328- Devolutionary Design

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It's hard to overstate just how important record album art was to music before we downloaded everything. Our experience with a record or CD used to be visual. The design of the record cover was your first impression of what was to come. I would stare at the fonts on the cover and pore over the liner notes the first time I put an album on. It was a ritual. I'm not saying that era of music was better. It wasn't. It was just different. The art on the records tried to encapsulate the essence of a band, and then that essence was transferred to you because you were a fan and it became part of your identity too. At least that's what it felt like. Album art was certainly important to my friend and reporter, Sean Cole, one certain album in one certain band in particular. SPEAKER_11: Roman, were you ever a Devo fan? SPEAKER_06: I was more of a Devo appreciator. I don't think I was really a fan. Like I listened to, I liked the songs I heard. I remember Whip It when I was a kid. I remember they were not a Devo T. No, it was not a Devo T. I remember the red hats. And I have a particular memory of them doing a cover of I Can't Get No Satisfaction by the Rolling Stones on Saturday Night Live wearing these yellow hazmat suits. They were really weird. Yes, weird. SPEAKER_11: Yes. So this story is about that Devo album, the one that they were promoting on that Saturday Night Live performance you saw. More specifically, it's about the album art of that record. Because the story of the image that ultimately ended up on the cover of that record is this crazy rabbit hole that I fell down. But before we get there, I just need to cover some things about Devo that you might not know. Do you know where the name comes from? I do not. So a lot of people think of Devo as this really silly, nutty band and jumping around. But they were actually very serious and had a very considered philosophy. And that was that the human race is in a state of de-evolution, hence Devo. So their songs are all, other than Whippet, like their songs are mostly about corporate control and blind conformity. And they were actually visual artists before they wrote any songs. This was in the early 70s in Akron, Ohio. So I talked with one of the founders of Devo, Jerry Casale, who says like back then they were, they were mostly trying to figure out what de-evolutionary art would look like. SPEAKER_04: You know, because we were very, very enamored and put off at the same time by pop culture, like the lowest end of like ad graphics, terrible TV commercials. We were kind of drawn to kitsch. SPEAKER_11: And occasionally they would go out shopping for kitsch. SPEAKER_04: So we're walking through the Kmart. Nope, it was the predecessor to Kmart. SPEAKER_03: It was Klik. SPEAKER_11: And this is Mark Mothersbaugh. He's another member of the band. This is probably the point to mention that this was more than four decades ago and not everybody's memory is too clear. SPEAKER_06: So independent of what department store they're in, they're in a department store. SPEAKER_11: They are in a department store. SPEAKER_03: We were looking for supplies. We were collaborating on a visual art piece together and walking through the sports section. SPEAKER_04: And there's these six practice golf balls in a clear plastic pouch, sealed shut at the top with a cardboard display head. SPEAKER_11: So can you picture this? It's like that display head with the hole in it that hangs on a hook. Yes, I can picture it. SPEAKER_06: Kind of like the racks with bags of generic candy at the gas station, like a clear bag full of candy. And it just says gummy bears at the top. SPEAKER_11: All right, so on that display head is an illustration of the smiling face of Chi Chi Rodriguez. SPEAKER_06: And who was Chi Chi Rodriguez? SPEAKER_11: Chi Chi Rodriguez is one of the most famous golfers in history. He was like, I don't know what Chi Chi Rodriguez was like. He was like the Elvis of golfers. He was just like a big showman. SPEAKER_03: I saw it and I just loved it. There was a picture of him in front of a golf ball. SPEAKER_11: So his head's kind of haloed by a big golf ball. SPEAKER_03: Kind of imitating something that I'd already been printing, which was human heads in front of the moon. And it made us laugh. SPEAKER_04: We chuckle. We have to have that. And of course, golf was almost symbolically like the most lame kind of, you know, bourgeois pursuit that you could have, especially at that time. Unless your parents were rich, you didn't get to go golfing. SPEAKER_03: If we ever imagined ourselves on a golf course, it was probably as a caddy. SPEAKER_04: And how boring it looked then on TV and the announcing. But the one guy who stood out