Happy 35th: Devo, “Whip It”

35 years ago today, Ohio’s favorite sons – or at least some of them, anyway – released the single that would go on to become the biggest hit of their career.

In an interview for Rhino.com earlier this year, Devo founding member Gerald Casale reflected on the origins of the song:

“I was reading Gravity's Rainbow, and I wrote the lyrics in one night after who knows how many pages. Because that's a lot of pages. But it was because I was just so turned on by (Thomas) Pynchon's parodies of limericks and the Horatio Alger story and ‘you're number one,’ ‘there's nobody else like you,’ and ‘you can do it.’ I was just kind of doing my take on it. And, of course, I was also aware of the double or triple entendre. But it worked!

“The music was pieced together from four different demo tapes. Mark had done some stuff in his bedroom, and what became the bridge was this very beautiful, slow, almost classical music sounding thing with no drums on it. And then on another tape, he had the [Vocally imitates the riff immediately before the words, ‘Crack that whip!’] that he played on a guitar line with a drum machine. And then a drummer that drummed with Captain Beefheart had been jamming in our studio, and Mark taped him doing drum beats, just pure drum beats, and that drum beat that became ‘Whip It’ was pretty much the way it was. Alan (Myers) perfected it, but it was this beat that this guy had done, and it was amazing. And then a fourth thing came from something I'd been doing with Mark in a live jam in the studio.

“So we had these pieces of music, and I took them all and put them over that beat so that it was one time signature and now one form of instrumentation rather than all these little pieces, and…that was that! The lyrics fit so well, I didn't even have to change them, not even the meter. It was one of those things that just came together very nicely.“

Casale also confirmed the longtime suggestion that the riff for “Whip It” was really just a tweaked version of Roy Orbison’s “Oh, Pretty Woman.”

“Oh, yeah, because I said, ‘Wow, when did you do that, Mark?’ And he said, ‘Oh, I've had that for about three or four months.’ I said, ‘Really?’ He said, ‘Yeah, it's just 'Pretty Woman' cut in half, with two extra beats in between.’ And I never would've recognized it, but once he said it, I was, like, ‘Oh, yeah!’ You take out those beats, and you can't miss it, but putting them in was brilliant. And it was a perfect example of Devo warping and mutating and deconstructing from the existing lexicon of rock and R&B.”

Remarkably, Devo funded the video for “Whip It” with $15,000 of their own money, but it obviously proved to be a wise investment: it became a staple of early MTV, and it furthered the slow build of the song, which – as the band fully admits – only found success as a result of Florida record promoter Kal Rudman pushing the single to such a degree that it started gaining enough buzz to move from being a regional hit into hitting #14 on the Billboard Hot 100.

Indeed, it was one of those singles that became so successful that, for better or worse, there are millions of music fans who literally do not know another Devo song, but we’ll say what we so often say in cases like this: if you’re going to be remembered for one song, you could do a heck of a lot worse than “Whip It.”