Kent State Uni­ver­si­ty is known as the site of two impor­tant events in Amer­i­can cul­ture: the mas­sacre of May 4, 1970, and the for­ma­tion of Devo. When the Nation­al Guard shot thir­teen stu­dents at a Viet­nam War protest, it sig­naled to many the end of the youth-dri­ven opti­mism of the late 1960s. It also moti­vat­ed a group of musi­cal­ly inclined under­grad­u­ates to con­sol­i­date the band/conceptual art project they’d premised on the idea of “de-evo­lu­tion.” Around that time, the group’s founders, art stu­dents Ger­ald Casale and Bob Lewis, met a key­boardist named Mark Moth­ers­baugh, who con­tributed some of the sig­na­ture musi­cal and comedic sen­si­bil­i­ties of what would become Devo.

“The band, or at least a band known as Sex­tet Devo, first per­formed at a 1973 arts fes­ti­val in Kent,” writes Calvin C. Ryd­bom in The Akron Sound: The Hey­day of the Mid­west­’s Punk Cap­i­tal. Fill­ing out that sex­tet were Casale’s broth­er Bob, drum­mer Rod Reis­man, and vocal­ist Fred Weber. A hand­out for the show promis­es a series of “polyrhyth­mic exer­cis­es in de-evo­lu­tion,” includ­ing a num­ber called “Pri­vate Sec­re­tary,” footage of which appears above.

“The group were all dressed odd­ly, Bob in scrubs, Jer­ry in a butcher’s coat, Bob Lewis behind the key­boards in a mon­key mask, and Mark in a doc­tor’s robe,” writes George Gimarc in Punk Diary: The Ulti­mate Trainspot­ter’s Guide to Under­ground Rock, 1970–1982. “The audi­ence was, at times, con­fused, amused, and some even danced.”

Sex­tet Devo “would have been off the charts in most envi­ron­ments,” says Myopia, a ret­ro­spec­tive vol­ume on Moth­ers­baugh­’s work. At the Kent Cre­ative Arts Fes­ti­val “the band actu­al­ly fit with­in the spec­trum of nor­mal behav­ior, albeit at the far end of the scale.” But even their most appre­cia­tive view­ers could­n’t have known how far the con­cept of de-evo­lu­tion had to go, to say noth­ing of the pop-cul­tur­al heights to which the odd­balls onstage would car­ry it. Just five years lat­er, Devo would make their nation­al-tele­vi­sion debut as a quin­tet on Sat­ur­day Night Live, “de-evolv­ing” the Rolling Stones’ “Sat­is­fac­tion.” But they did­n’t for­get where they’d come from: near­ly thir­ty years after their first show, they came back around to 1970 for a de-evo­lu­tion of Cros­by, Stills, Nash & Young’s “Ohio.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

New Wave Music – DEVO, Talk­ing Heads, Blondie, Elvis Costel­lo — Gets Intro­duced to Amer­i­ca by ABC’s TV Show, 20/20 (1979)

Devo De-Evolves the Rolling Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Sat­is­fac­tion”: See Their Ground­break­ing Music Video and Sat­ur­day Night Live Per­for­mance (1978)

The Phi­los­o­phy & Music of Devo, the Avant-Garde Art Project Ded­i­cat­ed to Reveal­ing the Truth About De-Evo­lu­tion

The Mas­ter­mind of Devo, Mark Moth­ers­baugh, Presents His Per­son­al Syn­the­siz­er Col­lec­tion

DEVO Is Now Sell­ing COVID-19 Per­son­al Pro­tec­tive Equip­ment: Ener­gy Dome Face Shields

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

Let’s pro­vide the con­text, just like host Adam Neely and guest Bri­an Krock do in this video: in 1960 Steve Lacy, a young, white sopra­no sax play­er, briefly joined Thelo­nious Monk’s band. Two years pre­vi­ous, Lacy had  been the first jazz musi­cian to release an album of Monk’s com­po­si­tions oth­er than the man him­self. Even so, Lacy was young, excit­ed, and starstruck at play­ing along­side not just Monk but John Coltrane (who shared the bill on the 16 week tour), just absorb­ing every­thing.

At some point, Monk took Lacy aside and gave his some advice which Lacy wrote down, 25 pieces of advice to be exact.

In the video below, from Neely’s always inter­est­ing chan­nel (we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly writ­ten about him here), he and Krock go through the 25 points and com­ment on each one. For those who love to hear musi­cians (or any artist) talk shop, this is won­der­ful stuff.

Some of the advice is such as befits a live musician—“Pat your foot & sing the melody in your head, when you play”, “Don’t play the piano part, I’m play­ing that”, “When you’re swing­ing, swing some more!,” and “A note can be small as a pin or as big as the world, it depends on your imag­i­na­tion.”

