The groundbreaking rock band Devo would never have been formed if it weren’t for the May 4, 1970, shootings by National Guardsmen at Kent State University.
Gerald “Jerry” Casale, co-founder of Devo and a Ravenna native, was a KSU student at the time and was among the thousands of students protesting the Vietnam War that day.
He was with a group looking up a hill at the Guard members as they fired at protesters further back.
The shots went over Casale’s head, but the horrific moment changed him. It also led to the founding of Devo, which Casale calls “an artistic reaction” to the shootings.
“I often say that Devo wouldn’t exist without that event,” Casale said in a phone interview from his California home.
Four students were killed by the Guard members, and Casale was a friend of two of them: freshmen Allison Krause and Jeffrey Miller. Casale, who was a senior, had gotten to know them through his campus job as a counselor for incoming students.
“That day changed me fundamentally,” he said. “I think I had a nervous breakdown that day, although nobody talked about that then.”
One thing is certain: His point of view changed forever, in an instant.
“Until that point, I was kind of a mainstream liberal student, a Mr. Nice Guy,” Casale continued. “I thought that America was basically great except for some bad apples, but it could be fixed. I probably believed the whitewashed history of America being the land of the free, with equal rights and opportunity for everyone. That was eroding as I learned more. But May 4 was the dividing line.”
John Zabrucky, a fellow KSU student, was also on campus when the shootings occurred. The Warren native and Casale were friends and artistic collaborators at the time and have remained so throughout their lives.
After graduating, Zabrucky would move to Los Angeles and launch a company that made props for major science fiction movies, including “Star Trek” and “Star Wars.” He recently donated 500 props to the Trumbull County Historical Society, which is creating a museum for them.
An exhibition of props made by Zabrucky’s Modern Props Co. is currently on display at the Medici Museum of Art in Howland.
On May 4, Casale and Zabrucky will reunite at the Medici for a public conversation about the Kent shootings, their careers and their enduring friendship. Tickets for the 7 p.m. event are $30 at TrumbullCountyHistory.org (VIP tickets, which include preferred seating, a meet and greet with Casale and Zabrucky and a professional photo with both, are $100).
“We will reminisce and put things in context,” Casale said.
Zabrucky was not as politically active as Casale was when they were both students, and he was not in the thick of the May 4 protests. But an incident shortly before the shootings that day is forever burned into his memory.
“I was walking between the student center and the library on campus and had no idea that there was a problem,” Zabrucky recalled in a phone interview. “I saw a kid who was pretty skinny – he must have been 110 pounds – and he was carrying as many books as you can imagine a kid that size carrying. He was having a hard time and was obviously crying. I walked over to him and asked if I could help. And he said, ‘I was just at the library, and a National Guardsman came up to me and said I wasn’t supposed to be in the library and hit me in my arm with his rifle butt.’ That’s just a small taste. But it was the first thing I saw on May 4 that led me to believe that something was up.”
Discussing De-evolution
In the days after the shootings, Casale and his friends tried to make sense of it.
But the story that emerged on news programs in the aftermath did not jibe with the firsthand knowledge they had.
“We realized that, OK, things don’t work based on truth or justice,” Casale said. “You watched as all the wrong things took control. You watched as students got shot and then blamed for it. The population thought, ‘They should have killed more of them.’ You see who gets to write the accounts. It was like an episode of ‘Black Mirror.’ This is what’s being disseminated, but it’s not what happened at all.”
Casale, like many students, could feel his identity being stripped away and his self-expression being crushed.
“Some students who were politically active unfortunately went militant,” he recalled. “That path leads to getting killed or jailed. It wasn’t a creative response to the new world we found ourselves in.”
Casale responded by trying to make sense of things instead of getting angry.
“[The shootings] started discussions with Zabrucky and other colleagues, and they led to this word – de-evolution,” he recalled. “It was the overriding term that I put on what we were talking about, the umbrella for watching what we thought was a regression of human society, where we thought people were not basing their action on information or objectivity at all. It was completely tribal, repeating slogans and propaganda. Not being analytical or logical. That’s what we were seeing. People going backward, not progress. We saw regression and things falling apart.”
De-evolution became the label Casale put on it, and it informed his reaction to it.
“It started me in making visual art that I thought was de-evolutionary,” he said. “Bob Lewis [a fellow KSU student who would become an original member of Devo] was writing poems that were de-evolutionary. I thought, ‘Hey, what would de-evolutionary music sound like?’”
Casale shared his thoughts with fellow student Mark Mothersbaugh. “It resonated with him,” he recalled. “We decided to make de-evolutionary music.”
Devo was born.
The band played Kent clubs like JB’s and The Cove. By 1976, Devo had built a fan base in Akron.
The band went to New York in 1977 for shows at landmark clubs CBGB’s and Max’s Kansas City. Shortly after, Devo exploded nationwide. “It took on a life of its own,” Casale said.
The band was signed to Warner Bros. Records and released its first album, “Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo,” in 1978.
The band’s 1980 album “Freedom of Choice” spawned the megahit “Whip It.”
Casale credits Zabrucky with helping the band get signed to a record label. Zabrucky, who was living in LA, urged the band to send him some demo tapes, which he delivered to a friend in the music industry. That landed Devo a showcase concert for industry reps, which led to being signed by Warner Bros.
