Devo Gets Scalped On Career Retrospective

05/17/2000 1:00 PM, Yahoo! Music
Craig Rosen

(5/17/00, 1 p.m. ET) - New Wave heroes Devo return to the record bins this week, by way of the two-CD, 50-track career retrospective, Pioneers Who Got Scalped. The collection, from Rhino Records, contains such '80s hits as "Whip It" and "Freedom Of Choice," along with the band's extraordinary covers of such rock classics as the Rolling Stones' "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" and Johnny Rivers' "Secret Agent Man."

Devo's Jerry Casale tells LAUNCH that the album title -- Pioneers Who Got Scalped -- speaks the truth when it comes to the rise and fall of the band. "Tells the truth, sums it up, Pioneers Who Got Scalped," he said. "It was inevitable, I guess. In other words, you can only do as good as you can as long as you can when you're trying to maintain some kind of focus and force in the marketplace and have a voice. There's just all these things working against you. All the bad stories you hear about the record business are true."

Meanwhile, Devo will be present this evening (May 17) at Tower Records in Los Angeles as part of the Rhino Music Aptitude Test, or RMAT. The event, also taking place tonight at stores in Chicago, Philadelphia, Seattle, and Nashville, and at rhino.com, aims to crown a Geekus Musicus Maximus via a 305-question standardized test covering music trivia in all genres but classical. A winner will be proclaimed for each city and for the web.

-- Neal Weiss and Craig Rosen, Los Angeles

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