Are you picky when it comes to cables
and picks?
Well, I like coiled cords but they get all
tangled up onstage, so I use a wireless system. I use Dunlop Gator Grip picks, because
the outfits we wear onstage make me sweat
profusely. The picks have a powder on them
that gets sticky when they come into contact with sweat, so I don’t drop many picks.
Back in 1979 . . . I thought Les Pauls
represented arena rock, long hair,
and Puka shells.
Most of the classic Devo tunes are heavily
guitar based, and it seems that the more
the band moved away from guitar on later
albums, the less power the songs had.
You wouldn’t want to bend down to
retrieve a pick, only to have your Energy
Dome fall off.
Exactly, it would spoil the illusion!
Has the way Devo writes and records
evolved over time?
Totally. The way we used to do it was
that someone had an idea, and he’d start
playing it, and everyone would just start
playing along. Over the course of a couple
of days, we would play a song over and
over, and everyone would hone their parts.
We had to play the whole song and remem-
ber our parts and think about the changes,
because you had to play it all live. The last
couple of albums we did in the late ’80s
were all done with sequencers and synthe-
sizers, and they had very little guitar. A lot
of times, the whole song was pretty much
done by the time I put a guitar part down,
so I had to think of small guitar parts that
didn’t clash with all the synth parts.
Yeah, I’m aware of that [laughs]. Twenty
years ago, someone in the band decided
that guitars were obsolete and nobody
would be using guitars 20 years from then,
and they tried to make that a reality, which
really didn’t work for us.
Well, we’re glad you put your foot down
on that. Something for Everybody has
tons of guitar on it—like the old days!
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