If German progressive rock bands of the early 70s were members of the Weasley family from Harry Potter, Can would be Ginny Weasley, Cluster would be Bill, Kraftwerk would be Percy, and Neu! would probably be the one who studies dragons … but undoubtedly, Faust would be the twins. The sly pranksters of the Krautrock set (who hate the name ‘Krautrock’), Faust have always been known for musical larks, marketing scams, and instrument destruction across a career that’s spanned 40 years and seriously nurtured the fame of billionaires and redheads in the process. We caught up with one half of Faust over Valentine’s Day weekend. This interview by Dan Collins.

Your new album, Something Dirty, sounds so modern with its harsh distortion, like the noise bands of the last ten years or so. Have you been influenced by any modern bands? Or is this the kind of music you’ve always been making?
Zappi (drums): Of course I’m influenced by modern music. You hear new music, whether you want to or not. But mostly I’m influenced by marching music because my father was in a marching band.
Is the title in any way a tribute to Sonic Youth’s Dirty? There are some definite Sonic Youth-isms on the album—‘Tell the Bitch to Go Home’ even sounds like a Sonic Youth title!
Jean-Hervé Péron (bass): You’re asking a subjective question—were we influenced by Sonic Youth? And you want me to confirm or infirm the hypothesis, and so I will infirm it! I mean, of course, we are influenced by everything—I am influenced by the sounds of cement mixers in the street, and from Sonic Youth, and from my mother singing to me in the womb before I was even born! So yes, I can say that we were influenced—but once again, we are a group of five individuals who come together, so it is impossible to be influenced by anything, because we are not united.
Your new lineup includes artist Geraldine Swayne and James Johnston from the Bad Seeds—how did you meet them? And does Swayne play an accordion, as I saw in some recent photos? You can’t hear them on the album.
JHP: I met them at a concert in Paris, and the accordion got broken at a wild stage show, that’s why it isn’t on the album.
How did it get broken?
JHP: I am old, and my memory is not what it used to be. Remember that on stage, we are in a different state of mind, a chaotic state of mind, like a trance, and it is easy for things to get destroyed.
For better or worse, your music is normally described as ‘Krautrock,’ a genre which you have described in interviews as a wide spectrum of sounds, with Kraftwerk as one extreme side of the spectrum and Faust as the other. How would you describe the Faust side of that spectrum that makes it Kraftwerk’s polar opposite?
Z: I don’t like the name ‘Krautrock,’ it’s just a meaningless word for German bands that play rock music. However, I think our music originates more from spontaneity than Kraftwerk’s music does.
JHP: With Kraftwerk, they are a band that has a goal and a path, and they prepare. Faust is something that is always of the moment, always chaotic, a group of individuals that come together—from France, from northern Germany, from southern Germany, from Austria. That is why we will never be popular! We were always full of extreme chaos!
Do you feel more of a kinship, then, with English bands such as Hawkwind, that were more chaotic and less somber?
JHP: Hawkwind?! I don’t want to sound arrogant, but … I don’t think that there is any other band like Faust.
I thought all German bands of the ‘Krautrock’ era were good friends who hung out together all the time, recording on each other’s records at Conny Plank studios and befriending Brian Eno together.
Z: We didn’t have any contact whatsoever with other German bands from this time. We met Brian Eno once, but that’s the end of the story.
How important were rock critics in the 70s to inspring your enthusiasm and success at music?
JHP: Criticism comes after the work. I don’t think critics have impacted our music one way or the other—it’s their job. But the feedback we get from friends—I hate the word ‘fan’ because it is short for ‘fanatic,’ and I prefer the term ‘friend’—there’s been lots and lots and lots of young people that came to us and said, ‘Thank you for what you have presented to us, thank you for the new music that you have opened our eyes to.’ And every time, I am confused, because we never realized that we were doing anything special. Now, it makes me happy. I am very proud that the music we have made has apparently inspired a few people and given them strength! And this is why we keep on doing it, because it can’t be wrong. They are so close to us! When you see the stars in their eyes, and the big gleaming smiles they have when they meet us—that’s where the energy flows! This is the way I like it. I want to give and to get and to give and get and give.
Faust has served as a backing band for a wide spectrum of other artists, from Slapp Happy to Tony Conrad. Who do you remember most fondly?
JHP: If I had to name three events in my life that affected me the most profoundly, I would have to name the birth of my children, my journey through the Sahara, and my work with Tony Conrad. He had some definite ideas about simplicity—no changes at all, whatsoever. I guess you could call it ‘rock music’ because it has drums and a bass, but he was so insistent that nothing change whatsoever. At one point I decided, OK, I will play this same note, but I will play the harmonic minor, basically the same thing—you can hear it on side two of the album. And to see Tony—you could tell that just this one tiny change really disturbed him!
Your Outside the Dream Syndicate album with Tony Conrad is perhaps his most accessible. Did Conrad recruit you because he intended to make a ‘rock album,’ or did it just happen that way?
