8. DevoDuty Now For The Future
I could have chosen the first record Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo! or, to a lesser extent, Freedom Of Choice, but I like the rawness of Duty Now For The Future. I think the Eno production on the first one was great but this is just a little bit different. To me, they were very cynical but also really funny. They obviously created this whole myth for themselves. Devo had this whole package before bands really came up with that. They had this whole mythology built around them. Other people had that – I guess Magma had this whole mythology built around them so they’re maybe not the first – but at the time it felt really futuristic and it felt like a whole new thing was happening.
I heard Mudhoney joined Reprise because Devo were on the label?
Devo was on Warner Brothers but Captain Beefheart was on Reprise, and Neil Young and Jimi Hendrix. It wasn’t strictly why we were on Reprise. That would be kind of a dumb thing to do – like: "Hey, that stuff you put out ten years ago…". "What are you like now?" is a more pertinent question. Unfortunately I think we caught the last glimpse of the artist-friendly major label.
It changed while we were on that label. When we were on it there was still the old guard that was around for these signings, and a lot of those guys like Mo Ostin just retired and Lenny Waronker moved on to start DreamWorks I think, and within a couple of years the whole tenor of the label changed. We glimpsed something. We weren’t there in the glory day that’s for sure. That would probably have been when Captain Beefheart was there and Neil Young. Neil Young actually came back to Reprise after going to Geffen and then getting sued by them for not sounding enough like Neil Young!
Nobody could accuse Mudhoney of not sounding like Mudhoney, even when you’ve gone psych or jazz rock…
That’s maybe a fault. Any band worth its salt has its own stamp no matter what they do.