was Chi Chi because he didn't fit with the rest of the golfers at all. He wore these loud pants and bright shirts and he had this famous hat that only he wore, which had a specific hat band and, you know, a straw Panama kind of hat. So did they buy those golf balls? SPEAKER_11: They bought the golf balls. Mark used the Chi Chi image in a manifesto he was writing about being a quote unquote spud boy in the rubber town of Akron. But other than that, nothing really happened with it until we were already putting out SPEAKER_04: our self-produced single, Be Stiff. Oh, I like that song. SPEAKER_11: This is my favorite one. So it's like this kind of jokey anthem celebrating like literal stiffness, like uptightness, talking about televangelists, politicians and how stiff they are. SPEAKER_04: Somehow, and I don't really remember the moment, but we had the idea of putting Chi Chi on that cover. And so they used that picture of Chi Chi on the cover of the 45 of the single. SPEAKER_11: And it was like this commentary on commercialism and our obsession with selling. SPEAKER_04: In this case, selling plastic golf balls and the Americana of the golfer. SPEAKER_11: So Be Stiff comes out in 1978 and, you know, they're still not famous. They're this obscure art rock band. But then about four months later, Devo gets their big break. Warner Brothers signed the band to their first full length album. And that, according to Jerry, is where the real de-evolution began. SPEAKER_04: We've laid that whole thing out and working up to this moment. And then comes the real Devo twist that only a corporation could provide. In other words, what we're talking about, we become part of. SPEAKER_06: So they're about to be on top 40 radio and broadcast on the TV screens of middle America. What was that first record called? It's a long title. SPEAKER_11: It's called Question Are We? Men Are We Not Men? Answer We Are Devo. SPEAKER_06: This is their first major label album. This is their first. SPEAKER_11: Yeah, I know exactly right. So Mark and Jerry and the other members of the band, they're like, well, that picture of Chi Chi worked so well on the single. Let's just stick with it. You know, it's kind of our brand now. Let's just put that on the cover of the full length record. SPEAKER_06: And this is like a picture of Chi Chi Rodriguez. The original picture from that thing they bought at Kmart, they just took that, lifted it directly and put it onto their album. And they're going to put that now on a major label album. SPEAKER_11: So they head to California, you know, movie montage theme music here, Beverly Hillbillies, whatever. And they go to Warner Brothers HQ. And this is like the process back then. And maybe now, I don't know. But like they're heading from department to department and Warner Brothers, you know, dealing with all of the new album things that need to happen. SPEAKER_04: We're told to go see, I think Rick Cerrini was his name. And he seemed to be an okay guy. He's in the art department. Yeah, he's the head of the art department. SPEAKER_05: I was creative director at Warner Brothers Records. He seemed to like what we were up to. The one band that I appreciated the most was Devo. I love the fact that they just never took anything very seriously. Do you remember that first meeting with them? SPEAKER_05: Not only do I remember it, I have a Polaroid of it. SPEAKER_04: We show him the image he chuckles. I thought it was clip art. SPEAKER_11: Yeah, Chi Chi does look a lot like clip art. SPEAKER_05: And I guess I never asked. I only found out that it was him sometime later. Well, I guess what did it evoke for you? SPEAKER_11: Absurdity. SPEAKER_05: I mean, you have to think about what was going on back in the day. Artwork on album covers had rules attached to it. Most of the albums were delivered to little mom and pop music stores all around the country. And there'd be some kid who would come in at four o'clock after school and his job was to open up the box of records from Warner Brothers or Columbia or whatnot, and then rack them. So the one thing that they told all of us in the art department is don't screw that up. A rock band has to look like a rock band. A country western has to look like country western. They better have cowboy hats on. Otherwise they get misracked. And then if people can't find them in the rack of the genre they're interested in, they don't buy it. But in Devo's case, the music was so unusual that it could have something completely absurd on the cover and make perfect sense. So even though it makes no sense that a picture of a flamboyant golfer stolen from a package SPEAKER_06: of golf balls is the mascot of Devo, it does make perfect sense because that's who Devo is. SPEAKER_11: It was just like, pick something