Z: No, he had a definite plan beforehand. He wanted to have short, hard beats. During the recordings he often made mistakes on the violin, and as a result we had to play the tracks over and over again. I was dreaming about them at nighttime.
JHP: That’s the idea of Tony Conrad. He’s not trying to reach something with complexity. It’s totally the opposite. You can reach ecstasy, you can reach a trance state of mind if you repeat the same thing over and over and over, until the word or the sound you are producing or the thought are totally irrelevant. It’s like a donkey carrying you over thousands of kilometers. It’s just a carrier, a pretext. If all you have to do is ‘BAM boom BAM boom BAM boom BAM boom’ for over an hour, obviously your body will keep doing this, but your mind will start going through all kinds of phases. First you feel like laughing hysterically! You think, ‘Shit, this can’t be true! We are here in a studio going boom boom boom boom—it can’t be true. It’s ridiculous!’ And then you keep on doing that, because that’s what you’re supposed to do. And then you go one level higher and you ask, ‘Why? WHY am I doing this?’ And then one level higher: ‘What’s so good? Why do I KEEP on doing it?’ And one more level: you go through pain. My fingers were bleeding and I broke two strings on the bass while playing this live concert, so physically, it’s pain. So you go above this, and then you reach ecstasy, you know? Your body is here, but your mind is wandering.
Let’s talk about Slapp Happy, which their own members have described as ‘naïve rock.’ They had a much more conventional sound than the Faust sound, yet you guys were basically their backing band on their first two albums at the same time you were recording your own pivotal works.
JHP: Oh yes. I have more than one face, and there’s a part of me that likes songs, and while on the surface with Slapp Happy it seems to be conventional rock music, if you listen closely there is a twist. And with their lyrics, if you only pay slight attention, you might not hear it, but if you read them, if you examine them, there is always something odd, a twist. So I was very proud of my work there.
Your own music, while definitely avant-garde, sounds less psychedelic than, say, classic-era Can. Were you not very interested in making music to take mushrooms to? Perhaps you guys took different drugs than your peers?
JHP: Some of us in Faust were very interested in excess, and in pleasure, and in taking many drugs. And some of the members in that lineup of Faust were very intellectual, and wanted not to take anything and did not want to be involved with this.
Who was who?
JHP: Noooo—I am not going to go there!
I think it’s clear which camp Zappi falls into.
Z: I thought we were making psychedelic music at that time. We took the same drugs as our peers in those days. I think we just took more.
When you started, you were one of the first ventures for the fledgling Virgin Records, who sold The Faust Tapes for 49 pence and got the album to number 12 on the charts. But then after all that attention and care, Virgin dropped Faust after a few albums. What happened?
Z: We wanted a German cook during the recordings, but we didn’t get one.
JHP: We can’t blame Richard Branson for dropping us. I remember him being a very pleasant, very nice person. We took advantage of their kindness, I think. We were always having orgies and throwing parties, and we always left the bill with Virgin. We took advantage of their secretaries …
What was the name of the secretary from Virgin? Mary?
JHP: Her name was ‘Mary,’ and she was the secretary of the Virgin office when they were on Portobello Road. She was a very dedicated person, and we had a lot of ‘communication’—let’s put it that way!
Johnny Rotten said in an interview, ‘They’re quite the commune, Virgin. A load of groupies as secretaries …’ Was he telling the truth?
JHP: I agree! I can tell you, man, it was a beautiful time at the Virgin office. Richard Branson did something fantastic. He was the brain on the financial level, and he also knew how to make people feel good and keep the maximum of the efficiency in a very relaxed way. He wouldn’t call his secretaries and say, you know, ‘Behave and go back to your type writing machines!’ He knew they were working and keeping everybody happy, so what do you want more?
What was it like recording at the Manor?
JHP: We were invited by Virgin Records to go and record at their studio which was called the Manor, and it was an old manor with a large Irish wolfhound named Bootleg! If I had just had the right recording machine, I would have loved to record his heartbeat, because those big dogs have a very irregular beat. Sometimes I thought, ‘Hey Bootleg, oh, oh, oh, he’s dying!’ Because his heart would stop for like one, two, three, four, five seconds, like, no beat, and then suddenly, BOOM BOOM BOOM! And then stop again. It was really impressive. I also remember once in the studio, Keith Richards entered the room and I didn’t have my glasses on, so I couldn’t tell who he was, so I told him to fuck off! I think he was quite upset by this.
Were there any bands, maybe even bands on Virgin, that you were ashamed to be associated with? Mike Oldfield perhaps?
JHP: No. Mike Oldfield was a very good musician and honorable person! I can’t think of any group on Virgin I didn’t like. Henry Cow, Kevin Ayers, Kevin Coyne … all those people were highly respectable, dedicated, engaged people to their art. Tubular Bells was recorded in all the off-times of the Manor studio. Faust would work during part of the day, and Mike Oldfield would move in during the night when we would leave the studio and do his work, bit after bit after bit. And if it became ever so popular, certainly most of the reasons are because it’s something that lots of people needed and wanted. And it’s good!
The song ‘Jennifer’ is about a girl from that village, right? Many people consider that Faust’s most romantic song.
