Alan Myers

"This lone video artifact offers indisputable evidence that in 1980 Devo had reached a turning point. We were no longer just art monsters, we were mainstream performers too. " - Gerald V. Casale (from the back of the DVD case) August 17, 1980 Phoenix Theater, Petaluma

Now, the complete truth can be told...Devo, the seminal New Wave audio-visual concept band made a career out of setting to music video their Dada-gone-camp theory of de-evolution and its riotous rebuke of corporate culture. Punk/New Wave mad scientists Devo were among the few bands to understand the music video's potential as art form during its infancy in the eighties. Their brilliant and bizarre videos were compiled on VHS and then on laser disc; that long out-of-print disc, The Complete Truth About De-Evolution, has finally arrived on DVD, which should please longtime fans of this eclectic outfit.

Like The Men Who Make the Music, We're All Devo! has a storyline to tie the videos together. In it, the character of Rod Rooter (Michael W Schwartz) is reviewing Devo's music videos for Big Entertainment. Much to his chagrin, his daughter Donut Rooter (Laraine Newman) is a fan of the band. Donut discovers the videos after asking her father for money to get an abortion (though this is not explicitly stated). Two excerpts from the storyline were included in the "Complete Truth About De-Evolution" laserdisc and DVD (both out of sequence) but the rest is exclusive to this videocassette. "Theme from Doctor Detroit" was also not included, and is unique to this tape. (Wikipedia)

The new owner of a roadside diner stuck in a town built around an always leaking nuclear power plant plans to torch the place to collect insurance. However, an assortment of bizarre characters and weird events (such as spaceships flying around) gets in his way.

Part concert film, music video collection, and propaganda piece, The Men Who Make the Music was DEVO's first home video release. Features live footage from the band's 1978 "Duty Now for the Future" tour.

A failing television station is bought out by a slick TV evangelist and starts making mountains of money in the guise of religious programming, which is actually just an excuse to sell merchandise.

Not to be confused with the longform video of the same name first released in 1981, this earlier film was filmed as a prototype for that later piece and features DEVO in greyish-blue janitor uniforms. It includes songs such as Huboon Stomp, The Words Get Stuck In My Throat and Too Much Paranoias.