The band was wildly popular in the early 1980s, even though few fans knew – or cared – about the sociopolitical statement it was making. Fans simply found the rapid, robotic music irresistible.
Casale has always been OK with it, noting that many bands have similar stories.
“People really aren’t interested in what drives a band’s creativity,” he said. “What they find in the music has nothing to do with what you put into it.”
As an example, he cites an interview Bob Dylan gave in his 1960s heyday.
“After ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ became a hit, someone said to him, ‘You realize people don’t understand [the message] you are trying to tell them,’ and Dylan replied, ‘I’m glad, because if they did, it wouldn’t have been a hit.’”
Zabrucky said he remains amazed at what Casale accomplished.
“It’s not like everybody at a university starts an art movement,” he said. “I was always blown away by that – and the fact that it got so little coverage for what it was, which was something fairly mindblowing.”
Starting Place
Devo’s beginnings in a small college town far from New York or LA was critical to the band’s success.
“I don’t think Devo could have come from a major metro area art enclave,” Casale said. “It worked only because we were surrounded by anti-intellectualism, right wing anger, fundamentalist televangelism. That’s what that area was about. We were isolated and we were laughed at. And [the band] grew because we had a do-it-yourself aesthetic.
“There were no hipsters coming to see us. But that allowed it to gestate, so that by the time anyone did see us, we were fully formed and secure enough to not be talked out of it. We were committed. We knew it was polarizing, but that was OK with us.”
Casale said if the band had moved to the East or West Coast before it could develop, it would’ve been suffocated as soon as it started.
“If we started in Los Angeles or New York, the press would have been all over it from the beginning,” he said. “They would have decided what we were and then tossed us away. We wouldn’t have lasted more than a year.”
Despite its location, Kent was a national center of modern art and activism in the late ’60s and ’70s.
“It sounds apocryphal now, but at that point in time, Kent was a flashpoint, a hub,” Casale said. “Outside of the action in New York and the West Coast, at Columbia and Berkeley, there was nothing in between except Kent State.”
Thinkers, philosophers, poets, artists, musicians and filmmakers converged on the college town in Portage County.
“We saw everything,” Casale recalled. “The place was amazing. Nothing that was going on on either coast was beyond what was going on at Kent. And that’s why I have a double-edged feeling about Ohio. I have said Ohio is a great place – if you can get out of there. But it formed who we were, and there is so much about it that is great.”
The band moved to LA in 1978, and Casale renewed his friendship with Zabrucky, whose career was also taking off.
“John had already started Modern Props, working out of a garage,” Casale recalled. It wasn’t long before the company would move to a larger space.
The two teamed up to create the “Whip It” music video and others.
“We’ve always had this robust creative relationship,” Casale said of Zabrucky. “We were simpatico. John is singular and amazing as an artist and a designer.”
Zabrucky altered some of his props for use in Devo videos. Several can be spotted in the 1984 video for “Are You Experienced.”
He also created a device that allowed Casale to perform while he recovered from a back injury.
“When I ruptured a disc in my back and was basically paralyzed [in an upright position] with braces, he created something where I could be wheeled on stage standing up,” Casale said. “I was held in place by these metal braces that came from the back of the unit. They went around my hips and allowed me to play bass and sing. A microphone was on an accordion-like bracket that came out from behind, and there were flashing lights on it. People liked it better than when I just played normal!”
Present and Future
Devo has enjoyed a recent resurgence of interest from fans and the rock media.
The 2024 documentary “Devo” by filmmaker Chris Smith earned accolades and added fuel to the fire. The band will embark on a 22-city U.S. tour next month that includes a May 11 show at Masonic Temple in Cleveland. The current lineup is founding members Casale, Mark Mothersbaugh and his brother, Bob Mothersbaugh, with Jeff Friedl and Josh Hager.
Devo was nominated for the Cleveland-based Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2018, 2021 and 2022, but has yet to get enough votes. It remains eligible, however, and Casale believes its chances are improving.
“The criteria are supposed to be originality and lasting contribution to pop and rock,” he said. “We check all the boxes. The real reason [why the band has never gotten enough votes] is political, I think. We made Jann Wenner (the founder of Rolling Stone magazine and co-founder of the Rock Hall) very mad when we covered ‘Satisfaction.’ He decided with one listen that we had made fun of his rock gods, The Rolling Stones, whom he named his publication after. He was vastly powered and is vindictive, and that has been corroborated. Through the grapevine, we heard it was him. He controlled the Rock Hall board. Every time we were nominated, he made sure it got shut down. But he is gone, and we are hoping that animus will be over.”
Wenner was removed from the Rock Hall board of directors in 2023 after he made comments about Black and female artists that were perceived as denigrating.
John Sykes, an executive with iHeart Media and a co-founder of MTV, is the new chairman of the Rock Hall. Casale said Devo had a good relationship with MTV during its heyday. Many of its videos aired on the channel.
“We are still eligible to be nominated, and I know people like Dave Grohl are advocating for us,” Casale said. “We’ll see what happens.”
Pictured at top: Gerald V. Casale. (Photo by Jeff Winner).