Bob Casale, guitarist for DEVO – aka Bob2, died this week. My wife found this awesome version of “Gut Feeling” on Youtube that I will post here in remembrance. DEVO is a very underrated band and I encourage you to take a deep dive past the “Whip It” stuff if you haven’t already (although I like “Whip It” too).
Cross posted at LITGM.
8 thoughts on “RIP Bob 2”
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I was one of millions of dumbfounded viewers who saw DEVO for the first time when they appeared on Saturday Night Live. Their performance of Satisfaction was jaw-dropping, and you figured, if they do a second song, which most of the musical guests did, then there is no way they can top that. And then they did a deranged, high energy version of Jocko Homo that was unlike anything anyone had ever seen before. It was one of the great rock’n’roll moments of all time. At school on Monday, everyone was saying “did you SEE that? What the Hell WAS that?” Rest in peace, thank for being a true original, and bringing something new and thrilling into the world.
Reminds me a bit of Velvet Underground.
Awesome. I liked “Whip It” and their version of “Working In A Goldmine” – and was fascinated by the album covers – but otherwise knew nothing about them. Figured they were mostly a novelty act. Then sometime in the early ’90s when I lived in Chapel Hill Superchunk had covered “Girl U Want” & I asked one of ’em (everybody knew everybody in Chapel Hill) who that was & I was schooled for a minute on Devo. So I checked ’em out. They were way better than I had known.
Noticed in this clip that the drummer starts out playing cross-handed, and then switches to regular-rock style. Neat. I used to know a girl drummer, self-taught, who would switch like that. She was also right-handed but set her kit up left-handed b/c she had seen pictures of her grandfather (a lefty) playing like that so obviously that was how to do it. Also love how approximately two people in the audience recognize the song at the start!!
Nice catch on the drummer. And I love Superchunk!
Are we not men?
My ex-brother-in-law was heavily into this crew back when they popular. They seemed to have an odd effect on the guy. I remember his having to be removed from his parents house, shirtless and drunk, with Devo booming from his stereo in the background. He had attacked his little brother with a belt and also referred to the arresting officer as “Spudboy” repeatedly.
Needless to say, Will, I didn’t have that experience.
My favorite Devo story is how, at a friends’ house, I was exploring his music and making cassette tapes (yeah, it was the early 80s) and put Oingo Boingo’s “Good For Your Soul” album on one side of the tape, and Devo’s, “Are We Not Men? We Are Devo!” album on the other.
Why is this “interesting”?
Well, the Oingo Boingo album has a song on it, called “No Spill Blood”
And one of Devo’s signature songs is, of course, the title track of that album “Are We Not Men? We Are Devo!”
They both are references to H.G. Wells’ “Island of Doctor Moreau”, made into a film titled “Island of Lost Souls“, which was one of the last movies to make it out of Hollywood before the imposition of the infamous Hayes Code that was how Hollywood self-censored until it was broken and replaced by the MPAA system.
And I had no idea regarding the connection until I actually sat down and played the tape and realized this. I’d seen Island of Lost Souls years before at a classic film retrospective, so I spotted it right away — it was an interesting sheer coincidence of choice to put them onto the same cassette. My friend did not suggest it, he wasn’t a film buff and likely had no idea of the connection even if he’d played them “near” to one another.
P.S., I will recommend both Devo and Oingo Boingo if you want to explore the more alternative 80s “New Wave” stuff. Both, like The Police, started in Punk but transitioned out of it as time passed, each heading in their own direction. Unlike The Police, neither became a widespread hit, but they were each pretty damned talented, much like The Police.
Devo, for example, knew that someday their stuff would be turned into “elevator music”, so they recorded their own versions of their more popular songs using that style.