Z: Yes. And yes, Jennifer was a real girl.
JHP: In this little village, this very small village, I don’t remember the name [Shipton-on-Cherwell—ed.], there were a couple of young people, and obviously we were more interested in the young ladies, and one of them was called Jennifer.
Z: She used to watch us from the park there. She had red hair and was very shy.
JHP: And she had magnificent ginger, red hair. And she had a strong life attitude. She was always beaming, and saying, ‘yes, yes, YES!’ to life, and this impressed very much Rudolf—he’s dead now, so rest in peace—but he was really impressed by this, so he made a song. The lyrics are not very romantic, not very sentimental, but listen to the instrumental part in the middle of it, that breaks my heart! I think it’s highly emotional.
How did you react to the era of new wave and punk rock that immediately followed that era? Did you get along with the Sex Pistols’ generation of musicians?
Z: In the beginning punk and new wave was just simply rock music, but later I started to feel its brutality.
JHP: The raw energy that these bands had—they VOMITED their emotions! They didn’t mind to use very crude words to express the feelings of their generation, which was going through pretty hopeless times. They did it with such ruthlessness that I almost envied them!
You’ve definitely embraced the music to come out of punk, but aside from recording with the hip-hop artist Dalek, you seem to have avoided connecting with hip-hop. Why is that? Most people in my generation would say hip-hop was at least as creative and rule-breaking as punk.
JHP: Maybe here there is a generation gap. I was confronted with the punk movement at a time when I was much younger than I am now. And I am confronted with hip-hop in a world which is all digital, using a vocabulary with which I cannot identify, and where the political and social background are totally different. For me, I cannot compare the two of them—one touched me very intense, because I was young and probably eager to receive such in-sources, and the other one—I don’t want to negate the potential of hip-hop, and maybe it sounds stupid, but fuck man, it’s not for my age! I don’t get it. I don’t get it. It’s too fast! It was great to work with Dalek because it was a confrontation and it was extremely challenging. But when you are confronted with the music, I don’t get it. It’s my fault. It doesn’t move me the same as punk does.
Yet Faust has at one point done music that was similar to hip-hop sampling. With The Faust Tapes you took snippets of songs and strung them together, and in some ways it is that arrangement that makes the album compelling. So why haven’t you gone further in the direction of sample-based music?
JHP: Oh, OK, now I get you. I get you. We have not been interested too much in sampling things. What we have done is used elements of something that is now very common: field recordings. This we like very much, but we don’t use it that much. When you say ‘sampling,’ it has a different resonance in my head: I would record the sound of a breaking of a bottle, and I would ‘sample’ it and put it on a MIDI keyboard. And we don’t like this. We don’t like it; we don’t use it. But we do use pre-recorded tapes of something of nature, something human, something industrial, whatever—sounds of things that we find interesting. But not as a sample! It’s part of the music. It’s not one little bit that we use. If it’s thunder, it’s longer than just ‘baroom!’ We try to use it as an instrument, not just as a quotation.
And this is why you never embraced electronic music either?
Z: For me, it wasn’t really music I could concentrate on. For me, it’s functional music.
JHP: Faust is about anarchy and chaos, and for us, being locked into anything is too much oppression. We’re not a band that wants or needs borders. If you brought a drum machine into Faust—into any incarnation of Faust—in five minutes I think you would have a sledgehammer and the whole thing would be smashed!
You guys don’t even have the border of being one band anymore—youv’e split into two completely separate Fausts, with you and Zappi being one camp and Hans Joachim Irmler heading up the other Faust. Considering that the other Faust’s last album was Faust Is Last, what does the other entity of Faust think about your new album?
JHP: You are talking about the fact that there are two Faust entities? That is correct. There are two Faust entities. I don’t know why, but we have grown in such a way that our energies cannot be contained in only one group. The differences are too strong now. Both of them are a facet, an aspect of Faust. And we do get along okay. And we leave each other in respect. We don’t interfere with each other. And we have no sympathy for each other! But no one is saying bad things about the other.
But their last album was called Faust Is Last, which was marketed as the last Faust album ever. Aren’t they making presumptions that affect you?
JHP: I think it’s better you ask these questions of the other Faust. There are two entities of Faust, and nobody is fighting about the name, or who’s the right Faust or the wrong one. Let’s keep it that way! There hasn’t been a lawyer between us yet, and I don’t think there will be one ever. I wish all the best to any entity of Faust who plays in the spirit of Faust. It’s up to the audience to see how they react to one or the other entity of Faust. I don’t know what they think about our music, and you will not know what I think about their music!
If the other Faust came out with a new album, and I were to ask you to write a 250-word review of it, you would refuse?
JHP: Oooh … um….
This isn’t hypothetical! Want to write a review of the upcoming Faust album for L.A. RECORD?
JHP: I would probably be diplomatic and say, ‘I’m very busy at the time; I can’t do it!’