impossible. And Rick is just psyched. He loves working on this with them. They're doing all the little designy things and giving them the font with the double bold and all this stuff and getting everything ready. SPEAKER_04: He laid it all out, specked the colors, did the whole serious thing where they give you a transparency that's a mock-up, right? And we approve it. And then about two days later, we get this call and it's a big crisis. SPEAKER_11: The call was from the vice president of business affairs for Warner Brothers. David Berman, who was a guy that you would cast in a movie about the music business. SPEAKER_04: As the villain or as the hero? SPEAKER_11: Well, it just depends on your point of view. SPEAKER_04: He was very smart, very good at what he did and played hardball. And the first communication is, I'm a golfer and I'm a fan of golf. And I know Chi Chi Rodriguez. I've met Chi Chi Rodriguez. You cannot use Chi Chi Rodriguez. SPEAKER_07: That is completely and totally false. SPEAKER_11: This is David Berman. I told you not everybody's memory is crystal clear regarding this story. SPEAKER_07: Not only have I never met, I have never seen Chi Chi Rodriguez other than on television. I'm not going to make fun of a friend of mine. Never met him. I've never spoken to him. SPEAKER_04: I'm not going to get this company sued. SPEAKER_11: That part is accurate, says David Berman about maybe being sued. Yes, he did play hardball, but he says his objection was purely a legal one. SPEAKER_07: Purely. And California law is crystal clear. You can't use somebody's name or likeness for commercial purposes without their permission. Had nothing to do with my being a golfer other than because I was, I knew that it was clearly Chi Chi Rodriguez, but it wasn't the fact that he was likable. It could have been Rory Sabatini and I would have done the same thing. Wait, who is Rory Sabatini? He's a golfer. But nobody likes Rory Sabatini. SPEAKER_06: Why does nobody like Rory Sabatini? SPEAKER_11: I don't know. So Rory Sabatini was born in 1976 and would have been two years old when this Devo record came out. But anyway, this all came as a real blow to the band. SPEAKER_04: We're dumbfounded and crestfallen. We don't know what to do. And, but of course, we're stubborn. We're not giving up. SPEAKER_11: So they're like, let's just write Chi Chi a letter and ask his permission. But in the meantime, you know, the corporate gears are rolling and money has been paid and you know, Warner Brothers is expecting a product. So Devo's like, let's come up with a plan B. And they had this idea that actually involves another piece of de-evolutionary art. It's an artist rendering of what the last four presidents would have looked like had SPEAKER_04: you combined them. SPEAKER_11: So Ford, Nixon, Johnson and Kennedy, all of their faces mashed together. Mark Mothersbaugh just had this picture lying around. SPEAKER_03: And it was this hideous, bizarre face that had John Kennedy's hairline and it had Lyndon Johnson's ears and Richard Nixon's nose. SPEAKER_11: So the band brings that image to the Warner Brothers art department. SPEAKER_04: On an idea that why couldn't we just mutate Chi Chi's face so that it isn't Chi Chi anymore? SPEAKER_06: So what did they end up doing to Chi Chi's face? SPEAKER_11: So they basically like, it was like building a Mr. Potato Head toy. Like they grafted Johnson's ears and Nixon's nose onto Chi Chi's head and reversed the mouth. I should actually, I should say that David Berman, who was in business affairs at the time, he doesn't remember the image being altered. So I sent him the original Chi Chi image from the golf balls and the Potato Head collage just so he could compare them. SPEAKER_07: Looking at it today, I wonder why I approved it because to me it still looks like Chi Chi. But obviously I must have. SPEAKER_11: And here's Jerry Casale. SPEAKER_04: About three weeks later, a letter comes back from Chi Chi's representatives saying, yes, Chi Chi thinks it's fine to use that image. He just wants 50 records at Christmas time to give out to his friends and family. SPEAKER_11: He wanted to say to his friends and family, look, I'm on a record. Right. He liked that. And this is Marc Mother's ball. SPEAKER_03: And so it was at that point, it's like we couldn't go back. They'd already printed the cover. So now we had this mutilated potato face for an album cover. And it didn't really look like the handsome Chi Chi anymore. So I'm sure he was quite surprised when he got a box of them in the mail. SPEAKER_04: All our efforts were, in fact, in earnest. But what it looked like in the end is that Devo had meanly tricked Chi Chi Rodriguez and put out something that made him look hideous. It was, you know, it's a mess. SPEAKER_11: