Devo frontman Mark Mothersbaugh plays favourites

American musician Mark Mothersbaugh has some advice for people who have symptoms of Covid-19 – get tested right away.

He thinks if he'd got tested earlier he might not have ended up on a ventilator for ten days.

The composer and former frontman of new wave band Devo talks to Kim Hill.

Mothersbaugh founded Devo in the early 1970s and is now one of the most successful soundtrack composers in Hollywood.

He says that when he contracted Covid-19 earlier this year – he suspects from a mask-less coughing man he gave a ride to once – he wasn't being as careful as he should have been.

Even when he later got sick, Mothersbaugh was in denial and "very hardheaded".

"I kind of just thought 'I'm going to plough through it because I was working on a number of projects. I was like 'I can't get sick right now'."

Eventually, a nurse came over to his house and told him he should be in intensive care.

"My advice to anybody that hasn't had it, if you do feel sick you should get tested right away. Because if I had got tested earlier I might not have needed a ventilator … At least, if you're gonna get it, wait till they find a vaccine."

Mothersbaugh grew up in the town of Akron, Ohio, and although he learnt the organ from the age of seven, he tells Kim Hill he wasn't always keen to be a musician.

In fact, until he first saw The Beatles play on American TV when he was 12, he thought music had been invented to torture him.

After high school, Mothersbaugh went on to art school at Ohio's Kent State University.

He thought he'd probably end up as an art teacher until a shooting closed the university art studios in 1970. He and his friend and future bandmate Gerald "Jerry" Casale started playing around with music instead.

The pair were interested in art movements like Dada, Bauhaus and Futurism and conceived of Devo as some kind of early '70s equivalent, Mothersbaugh says.

"I thought that Devo could easily be Akron Ohio's version of The Residents from San Francisco … we could be this band that never leaves Akron and we always make these interesting films and songs.

"But we decided we wanted to see how strong the concept was. We wanted to find out if de-evolution rang a bell with anyone else or struck a nerve."

The band were also interested in power, and realised it was the advertising agencies of Madison Avenue who had the most power to make change in the world.

"They can get people to buy things and do things and eat things that aren't good for them and make them happy at the same time. How do they do it?"

Mothersbaugh was intrigued by a 1974 ad for Burger King which laid a sales jingle over Pachelbel's Canon – "one of the most beautiful pieces of music ever written".

"I thought 'oh my god. That's as subversive as you can get'."

For maximum subversive power, the band headed for "the belly of the beast" – Hollywood, Mothersbaugh says.

When his friend Paul Rubin asked him to score his TV show Pee-wee's Playhouse, Mothersbaugh got hooked on the quick turnaround of television.

He also had a lot of fun putting his own subliminal messages in the show, such as adding the line 'Sugar is bad for you' to a commercial for Hawaiian Punch. Mothersbaugh says he got away with doing this for 2 or 3 years.

In 1991, Devo went into a "cocoon siesta hibernation state" and Mothersbaugh worked on the soundtracks for TV shows and movies, including The Royal Tenenbaums, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou and Tiger King.

He wasn't a big Marvel fan when he got the call to do the music for Taika Waititi's Thor: Ragnarok, but had seen the What We Do In the Shadows film (he later did the TV show's soundtrack) and was impressed by the Hunt for The Wilderpeople soundtrack.

Waititi is "definitely an eccentric genius," Mothersbaugh says.

"I would love it if someday they would come back and say 'hey Taika, lets put the three-hour version back together again that you originally showed us. There was some amazing, probably closer in style to flash Gordon footage with … Jeff Goldblum ... There was a lot of really outrageous footage that was not typical Marvel and they kind of pared it away."

"I don't know if he would take it as ac compliment or not, but I feel like Taika Waititi is kind of the New Zealand Wes Anderson in a way. They just have a similar sensibility and they both are real artists."

Mothersbaugh says he respects Anderson for the way he seems to trade earnings for artistic control: "It reminded me of what I used to with Devo … Taika, to me, has that kind of an energy."

Mark Mothersbaugh played:

'She Loves You' by The Beatles from the 1963 album Twist and Shout

'Uncontrollable Urge' - the first song on Devo's 1978 album Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo! – is a homage to The Beatles, he says. It has similar chords to 'I Want to Hold Your Hand' and some "deconstructed" yeah-yeah-yeah's inspired by 'She Loves You'.

 

'Editions of You' by Roxy Music from the 1973 album For Your Pleasure

Mothersbaugh first noticed the genius of Brian Eno - who ended up producing their first record - via this song.

"Eno takes a solo … and it made the hair on my arms stand up. He had this really liquid, aggressive, interesting synth sound that he played for his solo. I was like 'he's not using a regular keyboard he's got something special I don't know how he's doing it.' So I paid attention to his solo albums after that."

 

'The Blimp (Mousetrapreplica)' by Captain Beefheart from the 1969 album Trout Mask Replica

When Mothersbaugh first heard Captain Beefheart, he thought a real change in popular music was coming.

"This is a tsunami earthquake tidal wave tornado pandemic that's going to destroy rock and roll and a whole new vocabulary is in store. And it's not going to be limited to jus sonics, it's going to be visual also."

"I thought pop music was going to change and hair bands and metal bands were all going to just melt and disappear."