Oth­ers are more cru­cial to the busi­ness, espe­cial­ly “Don’t sound any­body for a gig, just be on the scene.” That is: if you around the scene enough, and show your worth, you will get asked to play. But just cold ask­ing won’t get you any­where. Also, when asked what to wear to a gig, Monk advis­es: “Sharp as pos­si­ble!” which you could indeed say of Monk.

Oth­er advice is more mys­ti­cal: “You’ve got to dig it to dig it, you dig?” “What you don’t play can be more impor­tant than what you do.”

And the one that gets quot­ed the most, “A genius is the one most like him­self.” That’s true when it comes to Monk or any of the giants of jazz. To hear Monk, or Coltrane, or Miles Davis play is to hear the artist, the genius, and the per­son, not just the melody or the instru­ment. It reminds me of the great Har­ry Partch quote: “The cre­ative per­son shows him­self naked. And the more vig­or­ous his cre­ative act, the more naked he appears — some­times total­ly vul­ner­a­ble, yet always invul­ner­a­ble in the sense of his own integri­ty.”

And maybe that’s why we keep com­ing back to them, long after their phys­i­cal bod­ies have left this plane of exis­tence.

The full list is as fol­lows:

1. Just because you’re not a drum­mer, doesn’t mean you don’t have to keep time.
2. Pat your foot & sing the melody in your head, when you play.
3. Stop play­ing all that bull­shit, those weird notes, play the melody!
4. Make the drum­mer sound good.
5. Dis­crim­i­na­tion is impor­tant.
6. You’ve got to dig it to dig it, you dig?
7. All reet!
8. Always know… (monk )
9. It must be always night, oth­er­wise they wouldn’t need the lights.
10. Let’s lift the band stand!!
11. I want to avoid the heck­lers.
12. Don’t play the piano part, I’m play­ing that.
13.  Don’t lis­ten to me. I’m sup­posed to be accom­pa­ny­ing you!
14. The inside of the tune (the bridge) is the part that makes the out­side sound good.
15. Don’t play every­thing (or every time); let some things go by. Some music just imag­ined. What you don’t play can be more impor­tant than what you do.
16. Always leave them want­i­ng more.
17. A note can be small as a pin or as big as the world, it depends on your imag­i­na­tion.
18. Stay in shape! Some­times a musi­cian waits for a gig, & when it comes, he’s out of shape & can’t make it.
19. When you’re swing­ing, swing some more!
20. (What should we wear tonight?) Sharp as pos­si­ble!
21. Don’t sound any­body for a gig, just be on the scene.
22. These pieces were writ­ten so as to have some­thing to play, & to get cats inter­est­ed enough to come to rehearsal.
23. You’ve got it! If you don’t want to play, tell a joke or dance, but in any case, you got it! (to a drum­mer who didn’t want to solo).
24. What­ev­er you think can’t be done, some­body will come along & do it. A genius is the one most like him­self.
25. They tried to get me to hate white peo­ple, but some­one would always come along & spoil it.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Thelo­nious Monk Bombs in Paris in 1954, Then Makes a Tri­umphant Return in 1969

Andy Warhol Cre­ates Album Cov­ers for Jazz Leg­ends Thelo­nious Monk, Count Basie & Ken­ny Bur­rell

A Child’s Intro­duc­tion to Jazz by Can­non­ball Adder­ley (with Louis Arm­strong & Thelo­nious Monk)

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the Notes from the Shed pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.

Pur­vey­ors of the shock­ing, pri­mal idio­cy of pure rock and roll can in many cas­es be some of the most intel­li­gent peo­ple in pop. Or at least that’s the case with the king of shock­ing, pri­mal idio­cy, Iggy Pop. He has inter­pret­ed Whit­man’s “bar­bar­ic yawp” and deliv­ered the John Peel Lec­ture for BBC Music, becom­ing “a vis­it­ing pro­fes­sor from the School of Punk Rock Hard Knocks,” writes Rolling Stone and bring­ing an elder statesman’s per­spec­tive informed not only by his years in the bow­els of the music indus­try but also by his avo­ca­tion as a schol­ar of the Roman Empire….

Yes, that’s right, Iggy Pop is not only an adroit styl­ist of some of the most bril­liant­ly stu­pid garage rock ever made, but he’s also a seri­ous read­er and thinker who once pub­lished a brief reflec­tion on his rela­tion­ship with Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in the aca­d­e­m­ic jour­nal Ire­land Clas­sics.

