Mark Mothersbaugh

It's it's like I would go to a record store and i would go past the Elvis Presley and the Frank Sinatra stand up cutouts, and I'd work my way back to the rock section, and then I'd go to a cardboard box that said other stuff, and then I'd go in there and I'd find capt'n beef Heart and Wildman Fisher and things like that. And now kids on their cell phone, they have so much power and they have the ability to find out so many things so

instantaneously and easy. It's it's it's impressive. It's it's like we've been playing shows this year. I'm probably the documentary had a lot to do with it. We've been playing shows where instead of just being a bunch of people my age that were slightly younger that were at the shows in the past, there was like a lot of kids there, there's been a lot of kids at our show and surprisingly they're singing along. So it's like, you know, leave it to the Internet to help out on some things.

And you know, i'd be I'd go I'd hear something on the radio where a DJ would say, Okay, tomorrow, I'm going to play you. There's a band called led Zeppelin, and I'm going to play their whole album NonStop with no commercials at eight o'clock tomorrow night, and you'd listen to the whole album and you'd hear this productions level that had never been reached before. And you know you had to depend upon them, you know, you depended upon DJs.

this one industry. And you know, there were you know, one of the things that were good about being an Akron is that we were insulated, and we were in a you know, we were in a basement, an actor and writing music together to entertain ourselves. And and you know, like if you were a band in New York at the same time in the the mid or late seventies. Uh, you know, you'd you'd go, Okay, I saw the drummer left Talking Heads, and now he's playing with Blondie or whatever.

You know, you'd watch these bands develop. And by being an acron that whole length of time, we had a chance to marinate and to to kind of fully form before we ended up, you know, driving to New York and and uh performing.

food for the kids. And so because coal mines weren't doing anything, so they they all ended up in So both families ended up in in Akron working for the rubber industry, working at Firestone and Goodyear, and I was living in I was you know, I was around those kind of that kind of lifestyle.

kids know the right answer to that? And then at the end of my second year of school, I was just turned eight, I think, and and it was almost second grade was almost over. She was, she said to my parents. She saw me trying to read a book from about six inches away, and she asked my parents if they ever had my eyes checked, and they said no,

and they found out I was legally blind. And I remember a day where I went came out of an optometrist office and I looked around me and I saw clouds and I saw birds, and I saw the sun for the first time of my life. I'd never seen telephone wires. I'd never seen the roof of a house except in pictures and books, and it was astounding. I saw trees, and I recognized them from books because I had only ever seen them in books or in photos. I'd never seen them in real life. And it was

like this amazing experience. And it was my very last week of second grade, and my teacher was standing behind me, and I was drawing a tree because I was so excited about having seen them for the first time, and she said, you draw trees better than me, And it was the first nice thing that that teacher had ever said to me. She'd, you know, corporal punishment was like accepted back in those days, so she'd paddled me a number of times in front of the other students and

things for being a smart ass. But I just I was legally blind, and and I getting glasses was this amazing thing, but it affected the trajectory of my life through school. I was the littlest kid in my class, and I had a big head and a tiny body, and I had glasses that looked like pop bottles, you know, on the bottom the lenses were like pop bottles glasses, So it was like a cartoon character. And I don't know.

I pretty much fought with everybody between you know, first grade and twelfth grade, and.

And then it was my sister Sue, who as soon as she got out of school, she was like, I'm getting out of here and she went to UH, I think Arizona to become a uh she a park ranger, and she just she was she she really loved nature and UH and went there. And then my youngest sister stayed in Ohio and she's an artist and we talk at at different times. I see Bob almost daily. And then everybody else I see less often because they're in different parts of the country.

seven years ago. And so school was yeah, school was something that that I was confused about and and you know, but I did love art and I loved drawing, and I really became obsessed with that, and it was kind of like my main love in life until I saw the Beatles on Ed Sullivan and then I was certain I was going to be in a band. I was absolutely certain. Like I guess, was it sixty four? Yeah, yeah,

So if it was before May, I was thirteen. If it was after May, I was fourteen, and from then on I was sure I was going to be in a band for the up until I got in a band.

hit by a car for two years. Uh So, so there was some of that, yeah, But but I also had stuff like my mom said, you know, when you were a barn, your head was so large, we were concerned that maybe you were a hydrocephalic child, and you know, so I had all those kind of of things to deal with, and then i'd probably my brothers and sisters were all smarter than me, if you want to, you know, I'm a If we all would have taken a test at the same time, they probably would have all scored higher than me.

most optimistic people I knew. And and so when I said I wanted to be a musician, he was like, well, okay, you know he's thinking, he's thinking, does that mean you'll be living in the apartment above the Roger? You know, what does that? What does that mean if you're in a band. But they were they were supportive of it.

in it anyhow. But also my vision and you know, it's like when you if you imagine, you know, you're looking into a doorknob and somebody throws up a football at you throw fifty feet away and it starts off tiny, it gets big and then it gets gigantic? Is it is it when it's about two feet away from you? So it was the whole thing with the with the fish islands? I where was made sports? Kind of like something that I never became participant in really?

