Spud attack: Devo at the Warfield on Jan. 15. All photos by Peter Conheim.
By Peter Conheim
Devo valiantly tried to protect us from the ninnies and twits for a roughly a decade beginning in 1975. The buzz about this ferocious live beast from Akron, Ohio – the seeds of their rage sown at Kent State during the time of the National Guard shootings – eventually brought the band into the corporate maw of Warner Bros., through which they become superstars – for a while. A label fallout and the critical departure of drummer Alan Myers led to a hiatus, and then a reemergence on the smaller Enigma label with a new percussionist and pair of near-horrendous studio albums in the late 1980s.
Yet Devo never quite went away. The past decades have seen the group – which can only be loosely defined as a band, considering they no longer create new material – rearing its head only for corporately sponsored mini-tours or one-offs of an equally well-funded nature (patrons have included Vans sneakers, Acura, ZDNet, et al). Nonetheless, the majority of their performances in the past five years have been full-throttle affairs with the combo in fine form, tossing out hits and misses with nary a sampler in sight, the Brothers Four (two Mothersbaughs and two Casales) comfortably deep into middle age and completely ripping it up with abandon.
It came as little surprise, then, that these spuds would appear on Jan. 15 at the Warfield – for the first time since New Year’s Eve, 1981 – as the evening’s entertainment at “MacBlast,” Macworld’s biggest private party and the launch of Microsoft Office 2008.
