DEVO: Chicago, the Vic. 11.13.2009, 8 PM Night Two-Freedom of Choice (review)

Chicago, Illinois--Last night's Chicago performance was a barn burner for the many Midwestern fans of DEVO, itself being a Midwestern band going back to the early 1970s. As a matter of fact, the members of DEVO met at Kent State University during the Vietnam War era, some were members of SDS, and bassist Gerald Casale helped organize the antiwar demonstration in the spring of 1970 in which the infamous shootings took place. If you stay in the Midwest long enough, you get as weird as these guys or weirder, mostly from boredom.

Far from being "nerds," or "yuppies," DEVO began as a multimedia arts collective and still operates as one to this day. The real irony in all of this is that they never broke up and have continued to record in their Sunset Strip "Mutato" studio doing soundtrack and commercial work, the most well known being with director Wes Anderson.

Like several other old school punk and postpunk bands that have been touring this year--like the Pixies and even R.E.M.--the spuds were doing entire albums live and in their original running order. Night one was "Are We Not Men?" from 1978 (a punk classic) which sold out so quickly that another night was added to their Chicago appearance. Night two brought the entire "Freedom of Choice" LP from 1980, and yes, "Whip It" was in full bloom with all of its punch and glory. The music hasn't aged and the entire original lineup looked healthier and happier than they have in--well--over a decade, and the mood was celebratory, even for Chicago. From the opening guitar-riffs of "Girl U Want" to the more obscured album cuts like "Gates of Steel" and Mr. B's Ballroom," there was a real sense that this music hasn't aged at all...which was interesting since there were probably no more than maybe two dozen twenty-somethings to be seen. The majority of the crowd was 30-and-up, and with the bar, it was an 18-and-older show. But what the hell, people are broke all over the place these days! The audience was more fun than people watching at Wal-Mart. The icing on the cake was the gorgeous Bettie Page-style model coming out with her boxing-round cards emblazoned with "Track 1," and so on.

Some of the best times I had was looking at all of the former New Wave glam queens, now in their forties and early fifties, but still looking pretty good! Many concertgoers literally hadn't seen the group since the 1980s, or if they were like this writer it was their first time ever. The merchandising will be legendary, but there was nothing especially crass about it and it all appeared to have been made in America. All said, it was exactly what you would have wanted out of a DEVO concert and that includes Mark Mothersbaugh coming out onstage and singing "Beautiful World" in the second set dressed as the utterly grotesque "Boojie Boy," then regaling the audience in a totally surreal account of DEVO's trek to Los Angeles and meeting Michael Jackson, that he was dead, and how great it would be if he could rise from the grave like in the video "Thriller" to tell us all "what a beautiful world it truly is." The brutal truth was that there was no irony to be had!

But really, having been a budding teenager listening to Freedom of Choice when it was new, this was just a real road to Mecca moment, pure bliss. Not only is DEVO still great, they're professional and can still stop on a dime. Most of these guys are hitting their sixties, but the joy and the appreciation were so palpable that Mark Mothersbaugh, and even Gerald Casale, could only smile along with the rest of us and enjoy a very special tour in a very unique cultural moment. One of the greatest surprises of the evening was the dusting-off of a very old DEVO song, "Be Stiff," going back to the mid-1970s, almost one of the earliest songs that they ever did. Hey, they weren't going to do "Oh No! It's DEVO!" (1982) or "Shout!" (1984). Here's to art and crowd pleasers! Whoever said you can't have both in art was wrong.

Are some serial killers created? An observation, by Len Howlett

I had been to North Miami Beach High (no, but I was sure spaced out by the time I graduated --an old throwaway punchline from Rowan and Martin's "Laugh In") to a seminar on teaching A.P. Chemistry, and there was a lunch break with a convenient little neighborhood deli across the street.

I went into the place and had a seat at a table in the small, almost full dining area which may have had a dozen tables in it. A guy I recognized from the seminar came up to my table and asked if I would mind if he sat in the chair across from mine. I invited him to join me. He was a personable guy and told me that he was from Queens or Brooklyn, or whatever borough it turned out that Dave Berkowitz lived in during his adolescence. The talk was light, and I was a curious figure to him since I was possibly one of the few people that he ever met with a Southern accent who loved Manhattan.

So, the talk went on, and it ranged from topical stuff to teaching and its pros-and-cons. I observed that maybe the best or worst of our tendencies embodied the vast potential that inadvertently plays a part in shaping future lives, which in the end, was more important and long lasting than anything they could possibly retain of the facts of Chemistry.