you know, tiny. It was like five acres or five and a half acres, but had a little stable, just big enough to hold a couple of horses, and had an orchard, and he grew some stuff there because he kind of had a romantic notion about farming and farms and getting out of the city. So I went to a whole new school system for high school, and it just started off wrong. I said something to somebody and they punched me, and then I became the kick me guy, the guy with the sign okay.

the next room. I'd be in I think we had this little small Hammond organ in the dining room. And then right now I was right between the kitchen and the living room, and I remember trying to get my parents. They'd all be sitting there trying to watch the TV in the next room, and Missus Fox would be singing while I played, and she sang really out of tune. It was great, And so I'd played really slow and loud on purpose, so she'd even sing louder, and she'd

be like the falling le drift by my win. It was. It was awesome. I would I'd be watching in the other room and they'd all be huddling closer to the TV, and I was hoping that they would say you're done, But instead the Beatles came along and it and I went, That's why I've spent my whole life being tortured learning how to play music. And so I entered a new, a new direction.

interested in. But my dad, in World War Two, he was a radio tech mission and he came back to the house and he kept a little workshop down in the basement and he built stereo amplifiers and electronic things. He built drones. Believe it or not, he built drones and we'd take them out on the weekend and fly them and crash them and lose them. But he built h stereo and I remember he bought these stereophonic albums.

I think it was either Capital or RCA that put them out back in the day, and they'd had a hypodermic needle on the front of them because they were extra pumped up high fidelity and they were stereo, and they were actually kind of some of them were binaural. You know, binural was really popular when stereo first came out because it really separated, you know, like you could have a voice on one side of the room and the drums on the other side, and and people use

that a lot. I still listen back to, like, like, if you ever listened to the Revolver album. On the original recording of it, they used a lot of binural recordings, so so like paperback Writer, you can hear somebody going while they're up to it. You hear him going pay paper paperback, right, it's so awesome if you ever listened to Revolver, But don't do the remixes or the re releases because they corrected the binaural stereo, so don't listen

to that. But my dad would play. He'd set us on one side of the living room, all the kids, and then he'd put the speakers for the stereo on the far end of each corner of the room, and we'd listen to a train chugging going through the room, starting on one side, going to the other side of the room. And he loved all that stuff.

bucks back in those days. But we finally got one, and that's when I went out looking for people to be in a band with, and so it started off. I got in a band with these guys that were taking guitar lessons at this accordion shop, and that was the first band I was in. I forget what we called it. We might have called it Purple Haze, I don't know for sure, or the Shags or something. We just took a name that we heard already somewhere. I didn't even have anything to do with that.

our concept was we'd untuck our shirts. That was and I remember it because our bass player, halfway through the set of his parents showed up and he stopped playing bass in the song to tuck his shirt back in and then start playing it. Ah, you went disappointed, but that was so we did. There were very few places to play an Akron for for a band that was as much of a novus as us at first.

artworks I'd done. And so there was a program at Kent State back in the late sixties where if there were kids that were had some modicum of talent in some particular area, but they were like probably not going to go to college, they had a program where they could give you a fifty percent discount. And she signed me up for that and didn't even tell me, and

I got it. I got to I got a certificate them Kent and they put me on this fifty percent and I could so I could get a job at night and then during the day I went to school. And that was night and day different to go to college. First off, I was not like one in a class of ninety three kids that were that like all knew me as the weirdo I was, you know, at a school with like fifteen thousand kids or something at the time, and I loved it. I loved it. I could and

I was. I was, you know, there as an art student, and I didn't know what that even meant, to be honest with you, I wasn't sure what I was taking or why. I just was. I knew I was. I knew it meant I didn't have to go to Vietnam, and that that made me happy because I remember thinking about Vietnam and watching it on TV and going there's not a single Asian person I would ever want to shoot, you know, especially if it's just because they have a government I don't like, you know, It's like I couldn't

imagine doing that. And so going to Kent was a salvation. But I liked school for the first time. I loved school. And I found out about something called printmaking, and that was, you know, long before computers. You know, it was like super high tech, this thing where you could like have an idea for a piece of art and draw it and then put it on screens and then print it and do multiple copies of it. And I was really

fascinated with that. I loved printmaking, and so early on I found out that that like at three point thirty when the school bell rang, all the other kids would run off to their sorority houses and fraternity houses or wherever they lived, and they'd go to the bars or whatever, and they'd be done for the day. And that to me just span that the art department was totally empty, and I could go into the printmaking department and I

could burn a screen print a color. By the time I cleaned the screen and burned another screen, the first color was dry, I could print another color, and I could by three in the morning, I could have a finished piece of art. I didn't have to queue up every day and spend two weeks to do one piece of art. I could do a piece of art every single day. And so I got into doing this artwork at night at Kent, and I did things in a

