The Magnificent Others with Billy Corgan
Devo | The Magnificent Others with Billy Corgan
10 Sep 2025
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What was the significance of Devo's performance on Saturday Night Live in 1978?
That night, all the young kids who were too young to go out and have dates or whatever... Yeah.
Yeah. They were watching Devo. So, in my parlance, I call it the thing that should not be. Devo should not be, but you are.
Well, you know, we were really... controversial and polarizing back then. And there were people who loved us and people that hated us. More of them that hated us. Well, yeah, more in the beginning, you know, like anything new.
That's the beauty of rock and roll. It doesn't sleep. It's always looking for the next thing.
The only reason people are interested in us now is because we did something sincere and creative and original at that time that a lot of it has withstood the test of time.
Well, here we are. Thank you for being at Madden. This is our first ever live podcast for my podcast, The Magnificent Others. So I'm very honored to have you on my podcast. You can apply.
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Chapter 2: How did Devo's concept of de-evolution influence their music and philosophy?
It's hard to get people to visit.
And this is the first time I've met you in person.
Yes, we played together in about 2007 in Kentucky.
They kept us apart, though.
Well, you know, despite your sort of egalitarian profile, you know, it was like, don't go near them, don't talk to them, don't look at them in the eye.
You could catch something. Who said that?
Some guy wearing a flower pot.
Yeah. That's the problem.
Okay. So let's jump in. So I know where you were October 14th, 1978. Do you remember?
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Chapter 3: What role did Neil Young play in Devo's early career?
Somewhere around there. Close. Okay, I'll go with you because you were there. October 17, 1978, Saturday Night Live. You played two songs, Satisfaction and Jaco Como. Yeah. And the reason I want to start here is because my father was a musician, hated pretty much everyone, maybe outside of Sly Stone or something.
And I didn't have a bedtime when I was a kid, so I would have been, at this point, 11 years old. And I heard my father howling with laughter and glee from the other room.
Oh, okay.
And I walked in because I couldn't understand whatever he was laughing at. But it wasn't laughter or mockery. It was like he couldn't believe what he was seeing. Exactly. And I came in and we had the little roller TV on color, color TV in the kitchen. And he pointed the TV and said, you have to watch this. Oh, and that was the first time I ever saw it.
Yeah. You know, the most common story we get is, I watched you guys on Saturday Night Live, and it scared the shit out of me.
Oh, really?
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Chapter 4: How did the rise of MTV impact Devo's music and public perception?
Yeah, we get that. Yeah, nobody believed it was real. I remember people telling me, did Lorne Michaels and those people, did they speed up the video? And I go, well, they couldn't because it was live. And they go, how did you guys do that?
Well... What was strange for me was I was used to my father pointing at the television saying, I hate this. I hate it because he was a musician. And it was always bad, bad, bad, worse, bad. He can't sing. She can't dance. And I couldn't quite at that moment, now it makes sense to me, understand what he saw in it because it was so different.
And my natural thought would be, well, this would be something he wouldn't like.
But it was two steps ahead of difference so that he couldn't hate it.
No, I think he immediately got what you were doing. Now, he was a stoner, so that might have contributed.
No, there were people like my parents who were just like your dad about everything. But when they saw the Beatles, it kind of stunned them. They weren't able to process it.
It was sort of like, this is so awesome.
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Chapter 5: What stories illustrate the band's relationship with their manager Elliot Roberts?
What is this? Yeah.
Yeah, until then it was like, it was all terrible, stupid.
Did you feel the effect of that performance or that appearance immediately? Was that apparent to you from the inside?
Pretty much overnight, yeah.
We changed our venues. We were in the middle of a tour and our venues all changed.
You went up to the level.
We went up a step. Yeah, because you got to remember the viewership then. There were only three channels, right? National TV channels. Everybody had common experiences. And Saturday Night Live was this revolutionary thing. And on any given night, they had about a 15 million share, 15 million viewers. And so that night, all the young kids who were too young to go out and have dates or whatever.
Yeah.
Yeah.
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Chapter 6: How does Devo view the impact of AI on the music industry?
Yeah.
College students, everybody watched SNL. It was a phenomena.
Did you get any kind of, not I want to say media kickback, but like, did the hipsters decide they all liked you all of a sudden?
Yeah.
Yes, the hipsters did, but not radio. Right. They all decided they hated us.
Really? Yeah. Because it was, pick your adjective.
Well, we were trying to trick people into thinking it was rock and roll or something like that. They didn't get at all what we were.
Yeah. For the punters in the crowd, including me,
me your sort of general uh because this was the i i bring this up because when i did start paying attention which was immediately after that performance i remember the first thing that hit me conceptually was the idea of de-evolution and and it was a big thing yeah so can you give me your your kind of thumbnail on because it obviously drove the philosophical underpinnings of the band if that's a fair way at that time the thumbnail was that we didn't see evidence of evolution we saw
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Chapter 7: What reflections do Devo have on their cultural relevance today?
I mean, it's the trend line has continued. Correct. That must strike you as some sort of irony.
Well, we were hoping we were just paranoid, but it hasn't turned out that way.
Yeah. We thought we were canaries in a coal mine and being kind of snarky and student cool, but it's beyond idiocracy now.
Yeah.
Do you agree with that?
If you could talk a little bit about the Dada influence on your thinking. Mm-hmm.
You know, we were at school, all of us in the late 60s, early 70s, and we were really interested in all the art movements going on in Europe in the 20s and 30s. And I just remember wishing I could have been there then, you know, back in the, you know, there were the Futurists in Italy that we didn't share their politics, but we loved their concept of music where they thought that,
that current orchestras and the music that was available then didn't relate to our culture. And they said, for industrial society, you need new instruments. And they were experimenting with foghorns and clanging sounds and sirens.
There was even that kind of early Dada film where it was trying to kind of, it was called something mechanical ballet. Oh, ballet, ballet mécanique. Ballet mécanique, yeah.
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Chapter 8: How does Devo define their legacy in relation to contemporary music?
I mean, even the outfits in that were geometric. Yeah. Oh, okay. And so we liked that. So we were drawing pictures of, how we imagined if we ever got to play a show somewhere, you know, we'd dress in, you know, we were drawing, you know, like geometric shaped outfits
Going back to American culture for a second, and I know this is a bit of a heady way to put it, but was your hope that American culture would be subverted and it would be replaced, or did you, in a way, wished it turned out to be the idealized sort of 50s version that we all talk about?
No, you're right. Subversion's the word. Okay. We were trying to subvert in a creative way. Our... Our whole existence was a creative response to horror and drama. That's really what it was. And we were just anti-stupid, okay? It went beyond any kind of partisan thing. It was about the duality of human nature being so flawed and so dangerous.
that what we saw was the danger of stupidity, you know, just crushing liberty and the human spirit. And so we were being funny and creative and having fun.
Did you hope with that subversion that it would be replaced by something or was it sort of like, can we kind of reverse the trend line here?
Well, we thought things were going to go differently than they did. We were paying attention to artists like Andy Warhol and other current artists at the time that were just coming out, and they were like, They weren't just, I just do this. I just play one instrument or I just do one kind of art.
They were about the idea first, and then they would use whatever technology or whatever method they needed, whatever technology. whether it was visual or audio or film or whatever. And we liked that. We wanted to work in all the mediums. And so at the time we were forming, There was video. It was just starting to become available to the average person.
You could go get, you know, some really clumsy, you know, like video equipment. Beta camera. Right.
We were embracing technology.
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