"After all," I said, "we could influence their view of the academic and the adult world just through example, either for the better or the worse. Then I made a statement--mostly in-jest-- that I didn't want to feel like I had helped make any serial killers or engendered resentment that twisted young psyches. Looking back, I can only believe now that I must have been reacting to some recent news about a case that was still active, and I was regarding my corned beef and half-a-sour pickle when I felt the stillness of a significant pause and a rather sobering, quiet response from him.

"I may have," he said. I looked up to catch the light humor I would expect to see in a satirical reply. It wasn't there. He was somber, like someone who feels the gravity of an act gone bad and the silent record of guilt.

He added, "Not as a teacher, but as a student."

"How so?" I asked.

There was another significant silent space and a measured response. Then he said he went to the same high school that David Berkowitz did and asked if I remembered who that was. "Of course, I did," I replied. He had been in the same class as Berkowitz.

I asked what kind of kid David was: his reply was the expected description of a friendless, lonely boy who ate every meal alone, sitting in the cafeteria at a table by himself. My lunch companion said with detectable guilt that he had been one of a group of four boys who would sit the next table over and ridicule and harass him every day while David sat and wordlessly ate his lunch.

The topic he remembered most frequently was the question, "So what you got planned, Dave? You got a hot date? I hear all the girls taking about you? They really like you. They're crazy about you, Dave." You know, the usual compassion of high schoolers and humanity when it's allowed to distract attention from it's own loneliness and self-doubt.

Then he said, "So, I come home one day some years later and open the paper and who do I see on the front page being led away by the police wearing that frightened smirk that I had watched him walk around with for years in high school?" He said he recognized Berkowitz immediately, even before he read his name, even though he hadn't thought about him in some years. And then, he said that he often found himself wondering--if just maybe--he had played a part in what happened later. "Maybe, maybe not," was all that I could say.

But nowadays, I think about it and the unknown consequences of unthinking actions.

A Russian Finlandia Vodka ad from a old Prague Spring soldier

Ed.--This was forwarded to a friend of mine who lives in the Czech Republic--Brno to be exact--so much a citadel of computer hacking and pirating that many large tech-firms decided to hire them. My pal in Brno claims he was a signer of the Charter 77 Human Rights Statement to President Carter by Czech dissidents; we met in 1986, here in South Bend, we both worked at the same restaurant.

I have little reason to doubt him--he was kicked-out of Soviet dominated Czechoslovakia just months later. Lucky him. If you wonder what things are like in Russia right now, here's a little cultural artifact, a peek. I agree with the logic of the ad, as vulgar as it may be. It's just true, and it works. The bottom-text appears to be Czech. As anyone can tell, I created this ad, never mind the temerity of posting it here, at another internet location. The gall, I know.

August 16th, 1977: The Day Elvis Died

South Bend, Indiana--It was a really hot day that day. We were all outside playing, dreading the return to school that month. The last year had been extremely violent, especially just walking to Edison grade school. The sky had a real amber-hue to it, and my brother and I were outside in our front-yard playing. I was nine, and he was seven.

We were cute kids, but our neighborhood was an unusually troubled one. Next-door, there lived a woman who was literally insane, a drug-addict (cocaine and pills), a child-abuser, an alcoholic, and she was fucking someone in the prosecutor's office, so when she threw a lawn boulder through one of our living-room windows, there was no recourse whatsoever.

The story of this woman will have to wait for another time, it's so baroque. On that same day in a part of London, the Sex Pistols' guitarist Steve Jones was doing his guitar-parts for "Never Mind the Bollocks," when one of the engineers in the studio stopped-in and told him that Elvis had died (he didn't care). My mother saw Elvis at Notre Dame University's Joyce ACC, where Frank Zappa and everyone else played, on that last tour. She loved it.

Did I say it was hot that fateful day in August of 1977? It was, it really was. We'd already been to the Museum of Natural History in Chicago to see the full-on King Tut exhibit--a once in a lifetime affair--and Star Wars was coming. Punk was already here at CBGB's (good riddance!)and Max's Kansas City (wish it was still around and relevant), but hardly anyone knew what it was in Northern Indiana at that time, nor cared.

It was the salad days of the Eagles, Led Zeppelin, Styx (yeccch!), Supertramp (double-yechhh!), Billy Joel, Alan Parsons Project, Steely Dan (back again, still good!), Carol King, Queen, Pink Floyd, James Taylor, Alice Cooper, AC/DC, Black Sabbath, and even Frank Zappa...it was another time altogether from today, but familiar in some ways. Elvis just seemed out-of-place by 1977. It was actually hard to understand his place anymore, and I guess he felt the same. In retrospect, it was a decade literally teeming with cultural innovations, a flipside to today where there are virtually none.