FAUST’S SOMETHING DIRTY IS OUT NOW ON BUREAU B. VISIT FAUST AT FAUST-PAGES.COM.

Michael Rother -- Zyklodrom

www.youtube.com/watch?v=s55ulKEv1U4

Michael Rother -- Sonnenrad

www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMsnqFZ4suI

Michael Rother -- Feuerland

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rw6ZUu0TdPI

Michael Rother -- Blauer Regen (LP: Sterntaler 1978)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Om1j-k0HDLE

Michael Rother -- Fontana di luna (from the LP “Sterntaler”) 1978

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4jPe0vQcXg

Michael Rother -- Orchestrion (from the LP: Sterntaler 1978)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzYlh-G85xU

Michael Rother live clip

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENKfpK5O27w

Michael Rother -- Karussell

www.youtube.com/watch?v=rezpvX4prek

Kraftwerk -- Rückstoss-Gondoliere

www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8Y_-ZLGW1o

Grab the Michael Rother playlist. Go to the link, press “play all” and enjoy uninterrupted Youtube magic.

Stream: Devo “Planet Earth”

(from Freedom of Choice reissued now on Warner)

The world is now a DEVO song, and so Warner has just reissued two vital early DEVO albums barely containing some of the most annihilating reality ever twined into vinyl. And so L.A. RECORD’s Dan Collins reissues this vintage interview with Mark Mothersbaugh from the archives of the defunct Ostrich Ink. DEVO will perform Freedom Of Choice at the Fonda tonight.

