Are we not retiring? Devo, X, and other bands who created the alternative nation are reluctantly taking their final bows
Devo’s yellow hazmat jumpsuits are in tatters, an unavoidable side effect of the band’s collective (in all senses) perpetual motion. It’s a breezy Sunday night in New York, and Devo’s tightly coiled nature hasn’t eased a bit. Even the coordinated dance moves they bring out on their closer, “Uncontrollable Urge”, are more in lockstep than you might expect for a group that celebrated its 50th anniversary a couple of years ago.
2025 was a banner year for Akron, Ohio’s most sardonic exports. Devo played Saturday Night Live’s 50th anniversary special, headlined festivals, were the subject of an acclaimed Netflix documentary and capped it all off with a fall amphitheater tour with fellow New Wave survivors the B-52s. It’s all part of a farewell bow they first announced back in 2022. Considering how well it’s all going, one might reasonably wonder why Devo are stopping now. And one wouldn’t be alone in this regard.
“If it was up to me, I would have never said anything about a farewell tour,” says Gerald Casale, Devo’s co-founder, co-frontman, and bassist. Sitting in the lobby of a New York hotel a few days before the show, he sips a glass of rosé while hitting the midway point between gratitude and perturbation. “I do think Devo, oddly enough, given the chaos and right-wing turn of American culture, is more relevant than ever.
“So I would prefer to be creating new material,” he adds. “I don’t want to put Devo in some lockbox. That’s not my idea at all.”
Whatever mixed feelings Casale might have about his iconic band calling it a day, he might find some comfort in knowing he’s not alone. Their ’70s and ’80s contemporaries Gang of Four, Ministry, X, and the B-52s have all recently announced or completed final tours, and Blondie has indicated that its upcoming album will be its last. This represents the eventual curtain call of the New Wave and Post-Punk groups that came up in the wake of the punk explosion ignited by the 1976 release of Ramones, paving the way for Indie Rock.
“All these bands were original in their day, and they didn’t sound like each other,” says Casale, beaming. “That’s what made that era so exciting and powerful.”
Born Gerald Vincent Pizzute, he grew up in Kent, Ohio, and was there just as the ’60s utopian dream was beginning to collide with the realities of the Vietnam War, an imperialistic boondoggle he feels fortunate to have evaded. “I lucked out,” he says. “I failed my physical. I wasn’t a guy who could have escaped to Canada. I knew that if I went to Vietnam, I was going to die.”
Instead, he escaped to Kent State University, and in one of the most awful origin stories in the history of music, he watched on May 4, 1970 as the National Guard “shot at us and killed four people, two of whom were my friends,” he says.
As part of his scholarship, he was assigned to look after some freshmen, two of them, “just by chance,” were Jeffrey Miller and Alison Krauss. “And we really connected. They were the cool kids. I knew them for nine months before….”
He pauses for a moment, and begins to cry.
Kraus and Miller were among the reported 500 students protesting the Vietnam War and its expansion into Cambodia, and Casale was there when the National Guard opened fire, killing them both. “You’re seeing people shot with M1 rifles. And I laid down on the grass, and I can’t even explain what went through me.” He trails off for a moment. “And then dealing with the fact that the national news media completely misrepresented it. You’re watching the lies.
“I thought that was the worst point of my life and that I had found a creative response to it. And that creative response became successful with Devo. And now I’m an old man and I’m watching this…” he says, waving his hands. “It makes the Nixon era look like kindergarten.”
He looks down for a second, a bit dazed. I glance at the television in the lobby behind him; the anchors on Fox News are talking gleefully about the latest bloviation from Pete Hegseth.
Gerald Casale of Devo on stage at the Hammersmith Odeon, London, England, on December 2, 1978. (Photo by Gus Stewart/Redferns via Getty Images)
While Gerry admits there wasn’t much going on culturally around him in Ohio, being away from the center of it all had its advantages for the band that became Devo, whose line-up included co-founder and keyboard genius Mark Mothersbaugh, his brother Bob Mothersbaugh on lead guitar, the late Bob Casale on guitar and the late Alan Myers on drums.
Instead of being “in on the action,” where hipsters would have anointed and then booted them, he says “we spent four years in basements and garages and little clubs getting laughed at and booted out. So by the time the hipsters in the national media picked up on Devo, we were fully formed. It blew their minds.”