smaller size because of my vision. The fish eye lens made it so it was really hard to do to hold on to perspective, like when I was drawing if it was a big piece of art, whereas if I did something smaller and card size, I could hold the perspective you know, with with my with my glasses, and so I was printing these small things and I was in the decals. I don't know, maybe some making uh, plastic models. When I was a kid, I liked putting the taking the decals and putting them on the planes

and the cars and the stuff. And and there was a someone who kind of saved my life in my

high school days was a guy named Guilardi. He was a TV personality who was on He was a weather man during the day at w e ws UH in Cleveland, but at night he had a TV show and he wore like a fright wig, and he had a pair of sunglasses with one lens, and he had a mustache and a goat tea, and he looked like a beatnick, and he talked like a beatnik, and he made up his own terminology, like he'd say things like cool with the boom booms and purple caniff and he had all

these phrases that he made up that if you were like a kid that didn't have a you know, a driver's license, because you're fourteen or fifteen and you're sitting at home by yourself on a winter day, you just turn him on and he played old B movies, C movies, and D movies. He played like the most funky, mostly black and white films. They probably were all black and white, I think. I don't think we had a color TV. And and he would sit on a stool in front

of a blue screen. And he must have got this from being a weather man, because he would do this thing where like halfway through like fifty Million Years BC or a movie like that, Gulardi would like jump onto the blue screen and he'd be in the movie with caveman that we're trying to pick, yeah, caveman trying to pick fruit off of a tree, or they be running from a lizard that had a horn glute on its head, you know that was giant and chasing them, and he'd

be running with them and he'd fall over right as the lizard got there, and stuff like that. And to me, that was like, how's he how's he allowed to do that? He's he's breaking the rules, he's busting through a wall. The fact that he was like that, he was like you know, like interacting and making fun of Hollywood movies blew my mind. And I just thought he was the coolest person that ever existed. And even up until I

met him for one brief second. They in high school, they did this thing that I would never have gone to, but it was called donkey basketball, where for charity, the TV station would send people from the TV you know, the newsman, the weather cast or blah blah blah. They'd all come down and they'd dride donkeys in your in your basketball court. And so so the teachers in your school would do the same thing, and they'd try to

play basketball on donkeys, which was really stupid. But the good part about it was that Gulardi came to my high school, the place I really dreaded to ever go, and he ever. I hated that high school. But I remember after the after the game, I was walking down the hallway to go to where my locker was and and get my jacket out, and I'm I'm the only one in the hallway, and then this guy comes out of the the men's locker room, the dressing room for you know, that's attached to the gym, and I go, oh,

my god, that's Gulardi. And he's walking towards me, and he's lit a cigarette and he's smoking it in the high school and I'm walking that way, and he's walking towards me and we get like about six feet away and I go Gulardi and he goes fuck you. And I remember I was like it was like I had goosebumps all over me. I went Glardi talk to me. I was like totally flipped out. I was like, Glardy talk to me. That was so incredible. I could not

believe it. But yeah, Ernie Anderson. He ended up coming out to California and becoming a voiceover and he made a lot of money doing that, doing commercials and voiceover stuff, and his son became a filmmaker. Why was I telling you that.

I'd be walking towards the parking lot where my car was and on the way, I just had to do something with these decals, and I start putting them up on like fire hydrants and stop signs, and sometimes on somebody's bumper and on lockers and on teacher's doors and stuff like that. I put these up, you know, like

something every day. And one day I think, I'm it's sixty nine and I'm now a sophomore, first quarter sophomore, and these two older guys walk into where I'm where, into the art class I'm in, and this one guy walks up to me and he goes, are you the guy putting up pictures of astronauts holding potatoes standing on the moon? And I go, yeah, what of it? And he goes, what did potatoes mean to you? And I

was like kind of shocked about it. And then we started talking and he had this whole theory about, well, potatoes are like you know, in the vegetable Kingdom, they're the they're the proletariats. You know, potatoes are asymmetric, and they're dirty and they lived underground and uh they uh, but they're a staple of everyone's diet. Everybody eats potatoes every day. They don't even think about it. They're eating French fries, mashed potatoes, whatever kind of potatoes. They're a staple of

your diet. They're important, but but they're you know, they're just they're not elegant or beautiful, like the asparagus or the eggplant or something. And he says, and also potatoes have eyes all around, so they see everything. And we started and we started talking, and then he had a he was a grad student and he was he was he had a project he was doing for his grad class and he said, how do you make those decals? I said, God, it's easy. I use lacquer inks and

blah blah blah and special paper that's water release. And he goes, could you make some for me? And I go, yeah, what do you want? He goes, I want some potato men? And so I made him potato man decals and for his senior graduation project, he took the decals and put them on photographs of people he didn't like them as

high school and that was his grad thesis picture. But it was Jerry Cassally and the thing that he said to me that was as important as all of that, as he said, you know, next quarter beginning of nineteen seventy, you should take this class. It's a conceptual art class. He goes, they've never had one kent before and it's important. It's going to be important, and I think you should sign up for that class. I go, I'm only as sophomore. I don't have the credentials. He goes, it doesn't matter.