Now, they did send Chi Chi a couple thousand dollars also as well as the record. So it wasn't a total loss for him. But then they just then they never heard from him again. Wow. SPEAKER_06: So they never got his take on the album art or even the songs on the album or anything like that. SPEAKER_11: Which is my reigning question in all of this. I really want to know if Chi Chi ever listened to that record and what he thought of it. SPEAKER_04: Yeah, that would be the big question. Well, why don't you interview Chi Chi Rodriguez? SPEAKER_11: Hello. Hello, Chi Chi Rodriguez. Yeah, who's this? It's Sean Cole. I reached Chi Chi at a country club, naturally, in West Palm Beach, Florida. He's in his early 80s now, still handsome, still plays golf, not professionally. Does a lot of philanthropic work through his foundation and an annual charity event. It's really an honor to talk to you. It's my honor to talk to you, Johnny. It's Sean, but that's okay. Oh, he sounds like the best, Johnny. SPEAKER_06: I love him. He's so sweet. SPEAKER_11: I love him. Chi Chi says he remembers getting this letter. And he says he did give out those records to his friends and family. Did you notice when you got the record that it didn't quite look like you that much? SPEAKER_09: Well, it looked like me. I look at the pluses. It looked like me a little bit. At least, at least they had looked like me. SPEAKER_11: But he didn't know anything about them messing with his face. And he had no idea that they were worried he was going to sue them. Sue them? SPEAKER_09: Well, anybody that worry about somebody suing them, that means that they're so crooked that they sue people and they think that people are going to sue them. I thought it was these young people trying to make a career out of it and I could help them and that's it because I like to do something good every day of my life and I want to live the earth better than I found it. So even young sort of avant-garde punk musicians you want to help? SPEAKER_11: Yeah. Did you listen to that record? SPEAKER_09: Yeah, I listened to it one time. Just once? I put it away. SPEAKER_11: You didn't like it? SPEAKER_09: No, I didn't like it. I like Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole and Dave Martin, who was my favorite, you know, because music is not supposed to rattle you up. Music is something to bring you down. SPEAKER_06: So the most important question answered. He did not like it. SPEAKER_11: Right. But as I was talking to him, I was like, well, there's like a kind of greater question here, which is like, what did he think about his face or a mutated version thereof being on the cover of this apocalyptic weirdo art rock band's first record? Like did that make sense to him? And it did in a way because because Chi Chi knows he's Chi Chi. He knows how much he stands out and how outlandish he is. None of that is lost on him. And in fact, he said it's purposeful. SPEAKER_09: Golf is show business. And when you're on stage, you got to give the people a show. And that's what the what Debo did. Debo came out and gave the people a good time. SPEAKER_11: So that is the similarity between you and Debo. Yes. So in a way, it really makes sense that they used you on the cover of their record. I think they were geniuses. SPEAKER_09: And it takes a genius to recognize another. SPEAKER_06: Whoa, you guys sound almost diabolical there. Yes. SPEAKER_11: Me and Chi Chi, the bottom of a volcano. Planning the evolution of the human race. The evolution of the human race, exactly. SPEAKER_04: One could argue that... Again, Jerry Casale. What we were put through by David Berman actually achieved something here better than just using a found image. SPEAKER_11: So what you're saying is corporate interference plus the faces of four American presidents who prosecuted the Vietnam War and its aftermath and this wonderfully dandy-ish golf legend, all of those together. Yeah. It's more Debo than the original Chi Chi image in a way. SPEAKER_04: That's what I'm saying. It's Debo in action. Like, do you need an example of what we're talking about? Here it is. SPEAKER_06: So this whole story takes place at the beginning of Debo's career. And they go on to play for decades, extremely famous. They were just nominated to be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Do they think about Chi Chi as part of their origin story? You know, Mark Mothersbaugh actually sort of raised that when we were talking. SPEAKER_03: I don't think anybody ever tried to measure how much that album cover had in the success of Debo, but it could possibly have been the tipping stone that just changed everything and gave us a chance to have a public career. So just in case, thank you, Chi Chi. SPEAKER_11: Hey, Roman. Yeah? Story's not over. There's