Music video pioneer Gerald Casale, co-founder of the New Wave art-rock band Devo, brings his quirky sensibility to the small screen.

In mid-1970s Middle America, the unassuming industrial town of Akron, Ohio suddenly became known as the launching pad of Devo, a self-professed "postmodern protest band" whose arty, kitsch-driven brand of electronic future pop helped herald the "New Wave" era of modern rock music. In its inception, however, Devo was conceived as an extreme exercise in Dadaist moviemaking, with its melodies intended to serve as mere accompaniment. The band’s members quickly made an impression as rubber-faced, jerky-jointed androids in "Secret Agent Man," a surreal video which also featured a pair of bare-chested, monkey-masked men spanking a robe-draped woman. A followup clip, "Jocko Homo," presented three figures in full-body straitjackets writhing about on a conference table as a surrounding swarm of surgeons in sunglasses exclaimed the band’s infamous tag line: "Are we not men? We are Devo!"

Far ahead of their time, Devo thus advanced the art of music video before they even became a bona-fide band. Co-founder Gerald Casale directed all of the act’s 22 videos, including the memorable clips for "Whip It" and "Satisfaction" (both included on Rolling Stone magazine’s list of the top 100 videos of all time), as well as "Girl U Want," "That’s Good," and "It’s a Beautiful World," which occupies a permanent position in New York’s Whitney Museum. In 1986, Casale also began shooting videos for other musical acts, among them The Cars, Jane Siberry, Rush, Blancmange, Silverchair, The Foo Fighters, Soundgarden and Mint Condition.

Before embarking upon his career, Casale was an art major at Kent State University, where he was introduced to cinema production in a class taught by underground filmmaker Richard Myers. While attending Kent State, Casale became acquainted with Chuck Statler, a fellow student and future friend who would go on to shoot some of Devo’s earliest videos. "Chuck and I had similar aesthetic sensibilities, and we ran around [with his Bolex] making really bizarre little movies with no real plots just sequences of image-driven events that were evocative, funny, dark and nasty. Usually, I would end up in front of the camera in one of the various costumes that I’d made."

Casale later made the acquaintance of fellow musician Mark Mothersbaugh, and the pair soon enlisted drummer Alan Meyers and their respective younger brothers both named Bob. The concept behind the band was "de-evolution," and the quintet began designing a soundtrack which would help illustrate their philosophies. After saving up $3,000 from a silkscreening and rubber-stamp venture, Statler and the band produced The Truth About De-evolution, a 10-minute experimental short directed by Casale which won an award at the 1976 Ann Arbor Film Festival.

Following this success, Devo signed a contract with Virgin Records, which gave them $5,000 to shoot a video. Opting to modernize a rock ’n’ roll standard, they filmed themselves performing the Rolling Stones classic "Satisfaction" while clad in what would become signature Devo couture biohazard suits fashioned from yellow plastic. Censorship reared its ugly head, however, and shots of a masked baby jabbing a fork into a toaster got the video banned from the British music program Top of the Pops.

In those pre-MTV days, record companies considered the very idea of making music videos to be rather pointless. As a result, budgets were quite frugal, since no one expected a financial return; "Whip It," which was recently inducted into the Music Video Production Association’s Hall of Fame, cost just $15,000. The clip’s oddball idea came from a Fifties magazine article about a dude-ranch owner who occasionally used a bullwhip to slash off bits of his wife’s clothing for the thrill of paying spectators. During the video’s 18-hour production, Casale stood on a ladder, hovering above an actress wearing a dress made up of detachable Velcro. Each time Mothersbaugh yanked back the long lash, Casale would peel off a piece of the woman’s outfit in sync to the song’s synthesized whip-crack. Reversing the shots completed the illusion that Mothersbaugh’s marksmanship was responsible for her gradual exposure.

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