Are We Not Men?

In October of 1978, I had been at George Air Force Base for about a month.

I was still adjusting to my new life in the Mojave Desert—settling into life at George, getting used to the cool, dry air, and finding my bearings again after two years in Panama.

Most Saturday nights ended the same way back then: a few of us sitting around the barracks watching Saturday Night Live.

 

That particular night, something strange came on the television.

 

Five guys in stiff, jerky movements, wearing yellow hazmat suits, launched into a mechanical, herky-jerky version of the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction.”

 

The band was Devo, and the performance felt like it had arrived from another planet.

 

Up until then, most of the rock I knew lived somewhere between Led Zeppelin, the Eagles, the Who, the Beatles, and the long shadow of the seventies. But this was different. The guitars were sharp and angular. The rhythm sounded like machinery learning how to dance. The whole thing felt half punk, half science experiment.

 

I didn’t know it at the time, but I was hearing the beginning of New Wave.

 

The following Saturday, I climbed into my car and drove down the Cajon Pass toward Los Angeles. Somewhere—either Tower Records in West Covina or maybe the big one in Hollywood—I found the album that had started it all.

 

It had one of the strangest titles I had ever seen:

 

Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!

 

The record looked like nothing else in the racks. The music inside sounded like nothing else, either.

The album opens with “Uncontrollable Urge,” which explodes out of the speakers like a nervous system suddenly wired to electricity. The guitars slash, the rhythm jitters, and Mark Mothersbaugh spits out the lyrics with a manic urgency that felt perfectly suited to the late seventies. It wasn’t smooth rock. It was nervous energy.

Then there was “Mongoloid,” one of the strangest and catchiest songs on the album. Built on a simple mechanical groove, it sounds almost playful on the surface, but the lyrics carry that dark Devo humor about conformity and modern society. The song felt funny and unsettling at the same time.

 

Another standout was “Jocko Homo,” which felt less like a song than a chant from some future tribe. The call-and-response chorus—“Are we not men?”—came from the old film Island of Lost Souls, but Devo turned it into a rallying cry for a strange new musical movement.

 

“Too Much Paranoias” may have summed up the late seventies as well as anything on the album. It sounded twitchy, claustrophobic, and wired tight, like a mind taking in too much noise from the culture around it. There was something comic about it, but also something uncomfortably familiar. Even then, it captured that feeling that modern life was becoming more anxious, more suspicious, more fragmented.

 

And then there was “Gut Feeling,” which begins with a slow, eerie build before bursting into a driving rhythm. It had a cinematic quality, like the soundtrack to some industrial dream—or nightmare.

 

Listening to that album for the first time felt like opening a door. It opened my ears.

 

Not just to Devo, but to an entire new wave of music that was beginning to roll in—Talking Heads, Elvis Costello, the Pretenders, the Cars, and dozens of others. What had seemed strange at first soon became part of the soundtrack of my life.

 

Four years later, I found myself standing in a packed auditorium in Merrillville, Indiana, waiting for the lights to go down as Devo walked onstage.

 

Billed as An Evening with Devo, it was unlike any concert I had attended before or since. There was no opening act, just mutated Muzak versions of their own songs drifting through the hall before the show began.

 

At one point during “Jocko Homo,” the band broke away long enough to change into black T-shirts and shorts. When the lights came up again, Mark Mothersbaugh was nowhere onstage.

 

Then suddenly his voice rang out:

 

“I’m up here!”

 

He had climbed into the balcony.

 

A moment later, he lowered himself down to the main floor, not far from where I was standing, and began moving through the crowd, singing, “Are we not men?”

 

And the crowd answered:

 

“We are Devo.”

 

He made his way back toward the stage through the audience, turning the whole hall into part of the performance. It was part concert, part theater, part something I still don’t quite have a name for.

Somewhere between that barracks room at George Air Force Base and that crowded Midwestern concert hall, the music had followed me.

 

And in some ways, it still has.

 

Can an album change your life?

 

Maybe not in the dramatic ways people sometimes imagine.

 

But sometimes it can change your ears. Sometimes life gives you a soundtrack before you even know you’re going to need one.