Advertising Age
1992?

Revenge Of A Nerd
by Terry ?????

Mark Mothersbaugh, Co-Leader Of Devo, Those Darwinian Losers Of Rock's New-Wave Yesteryear, Has Taken His Own Devolutionary Advice - 'Mutate, Don't Stagnate' - And Whipped Up A Music For Television Career That's Heavy On Commercials. In Fact, He's Whipped It Good

   Mark Mothersbaugh, lead singer and keyboard player of Devo, one of the stranger incarnations of pop's late '70s new wave, claims an early fascination with "inane" commercials music. In fact, one of the songs he wrote for Devo's debut record, back in 1978, "Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!" a little ditty called "Too Much Paranoias," features a "Hold the pickles, hold the lettuce" chorus - a homage of sorts to the classic Burger King mantra, and the jingle, you might say, as the ultimate hook. "It was so evil, yet so enticing," says Mothersbaugh. "I loved the commercials because, in the first place, it was a sabotage of Pachelbel's Canon; to take that piece of music, which was so innocent, and turn it into a hamburger jingle...I loved the concept. And there were all sorts of different versions: country western, slick white jazz, rock...it was both absurd and entertaining."
   Much as Devo itself was, or is; though their last major record release was about a decade ago, Mothersbaugh says the band is in a state of suspended animation, and notes that the five "spuds," as they call themselves - Mothersbaugh and his brother Bob, and co-founder bassist Jerry Casale and his brother Bob, among them - player a 30-city tour of Europe only last year. Yet a full-scale Devo reunion strikes Mothersbaugh as unlikely, and not particularly relevant. "I did the thing where you live with a record for two years," he shrugs. "I toured the world eight times. I sold six or seven million records. It's kinda cool to be in a band when you're in your 20s."
   Now 41, he has branched off in another kinda cool direction with Mutato Muzika, his Los Angeles based music publishing company that officially mutato'd into music for television when, in 1986, at the behest of his friend director Stephen Johnson of Peter Gabriel's "Sledgehammer" fame, he wrote the theme for "Pee-wee's Playhouse." ("Spike Jones meets Nino Rota," he calls it") Since then, Mothersbaugh - who says he doesn't read the trades, has never hired a rep, has never before made any effort to publicize his ad work and admits to not really knowing one ad agency or commercials director from another has built a reelful of spots in a variety of musical styles, many notable for some zaniness, for Nutra Sweet, Sears, Life Savers, Reebok, Dole, Supercuts, Keds, and others. He just "sits around waiting for the phone to ring," he says - and it does. Besides writing music for several TV series - including "Davis Rules," the CBS sitcom with Randy Quaid and Jonathan Winters; "The Unnaturals," for the Ha! Channel; MTV's "Liquid TV" animation series; and Nickelodeon's animated "Rugrats" series - he estimates he scored more than 30 ad campaigns last year.
   So, what gives? Is all the commercials work just another downward spiral in one man's personal "de-evolution"? No way, spud. While the cryptic Devo aesthetic is often construed as a smug parody of consumerism - Dave Marsh, in "The New Rolling Stone Record Guide," for instance, condemns Devo's "elitist putdowns of everything 'normal' " and its "unearned contempt for mass culture." Mothersbaugh explains that the band was doing battle with the Me Generation, the lowest common denominator theory of marketing, and the "pompous concert rock scene, which needed a musical enema." In fact, he was not at all reluctant to get involved in commercials, which are not inherently un-Devo, and, as the theory of de-evolution has it, he's just following the twists and turns of his DNA programming anyway. (According to a Devo history the band "devolved from a long line of brain-eating apes, some of which settled in Northeast Ohio.") As Mothersbaugh sees it, beneath Devo's often misunderstood irony was a proto-green outfit, a bunch of Cassandras who just happened to look like NASA technicians. "In the early days we'd talk about de-evolution, and the planet being in a downward spiral and people used to get upset and defensive," he recalls. "We talked about technology destroying the resources of the planet, which was somewhat radical at the time, particularly in a pop music format. Now it's like everybody knows the planet's basically been trashed. But were never anti-technology; we were anti-stupidity."
