I don't know if you remember DEVO back in the day. I certainly recall as a youth watching their film, I believe titled "We're all DEVO" on MTV and finding it unnerving. Was it the messages about de-evoloution that were a bit too on the money or was it just my aversion to men in a rubber masks? Regardless, tonight, surely 20+ years after my first exposure to DEVO, I find them older, creakier, but just as unsettling as ever.
First, it's fair to note that the crowd is just as scary as the band. Wearing vintage power dome hats and yellow plastic suits, a guy even passes by my seat sporting a "Peek-A-Boo" tattoo on his arm featuring the two toned devils from the band's early 80's video. Man, these people are fierce!
After an uncomfortably lame set by The Tom Tom Club (who have added a hunky African-American model guy in an attempt to make us ignore the fact the rest of the band is just old, limp, and terrible) a video comes on that must have been shown before DEVO's New Traditionalists tour (how cool is that?), with General Boy (Mothersbaugh's father) telling us all the truth about de-evolution. Shortly thereafter, DEVO themselves appear on stage in their trademark yellow suits, kicking off the night with "That's Good".
How do I sum up the rest of the show, save to give you a laundry list of what happened? The band allowed their set to rest pretty much on work before 1983 and eventually stripped down from yellow suits to the vintage black shorts and kneepads look (forgot about that one). Nary a single was left unplayed, making the man sitting behind me screaming "Girrrrrl Uuuuu Waaaaaant!" so very, very happy. Singer Mark Mothersbaugh now has a pot belly but technically has not become less attractive than he was as an unattractive 20 year old. Best of all however was the encore in which Mothersbaugh donned the Booji Boy outfit and sang "Beautiful World" in Booji voice. At the end of this song, he unzipped the front of a long smock he was wearing and from inside produced handfuls of hi-bounce balls which he threw at the stage to the beat of "For You!" which then bounced away into the audience. Then, in the most distressing moment of the night, reached into his smock again and produced a good dozen or so bananas, which he one by one threw at the audience. Then he left the stage.
That would make number of concerts I've been assaulted by bananas thrown by a man over 50 wearing a rubber mask: exactly one.
Below - The band plays Uncontrollable Urge