In addition to being a great, weird rock band, Devo is also a multimedia art project, complete with costumes, and an ongoing social critique. Their party line has always been that they formed to spread the truth about devolution, the idea that mankind has been regressing as a species, and perhaps we all should have stayed apes.
It’s a high concept way of pointing out that the media, the government, and the forces of commerce dumb down society to make it easier to manipulate people to act — and vote — against their best interests. It could be a hard sell, sometimes. “When you tried to explain to the very people whose sons were dying in Vietnam how they were being exploited by the military industrial complex, they didn’t appreciate that.”
Produced by Brian Eno, Devo’s 1978 debut Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo! was hailed as a masterpiece. Devo had been making music videos since the beginning, and when MTV debuted in 1981, Devo quickly found itself adopted by the fledgling network, which was desperate for anything to air. Suddenly, the video for their sardonic corporate-speak parody “Whip It” was everywhere. Platinum success was fun, if weird at times.
“There was a lot of silent smirking and eye rolling because you’d have these guys that had been so anti-Devo in their thinking, these fuckers with their short hair and their little collared shirts,” he says, “and now they’re like coming to these record release parties wearing yellow suits.”
It was a thrill while it lasted. “With Reagan and the culture doing a really about-face right turn and the Evangelical thing, that really was a kill shot for Devo,” he says. “But also, we stopped making our best music.”
After their initial five-album run, Devo began infighting, Warner Records began pressuring them for more hits, and their drug use escalated. (Casale says he quit using cocaine in 1993). “Devo was an art collective, and the collaboration factor was high. We practiced in the rehearsal room maybe six, eight hours a day.” On later albums, Mothersbaugh began relying heavily on the Fairlight CMI, an early sampler, and the rest of the members were sidelined. “Mark was no longer apparently interested in collaboration. And guess what? The record company hated it, and the people hated it.”
Following the release of 1990’s widely panned Smooth Noodle Maps, they broke up. Mothersbaugh went on to become a prolific and acclaimed film composer, scoring movies like The Royal Tenenbaums, and Casale became a prolific director for TV commercials and music videos.
As is often the case with forward-thinking artists, the culture eventually caught up with Devo. Nirvana, Soundgarden, and Rage Against the Machine saluted them with covers. Eventually, Devo “relented” and began playing shows again, including spots on the original ’90s Lollapalooza. Something for Everybody, a well-received album of new material, was released in 2010, and ever since Devo have been busy with touring and reissues.
“It’s frustrating because Devo, to me, was big. And then it was made small,” he says.
But now, it’s getting big again, right near the end.
“I like the fact that despite all the dysfunction suffocating Devo, it didn’t work. We’re playing to bigger crowds than we ever did since the ’80s. Kids discovered us on the internet. We’re relevant because of the toxicity and malignancy of this culture.”
He insists he doesn’t feel cynical. “The fact that I like satire and irony, maybe that comes from being hurt. But I still care about corny things, like justice.”
Exene Cervenka of X onstage at Park West, Chicago, Illinois, July 21, 1982. (Photo by Paul Natkin via Getty Images)
It’s 1980, and Exene Cervenka is drunk, as is the rest of her band X. Drunk on gleeful insouciance, and drunk on the certainty that the world, or at least a discerning slice of it, will soon discover that she’s in the greatest American punk group since Joey Ramone laced up his Converses.
And booze. She’s also drunk on booze. As documented in Penelope Spheeris’ essential documentary The Decline of Western Civilization, X are partying in a small apartment, having a blast. They always did, except for when they didn’t, which was pretty often as well.
X has had its ups and downs since their attention-getting 1980 debut Los Angeles. For the first half of that decade, they were one of rock’s fiercest chroniclers of the desperation and queasy hope of those who lived on the outskirts of Hollywood and America, the runaways and destitute souls whose stories otherwise went untold. And they’re still having a great time. Mostly.
“We’ve been doing it for almost 50 years. And we can’t believe we’re still the surviving punk LA band,” she says, today. “Nobody died, miraculously. How is it even possible that we’re doing this?”
