Devo Wear Many Hats — But No Yellow Buckets — For Spirited, Deep-Cut NPR Tiny Desk Concert

The art punk legends dug all the way back to a song they hadn’t performed in more than 40 years for the four-track set.

Devo

Zayrha Rodriguez/NPR

Spuds of the world unite! Everyone’s favorite devolution merchants, Devo, popped in to NPR’s Tiny Desk studio recently for a raucous four-song set for the public radio series that featured one obscure track they hadn’t performed live in more than four decades.

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With founding singer/keyboardist Mark Mothersbaugh leading the charge alongside brother and longtime guitarist Bob Mothersbaugh and original bassist Gerald Casale, the group bounded out of the gate with the bluesy, bouncing rarity “It Takes a Worried Man.” The song — inspired by the folk/roots classic “Worried Man Blues” — was originally recorded for the little-seen 1982 nuclear panic comedy Human Highway, which was directed by Neil Young, who also co-starred alongside Dean Stockwell, co-writer Dennis Hopper and Devo, who played radioactive waste garbage men in orange outfits and hard hats accented by plastic tubes that snaked down into the band member’s noses.

In addition to Mothersbaugh’s sermon-like breakdown about how everyone is just going for that “big ice cream cone in the sky,” the song featured a wiggy keyboard solo from the frontman, who ,alas, was not wearing the band’s signature yellow flower bucket hat.

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“Wasn’t that uplifting?” said Casale. “See? De-evolution isn’t depressing.” The band then dipped into 1979’s twitchy “Blockhead” from their second studio album, Duty Now For the Future. “Never tips over/ Stands up on his own/ He is a blockhead/ Thinking man full grown/ He comes well-prepared,” Mothersbaugh bellowed in the song about the titular, boring character who he also describes as a “Cube top/ Squared off/ Eight corners/ 90 degree angles/ Flat top” kind of guy.

Joking that he was looking to get spiritual, Casale then set up the buzzing, frenetic surf punk burner “Praying Hands,” which appeared on Devo’s iconic 1978 debut album, Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo! Shouting the lyrics through a megaphone, Mothersbaugh yelped, “You got your left hand/ You got your right hand/ You got your left hand/ You got your right hand/ While the left hand diddling/ While the right hand goes to work.”

Mothersbaugh, 74, wasn’t content to just blast his hand jive from behind the desk, so he went into the audience to ask NPR staffers what their hands were doing at that very moment before dropping to his knees and putting on a sailor’s cap he’d found in the NPR closet earlier. After rummaging around in the Tiny Desk closet to find some alternate headgear for the 17-minute show, Devo ended the set with another song from their debut, the galloping, herky jerky “Come Back Jonee.” During that one, Mothersbaugh swiped through a series of other hats he pilfered from the public radio storeroom, but, alas, none of them in the shape of the band’s iconic yellow bucket chapeaus.

Devo, who celebrated 50 years of devolution last year, will play the Ohana Festival in Dana Point, CA on Sept. 24.

Watch Devo’s NPR Tiny Desk show below.

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