The central concept of Devo’s music—devolution, which inspired the group’s name and posits that humans as a species are not evolving but are instead moving backward and bringing on the breakdown of society—was on the minds of members Mark Mothersbaugh and Gerald Casale well before they started the band. But 53 years after the iconic new wave act’s formation, how does devolution look compared to what they thought it might look like when they began?
“It’s worse!” says Casale, whose band will bring its energetic show to the Capitol Theatre on June 9. “We didn’t want to be right about things. We were just being smartasses. But what’s happening now is beyond our worst dystopian nightmares. Devolution is real.”
Born and raised in Akron, Ohio, Casale and Mothersbaugh met as art students at nearby Kent State University around 1970. That year, of course, something tragic happened at Kent State, something that, along with their shared sense of surrealist humor and social satire, greatly shaped their artistic vision.
“Two of the students who were killed in the Kent State Massacre were friends of mine,” says Casale, who has called May 4, 1970, “the most Devo day of my life.”
Fueled as well by the Dada art movement, early science fiction movies, and the discovery of Jocko Homo Heavenbound, a 1924 evangelical anti-evolution pamphlet with a monkey as its central character, the pair and fellow student Bob Lewis started creating art pieces and primitive, lo-fi, proto-art-punk music that sometimes incorporated junk electronics.
No long after playing their first show on campus in 1973, Devo settled on the lineup of Mothersbaugh (vocals, keyboards, guitar), Casale (bass, vocals, keyboards), Mark’s brother Bob Mothersbaugh AKA Bob 1 (guitar), Gerald’s brother Bob Casale AKA Bob 2 (guitar, keyboards), and Alan Meyers (drums), and performed locally to mostly repressive Rust Belt audiences.
“Ohio is a great place to be from, but it’s the boot camp for the world if you’re any kind of artist,” explains the musician about the often-hostile environment. “Like the Chinese proverb says, ‘The nail that sticks out gets hammered down.’”
But the adverse responses only confirmed to the band that they were doing something worthy. In 1976 they produced The Truth About De-Evolution, a promotional film that attracted the attention of David Bowie, who helped them get signed to Warner Brothers; a move to LA came next.
The release of their Brian Eno-produced 1978 debut, Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!, led to a history-making slot that year on “Saturday Night Live” with their manic version of the Rolling Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” The appearance made Devo the avowed flagship of the rising new wave, a spot cemented by the quirky band videos Gerald Casale codirected for the singles from 1979’s Duty Now for the Future and 1980’s Freedom of Choice, the latter home to “Whip It,” their first and only Top 40 hit.
The group went on the first of a few hiatuses after 1981’s New Traditionalists and 1982’s Oh, No! It’s Devo, with Mark Mothersbaugh moving into composing music for TV and film, starting with his work for “Pee-Wee’s Playhouse.” Alan Meyers, who’d left the band in 1986, died in 2013; Bob Casale passed in 2014.
There were more albums and occasional reunions with different lineups and even Devo 2.0, a Devo-sponsored tour of handpicked younger musicians covering their classics as Gerald Casale kept busy directing videos for other bands and making music on his own.
“We’d done a smattering of festivals and other [performances] in the decade before Covid and a little after, but basically Mark was busy with soundtrack work and things were on ice there for a few years,” Casale explains. “Then one day he called me up and said, ‘Hey, let’s play some shows.’ And I was, like, ‘Yeah!’”
Concurrently with the release of the 2024 band documentary Devo, the reconstituted quintet has returned to the road with a vengeance, with nearly 30 dates booked for 2026 so far.
Devo’s influence on music and popular culture has only grown in recent years, and these days they find “beautiful mutants”—their term of endearment for fans—of all generations at their concerts.
“We still get a lot of the older fans from the ’70s and ’80s, but we also get their kids, and now we’re starting to get their kids’ kids,” marvels the bassist, whose band’s current tour is titled “Mutate, Don’t Stagnate.” “We’re in middle of devolution. But you can’t let yourself go backward, so what are you left with except to mutate, to adapt and survive.”
Students from Woodstock’s Rock Academy will open the Port Chester show on June 9.
This article appears in June 2026.
