Happy Anniversary: Devo, Shout
30 years ago today, Devo released Shout, an album which – in addition to playing like an unofficial love letter to the Fairlight CMI – fared poorly with both critics and consumers, resulting in the band going on hiatus for the better part of half a decade.
Given that Shout made it to #83 on the Billboard Top 200, it certainly can’t be called a complete flop, but neither of the album’s two singles – “Here to Go” and “Are U Experienced?” – managed to chart in the US or the UK (although the former did just barely go top-40 in Australia), but it’s still surprising that, in an environment where synthpop was all the rage in mainstream music, Devo weren’t able to reproduce the successes of songs like “Whip It” and “Working in the Coal Mine.”
In a 2005 interview with Bob Mothersbaugh from Booji Boy’s Basement, "Mark (Mothersbaugh) and Jerry (Casale) kept saying in interviews that the guitar was obsolete and wanted to prove it with the Shout album.
If that’s the case, then Casale clearly had a change of heart by 2007, when - in a Q&A with Billboard – he cited it as his greatest regret. “The Fairlight [synthesizer] just kind of took over everything on that record,” said Casale. “I mean, I loved the songwriting and the ideas, but the Fairlight kind of really determined the sound.”
In a perfect world, we’d love to include the video for the band’s cover of “Are U Experienced?” in this piece. Unfortunately, there’s no official version currently available, as Devo was prevented from putting it on the DVD reissue of their career retrospective, The Complete Truth about De-Evolution: per Casale in an interview with EarCandyMag.com, the Hendrix estate refused to grant permission for its inclusion.
“You understand that the consortium of people that now represent the Hendrix estate are basically run by lawyers,” said Casale. “Lawyers always posit the worst-case scenarios. Though that video was loved for years by anybody who saw it, including the man who commissioned it – Chuck Arroff, a luminary in the music business who still claims to this day that it was one of his five most favorite videos ever – (the lawyers) didn’t get it and assumed we were making fun of Jimi. That’s like saying ‘Whip It’ makes fun of cowboys. This is so stupid, it’s unbelievable.”
As consolation for this disappointment, we instead present something else from 1984 that’s almost as interesting: the band’s contributions to a demo disc for Pioneer Laserdisc.
So how does Shout sound now, 30 years after it first hit record store shelves? Well, if you enter the proceedings with a slightly malleable idea of how Devo’s supposed to sound, then you’re likely to find that – shocker! – it sounds quite a lot like Devo. Give it another spin, won’t you? You may not walk away feeling that you’ve rediscovered a lost gem, but if you’ve never heard it before, then at the very least you’re likely wonder why it got such a bum rap when it was originally released.