You and the Residents were making videos so early—where do you think the idea came from?
Mark Mothersbaugh (vocals/synthesizers/etc.): A lot of that was owed to the time we grew up. Artists that we were interested in were people like Andy Warhol, who was a multimedia guy. He designed clothes and he silk-screened and he painted and he photographed and he produced bands, and he made movies and put out a magazine—you know, that guy’s so cool. That’s what I want to do. I like it because he’s about ideas rather than just being about an instrument or a technique—rather than an old-time craftsman. We really liked what he was doing. And other people like him that were multimedia artists. Chuck Statler, who Jerry and I had gone to school with at Kent State, had gone to Minneapolis while we were still kinda struggling in Akron. He came back and he had this Popular Science and it said, ‘Laserdiscs: The Wave of the Future.’ It’s 1974. We’re like, ‘Laserdiscs? What are those?’ ‘Well, it looks like a record, but it holds visual and audio information.’ And we thought, ‘Whoa—sound and vision! That’s great! That’s what the future is going to be. And rock ‘n’ roll—we can bury it once and for all!’ We were certain that sound and vision was going to kill rock ‘n’ roll and create a new art form. And the artists that would carry weight in the populace would be artists that thought visually. So he came back and said, ‘Let’s make a film.’ And we said, ‘We don’t have any money—how are we going to handle that?’ ‘I’m working in this company. I’m trying to do commercials now. I can get us free editing time and I can borrow a camera and all we have to do is come up with money for film.’ Our first seven-and-a-half-minute movie took about four months to do because we didn’t have money. But we made it for like three thousand dollars. General Boy was a lucky accident. What happened there was there was this lawyer that was a friend of ours—this young guy that was kind of an asshole yuppie guy.
Is he the one parodied in the in the later videos?
Mark Mothersbaugh: No—that’s other people that we liked much less. But this guy did us a favor because he said, ‘You know, I don’t think it’d be good for my reputation to be in this film you guys are making.’ Oh no—who’s gonna play General Boy? Because we’d written the script. And Jerry goes, ‘Mark, would your dad do it?’ ‘I don’t know. Let’s ask him.’ So we went and asked him, and he was like [in bold announcer voice] ‘WHY YEEES!’ At first he didn’t get the idea. But once he saw himself on screen, he like totally got the acting bug.
He’s a magnetic actor. He really is good.
Mark Mothersbaugh: Yeah—some latent desire to be an artist that was thwarted by World War II and the Depression. He painted a bit and played music a bit, but he never really pursued it because he came from a family of coal miners. The idea of being an artist was like if he would have said, ‘Hey Mom! Dad! I’m gonna be a man from the moon!’ You know—they’d go, ‘Whut? Whut tha fuck yew tawkin’ about?’ He didn’t really pursue that at all. He wasn’t driven enough or obsessed enough to do it and just instead opted for survival. But he did good on his General Boy. Actually I remember on our first tour, we opened at a show in Minneapolis. We were playing at the Walker Arts Center. And one of the roadies—one of the security guards says, ‘There’s an old guy at the back door with an army outfit on and says he’s General Boy, and he wants to talk to you.’ And we’re like—he drove from Akron, Ohio, to Minneapolis? So my dad comes in and he goes, ‘Mark, I’ve got this opening speech I’ve written so I can introduce you boys.’ He was more DEVO than we could ever have been. He had his whole own perception of what DEVO meant—what devolution meant. And it was filtered through the eyes of a guy who’d been in World War II and who was a salesman who sold fire alarms and and vibrating pads and stuff like that. His schooling stopped with the Dale Carnegie book. You know—‘Look ‘em in the eyes! Give ‘em a handshake!’ ‘Make a friend and a sale at the same time.’ He was that kind of guy. So his take on it was kind of interesting. It kind of freaked us out a little bit, but at the same time we kept encouraging him, and he ended up writing lyrics for songs and stuff.
[Mark leaves, and comes back holding a banjo as the interview continues. Imagine the rest of the interview as if it were being accompanied by the strumming of an Appalachian mountain boy.]
Let’s talk about the whole DEVO ethos.
Mark Mothersbaugh: We were living in Ohio. From our vantage point, it was like being on a cultural wasteland. We heard about the Village in Manhattan. And we heard about Carnaby Street in London, or things in England and San Francisco and the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles. We heard about all these places. And there was nothing happening in Ohio. It was the Summer of Hate while everyone else was having the Summer of Love. And we were just watching everything. Also at the time, the economy in Ohio had collapsed. It was one of those areas that got hit really hard during that depression that happened in the seventies and eighties. It was a factory town for the first sixty or seventy years. And then all those factories pulled out and went to Malaysia and South America, so there were these big draconian factories that weren’t employing very many people. Everybody was out of work. Nobody knew what to do. None of them were educated. They made tires, you know? It was a city full of blue-collar tire makers, and it was really a dark time. But yet there was all this promise. I remember going to the Akron Art Institute and I saw laser projected holograms where—for instance—there was a shark that was six feet long in one of the rooms, and you could walk around it. It was like five feet in the air. You could walk around it and look underneath it and look down its mouth and look at it from the back of the tail and look inside the gills. It was totally 3-D, but it was a ghost. You could put your hands through it. And at the time, I said, ‘You know what? I want whatever’s going on in technology. That’s where things are happening.’ And also at the time, there was no voice in music. There wasn’t a Bob Dylan, and there wasn’t a Woody Guthrie or anybody that was a conscience for youth. After they shot kids on different campuses in ’70, it’s like the country went into a big sleep. And all the really politically active people—who were protesting globalization, and America and fucking around with the politics of Southeast Asia, and the Cold War and things—they all stopped. They all just became quiet. And by ’73 or ’74, the, the music that you were hearing was disco and concert rock. The Eagles. Styx. There was nobody talking about the issues. And this was a time when things like the Cuyahoga River, which we lived on—there was all this white foam I remember always floating down. When I was I kid, we’d be swimming around. In the early seventies, the river caught on fire and stayed on fire for days—weeks!