Devo’s Mark Mothersbaugh Talks Rock Hall and Neil Young’s ‘David and Goliath’ Spotify Fight
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“Well, you know what they say – third time’s the charm,” Mark Mothersbaugh says with a small laugh after seeing the nominations for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s Class of 2022. Mothersbaugh, who is also an acclaimed composer and founder of Los Angeles-based music production company Mutato, co-founded Devo in the mid ’70s as a conceptual art project that morphed into an off-kilter rock band at the forefront of the burgeoning new wave genre. “Somebody there must like us, there’s somebody tenacious over there,” he says of Devo popping up for a third time on the Rock Hall ballot. “We’ll see what happens. It’s a nice honor if it would happen – but I look at all the other people [nominated this year] and I would vote for them, too.”
Having been down this road twice before, Mothersbaugh seems to be taking it in stride; when asked who he would like to see do the honors of inducting his band, he drily replies, “Jimi Hendrix.” He lights up when another name is floated, however: “Neil Young? Now you’re talking. That would be fitting if he’d be up for flying into Cleveland for that.”
Casual fans may not be aware of the connection, but under the pseudonym Bernard Shakey, Neil Young co-directed the willfully weird nuclear holocaust comedy Human Highway in 1982, which starred Devo and Young himself.
“It had a script, but they were very loose about it,” Mothersbaugh recalls. “There’s a scene in the movie where Devo is jamming with Neil Young at a place called Different Fur Studios up in San Francisco. I was Booji Boy, wearing diapers and a Devo t-shirt and a mask, of course. I was sitting in a playpen with a Minimoog and mic and singing (‘Hey Hey My My’) and he started smashing my playpen near the end of the song. It was funny. I liked him. If he ever said, ‘I’d like to join Devo,’ we would have said, ‘You’re in.'”
The Devo frontman says he’s still behind Young these days, especially in the way of the Rock and Roll Hall of Famer removing his music from Spotify to protest the platform hosting episodes of The Joe Rogan Experience podcast that give voice to misinformation about the pandemic and vaccines (Spotify and Rogan signed a $100 million deal in 2020). “It’s a strange time that we’re in,” Mothersbaugh muses. “The fact that people are spreading misinformation on purpose, and that it’s dangerous to the people they spread it to. That, to me, is quite shocking. Neil Young is a smart man. I understand battling somebody like Spotify in the first place is like David and Goliath. That’s a hard one to undertake. I do agree with him that there has to be some sort of responsibility if people are getting all their information from places like Spotify.”
Mothersbaugh wonders if the dangers of misinformation are more pronounced among older listeners. “Kids might even be more immune to that stuff, but older people are used to having news agencies that were pretty well validated on any of the statements they’re making. It’s different times. I’m on Neil Young’s side for sure.”
Regardless of what happens with Devo and the Rock Hall in 2022, there’s a separate project in the works that will give Mothersbaugh and his bandmates an impetus to look back on Devo’s idiosyncratic legacy. “We’re working with a documentary filmmaker, Chris Smith, now to do something definitive,” Mothersbaugh says, “suppling him with old stuff from the (band’s) formative years.” He’s quick to note, however, that “it’s not my film, it’s his film, so whatever he puts in it is up to” him. (Smith, who broke out on the documentary scene in 1999 with American Movie, also directed the 2019 documentary Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened, and was one of the producers on Tiger King, which Mothersbaugh helped score.)
Looking back on Devo’s early years, Mothersbaugh admits the group initially had “bigger aspirations” than the path they ended up taking. “We thought we were gonna be something different than a rock band. I thought we were gonna be an art movement. I was convinced we were representing a new way to think about being a human on this planet.” He sighs. “That’s stuff’s hard. It’s complicated to work like that and still be in the entertainment industry. You’re at odds with the people who are financing things, and they have different priorities than you do. It’s been an interesting journey. We did some things right, and some things I wish we could go back and redo them.”
What regrets does a revered career musician and composer like Mothersbaugh still harbor? “I would not believe everything Richard Branson told me when we signed with him,” he says with a laugh.
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