This is the first year they're using computers to to assign kids classes. And you can just write in that you have all the pre records. It's just right you have them all, and then sign up for the class. So I did it, and I got signed up for

a grad student class. That was the spring quarter of nineteen seventy and I was in a conceptual art class with Jerry and Chuck Statler, who directed the first Devo film, and John Zabruckie, who came out to California and started Modern Props, which was one of the biggest prop companies out here. And it was interesting because after that I decided, well, I don't even care if I what do I care if I get a bachelor's degree aout, I'm never going to be a school teacher. I'd be terrible at that.

I don't even like schools, so I don't want to go back to high school. So I just started signing up for all the classes I wanted to take, and I and when I finally left Kent State, I think I had a bunch of important classes like tennis and other sports classes and art history that that I hadn't taken. So I didn't ever get to officially graduate as a

bachelor degree in art because of that. But I took a lot of classes that I wanted to take, and I made sure to take printmaking classes every quarter so I could continue doing what I really loved.

could I could play in them. And then you know, I got a job in one band that paid my way through college on my sophomore year. They played at a strip club, and so so I just had to show up at the strip club every night and play, you know, like Sly in the Family Stone and uh and Deep Purple or whatever they were going to be playing. And and I was still making music, but I wanted

to make my own music. Uh. When I was in school, I I I saw movies I'd never seen before, you know, like I saw things by Enio Morricone his music, and I just heard all these different artists that were experimental. And and I saw my first synthesizer when I was at Kent State, and I thought, I want to write music for the seventies. You know, I'm going to write I mean, you know that I was looking back at fifty.

I always wished I was born fifty years earlier. I wished I would have been a teenager in Europe during the twenties and early thirties, back back when Bauhaus and Surrealism and Dadaism and Futurism especially. I mean, although I didn't like their politics, their concepts about music were amazing. Remember you know, ballet mechanique and things like that. But but the Futurists, they were saying, the modern orchestra does not contain the instruments capable of making sounds to represent

industrial culture. And this is like in the twenties, and so they were they were using like fog horns and they would spin a bicycle wheel and and U you know, play it with a with a drumstick or something, and they were I love that idea of just saying goodbye to contemporary instruments and looking for something new, and technology had brought this synthesizer along. I saw this guy, Morton Sebotnik, came to Kent State and he played a show and I just stood there right next to him, mesmerized the

whole time watching him play. And I was like, how do I get one of those? And I thought it would never happen, you know, because I had no money. I mean, I remember at that time. I remember thinking, like cars, they're just a They're just, you know, a waste of money. I said, you know, I said, anybody that spends more than one hundred and fifty dollars on a car is a sucker. I said, you can get a car that can drive you anywhere for one hundred

and fifty bucks. And I remember saying that to my friend and he was like, well, but you don't have a rear window on the passenger side of your car. And I go well that's yeah, But I just I can cover that up with a piece of cardboard when it's raining, you know. And I said, the car's only one hundred and fifty bucks. I can drive everywhere. So I'd been in all these different bands, and I mean even one of the bands I was in during that time period was Chrissy Hein. It was the first band

she was ever in. She was singing and there was an older guy that was writing music and he wrote the songs and we played them and she sang and she was very shy, sullen, very sullen and very shy. And but we were in a band together before uh start a devo. Okay, So the drummer from that band that I was in with, Chrissy Hin he called me up one day. I was like a sophomore, or maybe I was a junior now, and he said, hey, Mark, how would you like to have a HAMM and B three.

I go, that's some possible. They cost fifteen hundred dollars. I don't have any money. He goes, how would you like to have your own synthesizer? I go, that could never happen. They don't even have I don't even know if there are any synthesizers in Ohio, you know, and he goes, I got introduced you to these guys. I just I just met these guys. They're Vietnam Vets and they went to Vietnam and I did. I came over. I met these guys. They wanted to start a band,

and but they were all sport guys. They were all football, basketball players, and they they you know, they they they they didn't wait to be drafted. They they joined up, you know, because they wanted, you know, they were they were they wanted to protect America from from communism, and so they went over to Vietnam. They did a lot of LSD and they killed people. And they came back and they were like, what just happened? What did we just do? And they weren't sure what they had what

that was all about. And uh, they said, well, let's start a band. But none of them could play an instrument. But they all were getting money from the government because they had all been in in uh you know, in the in the military, and they all had jobs. So they they were hiring people to be in a band that they would put together. And so this drummer, they gave him a house and a car and and me.