It's funny, but most of the music my brother and I listened to as kids were my mom's old 45s. They were great, and in 1977, music was expensive and scarce compared to now. Obviously, there was no internet, no world wide web. People kinda still lived in a regional sense, in a kind of cultural isolation, and you might never even hear of a cultural movement until it had been over for at least seven years. We had time to let our imaginations run wild, we didn't have to be told what to see, hear, or even think. It was cool. In that sense, we lived in an Edenic paradise that children in the modern world may never experience again (unless order breaks-down as I expect it to, then it might), and our minds were allowed to roam free as a child's should--at least outside of school.

But what was so special about our experiences that day? The crazy, stupid rednecks who lived diagonally to our house at Whitehall Drive: They were the first to have a VCR, but needed to shave their knuckles so as not to alarm us city folks. The father had the personality of a potato chip and worked in a paint-factory. Both parents left guns lying around in their bedroom, including a .44 revolver, which was pointed at me by the son (the youngest). They all definitely looked like inbreeders and could barely talk, let alone read very well, and they worshiped Elvis as a god. I think they were from Kentucky, which was unsurprising, and had a kitsch museum that they called home.

The rednecks had entire photo albums the factory dog father had made, all from before Elvis went into the Army until the seventies. Some were faded-Polaroids, some were from negatives, but most were in color, and most were pretty impressive. I should say here that I love Elvis's earliest recordings with Sam Phillips and the Sun Records label, as well as his early-singles with RCA ("Hound Dog" is still one of the heaviest rock songs ever).

Hey, I even love "Suspicious Minds," a later single from the "fallow years." Never, ever, recite the lyrics to this song to a schizophrenic. Read the lyrics, and you'll know why. Oddly, they could easily describe the King's life at that time, as well as life in America in 1969-70. Or now.

What happened that day? We're sitting outside on the edge of our lawn, right up on the curb. Broken-glass is all over the street in-front our house from Coke (TM) bottles, because we used to break them all the time there. We also used to have water and snowball/iceball fights a lot, but that's for another time, heh-heh. What did we hear that day?

This is what we heard: wailing and screeching--much like that of Muslim or Sicilian women at a funeral--that began emanating from the redneck house. It was really loud, then--all of a sudden, the fat brunette daughter came running-out screaming, and so did the other kids. I never saw the parents' reactions to the death of Elvis, but there wasn't much activity over there for awhile, it was really quiet. I assumed they were all in-mourning. We laughed really hard at the kids as they came outside squealing, it was pretty funny and ridiculous. Again, keep-in-mind that we loved Elvis too.

The reactions were similar throughout the USA that week, it was bizarre, and thus, the Cult of the Dead Elvis was born. Ever since then, I have wished they would all shut-up. For that reason alone, I wish he was alive, and his death at 42 was certainly untimely. If you want a real headstone for rock's demise, one could argue it was the day Elvis died, with some minor-footnotes of relevance afterward.

As a genuine cultural movement, created and played-by ordinary people for other ordinary people, rock has been dead in America ever since. The pockets are all that have ever mattered, not the mainstream. Rock was barely alive then. I miss Elvis. I wish he hadn't died in the state that he was in (Tennessee). "Train arrived, sixteen coaches long, ...Well, that long black train take my baby and gone." My baby's gone. The real Elvis is the lonely Elvis, the ponderous young man who yearned for a better life. How many whites listened to "Worried Man Blues"--the genesis of "Mystery Train"--in those days? It takes a worried man to sing a worried song.

I wish he'd made more of the 68' comeback, fired "the Memphis Mafia," Colonel Parker (really Mephistopheles to Elvis's Faust), and the idiot doctor who was prescribing him those pills that killed him. But that's not how things worked-out, and it's sad. What's sadder is that Elvis proved the American Dream is a lie, that fame is a hell of being constantly bothered, ripped-off, and misunderstood, and that all those rednecks are dreaming of something that never existed for more than a few-years.

Rockabilly rode a wave of Cold War fears, angst, and sexual-repression. It made a struggling redneck trucker a star, and it also ruined his life. On that hot August day--30-years-ago--we had a good laugh at the expense of the neighborhood rednecks--we loved Elvis too, but they made it into something more than it all was: a religion, and that's what it soon became, and what the Cult of the Dead Elvis still is today. Rock is a pathetic outgrowth of the American Dream, and it's a lie. Elvis, RIP (if you can).

At least my brother and I had a good laugh that day. We wouldn't be laughing the next year--in November--when Jonestown hit.