—before they got it put out. Because there were so many chemicals that companies all along the Cuyahoga River had been dumping into the river that were going into Lake Erie. And that’s when all the early alarmists were saying, ‘Wait a minute, you know—our ozone’s been fucked up, there’s global warming, you know? We’re drinking and eating chemicals that are poisonous, and nobody’s paying attention to all that.’ There were a few scientists and people that were trying to speak and they were getting shouted down by the same people that are right now building roads through pristine timberland and drilling for oil. We were mesmerized by the choices that humans were making at the time. By what people thought was important or precious. And it was before having a conscience was made almost embarrassing by people like Sting—jumping in a Lear Jet and flying down to the Amazon to tell pygmies that he was there to protect them or something, you know? They’re like, ‘Who the fuck are you?’ So that’s part of this whole thing about where DEVO came from—it came from a lot of different sources. We were just looking for a way to describe what we saw going on. We saw this incredible technology fucking everything up. But we saw this stuff that looked and seemed amazing. And it should be doing great things. But the quality of life was deteriorating. So there was like a bunch of things that came together at once. The movie Island of Lost Souls, with the House of Pain—‘What is the Law? Not to walk on all fours, not to spill blood!’ And this Superwoman comic book, where this mad scientist had an evolution-devolution machine. He’d push the lever forward, and there was like this vacuum capsule. And there’d be a guy that was in there. When he pushed it forward, the guy’s head would blow up like a light bulb, and his hair would fall out, and he’d look like a progeria kid. And he’d pull it backwards, and then his brow would drop, and he’d get covered with hair, and he’d be like a caveman.
[Mark gets up out of his seat and grabs a black guitar amplifier nearby. He swings it around to reveal in white letters: ‘DEVOLUTIONARY ARMY.’]
Mark Mothersbaugh: This is an old amp from way back when. We called ourselves ‘The De-evolution Band’ for a while. And then we were the Devolutionary Army, and then we trimmed it down to DEVO. It was just easier to say and it was kind of like ‘Smart Patrol’—the song was originally ‘Smart Proletariats,’ but it just didn’t roll off your tongue. ‘Smart proletariats, nowhere to go!’
You also have a lot of sex imagery—it’s kind of novel in the Hardcore DEVO collections how many of the songs are devoted to really making sex look silly or gooey or messy, and it seems quite the opposite of what was going on in the seventies.
Mark Mothersbaugh: We just felt sex in America was still so Victorian, you know? A Planet of the Apes funky show-your-butt-party is much more interesting than the porno that was around at the time where two people meet on the tennis court. I think porno is like a weathervane for a culture, you know? The more interesting the porno, the more interesting the culture.
What about the covers of the Hardcore DEVO albums? You have some woman with fake breasts over her real breasts, and then they’ve got a picture of you guys.
Mark Mothersbaugh: And we all had fake breasts on, too. We couldn’t afford the real surgery at the time. There was this one photographer out here named Moshe Brakha who really played devil’s advocate—we got some of the best photos of DEVO ever during this photo session. There’s some shots from those photo shoots that nobody’s ever seen. Somewhere near the end of the photo shoot he pulled out this gigantic Nazi flag—I don’t even know where he got it—and he’s got us holding this Nazi flag for a few photos, and we’re like, ‘Whoa, what’s that about?’
How did you meet Brian Eno?
Mark Mothersbaugh: We were playing in New York that summer, and started to get kind of a following and we never got paid. But the shows would be crammed. They’d be totally filled with people. Our guest list would be like sixty or seventy people and they’d have everybody; there’d be like Jack Nicholson and all the Rolling Stones and Frank Zappa’s band. ‘It’s alright with you if Frank Zappa listens to you play?’ ‘Sure!’ ‘Alright with you if Candy Clark is on your guest list?’ So Bowie came and saw us one night. We’d done some interviews and people said, ‘Who’d you like to have produce you guys?’ Of all the people I could think of, I thought it would either be David Bowie or Brian Eno. I liked their music, and I thought maybe they would understand what we were trying to do. David Bowie showed up one night and on the second set before we came out, he introduced us,and he goes [in a canned carny voice] ‘This is the band of the future! I am producing them in Tokyo this winter!’ And we’re like, ‘Okay, we’re sleeping in a car tonight—that sounds good to us!’ Then afterwards, he said, ‘Yeah, I really want to produce you guys. The only thing is, I’m up for this movie called Just a Gigolo. If I get it, I have to go to Berlin for a couple months. So that would push it off.’ And we go, ‘Well, we don’t even have anywhere to go when we leave here.’ We’re homeless, you know—we don’t know what we’re gonna be doing for those two months. The next week, we played again, and Robert Fripp and Brian Eno came. And they invited us over to Robert Fripp’s house. And he fed us. And they both said, ‘We would want to produce you guys if you were up for it.’ And we said, ‘Well, Brian, David Bowie last week said he was producing us in Tokyo!’ And Brian Eno starts going, ‘He’s full of shit.’ At the time I didn’t know that Brian Eno was kinda pissed at Bowie because he felt he didn’t get credited properly on Heroes. And Low. Brian Eno said, ‘Let’s just go right now. Don’t even worry about a record company. I’ll loan you the money. We’ll go over to Germany, at this studio I work at all the time—Conny Plank Studio.’ It’s the place where bands like Birth Control and Guru Guru and Kraftwerk and you know—Can, Moebius, Roedelius, they all recorded at that studio. ‘Sure, that’s great—you’re gonna pay for us to go to this?’ So he flew us over to Germany. David Bowie of course still wanted to be involved and showed up every day on the weekends and hung out with us, and then bickered with Eno.
What did all the German bands think of you?
Mark Mothersbaugh: While we were in Germany, I got a call from the band Kraftwerk and they said, ‘We’re gonna go on our first tour, and we would like to play your film.’ We only had one film at the time. The Truth About Deevolution. So in the spring of ’78, they took the DEVO movie as their opening act.
When did DEVO officially start?
Mark Mothersbaugh: Jerry and I first started writing music together in 1970. There wasn’t another band we were ever in together. We were only ever in DEVO. And in 1970 we were both Students for a Democratic Society. And my brother Bob, he used to come up to Kenton. At the time Bob and I were in this kind of acid-blues band and Jerry was in kind of a more of a straight-ahead blues band. They shot students at Kent State—we were protestors then—and they shot people. They closed down the school that spring. We were there. Jerry was standing right about ten feet away from one of the girls that got her—got blasted.
Did that change your perspective on what you should do with music?
Mark Mothersbaugh: Yeah, quite a bit.