They said, well, you can move into the attic. So I moved into the attic at their at this house that they had in downtown Akron, kind of a really funky place. But we went to uh the Mogu, the original Mogue company in outside of Buffalo. It wasn't that far from Buffalo, New York. And we drove there and you know, we stopped and it was a farm with

a gigantic barn. And we went into the barn and there were these lofts that that looked there were these tiers of wooden racks that might have held farm here at one time, or bales of hay. And they had mini mogush. They had like maybe one hundred minimugs that were in process of being built by hand right there and in New York, in this little rural I mean to me, I thought I was in like an outer space,

you know, laboratory or something. When I saw this electronics and I saw this stuff, it was like it was like mind blowing. And we got a mini Mogue and we brought it back to Akron. Ohio.

makes music. And I kept listening to music, and I remember hearing the first Roxy album and I'd been playing with synthesizers for about about a year at this point, and it was all right. The lyrics were the best part of the album. I was thinking, you know, and then you know, songs like Inflatable Dolly and kind of interesting. It was like Bryan's kind of darkest, most arty album.

And then I got to this throwaway song called the Editions of You, and it was just like this song where they gave everybody a solo, like like like if you were a band playing at a nightclub or something. They gave everybody these extended solos in the middle of the song and I'm like, just listening to it. It's okay, it's and then all of a sudden, the synths started and this guy's playing a synthesizer, and it was like, definitely, it was like a moment where I went that that's it.

This guy, whoever this guy is, he knows how to make synth sounds that are unique and that haven't no one's ever heard him before, and he was playing it in a way that was unique and that no one had ever played it since before or played it because I mean there was people like Rick Wakeman and Emerson, you know that we're playing like they made They made like synthesizers sound like glorified organs or calliopes or something. They used really silly sounds with the since they didn't

really know what to do with them. And I heard the solo by Eno, Brian Eno in this song, and it was incredible and it totally helped me turn my world upside down into find a direction to how to look for sound and how to how to experiment with sense. And so right about the same time this is all happening, is right about the same time, there's you know, we're at Kent State. It's April in nineteen seventy May. And you know, I felt in Kent State, I felt empowered.

I felt like what I had to say made a difference. You know, there was a student union and people would go protest the war, or they would go protest different things going on in the world, and or they talk about them, you know, they talk about things. And I

thought what I had to say made a difference. And so when they started talking about the United States is now secretly invading Cambodia and we've got to stop that, We've got to send a message to Washington, d C. I joined in the protests, and so did my brother Bob, and so did Jerry, who I just kind of barely knew at the time, and we were you know, they shot kids at our school and killed them. They shot like thirty some kids got wounded, but four of them died.

And I remember after that, and they closed down the school. And I remember after that, I was saying, what maybe maybe when I I I think doesn't matter. Maybe you know, when they just get irritated with you enough, they just kill you, you know, And that's and protesting is a waste of time. And that's so Jerry and I we we got we had met and I was in that class. I was telling you about the conceptual art class at

the time. And it got uh it got stopped in the middle of the class, and they closed the school down for three months during the summer, and Jerry would come over to where uh my brother and I lived and play music with us, and we talked about what was going on in the world. And and you know, we had some other friends from Kent uh and I had these people I was working with that were, you know, Vietnam vets, and some of them, this one guy, Ed

Barger Uh was was working on sound with me. He was an engineer and and we we were creating sounds and looking for sounds and ways to make a synse sound. And you know, we're we're we're working on stuff in this little room, and we we kind of come to the decision that maybe, uh, revolt, you know, maybe you know, that's not the way to change things, you know, because if because the powers, when they just finally get irritated enough,

they can just mow you down. And but at the same time we were we wanted to talk about what was going on, and and we you know, because of our interest in graphics and design and things we we loved like sixties and seventies stuff. You know, Spencer's catalogs cracked me up. I loved the useless things that they sold in a Spencer Gift catalog, and but I love the artwork also, for the these little postcard shape things.

And at the time, you know, when I first went to Kent, when I was back in sixty eight, I found out about mail art and I started making art on postcard size because of my vision, and I was making it then, and so Spencer's Gifts. I would sometimes add images out of a Spencer's Gift catalog and then correct them, is what I'd call it, you know, when I added other artwork to it, and in the process we found different things. Jerry found a book with a

friend of his, Bob Lewis. They found this book at a at like a witchcraft store or something called The Truth about No The beginning was the end how man

came about through cannibalism. And it was a Yugoslavian anthropologist and you know, he was taking things that the maga of the the twenties and thirties, I mean of the thirties who were who were like, uh, you know, reacting to Darwin and they were like the you know, there was Christian groups back in the thirties that were like making fun of evolution and then they said, well, de evolutions more real, that's that's more likely, and it was like a joke, but it was like, you know, I

found a reverend B. F. Shaddock from Rogers, Ohio who had done all these pamphlets, and one of them was called Jockohomo, and they were basically saying the same. They were making fun of of science and making fun of of of you know, evolution, and they were like say, well, de evolutions really more likely and more possible. And I remember we were thinking something about we liked the idea of the evolution. To us, it seemed like what if you took it serious instead of just use it to

make you know. I mean, it was probably at the time it was like the equivalent of their eating the dogs and the cats, you know. And so we took this this idea and we said, we want to incorporate it into our art, whatever that is. And we weren't sure if it was music or maybe it was going to be like a cabaret because we were you know, we thought about all the cabarets that were going on in Europe at the time. But I mean in the

