Heading back in time, let us examine Devo's mid-seventies basement tapes via these long out-of-print Rykodisc collections. While Volume One does contain early version of later classics, like "Mongoloid", "Jocko Homo" and their cover of the Rolling Stones "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction", most of these fifteen tracks had never been heard before this was released in 1990.
The results, as the title makes clear (but the covert art muddies), are not for the lightweight, "Whip It" loving Devo fans. No, to love this pointy-headed artiness ya gotta wanna understand.
Nothing about Devo really made sense: not their ever-changing matching outfits and hats, their AC/DC meets Kraftwerk sound, their undergrad philosophy of De-Evolution, their robotic cover of classic rock staples, their nerdy synchronized dance movements and, least sensible of all, the fact that for a time in the late seventies and early eighties, they defined punk to the straight world in North America.
All those incomprehensible elements (their defining punk aside), their alien-ness made Devo irresistible to those who sorta understood. Even though I was listening to a steady diet of North American hardcore and British punk, I had tapes of every Devo album (though I admit that, fittingly, they got gradually worse through till 1984's Shout). Blame it on Fridays, that easier-for-kids-to-see version of Saturday Night Live for whom Devo was practically the house band.
This bootleg includes all those Fridays appearances as well as ones on Letterman, SNL and a set from the King Biscuit Flower Hour. It all makes clear Devo's complicated but comprehensible influence on much of modern music.
MRML Readers: Leave us a comment with your take on Devo and whether or not you want to hear more!
After the Beach Mutants (see here) broke up, then-bassist Brad Johnston's next band, Artificial Life (with Mike Brownlee on drums, Damon Hill and Jason Syrota on guitars, Jay Smith on lead vocals), took over as Winnipeg's kings of punk. Only now instead of monopolizing the basement of Wellington's they ruled the roost at the by-the-punk-for-the-punks club, The Cauldron. Listening to these songs, like "Death Dive", I was taken aback at its resemblance, musically, lyrically and vocally to S.N.F.U. It's not that they were slavish imitators - there's lots of little arrangement tricks and vocal hooks that are all their own - but it's obvious that S.N.F.U. visited Winnipeg constantly in this time.
Here, to set the warped record straight on Winnipeg's mid-eighties punk overlords, is Paul "Willy" Williamson, automotive columnist for the Winnipeg Free Press and current lead singer of The Gearheads.
"The Beach Mutants were from Charleswood. The lead singer was Pete McCormick. Most of the band members attended Shaftsbury High School, and were the only punks in a predominantly "rich kid" school. Hits included a rewrite of "My Generation" titled..."My Masturbation", and a little ditty called "Fuck Monster"...("I think I saw the fuck monster sliding down a banister, I think I saw this scary guy with his dick caught in his fly"). I was basically the chief roadie, but I used to sing "Born to be Wild" and a couple of really fast Neil Young covers. Brad Johnston on lead guitar, his little brother Garth played drums sometimes, but it was usually Mike Stevens. Steve Benedictson was the original bass player, he was replaced by Wycliffe Hartwig, who incidentally is now an actor and had a role in the TV series Stargate. The band played many gigs in the mid 80s, including countless trips to the basement of Wellingtons and a tour of western Canada where they opened for (jangle-pop band) the Grapes of Wrath. In 1984 we rented a video camera from Global Video and made a movie called Pizza Guy. It had Beach Mutant songs in the soundtrack. It was an ambitious project. Basically, I would take a pizza, and with the camera hidden in the bushes, knock on someone's door and try to deliver the pizza that they never ordered. I had a Mohawk at the time, and they put fake blood on my face and shirt, so I looked pretty messed up. I actually convinced one lady to buy the pizza...it was three days old."
Here's the press-kit, such as it was from 1986 (click to enlarge) .
Their relentless gigging (I must have seen them a dozen times) transformed The Beach Mutants into a ferocious monster. Pete McCormarck was a feral frontman and the huge, imposing Wycliff anchored the band with his guttural bass and backing vocals. Eventually they released one of the cheapest-looking, thinnest-sounding punk singles of all time, Christmas, Grandma.... Polka Dot Pyjamas. You can still hear the glorious recklessness, especially in their gonzo re-write of "My Generation" and their Reefer Madness inspired "I Need Dope" but you've got to really crank it to approximate the live experience.
Punk Rock was prophetic: its forbearers were voices in the wilderness, its leaders reveled in ‘the-axe-is-at-the-root-of–the-tree’ proclamations and its followers envisioned a rule-less paradise wherein each believer wrought their own culture. But even fierce prophets struggle with local acceptance; since once their prophecies come to pass they’re left to explain the fall-out. Like that glut of cheap CD compilations that still clog up retail racks, those are punk rock's fault. Before punk, the compilation, soundtracks aside, was primarily an exercise in nostalgia, a history lesson. But punk and especially hardcore would turn those sepia snapshots of the good old days into blurry Polaroids of the near future. The Rodney on the Roq compilations envisioned LA punk’s long desert-march to the pop charts and Bruce Pavit and co.’s American Youth Report, besides being a near-perfect compilation, predicted the riotous growth of the American Underground.
It Came From the Pit, alongside Something to Believe Infrom California’s Better Youth Organization laid bare Canada’s contribution to this Revelation. Besides the requisite thrashy hardcore acts like Ontario's Problem Children, ICFTP featured the garage rock of Vancouver's Enigmas, the jazz-punk of Victoria's NoMeansoNo, the proto-riot grrl of Winnipeg's Ruggedy Anne’s (coming soon!) and Edmonton's S.N.F.U.' (more here) doing a ripping take on Warren Zevon's "Poor, Poor Pitiful Me So". By accommodating different musical sects, albums like this not only helped ease the underground schism of the mid-eighties, they also foretold a plague of budget-priced punk compilation CD's to come.
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Re: Re-Ups
MRML does not plan to restore all of the content lost in The Great Mediafire Gutting of 2012. Polite requests may be made in the appropriate section, regular commenters will get priority.
