one. There's nobody else like you and, you know, like American exceptionalism. And we thought that was funny stuff. Yeah, it's like a heavy story, but then he'll look out a window and there'll be kids playing on a sidewalk and they'll be singing an odd nursery song. And I go, I want to do one of those. I'm going to do one of those for us. So Whippet was inspired by these things that Thomas Pingeon had interlaced into Gravity's Rainbow. Well, while we're talking about the lyrics, you have scribbled down. I have the original scribbles. That's amazing. I had buy these cheap PSS books. Not that cheap. They were like 75 cents. Oh my gosh. They were just ridiculous low. They were all blanks with, you know, ha ha captions like Superman traveling faster than the speeding bullet. So that's why you don't see anything. And you know, North Pole landscape ha ha ha. But I would just use them to write a song in each box. So that book is filled with other songs? Oh yeah. Or a song lyric. Oh yeah. Here's Whippet, the original Whippet where it's not, it's the same lyrics, but not laid out in the same cadence that fit this music because this was written before that music. Interesting. What's an example of something that evolved? That was different in this original? Well, just the way. The length of the lines. They're not divided up for call and response. This would fit the square dance version of Whippet. That's right. Okay. Would you have had a melody for this too? Or did that come with the music? That came from the music. You know, it's more than writing lyrics. When you develop a vocal melody and a cadence, right? I mean, that's. Rhythmically where you place everything. It isn't just like some guy wrote lyrics, period. Yeah, right next to it is Going Under. I'm going under. I'm going under. All right. Well, let's get into the chorus. What do you want to play for us, my man? Well, let's start with just because it's there. And we talked about Pretty Woman. Part two, the top half ends up in the turnaround. And let's listen to it in the guitar. So in the chorus, we introduce a really important new element. And Mark, is this you on the fourth tritone weirdness, awesomeness? Yeah, more than likely. More than likely. And do you recall maybe an inspiration for this? Or it was just in the moment like this need, this weird thing has to happen this way. Oh, it was, you know, like always looking for like nervous, you know, like, some of commercial. It's very stressful. Yeah. And that's what it does. It keeps things tense and keeps them up here, you know, no rest. Right. Because while everything else is moving and I'll bring in the other elements, it's staying consistent and disturbing off kilter. Because the rest of it's quite melodic. The rest of it's quite, it's a nice, pretty melody. Great, great parts. These are great parts, absolutely. Mark had brought in another tape and he had, and this one had the sound of something that he had done back at Akron through a frequency analyzer. I don't remember what synth you were using when you did Golden Energy. Oh, that was, it was a Paya. Paya. Do you know those? Yeah. You know, like these, you bought pieces and they'd send them to you from Oklahoma City, I think. Like you build your own kit? And you build your own, yeah, your own modular synth. It's like out of a Consumer Electronics magazine. For like $19, you could buy a VCO or for $22, you could buy a filter or an envelope or different pieces. Oh, the component parts that would make a synth. Like it was like, it had the weld of it all together, but it, you know, you ended up with a synth at the end of the day. Yeah. And it was really a cool sound because it, through the frequency analyzer, it was like quivering jello sound, right? And so this tape had like a very slow, which would be the chorus of Whippet. It went, bam, bam, bam. Okay. Bam, bam, bam. But half time. Bam, bam, bam. Yeah, this speed, this speed. Bam, bam, bam. And I loved it. You know, it's just, that's how cool is that. And then we just sped it up, made it the chorus, playing with the same set of sounds as the verse we had, right? And that's when we had, we thought was the song before the little bridge of that, that, that, that came later. But it, but I started trying to sing lyrics I'd written over this thing. I'd written Whippet totally independent of this music. And it seemed to be, how did you match it? How did, how did you come to match it? Well, it just seemed like it fit because the idea was we'd trade lines. That was the main idea. A little call and response. Yeah, call and respond. I saw somewhere the quote, the white robot James Brown. Well, in the spirit of R&B that we were talking about, robot R&B, it just made sense, right? We started trying it and it was great. And then in the vocals, let's listen to what you gentlemen have done together. I believe, but I do have a question. Here is what I think is the final main lead vocal. Now Whippet into shape, shape it up, get straight. Mark that sounds like, is this, is this you? Or it's, it's, it's me. That's me. It's you. Okay. But then Mark sings it with me and his voice is mixed behind mine. That's what I was going to ask because it's pretty low. He does a character voice. I like a whistle. He was doing a whisper almost. When you've answered the question, let's listen to that. I labeled it chill one and chill two. Now Whippet into shape, shape it up, get straight. Mix them together. Go forward. That's two marks. Move ahead. And one Jerry on top. Try to detect it. It's not too late to whip it. Whip it good. Right. See, it's the combo that does it. Right. It really does. In the final mix, I think it's, it's, the balance is interesting because I'd never noticed those lower ones until. I don't know. Maybe it's not there as much. I don't know. Yeah. Subliminal. It's so much of what you do is the second chorus. You guys have a new part. It's not the same as the first or the third chorus. Yeah. That's a bridge. This is a bridge. That's the bridge. I say whip it. Okay. Okay. Flip it good. That was the last part added to the song. Was this, this felt like something that maybe Bob wanted to do so he could finally bust out the distortion pedals. We can play this. And maybe not the distortion. Maybe Mark remembers. I remember we were playing in the studio when this was created. