DEVO REINVENT SATISFACTION
Devo bassist/voice Gerald Casale recalls adroit moves on rock TV, and undermining the machine.
“The album came out at the end of August 1978. Satisfaction was being played in England [the song reached Number 41 in April 1978], but we weren’t really getting any traction on the radio here. But we lucked out that October, because our manager Elliot Roberts also managed Neil Young. [Saturday Night Live creator/producer] Lorne Michaels wanted Neil so bad that Elliot promised him he’d get him Neil if he would let Devo play. We actually played SNL the week after The Rolling Stones. We had wanted to be on the show earlier, but Lorne Michaels did put his foot down to Elliot. That had nothing to do with why we played Satisfaction on the show, but it made it extra-interesting. Saturday Night Live was taken very seriously back then. It was the only game in town. Everybody who was 18-29 years old, they were watching Saturday Night Live. The response was instant. Overnight we went from being this little club band to having to re-book the tour to larger venues. Warner had given us a $5,000 promotion budget for the first album. They wanted to make cardboard cutouts or something. We said, Let’s use the money to make videos instead. We were trying to think of graphic examples of being denied satisfaction, like where desire causes pain. I had read something about a kid getting electrocuted when he stuck his spoon in the toaster. But we made it a fork instead because it was funnier. We thought we were going to make, believe it or not, laser discs that would be a collection of film shorts. We believed all this stuff we were reading in Popular Mechanics. We thought laser discs were going to revolutionise everything, and we would be right there, the only people doing it. The laser disc thing never happened. But then [on August 1, 1981] MTV came along. They only started in three cities before they franchised it. I think it was New York and Chicago and somewhere down south. They started playing all of our videos. We had five or six videos by that point and they started showing them all because they didn’t have much in the way of programming. Nobody was making videos yet. Then came Video Killed The Radio Star by The Buggles and that’s when they went national. Once they went national, Devo was in big trouble. They weren’t big censors before. But then suddenly they were being attacked by religious groups and standards people. The president of MTV, Bob Pittman, was a son of a Baptist preacher and they became more conservative. It wasn’t like Devo was showing scantily clad women; they just smelled that our message wasn’t the corporate message and that there was something subversive there. [Satisfaction] was so whacked out that it was an example of what [Devo philosophy] de-evolution meant musically. We had taken a massive worldwide hit that everybody knew and showed them, graphically, what you can do if you rethink it. It was a way into Devo for a lot of people. It made the Devo manifesto more understandable.”
Adapted from Ray Padgett’s Cover Me: The Stories Behind The Greatest Cover Songs Of All Time (Sterling Publishing) – out now.