From a psychedelic art project at first, to their eventual place as pioneers of electronic pop in the late 70s and 80s. Dismissed by the Rock establishment as that weird new wave band, copied by lame wanna-bes but never equaled. They kind of got lost in the later 80s but those first few years / first 4 albums are really great, IMO.
I saw them in December 1978 - it was about 2 months after their debut on SNL with Satisfaction and still before their second album (Duty Now for the Future). I was 17. I still see lots of shows and that Devo show still stands out as one of the best performances of any band I have ever seen. It was loud, raucous, and visually completely over the top. They were completely original and so far ahead of their time as artists. They showed early Devo films on a screen behind them while they played. Nobody was doing multimedia shows like this back then and even now I can’t think of any show that has ever been better in terms of a multimedia experience. Years later I found an audio recording from that show on the Internet. The recording is fair quality but even now when I listen to it, it confirms just how great they were.
Aren’t their really early videos something to see? I would have killed to see them in the early 80s but everything beyond music videos on MTV was hard to find and sort of secret about them. The mystery and lore surrounding the band was part of their appeal, for me at least.
Oh, man, I still remember seeing them on SNL in 1978, coming out in their yellow vinyl suits with their awesomely weird cover of Satisfaction. I was 16, and it was like nothing I had seen before; I watched the whole thing with a goofy grin on my face. Part of what was called “new wave” at the time, and that I had already been getting into, but man, I was hooked.
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