Devo

The first time I heard Devo was in a dance concert by two NYC choreographers who had come to teach a semester of dance at Interlochen. I was a sophomore in high school, and it was too early in my dance career to be taking classes from the guests (I had yet to bridge the wide gulf between the daily hour of Level 2 – I’m taking this for more than just phys. ed. credit, and the daily three hours of Level 3 – now I’m a dancer). But I was already deeply involved in the dance department as my mother was on the faculty and as I had been doing tech work for the concerts and tours and as the dancers had always been among my best friends.

At that time and place – like at a lot of different times and places – NYC was the shit. It was the inevitable, enviable center of the universe, the pot at the end of the rainbow, the point where all roads lead and from which all that mattered flowed. It was everything that where I lived wasn’t. It was big, it was exciting, it was urban, it was dangerous, and it was open all night. Interlochen was a blessed oasis in the cultural desert of rural Michigan, but no matter how many student art shows and student theatre productions and student recitals one went to, there was no escaping from the fact that we were, after all, in the middle of nowhere – and the art was by students, no matter how gifted. Many of us already knew that we would end up in NYC sooner or later, but we weren’t there yet, so anybody who was already living in that Shangri-la was held in the highest regard.

So I went to the concert. And I remember absolutely nothing about it, except that the last piece used some contemporary music that absolutely blew my mind. I had just recently waded into the murky waters of popular music and, although there was a lot of music I liked well enough, there was precious little that really spoke to me. I started enthusiastically listening to the radio along with everybody else during my first summer job in the cafeteria, and I would always looked forward to Sunday’s walk through the garden of hits with Casey Kasem, but I knew there was more going on than I was allowed to hear. I could see it at the local record stores – as provincial as they were. There were a couple of racks at the back of Midnight Records that held imports, and I knew from just looking at these strange and wondrous covers that they contained unimagined sonic treasures that were never going to hit the holy American Top 40. Unfortunately, they also sported exotic price tags, so I contented myself with spending my monthly allowance ($10 – devised so I could go to the movies once a week if I so chose, but I always chose to spend the entire amount on a record about two days into the month), on domestic releases that I knew I would like – such as Synergy and Tangerine Dream and Vangelis and Jean Michel Jarre. Records that had long ago branded me as a musical oddity among my local friends, who mostly favored ELO, Abba, Kris Kristofferson, and the soundtrack from Grease.

But sitting there in the darkness, watching these two too-cool dancers from NYC writhe through their postmodern ode to urban angst (or whatever it was they were doing), I had my head split open by the strange angular music on the soundtrack. The last two songs were awkward and frightening and dark and exciting and spoke of the city and alienation and strange situations undreamt of in the cold, dark woods of the north. The rhythms lurched and stumbled and banged into each other, the vocals were shrill and harsh, the lyrics were unsettling, the electronic textures were creepy and surreal and wholly unnatural and I was completely enthralled. I certainly never heard such poisonous incense coming out of my radio and I knew I never would. But I also knew that someday, I would find music like this for myself.

The pieces weren’t listed on the program and I never asked the two women who had performed them (being somewhat shy – and also liking to do things entirely on my own from a very early age), but I carried the memories of those songs in my heart as my own private talisman of coolness, confident that someday I would not only find this music, but that I would make it my own. Someday I would be that cool.