“Iggy Pop, like Bob Dylan,” writes E.J. Hutchin­son, “has an avid inter­est in Roman antiq­ui­ty and its genet­ic con­nec­tion to con­tem­po­rary life.” He may also be the sharpest, wil­i­est embod­i­ment of post-indus­tri­al Amer­i­can decline—his entire musi­cal per­son­al­i­ty a punch in the col­lec­tive face of the nation’s delu­sions.

In 1982, hor­ri­fied by the mean­ness, tedi­um and deprav­i­ty of my exis­tence as I toured the Amer­i­can South play­ing rock and roll music and going crazy in pub­lic, I pur­chased an abridged copy of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Dero Saun­ders, Pen­guin). 

The grandeur of the sub­ject appealed to me, as did the cameo illus­tra­tion of Edward Gib­bon, the author, on the front cov­er. He looked like a heavy dude.

Hutchin­son gives us a fine­ly wrought analy­sis of Pop’s “tour de force of clas­si­cal Gib­bon­ian Eng­lish prose, a scrap of Ciceron­ian peri­od­ic­i­ty.” (Gib­bon did, indeed, look like a heavy dude.) Pop’s read­ing of Gib­bon, “with plea­sure around 4 am, with my drugs and whisky in cheap motels,” absorbed him in its “clash of beliefs, per­son­al­i­ties and val­ues,” he writes, “played out on antiquity’s stage by crowds of the vul­gar, led by huge arche­typ­al char­ac­ters.” All of this appealed to him, he writes, giv­en his own role in “a polit­i­cal busi­ness… the music busi­ness, which is not about music at all, but is a kind of reli­gion-rental.”

Gibbon’s mas­sive saga, a mon­u­men­tal exam­ple of sweep­ing Enlight­en­ment his­to­ri­og­ra­phy, so cap­ti­vat­ed Pop that a decade lat­er, it inspired “an extem­po­ra­ne­ous solil­o­quy” he called “Cae­sar,” the clos­ing track on 1993’s “over­looked mas­ter­piece” Amer­i­can Cae­sar. The spo­ken word piece “made me laugh my ass off,” he writes, “because it was so true. Amer­i­ca is Rome. Of course, why shouldn’t it be? All of West­ern life and insti­tu­tions today are trace­able to the Romans and their world. We are all Roman chil­dren for bet­ter or worse.”

But there was much more to Pop’s read­ing of Gibbon—which he even­tu­al­ly enjoyed in a “beau­ti­ful edi­tion in three vol­umes of the mag­nif­i­cent orig­i­nal unabridged”—than a pos­si­bly facile com­par­i­son between one fail­ing empire and anoth­er. Much more, indeed. Read­ing Gib­bon, he writes (sound­ing very much like anoth­er pro­po­nent of the clas­sics, Ita­lo Calvi­no), taught him how to think about the present, and how to think, humbly, about him­self. He ends his essay with a num­bered list of “just some of the ways I ben­e­fit”:

1. I feel a great com­fort and relief know­ing that there were oth­ers who lived and died and thought and fought so long ago; I feel less tyr­an­nized by the present day.
2. I learn much about the way our soci­ety real­ly works, because the sys­tem-ori­gins — mil­i­tary, reli­gious, polit­i­cal, colo­nial, agri­cul­tur­al, finan­cial — are all there to be scru­ti­nized in their infan­cy. I have gained per­spec­tive.
3. The lan­guage in which the book is writ­ten is rich and com­plete, as the lan­guage of today is not.
4. I find out how lit­tle I know.
5. I am inspired by the will and eru­di­tion which enabled Gib­bon to com­plete a work of twen­ty-odd years. The guy stuck with things. I urge any­one who wants life on earth to real­ly come alive for them to enjoy the beau­ti­ful ances­tral ancient world.

Read Pop’s full 1995 Ire­land Clas­sics essay on Jstor or Medi­um.

via Han­nah Rose Woods

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Prof. Iggy Pop Deliv­ers the BBC’s 2014 John Peel Lec­ture on “Free Music in a Cap­i­tal­ist Soci­ety”

The Splen­did Book Design of the 1946 Edi­tion of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

Iggy Pop Reads Walt Whit­man in Col­lab­o­ra­tions With Elec­tron­ic Artists Alva Noto and Tar­wa­ter

Iggy Pop Reads Edgar Allan Poe’s Clas­sic Hor­ror Sto­ry, “The Tell-Tale Heart”

Stream Iggy Pop’s Two-Hour Radio Trib­ute to David Bowie

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Com­bin­ing pop music with opera was always the height of pre­ten­sion. But where would we be with­out the pre­ten­tious? As Bri­an Eno observed in his 1995 diary, “My assump­tions about cul­ture as a place where you can take psy­cho­log­i­cal risks with­out incur­ring phys­i­cal penal­ties make me think that pre­tend­ing is the most impor­tant thing we do. It’s the way we make our thought exper­i­ments, find out what it would be like to be oth­er­wise.” And with Fred­die Mer­cury and Queen, if it wasn’t for pre­tense we wouldn’t have “Bohemi­an Rhap­sody.” Hell, we wouldn’t have Queen, peri­od.