twenties and early thirties, we were thinking about that. I thought, wow, that wouldn't that be great if we did did like shows like that? And Jerry and I were both into that, and so was into it. He just wanted to play guitar mostly. But we uh, we started writing songs and my brother was helping me, like look for strange sounds, and we found this thing by Electra harmon X. It was a stomp box that only made ugly sounds. It was called a frequency analyzer. It was incredible. The fact

that they even made it and put it out. I'm still I'm still so happy for that because I used that to create so many of the DeVos sounds in the early days, things like the like the clown horns and Jockohan with the oh stuff like that, and I played it on. Jerry was writing these songs that were kind of like his songs were a little bit like the Thugs or something, but and I just put these ugly abstract sounds over top of it, and it gave it a whole nother feeling. It gave it a whole

nother impetus. And anyhow, so I was writing stuff like Jockohomo, and it was like in a timing where you couldn't answer to it. It was like, really, I was thinking of it. It was going to go on a stage. We'd be performing it in a in a theater somewhere and do a show with it. And Jerry was He said to Bob, I mean to Chuck Statler. He said something like, I don't know about Mark and what he's doing with sounds. It's kind of stuff's all kind of weird. I don't know, I don't know if this band's gonna

work or not. And so he he kind of was thinking about taking a he was thinking about maybe taking another path. I think he was gonna come out and work on the prop store with John zon Brookie. He was thinking about starting that company with him instead, and I said to him, I said, you can do whatever you want to do, but I'm doing a band and I'm gonna make sure that this happens no matter what.

And Chuck Statler had left Akron to go to Minneapolis and to make commercials and a year or so before or that, and he came over right about at that time period and he U this, this is like seventy four now, and he had a I think it was a popular electronics magazine and on the front of it it had like a like a young couple, a man and a woman, and they're smiling and they're like going like this. They're they're like going like that with their hands,

you know, like uh, like wow. And they had the silver disc in their hand that looked like it was the size of a of a LP but it but it was like a mirrored surface, silver mirrored surface. And it turns out they had something called a laser disc. And the magazine on the cover it said laser discs. Everyone will have him by Christmas. And you know, Chuck that to Jerry me and we're like that's what we're making music for laser discs. We're making art for laser discs.

That's what we thought we were gonna We thought that laser discs. We in our minds we imagined forty five's would now all be silver. They'd be the silver material and uh LPs would be the silver material. And not only would you get, you know, like forty minutes or more of music, you'd get visual image to go along with it. And Jerry and I said, that's us rock and rolls over. This is something new, this is something this is the next thing. This is you know, sound

and vision. And that's what we became interested in. But Jerry, but Chuck, he was worried that that Jerry was gonna quit the bat was gonna like gonna like stop working with me because of what I was doing with music. And and he said, hey, let's make a film. And so Chuck made up a move at seven and a half minute short film. It had two Devo songs in it, Jockohomo and then I wrote this song where I ended up taking thirteen words out of a Johnny Rivers song,

and so I called it Secret Agent Man. But I wrote all the music, all the lyrics, all the melody, everything except for those thirteen secret Agent man they've given you, they've given me a number taking away my name. And back in those days, that meant that Johnny Rivers owned the song. That's how they used to do it in the old days, if you had an influence like that. But he made this film and it came out really good, and we all collaborated on it. Everybody had something to

do with it. Everybody contributed, and Chuck after he did it, it's like, what do you do with that? You know, there was nothing to do with it. It's years before MTV was going to come out. So he just put it in the ann Arbor Film Festival and it won first prize for Film Short and we were like, what that's a movie called The Beginning?

that is the staircase to heaven. And each step is some human uh, some human wrongdoing like like uh like slavery, World War one, World War two, uh, murder. Each of the steps had a different night name all the way up to the top. And we all, you know, I think we all kind of contributed to it, you know, and everybody everybody had some piece of it. Uh. I. I got inspired in that time period in like in seventy five, I wrote a book by Boogie Boy and

it was Dream of Consciousness and it was crazy. It was kind of like he took this guy that had that had been tortured in high school and and grade school his whole life and uh disrespected and he just like it was like it was like that that kid just took a stick and hit a pinata. It was his brain and all this stuff came flowing out. Lyrics for songs, the titles for our first three albums, imagery for our first three albums. Everybody, everybody had something to do.

Jerry was a couple of years older than the rest of us, a couple of years than me, and then I was a couple of years older than Bob and Jim and Alan and Bob Sally and he was our spokesperson. He was definitely our spokesperson, and he was always right on the mark. He was really good at that, and

we liked that as a band. We liked having a spokesperson because you know, you'd see the sex pistols on TV or or even the Who, and they'd be like acting like school children, you know, misbehaving while they're sitting there doing an interview and like like you know, like Keith Moon would be like like you know, like trying to distract you know, uh you know, uh you know the singer or something from talking and uh where else, you know, Sid Vicious and Johnny Rotten would be like

throwing things at each other on on uh you know, English TV and stuff like that. We wanted to we wanted to be totally different. We wanted to really we we considered ourselves uh an art project from the very beginning, and so we wore matching outfits. But it wasn't like tailored suits like uh all the British bands. It was like we were wearing matching jen natorial outfits and we look very you know, we look very blue collar, working class.