   Back in pre-Devo days, he and his good buddy Jerry Casale (both grew up in Akron and met in Kent State's fine arts department in the late '60s) were aspiring printmakers and musicians, influenced by Dada, Surrealism and especially, Pop. "We liked the idea of playing with that murky territory between fine art and commercial art, and I'm still doing that today," says Mothersbaugh, whose graphic art has been shown in galleries in the U.S., Europe and Japan (he's even done an "Absolut Mothersbaugh" ad for Carillon Importers). "We wanted to create an art movement. There was Art Nouveau, Art Deco...why not Art Devo?" Indeed, Mothersbaugh usually calls the band Dee-VOH, in the French manner. As far as music goes, "I was interested at that time in tape manipulation and synthesizers, and Jerry had more of a blues background," he says. "We were working on a prehistoric industrial funk, like the Jetsons meet the Flinstones. We had our genetic imperative to fulfill."
   Not long after the band had effectively hung up their red plastic energy-dome hats Mothersbaugh's  commercials career started with an appropriately high-tech bang. His first job was "Chain-Reaction," the 1985 Hawaiian Punch dancing robots spot - a landmark in computer animation directed by Randy Roberts, then at Abel & Associates, now at Rhythm & Hues. Roberts sought him out for the job,  says Mothersbaugh, sensing a link between the industrial beat required for the spot and the techno-groove of Devo, a sound he and Casale had been toying with since the mid-'70s, influenced mainly by the German mechano-minimalism of Kraftwerk. "The Hawaiian Punch spot was right out of our last tour," says Mothersbaugh, "when we interacted with computer animation onstage. We had 15-foot tall robots dancing in sync with us, while we played to a click track on the 35mm film print. For me it was like scoring a miniature film, and that's the way I look at commercials jobs.
   "People didn't come to me for jingles," he says of his early commercials work. "they came because they liked Devo, 'Pee-wee's Playhouse' or Hawaiian Punch. They weren't coming to me to sing a beer commercial." Not that he wouldn't sing a beer commercial. "I probably would do a jingle, just to try it out," says Mothersbaugh, who seems more than comfortable with the business of commercials music. "I'm in an ideal situation," he reflects. "The musician has a great place in commercials because all the hard work's done. I get to do the final, fun thing. This is an enjoyable medium, where everyone's pretty much straightforward with you. The business side of the music industry was just repulsive to me. We got ripped off big by managers, lawyers, agents. It wasn't pleasant."
   Mothersbaugh is not the only one having a good time on his jobs. In a piquant reversal of his Devo days, when liner notes called the band "suburban robots here to entertain corporate life forms," now he's playing the human and the rest of the music industry may well turn out to be the tin men. Rich Carraro, for instance, a producer at FCB/Leber Katz in New York, has done seven computer-animated spots with Mothersbaugh, and he couldn't be happier. "You're working one on one with a guy in a studio in his house," says Carraro. "You hang out, it's relaxed, it's very refreshing. It's not a typical music house, many of which function like machines nowadays. Mark's a wacky guy, and one of the best things about him is his sense of humor. For example, we wanted to do a Ricky Ricardo-type Cuban music thing for a Gummi Life Savers spot. Well, we did some demos with regular music houses, and, while they could deliver a Cuban sound, they had no humor to offer. His version blew them all away. I never was a Devo fan, but now I've become one."
   What's the next stage in Mothersbaugh's de-evolution? While he's not averse to film scoring, the latest products of Mutato's Mac-driven studio (where Bob Casale, Devo's Bob No. 2, is chief engineer) are the upcoming series "Adventures In Wonderland" for the Disney channel, and NBC's "Man and Machine."
   So, is this guy, who used to wear 3-D glasses and a rubber pompadour, now completely normal? Nope. "The other thing I like about commercials," he offers deadpan, "is you have the chance to put in your own subliminal messages in...little suggestions just below the threshold of hearing...I hear them. People listen to the final mix and I hear, 'Lay a million eggs or don't - so shall your species survive,' and I look around waiting for someone to say something, but they're all just sitting there, slapping their knees, and I'm blushing. Nobody ever catches these whispered statements. Nobody's ever come to me and said, 'What did you do to our spot?' "