Please excuse Devo's Gerald Casale if he sounds a little bitter. Actually,

screw that, the guy's got every reason to be a little cranky. Devo have long

been erroneously written off as a joke band that wore funny hats and played

novelty songs, he watched his idea for a movie get rejected for years until the

Hollywood types finally got it and then they turned around and handed it off to

somebody else, white trash racists nearly caused a riot at the band's

triumphant return-to-form show at Lollapalooza last month and he just recently

saw his great idea for a CD-ROM reduced to slick, commercialized dust right

before his very eyes.

It's never been easy being in Devo. In their heyday,

critics accused them of being too cartoonish and more often than not, audiences

wanted the songs, not the philosophy. But Casale says their recent six-date

Lollapalooza stint proved to them that there are still fans out there who

wouldn't mind seeing a return of the flowerpots. "Lollapalooza was a great

self-imposed test to see what would happen if you went out in front of a crowd

that never really saw you or knew your songs--except for 'Whip It'--and didn't

believe in you. What would happen if we just walked out there, naked, without

the production. And we made it work.

Casale says the reaction was for the

most part great, except for the first date in Phoenix, Arizona. "There, it was

more like the old days when Devo was an agitant, or an agit-pop band that

provoked hostility on purpose. There were a lot of hardcore, subhuman white

supremacists in the crowd...

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