And we had one person talking and it would be Jerry, and rather than nonsensical, he would be talking about the evolution almost every time.

have to look different places for it. Uh. I don't I think, you know, like you know, I'm you know, I'm not casting any aspersions. But I don't think Taylor Swift it is relevant to any of that. She's like, that's like a whole different kind of what what you know, music that makes money is is something totally different than what it was fifty years ago. But I think the

irreverence is there. I think it's on the Internet. I think the hard part about it is you've got a lot of just plain old stupidity and you've got you know, if you go on the Internet and you look at responses to like anything that happened in the news today, you'll see an extreme left and an extreme right speaker that are saying things to try to get people upset or to get them worked up. And they don't really

represent the left or the right. They're like just they're just you know, people that are trying to get attention, and they're trying to get people to like log onto their site with outrageous statements. I think kids are maybe a little wise to that, and wiser than we're giving them credit for, because I think I think they see a lot of that is nonsensical and it's not really

where people are. I think most of the humans in the world are somewhere in between those two extremes that you hear arguing about, you know, you know, accusing immigrants eating dogs and cats and accusing uh uh, you know, the right of like being out to shoot everybody they can shoot. You know, there's there's like I think there's most of us, I think are more about common sense and about you know, survival. We want to live, you know,

we're not trying to to destroy the planet. And but but I think from an art standpoint, I think there's even more outlets now than there were before, and that that's kind of great. I mean, and right at this this moment, this exact moment we're talking whenever it is when this, when this comes over the air, this thing with AI has totally raised all the ante and and the possibilities for what could be considered art and sentient thought. I'm I'm kind of I wish I was like fifteen

right now. I wish I was young enough that this was I was just starting. I think this is an amazing time to be alive on this planet.

sort of. I mean, now we've taken it too far. Now, maybe there's too many humans, but that's another story to talk about. But as far as ai, I think, I love the idea. When I was a kid and I wanted to be in a band, and like I told you, I'd read the newspaper to find out bands I could play it. I I remember thinking, well, it's cost too much to buy a keyboard. I can't own a Wurlitzer

electric piano, so I can't be in a band. But but nowadays a kid can be walking home from school and they could they could have an idea for a bassline, and they could be going into their phone. They could go boom boom doom doo doo. Boom boom boom bo doo doo, and then they could go online and they could sign it to like you could say, oh, I want it to sound like the Foo Fighters, and so then they play that. They'd use an electric bassis sound

like Foo Fighters. They say, oh no, I wanted to sound like John Coltrane, and then there would be an upright bass playing the part where they say, oh, I want it to sound like Windy Carlos, And then it would be a mini mog Since or a moge Since or something. You can you can do all that and then if you like that, then you could say, they can go into the same phone and they can go

boom ba boom boom bah. They can do a drum beat in the phone and they can pick what kind of drums they want it to sound like what they are trying to do, change the tempo, the speed. They can put those two together. They can keep adding instruments

on of whatever kind of instruments you want. I just picked really basic common instruments that you know, having a set of drums in my day meant that you had them down on the basement and after about an hour your parents would be opening the door going stop playing those things, you know, get off of that, you know. And now it's like totally different. And if a kid has an idea for a song, he can put it

all together on his phone. You know. It's like your phone has more power than the Beatles had when they were recording in London and doing their albums, they had like these four track tape recorders and then it went up to eight, sixteen and twenty four. But kids now they have more power than that in their phone and they can do it so fast and if they get something that they like, they don't have to go out and find a record company. I mean, I remember when

I was in out of high school. I remember thinking, I don't think there's any record companies in Ohio, and if you did, how would you get them to put out your record anyhow? And you know, now kids they can just go right directly to the Internet. They can put their song up on it, they can make a video to go with it, and they don't have to ask anybody. And it's like there's more artistic freedom than that, you know. That's that's how I feel. I feel. It's like, you know, it's a pretty great time.

going under. I think I think people. I think people are just learning what their capabilities are and what their possibilities are, and I think they need to be aware of the fact that humans are the unnatural species, for better and for worse, mostly in a lot of ways

for worse. I just finished a film with a Pixar and I can't talk about it too much, but it's kids film, but it's but it basically that's what the messages for kids are, like the animals save the humans in the end, and you're like, like, oh, maybe humans are the one species that are out of touch with nature. And I think I think some of that's going to come back. I don't I don't want to move to Mars. I think anybody that wants to go to Mars, oh my gosh, go go man. It looks beautiful up there.