one more diabolical Debo twist. Here's Dari Casale. SPEAKER_04: I have to say that now that I'm a senior citizen, I completely changed my attitude about the game of golf. You did not, really? Yeah, I like it now. I really, it's changed so much from those days and who got to play it and how it's played. I mean, those guys really are athletes. SPEAKER_11: I never thought I would hear a member of Debo say that. SPEAKER_04: I know. Here's a doubly hideous secret unfolding right now. I really like professional football. SPEAKER_02: A version of this piece originally aired on the NPR sports show Only a Game. SPEAKER_06: All thanks to Gary Wallach, who conceived of the story, and Hugh Brown, who helped Sean Cole with the research. Around the time Debo was putting out their first singles in the mid 1970s, a music teacher in Canada was making his own DIY records with a bunch of his elementary school students. And the result was a haunting and uplifting outsider art masterpiece. That story after this. What's more important, making sure you're set for today or planning for tomorrow? You can actually do both at the same time. 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H-E-L-P dot com slash Invisible. In Canada in the 1970s, a music teacher named Hans Finger recorded 60 of his elementary school students singing in a gymnasium. He pressed a few vinyl records of those recordings and handed them out to parents. The Langley School Music Project was little known until a record collector named Brian Lind found one of those albums in a thrift store in the year 2000. Lind shared it with some people and eventually, Bar None Records gave it a proper release. The record's cover featured a collage of black and white pictures of the students singing, strumming guitars, playing drums, and clapping along. The album was called Innocence and Despair. The rediscovered recordings were a hit. Salon music critic Stephen Haydn wrote, The gloomy title Innocence and Despair is no lie. The echoing yelping renditions of this feel-good music gives off a powerfully aching melancholy. It's the sound of youth frozen on tape as it fades inexorably away. Here's the music teacher from the Langley School Music Project, Hans Finger, talking to Katie Mingle in 2010. SPEAKER_10: Before I was teaching in Langley, I played in a heavy metal band. It never occurred to me to be a teacher. I wasn't really a good student myself and the kids were okay, but I wasn't all that gushy about them, to be honest with you. I knew nothing about kids' music. I knew nothing about teaching. I knew nothing about anything. You know, I had hair, I had attitude, I weighed 98 pounds. Off I went to Langley and I started teaching. I was hippy-dippy. I had really no philosophy at all about teaching. I can't really say I thought about it a lot. I had a lot of ideas about music, but certainly not about teaching. For me, I mean, I've been playing in bands since I was like 11 or 12 years old and it wasn't like anybody taught us. It wasn't even like anybody said, oh, this is the way you do it or that's the way you do it. We just sort of did it. And I've been doing music like that since I was a little kid. So when I went into teaching music, it never occurred to me that I was going to teach anybody how to read notes or that I was going to teach anybody how to pass a test. The only thing I ever tried to teach children is really just to fall in love with making music. That was always my goal. SPEAKER_10: I just taught songs I knew. And I was very into David Bowie in those days. I was very into Iggy Pop. I was into old Phil Spector records, Brian Wilson. And it wasn't until much later that I realized that the songs were thematic. You know, I had gotten a teaching job originally because I was with my girlfriend and she was having a baby and I needed a day job. And by the time I got this job, we were breaking up. And I think that in the back of my mind, you know, I was feeling like a little bit lost. SPEAKER_10: Contrary to what people think, a lot of kids aren't that happy. They all have troubles. They've got problems at home. They can feel lonely. They can feel isolated. And the music can conjure up that feeling into them. Now whether or not they completely literally understand the words, I'm not sure that's so important. SPEAKER_10: I don't think Sheila, when she was singing Desperado, really knew what a lot of those references were about. And she certainly captured the feeling of the song. SPEAKER_12: When I heard other school choirs and things, we sounded so different and so weird, you SPEAKER_10: know, that I thought, oh, well, we can't be any good. I mean, listen to all those people. They really know how to sing. So I never thought of it in terms of it was special because it was good. But I