to sex with his teenage girlfriend back in Akron. “I just had to wait for Neil’s album
to be over,” he says.
Fast-forward to 1978, and Devo is acting in Human Highway at the request of
Young. “When Toni Basil brought Neil to our show, I did not think he was going
to like us,” says Casale. “But he loved it, and he told us about this film he was
starting.” It wasn’t long until the budding director had won over the skeptical
Mothersbaugh as well.
“Here he was making an art film, at the same time being interested in the Sex
Pistols and all that,” says Mothersbaugh. “I was a smartass young punk and didn’t
appreciate how amazing he was until we started that film.”
Young would direct Devo as several different characters that he eventually scrapped
before having a vision of the band as nuclear waste workers, with Mothersbaugh
singing a Kingston Trio parody—snippets of which were filmed by Casale, by then
a trusted member of Young’s team. “I was like a kid in a candy store, directing this
one segment where we play disgruntled nuclear waste workers unloading this truck
full of leaky barrels while driving through the countryside,” says Casale. “One of
the barrels came out of the back and took out Neil’s [then-] wife [Pegi Young], who
was on the back of a motorcycle. Of course, it was Booji Boy who did the pushing.”
Booji Boy (pronounced “Boogie Boy”) was a Mothersbaugh creation of the time, an
odd man-baby played by the singer who sang in a screeching voice and appeared
in Human Highway wearing an undersized Devo t-shirt, tight underwear, and a
frightening fat-kid mask with Mothersbaugh’s glasses on its face. “Neil wanted us
to be in this nightmare sequence where his limo stops at a tan adobe in Taos but
opens up to this punk club in San Francisco where we’re singing ‘Hey Hey, My
My,’” says Mothersbaugh, still incredulous with the memory. “And Neil’s nerdyDevo itself originally had mixed feelings about Young. Casale, a one-time-student at
turned-heroic character starts jamming with us. I didn’t want to sing the whole
Kent State University (as was Mothersbaugh) who witnessed the killing of two of his
‘Johnny Rotten’ line—the Sex Pistols had just broken up before this—so I sang
friends during the horrific campus shooting on May 4, 1970, thought of Young quite
‘Johnny Spud’ and changed several more of Neil’s lyrics. The whole script was like
poetically. “I may have skewed more to conceptual artists like Captain Beefheart as
that. Neil just went with it; nothing was pre-planned. ”
a teen, but Young’s songs were compelling and his minimalist guitar work appealed
to me,” says Casale. “After that massacre, with the whole place roped off like a crime
Devo had gone from cynical and curious about the squeaky-voiced folkie behind
scene, I was lying in my apartment—on Valium, after my girlfriend left—listening to
“Heart of Gold” to utterly impressed with the fearless auteur. In fact, the band
After the Gold Rush.” Combine that with Young’s rush to release the blistering, Kent-
indirectly contributed to a future Shakey picture when the direct