DEVO PERFORMING FREEDOM OF CHOICE ON WED., NOV. 4, AT THE HENRY FONDA THEATER, 6126 HOLLYWOOD BLVD., HOLLYWOOD. 8 PM / $43-$103 / ALL AGES. HENRYFONDATHEATER.COM. DELUXE REISSUES OF Q: ARE WE NOT MEN? AND FREEDOM OF CHOICE ARE AVAILABLE NOW ON RHINO. VISIT DEVO AT CLUBDEVO.COM OR MYSPACE.COM/DEVO.

Download: Xu Xu Fang Mix Tape Podcast by Bobby Tamkin

1. Jane’s Addiction “Trip Away”
2. A Place To Bury Strangers “I Know I’ll See You”
3. Jackie Mittoo “Get Up and Get It”
4. Bob Marley “Natural Mystic”
5. Lee Hazlewood “For A Day Like Today”
6. David Axelrod “The Mental Traveler”
7. Kraftwerk “Spacelab”
8. Gas “Eins”
9. Igor Stravinsky “The Rite of Spring Part I: Danses des adolescentes”

Xu Xu Fang like pictures of horses better than pictures of people and will release their new EP Seven Days Now this week. Founder Bobby Tamkin speaks to Scott Schultz about radio drama, fog machines and stoned Oklahomans who like Gossip Girl.