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. Was the idea like we need another different part to kind of. We needed a bridge. We needed a break from what was going on. Well, you say that, but then in the next part you also have a break because it's, is that the solo? We'll just play it. We'll decide. Yeah. Well, that's, yeah. So we're almost like a rest. It's a non-lead lead. Let's listen to the baseline. And this is, it's basically the intro two bars, but you truncated it to one and a half bars. Right. One, two, three, four, one, two, one, two, three, four. All these clever ways of bringing in familiar things, but making them slightly different. And then not unimportantly, we of course have the one note solo. Ping. Yes. By the way, snowy behind you. That's what he plays. And not even a symbol. This is the non-lead lead. Incredible. Was that influenced by something? Like, I always think of cinnamon girl by Neil Young. Has that like crazy one note solo? Well, maybe. We did like cinnamon girl. Well, listen, Whippet is now 45 years old. And as you guys are continuing your 50th anniversary tour, what does it mean to have a song like this in your catalog? I mean, like, you know, your career, we are Devo fans. But what do you feel about this particular song, Whippet, at this point in your career? Grateful for the attention. Yeah. I mean, again, I think I mentioned earlier, Mark and I didn't put anything on a record we didn't like. But we didn't single out Whippet in our minds. You know, freedom of choice, like, this is it. Right? We liked everything we put on there. And when the record company heard the record, they, of course, put all their chips on Girl You Want. We did a great song. And when, yes, I know. And I mean, in other words, we liked it as much as Whippet. And it may be more, who knows. But when it didn't hit. It went top 20, but it didn't go any higher. They were like, okay, we're out. But, you know, a radio DJ named Cal Rudman down in Florida on his own with no prompts from Paola or Coke or... I love the stories of how a single DJ can make this a huge difference. Back then they could. Right. We didn't give them donuts. No donuts. And, you know, back then there was no clear channel or anything like that. So he could with his Cal Rudman tip sheet or whatever he called it, he could influence like about 100 DJs in the Southeast play this song that he really liked. He took the record from Warners and actually listened to it and picked that song and overnight our fate changed. And that led to them giving you some money for a video, the Iconic video. Which also must have had some contribution, especially when MTV went from not existing to existing. Right. And we had already given them every video we had made previous to that. And they were still not national. They were only in like three cities. They were just about to go with American Express Money, national franchise. Right? So yeah, we made a video. But not unimportantly because videos you had been in the vanguard. Yes. Early laser disc, right? Yeah. You were making videos for long enough that you are so ahead of the curve that your videos did not look like anything else on MTV in the earliest days. Right. So memorable. Well, they were self-expression. They were all do-it-yourself. We weren't hiring outside directors to impose an idea on us. It was your complete vision visually. You directed the video. Is that right, Jim? Yeah. Right. Well, that's what I was going to ask about. There's something about this video that, again, going back to even as a child, there was something about it that was like, there's many layers here. And I can't put my finger on what it is. That was pretty naughty. But no, but even just the way the characters look at each other was clearly referring to sort of an advertising language or a fake language. A fake point out an hour ago, we studied TV commercials because we wanted to use that vocabulary to put our message out. Right. That was like a Jordash commercial moment. Yeah. Right. There were elements. Is there something you can put your finger on to explain to me as a more of a music person than a visual person? Like what was it that I'm picking up on that's so uncanny and strange about how these people are interacting? We were parroting the coming conservatism in America because Reagan was about to become president. And he even did cowboy movies. We knew he would win. And we were looking at all those Westerns and like Mark said, the Denim and the Jordash commercials that were permeating the air. So it was this kind of like, it's almost like what's happening with the MAGA people now. And it was happening back then and not as aggravated a manner. But it's like an appeal to like the real American country, blue jeans, something like that. It was our satire on it. American cabin, the great West backdrop from Western images behind us with Utah, Buttes and Maces. I like that backdrop. It was great. It was expensive. With this sort of underlying undercurrent of there's something going on. There's also something else unspoken. Well, Mark's whipping a woman's clothes