always thought of it in terms of it was special because it was different. Oftentimes I would have 60, 90 kids in my class and they'd be all over the place because there was no room and we'd have instruments and we had no equipment. So I brought in all the equipment from my band, which were huge Marshall amplifiers and bass guitars and all kinds of things. The kids, of course, really liked that. So there wasn't much room and kids were practically on top of one another. And I just sort of arranged them according to height. And that was it. I always felt like with my music teaching that I always was an outsider music teacher. You know, I mean, I never really participated in a lot of the music teaching events and all that kind of stuff. I was always like this little island unto myself. You know, people always use this term like thinking outside the box and all that. But I think for me, I didn't even know there was a box. You know, I mean, I, it does have this sort of the children of the corn. Yeah. Yeah. It does. It does have that feeling. Well, I think we were kind of like a little cult, you know, so it became kind of a, a kind of an underground hit in New York. Tony Visconti, who was David Bowie's producer, had heard it. And I think he thought it was a new wave band from New Jersey. And he couldn't quite believe there was a bunch of little kids from some farm country in Canada. Yeah, I have students that still do music to this day. SPEAKER_02: SPEAKER_10: They're always in touch with me. I jam with some of them once in a while. I felt that the whole success of this was a really vindicating kind of experience. It made me feel really like, wow, I can do something. So it was great. I mean, when, you know, I had always taught my students in a really positive way. And then when somebody suddenly is positive about what you're doing like that, it gives you a great feeling. So I say, I SPEAKER_02: You're so good to me! And I love him, love him! La la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la. I can't, oh yeah. But we can, oh yeah. SPEAKER_06: Our own K.D. Mingell talked to Hans Finger of the Langley School Music Project in 2010 for the show ReSound, produced by the Third Coast International Audio Festival. If you want to hear innovative documentaries from all over the world, you must subscribe to the ReSound podcast. And here are some fun facts. I worked on ReSound at Third Coast for three years. And during that time, I hired Delaney Hall as an intern in 2006. It was her first radio job. And then when I left, Delaney took over, and she hired Katie Mingle, who eventually took over the show herself. Now we all work here. So if you like us, you'll take ReSound. SPEAKER_06: 99% Invisible was produced this week by Sean Cole, Emmett Fitzgerald, and Katie Mingle. Mix and tech production by Sharif Yousif, music by Sean Rial. Kurt Kohlstedt is the digital director. The rest of the team includes senior editor Delaney Hall, Avery Truffleman, Taran Mazza, Joe Rosenberg, Vivian Lee, and me, Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7 KALW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. 99% Invisible is a member of Radio-Topia from PRX, a fiercely independent collective of the most innovative shows in all of podcasting. You can find them all at Radio-Topia.fm. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me, at Roman Mars, and the show at 99PI.org. Or on Instagram, Tumblr, and Reddit, too. But if you're thinking, I need more 99PI in my life, we have old episodes and new articles about design every couple of days on our website. It's 99PI.org. SPEAKER_04: Radio-Topia from PRX. SPEAKER_00: Thanks to your American Express Platinum card, you were pinged when a table opened up with priority notified through global dining access by Resy. How'd you find this place? I have my ways. See how to elevate your dining experiences at AmericanExpress.com slash with Amex. Don't live life without it. Terms apply. SPEAKER_08: Is there any trip more delightfully unpredictable than a road trip? After all, who knows where the road will take you? Who knows where you'll stay? Will it be that no-name hotel that says no to every request? SPEAKER_07: No, you'll have to find the elevators yourself. SPEAKER_08: Or maybe the one with the extra stale Danish for breakfast. I think I broke a tooth. When you want a place you can always rely on wherever the road takes you, it matters where you stay. SPEAKER_11: Welcome to Hampton by Hilton. Don't forget about our free hot breakfast. SPEAKER_08: Hilton, for the stay. SPEAKER_01: With the McDonald's app, every order gets you closer to free McDonald's. So ordering a Big Mac today could earn you a free Big Mac in your future. Earn free food with the McDonald's app. And participate in McDonald's.