The new EP Seven Days Now is more electronic than These Days’ stoner rock psychedelia. Was the shift a matter of incorporating new musicians to the sound or were you consciously looking to change?
Bobby Tamkin: That’s the weird thing about the band. Most styles of music have elements that I like, and I want to explore those. Sometimes I don’t know if the guitar song is going to fit with the electronic beat-based stuff, but it’s not a conscious effort. If there could be different styles of music back to back, I would love to do that, but I don’t know if that would make a cohesive record or show.
You use a lot of sound effects in your music. Do you factor the effects into your songwriting, or do you add them after the tracks are recorded?
It depends on how the song was created. It may have started with a keyboard sound or an effect, or it may start with a drumbeat. There’s really no rhyme or reason. Suddenly it ambles into something, and at some point I will stop and figure it’s ready to go. Some of the sounds I personally record, probably 85 percent of the effects you hear. I like to run around with a microphone and capture sounds. I love the sound of horses.
Where were the horse sounds recorded?
The horses were a combination of both homemade and post-production. I had a recording that I made of horses, but it wasn’t strong, so I enhanced it with a little sound effect synth sound. Part of the fun is creating it all on my own.
How many musicians have been members of the Fang?
It’s unfortunate that it’s been a process. It comes down to whether people are up to do it. Show up and play—no drama. Enjoy the music and play it. If that’s the case, you’re all set, but there have always been different circumstances. Everyone is always a little unique. It would be cool if it was the same setup all the way through, but it’s getting there, it’s getting there. Our current lineup played together for the first time when we opened for Swervedriver at the Fonda. That was a little over 11 months ago.
Your music seems influenced by movie soundtracks and radio theatre. Do you have any favorite soundtracks or soundtrack artists who inspire you?
Oh man, that’s almost an impossible question. The score I’ve been listening to a lot lately is Bernard Herrmann’s North By Northwest. Bernard Herrmann is pretty much my favorite. It’s like hearing Stravinsky’s ‘Rite of Spring’ over and over and over again, but there are subtle changes. He died in ‘76. The last score that he did was Taxi Driver. He died in the middle, but he was awesome. He’s partially responsible for the modern sweeping scores that you hear today.
Did you begin the radio drama piece with script, music, or concept?
I had a few bits of music that I recorded and didn’t do anything with. I really liked those old radio theater mystery dramas with the sound effects and I thought, hmmm, it would be interesting to make something like that, but make it a little more contemporary musically. I came up with a loose idea of what I wanted the story to be, and then I scripted out simple scenes and had friends do the voices. Then I wrote a bunch of new music for it to fill it out.
How many characters did you voice?
Just one.
The rat who turns in his friend to get whacked?
Yeah—terrible voice! It was so poorly acted. If you don’t know me, it may seem like the character was supposed to be that way, but if you know me, you know that I could have been so much better. Once I had the band together, we decided to play live. We didn’t have a singer yet, but we figured it would be cool to have images up behind us of L.A. in wintertime, and L.A. WEEKLY wrote a story about it and said that we played a live soundtrack to film, and I was like, ‘Hell no—this isn’t a film!’ I went back and shot hours and hours of more stuff, and I ended up editing all over again and finally it became some sort of a narrative and what it had been described as. It was never intended to be a score to a film.
From there, how did you segue into actual songs?
I didn’t want to make another film. I could have improved upon it, definitely, but I didn’t want to make something that would compete with it. Songs seemed like a good challenge: to write a song. It’s hard.
What was your first song?
‘These Days.’
Do you have more new songs beyond those on Seven Days Now?
We have eight new songs that haven’t been recorded yet. So we’re going to write two more and then make a full length with all new stuff.
How would you describe the new music?
That it’s more like The Mourning Son. Less dancey, more guitar. The real shape of it will happen when I get into the studio. At that point who knows what it could turn into.
You had two songs played on Gossip Girl, and they’ll be using a third song this month. Are you attracting Gossip Girl fans?
I guess it’s a testament to the producers and music supervisors that they would put songs like ours into a show like that. It was a total surprise. There are probably some 16-year-old stoner chicks in Oklahoma who check us out on Myspace after seeing Gossip Girl, and that’s totally cool.
Adam Franklin of Swervedriver found you on Myspace and gave you an opening slot when they came to L.A. last year, and Gossip Girl also found you with minimal hype. Are you just lucky?
We seem to have some sort of homing beacon like Batman for cool people. Adam Franklin liked the concept of the horse heads, and that drew him to us, and then he checked out the songs and like the music.
How did you come up with using the horse head pictures for the band photos?
I didn’t have a band when I put my first song up, and I wanted to put portraits of people to represent each musician, but then I figured if I put up a horse head, I wouldn’t have to change pictures. So I came up with a bunch of unique looking horse heads until I could get my band together, and then I just kept it. For a while it was funny—certain horses were more popular than others and would get more comments. I don’t know why.
You guys have some heavy jam breaks during your live songs, where Barbara (Cohen—vocals) dissolves into the murky mix with all three guitars going full rumble. Are you looking to make your jams even larger onstage?
We’ve always talked about doing one jam for the whole show. Just play ‘Good Times’ for an hour. It would be really fun to play that way, but the audience will get bored after a while unless they’re on something.
How long has Xu Xu Fang been using fog onstage?
Since day one. We also use the Stargate and really we’d really go nuts with the lights if we could. We’d need a full time person just for lights and fog. Barbara and Jenna (keyboards) don’t like the fog, because they say it messes with their voices. We had a residency at the Silverlake Lounge and we fogged that place up like crazy. I think he may have told us to stop at some point.
Your first CD had a very L.A. quality. Is the city a character within the story?
I love the atmospheric sounds, the rain—which we don’t get a lot of, but I think it has a real evocative sound in this city. The blasé—neither here nor thereness—fits the tone of ‘These Days.’ This city is so unique and there are so many great bands from so many scenes that are each unique but distinctly L.A., like Jane’s Addiction, NWA, The Doors, Guns ‘n’ Roses, Love, Van Halen…I think the bombast of the city is definitely in our stage show. The music is intelligent, but it’s not afraid to go huge.

MANIMAL VINYL AND RADIO FREE SILVERLAKE PRESENT XU XU FANG WITH VOICEsVOICES, DOWNTOWN UNION AND THE VOYEURS ON THU., APR. 30, FOR THE RELEASE PARTY OF XU XU FANG’S SEVEN DAYS NOW AT THE ECHO, 1822 SUNSET BLVD.,ECHO PARK. 10 PM / FREE / 18+. ATTHEECHO.COM. VISIT XU XU FANG AT XUXUFANG.COM.