off. Which almost seems like you guys saying like, look, they think this is what it's about. Let's just go for it. Let's just do it. That's what my point was going to be. We said, let's give them what they want. We had a song called Whippet. It seemed appropriate. Before we end the show, we want to play a game with you guys and we hope that's cool. It's called What's One Song? And I hear the rules. We'll ask you a question. You'll give us an answer really quickly. Like don't overthink it. Answer as quickly as possible. Let's begin. All right. All right. What's One Song that soundtracked your art school days? I guess it would be like a Rolling Stone by Bob Dylan. That's a great one. Purple Haze. Purple Haze. That's a good one. What's One Song that changed the way you thought about making music? Diamond Dogs. Beef Heart. What's One Song that you think defined the 80s, not including with it? Gary Newman Cars. Sure. Cars is good. Yeah. We went to the forum when he was playing and I sat in his little car that he drove out on stage and drove it around while there was nobody there. We have pictures of ourselves with him backstage. Aldry Hinococola. Love it. What's One Song that you could listen to every day for the rest of your life? It's tough. That's hard to say. That is tough. Because for me, it's like my favorite song of the day changes every day. Although if I was going to pick one, I might pick Satisfaction. By. That's an easy one. That's a great one. That sure is too. It could never go wrong. It's the ultimate rock and roll song. It's not for nothing that you chose it to be the song you cover. That's why we did it. That's why you did it and transformed it forever. That's One Song. We have to break down on a future episode of One Song. I'd say take any of them off the first album because if you took the 24 track, there's going to be tracks that Brian Eno and David Bowie intended on putting in the song that you'll only hear them on your show. Mark and Jerry, thank you so much for playing this game with us and spending some time with us. Where can folks find out more about your upcoming tour dates and just what you're up to in general? Devotee.com. Is there a circumstance where a divo is divo versus divo? I've been wondering this. I mean, whether it's Devo or Devo. Right. Yeah. With the emphasis. What was Devo back in the early days when it was Art Deco, Art Nouveau, Art Devo? Devo. And then Jaco Homo kind of turned that upside down. Devo. And also Bill Biff Devo came out. Yeah, we came out here and everybody went, hey, Devo. Early on, I mean, now we both kind of, we kind of just default to Devo, but early on, Devo was kind of like high Devo and Devo was kind of referenced low Devo. High Art, low Art. Even more Devo. I'm from Lowbrow. Yeah. I love that. I feel like we've learned so much today. It's amazing. It's such an honor to have you guys on the show. Thank you so much for coming down. Thank you. Deconstructing your own song with us. It was great to hear this like this, actually, because I realized how much is packed into two minutes and 46 seconds. It's really an interesting arrangement. A lot of changes. It only seems simple until you really listen to how it's broken down. That's what probably kept it interesting. I found that to be the case too, but I didn't write the song. So it's really cool to hear you say that you heard the same thing. Well, this show is great because the people that are listening to it, most of them aren't songwriters, and so they don't even know how a song is built or created. When you get to hear the tracks individually like that, I think it's very illuminating. It both demystifies the process, but also gives you a greater appreciation of the finished product. Exactly. I think you hit it right there. Well, I think you get the idea of how intentional everything was, right? How consciously we were doing this stuff. Both every sound in a moment, but also as you're saying, the arrangement over time. We've heard this. Let's hear something different for a moment than bring it back. Well, I think we should just agree right now that we've got about 149 songs left to go. We should do more. Please come back 149 times. We're going to do more. We'll do more. One Devo song. One Devo song because we're high-minded here. One Devo song. Well, do one of each. Mark, Jerry, Devo, thank you. Thank you for coming on one song. Thank you for letting us beyond. What an episode. As always, you can find us on Instagram and TikTok. You can find me on Instagram at D'Alo, D-I-A-L-L-O, and on TikTok at D'Alo Riddle. And you can find me on Instagram at LUXX-URY, and on TikTok at LUXX-URYXX. And now one song officially has its own Instagram and TikTok. Go follow at one song podcast for exclusive content. You can watch full episodes of the show on YouTube and Spotify. Just search for one song podcast. We'd love it if you'd like and subscribe. Also be sure to check out the one song Spotify playlist for all of the songs we discuss in our episodes. You can find the link in our episode description. And if you made it this far, we think that means you liked the podcast. So please don't forget to give us five stars, leave a review, and share with someone you think would like it. It really helps keep the show going. All right, Alex, will you help us in this thing? I'm producer DJ Songwriter and musicologist and massive Devo fan who's had the best day of his life, luxury. And I'm actor, writer, director, and sometimes DJ, but always Devo fan, D'Alo Riddle. And this is one song we'll see you next time. This episode was produced by Melissa Duanez. Our video editor is Casey Simonson. Our associate producer is Jeremy Bimbo. 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