But she’s not sure how much longer they can keep doing it. X recently embarked on what they say is their last-ever tour. “We call it The End is Near because we do know we’re getting to that point. We don’t know exactly when that point is. Just like we never knew anything in the past.” While they may sometimes do one-off shows, “we are not doing the tours anymore. I cannot stress that enough.”
The window of time in which X can still play live isn’t closed, but not as wide open as it used to be. “It’s been really great, we’ve been having the best time of our lives. I’m a much better singer than I ever was,” she says. “But eventually you go, ‘I don’t want to do this anymore. This is physically really hard.’”
Born Christene Cervenka, she grew up in rural Illinois “on a gravel road,” and eventually her family moved to Florida. “I was a weirdo. I dressed in vintage clothes and I made art and listened to weird music and got all my records at thrift stores.”
At the age of 20, she sold her car and moved to Los Angeles. “I had nowhere else to go,” she remembers. Before long, she met her future bandmate (and eventual ex-husband), vocalist-bassist John Doe (née Duchac) and guitarist Billy Zoom (née Stuart Kindell). Drummer D. J. Bonebrake joined later.
When she first began attending rehearsals, Zoom treated her like “this chick singer who’s my bassist’s girlfriend who can’t even sing,” she says, “And then we played our first show, he was like, ‘oh, okay, I get it.’ He recognized, sometimes, you’ve got to have that It Person.
“They could hold down the music, and all I had to do was write songs and be me.”
From left: John Doe, Exene Cervenka, Donald Bonebreak and Billy Zoom of X backstage at Berkeley Square in 1979 in Berkeley, California. (Photo by Richard McCaffrey/Michael Ochs Archive via Getty Images)
Los Angeles was recorded with Ray Manzarek, keyboard player for The Doors, a childhood favorite of Exene. “We got all the accolades, and we broke through the stereotype of punk,” she says. “It’s a merger of all kinds of stuff, Rockabilly, The Doors, poetry weirdness, and we’re not going to apologize for it.”
The album turned them into an underground favorite. “We did everything word of mouth for the first ten years. It was college radio, which was amazing. And there were all the cool fanzines and magazines like Boston Rock and Slash. We had a very, very strong network nationwide, worldwide, long before the internet,” she says, but a family tragedy made it impossible for her to enjoy the success.
“My sister died. We played our very first big show at The Whiskey, and we played two shows that night, and she didn’t show up. And then right between the two shows, I found out she’d been killed on the way there,” she says.
She pauses a moment and collects herself.
“I guess I have to keep living,” she remembers thinking, adding that her mother had died young, “and it was really, really, really hard. And I didn’t get any support or help. I didn’t have a therapist. I just toughed it out like all the other kids. And that’s part of the punk rock thing — you just get in the van, and you just keep playing.”
Shortly after, her friend Darby Crash of the Germs died of an overdose, and John Lennon was murdered. “It was just like everywhere we went, it was just death, death, death, death. You’re all jazzed up for all this stuff to be happening in your life, and then you’re just hit with all this too young,” she says.
X pushed on and released four strong albums in rapid succession. But the nonstop pace took its toll, and at their label’s request, they worked with heavy-metal producer Michael Wagener on 1985’s album Ain’t Love Grand!, which alienated fans and didn’t break through to the mainstream. Cervenka and Doe divorced, Zoom left the band, but they soldiered on for a few more poorly received albums.
“Maybe we were scared to stop,” she says. “John and I kept singing together, and we didn’t care if we didn’t even speak to each other half the time. That was really healing to keep working together.”
In the early ’90s, she began releasing poetry collections and making mixed media collages. She remarried, had a child, and started a solo career. She took a break from music for a time, but ultimately realized “I’m Exene from X. I don’t even think about it,” she says. Eventually, the original lineup, including Zoom, reunited in 1998, and have been intermittently touring since.
She’s delighted that X was able to make two final albums, 2020’s Alphabetland and 2024’s Smoke & Fiction. “I’m really glad we made those two records because they’re definitely my favorites,” she says. “Life is a culmination of everything you’ve ever done, thought, said, felt or has happened to you.”
X, Devo and their ilk might not be around much longer, but the underground world they helped create isn’t going away, and she’s thrilled to see multiple generations of fans at her shows.
“Bands like us create a space for people to find each other and to interact, and to find what they need in life to go forward and be stronger people and more artistic people. That’s the legacy.”