“It was unbelievable”: When Devo dismantled The Rolling Stones in front of Mick Jagger
Once heralded by David Bowie as “the band of the future”, one of Devo‘s purest moments was looking back to the past as Mark Mothersbaugh, Gerald Casale and their robotic new wave vision was applied to The Rolling Stones.
Keith Richards would, undoubtedly, never wear an energy dome hat, or even a yellow jumpsuit for that matter, although the get-up he sports on the cover of Dirty Work is garish enough to take out a weak retina, but Mick Jagger was always a bit keener on experimentalism.
“What somebody else was doing was far more interesting to him than what he was doing,” Richards reflected on his Rolling Stones peer when the quirks of the ‘70s began to capture his attention. “He even began to act as if he wanted to be someone else.” If he was beginning to fear that Jagger was losing sight of his “natural rhythm”, then things were about to get a lot worse for the irked guitarist when his pouting frontman attended a Devo gig.
Jagger stationed himself in the crowd with no small degree of admiration, and the feeling from Devo was surprisingly mutual. Tom Petty once said that the opening lyric to ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’ was “a great moment in rock history. Just the phrase is worth a million bucks.” And Mothersbaugh seemingly agreed.
While Mothersbaugh might have been critical of some of the ‘so-called’ classic rock that was arising in his era, he certainly didn’t classify the Stones as being of that ilk. “I feel like Mick Jagger is one of the underrated lyricists of his generation. ‘Satisfaction has some of the best ever lyrics written for rock ‘n’ roll,” he told Kory Grow. “There are so many other great things about the Rolling Stones that perhaps people don’t give him enough credit.”
With ferocity, angst, and a stunning central riff, ‘Satisfaction’ irrevocably changed the 1960s. A decade on, Devo looked to change ‘Satisfaction’, in turn. Their new wave cover version was originally self-released as a single in 1977 on their own DIY label Booji Boy Records.
A long 12 years on from The Rolling Stones’ original, Devo dismantled the old edifice of an era. It saw the dome-hatted group lay out their foundations for a new style of rock ‘n’ roll. The track then got an extra flourish when it was mixed by Brian Eno as part of their debut album.
Ripples of success soon saw Warner Bros Records take a chance on the band and sign them up. The issue was, their breakthrough cover song now needed to have a little extra big label vetting and security measures were quickly put in place. In short, they wanted Mick Jagger’s approval on the track.
A somewhat tense meeting was put in place. Devo founder Gerald Casale recalled this fraught affair in coversation with The New Yorker. Jagger had been summoned to a Manhattan office by Devo’s new manager, Peter Rudge. His mission was to play Jagger the song, with the band present, get his approval, and re-release the cover as a launchpad single.
“He was just looking down at the floor, swirling his glass of red wine,” Casale recalls of Jagger’s reaction. “He didn’t even have shoes on, just socks and some velour pants. I don’t know what his habits were then, but this was early afternoon, and it looked like he had just gotten up.”
The trepidation the band must have felt when playing their version was excruciatingly paralysing. As one of the world’s most prominent rock stars dissected a cover that barely resembled his iconic hit, the scenery of the day must have felt overwhelming. Add into that mix that Devo cite Jagger and The Rolling Stones as major influences and there’s a chance for a complete meltdown. But the duo held on.
After all, while their cover might have entirely dismantled ‘Satisfaction’, the aim was to illuminate some of the depth that might have been lost when the growling single became a ubiquitous radio classic. Mothersbaugh hailed it for “dealing with conspicuous consumption and the stupidity of capitalism and sexual frustration all in one song.”
His appraisal continues, “It pretty much encapsulated what was going on with kids at that time, much more than any of the hippie songs, as far as I was concerned.” The truths that the Stones had touched upon still rang true in the ‘70s (as they do today). That’s what attracted Devo to the song in the first place. But they weren’t labelled the future of rock ‘n’ roll for nothing, and they fittingly reconstructed it into a machine-led modulated version.
But this felt decisively modern in ‘78, and this cover was the furthest anyone would’ve dared take the track. Let alone have the gall to play it back to him. It was akin to completely redecorating the house you just bought and then inviting the old owners around for a dinner party.
So as the band sat down in silence across from a velour-attired Mick Jagger, they let their cover play out across the stereo. A weary Jagger suddenly “stood up and started dancing around on this Afghan rug in front of the fireplace, the sort of rooster-man dance he used to do.”
This felt like a good sign. He began yelling, “I like it,” over and over. “Mark and I lit up,” Casale recalls, “big smiles on our faces, like in Wayne’s World: ‘We’re not worthy!’ To see your icon that you grew up admiring, that you had seen in concert, dancing around like Mick Jagger being Mick Jagger. It was unbelievable.”
While it is easy to imagine the overwhelming incident from Devo’s surreal perspective, while the moment was life-changing for them in that they got the approval of this idol in every sense, for Jagger it was possibly pivotal, too. While the band had worried that their brick-by-brick deconstruction of the track might have been deemed a slight, in truth, Jagger self-evidently found the reinvention invigorating.
It was, at this stage, a 13-year-old track. The rise of capitalist realism made its wearying realisation of elusive satisfaction all the more eluciated, prompting ‘60s idealism to mutate into ‘70s cynicism, and therefore, a total reinvention of the same message was the appropriate route for a cover version to take. While it would be another seven years before Jagger would finally take a shot at a solo project, maybe being wowed by Devo’s reinvention gave him the courage to do so.
After all, he was dancing around like a “rooster-man”, and that’s not nothing.