But in 1988 the gam­ble didn’t exact­ly pay off. To the British music press, Mer­cury was coast­ing on Live Aid fumes and the shad­ow of his unsuc­cess­ful solo album. And then to hear that he’d teamed up with opera singer Montser­rat Cabal­lé? Despite what any hagio­graph­ic tale of Mer­cury might say, this passed your aver­age rock fan by.

Out­side the whims of the charts, how­ev­er, Mercury’s team up with Cabal­lé was the ful­fill­ment of a goal he’d had since 1981. The singer had fall­en in love with Cabellé’s voice in 1981 when he’d seen her per­form along­side Luciano Pavarot­ti.

Then began a dance between the two artists. Mer­cury was wor­ried that Cabal­lé would not take this rock star seri­ous­ly. Cabal­lé, on the oth­er hand, was a rock music fan just like so many peo­ple. They owned each oth­ers’ albums. Final­ly, in ear­ly 1986, the two met: Caballé’s broth­er was the music direc­tor of the upcom­ing 1992 Barcelona Olympics and ‘Who bet­ter to do a theme song with than Fred­die Mer­cury?’ said the singer.

Accord­ing to Peter Free­stone, Mercury’s per­son­al assis­tant and long­time friend, meet­ing Cabal­lé was the most ner­vous he’d ever been. Mer­cury was wor­ried the opera singer would be aloof and dis­tant. But she was as down to earth as Mer­cury in their off­stage moments.

As Free­stone recount­ed, “Fred­die assumed they’d only make one song togeth­er. Then Montser­rat said: ‘How many songs do you put on a rock album?’ When Fred­die told her eight or 10, she said: ‘Fine – we will do an album.’”

Mer­cury had two dead­lines: one based around Caballé’s sched­ule, and the oth­er based around his recent AIDS virus diag­no­sis. Though he had com­posed the open­ing song “Barcelona” to sing along­side Cabal­lé at the 1992 open­ing cer­e­monies, he told her that he prob­a­bly wouldn’t be around for that to hap­pen. (Cabal­lé instead sang “Ami­gos para siem­pre (Friends for­ev­er)” with Span­ish tenor José Car­reras.) They did man­age to per­form togeth­er, singing “Barcelona” at a pro­mo­tion­al event at Ku night­club in Ibiza in May, 1987.

Mer­cury wrote the eight songs on the Barcelona album with Mike Moran, the song­writer who’d also worked with Mer­cury on his pre­vi­ous solo album and whose “Exer­cis­es in Free Love” was adapt­ed into “Ensueño” for the album, with Cabal­lé help­ing in the rewrite.

Accord­ing to Free­stone, watch­ing Cabal­lé was the most emo­tion­al he’d seen the usu­al­ly reserved singer: “When Montser­rat sang ‘Barcelona’, after her first take was the near­est I ever saw Fred­die to tears. Fred­die was emo­tion­al, but he was always in con­trol of his emo­tions, because he could let them out in per­form­ing or writ­ing songs. He grabbed my hand and said: ‘I have the great­est voice in the world, singing my music!’ He was so elat­ed.”

In time, the album has gained in rep­u­ta­tion, but is crit­i­cized that the label spent most of its mon­ey on the title track—full orches­tra­tion, the works, as ben­e­fits a meet­ing of two oper­at­ic minds—and relied on synths for the remain­ing songs. Fans are ask­ing for a rere­cord­ing that brings the full orches­tra to all the tracks. We’ve cer­tain­ly seen odd­er requests grant­ed in the last few years, like the remix of what many con­sid­er Bowie’s worst album. So who indeed can tell? Watch this space.

via Messy Nessy

Relat­ed Con­tent:

What Made Fred­die Mer­cury the Great­est Vocal­ist in Rock His­to­ry? The Secrets Revealed in a Short Video Essay

Mar­i­onette Fred­die Mer­cury Per­forms on the Streets of Madrid

Hear a Pre­vi­ous­ly Unheard Fred­die Mer­cury Song, “Time Waits for No One,” Unearthed After 33 Years
Meet Fred­die Mer­cury and His Faith­ful Feline Friends

Fred­die Mer­cury Reimag­ined as Com­ic Book Heroes

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the Notes from the Shed pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.