Have fun, you know. I want to see planet Earth get restored. And personally, I think maybe it means less humans or being more careful than just like randomly everybody just making kids. We've been too successful at that. I think it. I think it's kind of there's a lot of things to think about and I'm hoping, I'm hoping that we don't blow ourselves up. I mean, it could happen.

I mean, if you put one crazy person in charge of a nuclear weapon, they could actually they could end everything, you know, And so that kind of stuff really worries me.

just say he has authoritarian elements. Okay, we have the same people who are on smartphones, experiencing AI, living on the internet. Their future economically is not what it was for previous generations. So do we just stumble along or is our big bang event? How does this work out? Well?

the TV set. You know, they don't they think that's that's humorous things like that. You know that they they do have more sophisticated, uh take on technology than us, and we're we're always are asking them how to how to make things work. It's never the other way around.

do incorporate technology, but I can't do everything. It's like I use my phone and I do work on AI. I do things like I do. I'm experimenting with like art for for Devo, and it's i mean even just plain old chat GPT, which is like about as run

of the mill age you can get. When we were playing at the Hollywood Bowl a couple weeks ago, I took a couple of pictures that I had made on my phone while I was sitting on an airplane and gave them to our lighting director and he put them on the screen and oh my god, they came out full resolution, fifty feet across, thirty feet high. I couldn't believe it, and I made it on my phone. I was like, that's unbelievable. And I just found that out

a couple of weeks ago. So now I'm really investigating that element because like I do stuff on cards, like I'll show you something here.

or use your Google or something. There's all these horrible ads. But then I've started finding the artwork on them. I started finding it entertaining and and so I take some of the other artwork and I do the same thing I did with the Spencer Gifts art and I, you know, I just take these things off on my phone and I can just put them in a printer when I

come to work here. I'm I've been writing music in this same building on Sunset Strip for thirty five years, and I have a printer here, so I could just throw these in the printer and print them up. And I'm not doing the most sophisticated AI work out there by any means. I'm doing this the most run of the mill, easy to do stuff. But what's exciting to me about it is if you're a conceptual artist. And this is what I've been talking to Jerry about this, because I do art all the time, I do physical

art all the time, but he doesn't. And I said, you really got to investigate AI. I said, you really just got to try it out, because he's really good with ideas. He loves to, you know, come up with an idea for something, but he doesn't like to go through the you know, the the all the toil that's involved. So so I just I just think I'm going to start We're going to start seeing things from people. And

it's just so early on. You know, AI hasn't been around that long and it and it's getting bigger and bigger all the time. I just love the idea that that kids could make films, that we all could make films, and you know, why not. Why shouldn't everybody be allowed to make films? Why should it only be like those that that a film company is willing to invest in.

I love the idea of letting everybody make something, and then I think that's going to raise the level of quality and that you'll find things that then there'll be even more. I think they'll be more great art. That's what I think.

then you're on ASSNL, and then you're on MTV. So the people who are completely not paying attention or aware of you today, that's an impossibility. The initial hurdle that Divo had, which was recording a national distribution, that's easy. Gaining the attention is difficult even at this laid date. For yourself. You create something, the ripples are not going to go as far. Is that frustrating?

there's something anything you say you want to hear. If you want to hear a space age, hillbilly croquet music, if you put those three words in there, there's some band that does that. And I kind of love that. I think it's a trade off. And you're right if you want to be like, if you want to be a rock star, you know, maybe you missed your opportunity to be a rock star. I mean you can there are some. I mean there's Taylor Swift. You know, she's

still out there and she's she's bigger than ever. She's bigger than anybody ever was, you know, the Beatles. She's probably sells more records in one year than the Beatles sold in their whole lifetime. But I don't know that number. I just made that up. But you know what I'm saying, it's like you're training for something that might be better, and that is that more people have access to the ability to be artists and the ability to make a statement.

And because of that, the best stuff you can find. You're you're thinking that the best stuff gets lost, But I don't think that totally is the case. I think there's a lot of great music that there's people that that's what they're searching for, and so they put together a collection of White Mice or whoever the bands are that they like that are doing some certain kind of

electronic music. And if you find one of those, if you if you even just say what it is you're looking for, there's these people will show you know, these sites will show up that will have that music and help you find it. And I think we're in a really nice time because of that. You know, if you got if you want to get into rock and roll because you want to get rich, well good luck. You know,

that's another story. It's hard to be Taylor's whoever. Those people are, all those people that are getting to make all that money. But if you're doing it because you're an artist, or because you have something to say, or because you just love making music. Now's the best time ever.

maybe this is as good as it gets. But I do remember, uh when Whip It became a hit, and all of a sudden, you know, like little kids would stop when I was walking down Wilsher Boulevard going to a print store or something, and like a little kid goes, hey, did you sing on that Jermaine Jackson song?

gave each other. We gave us ourselves enough so we could make our car payments, make our our our rentals, you know, for our house, and pay for our food. And uh, we didn't take all the money in one chunk, which a lot of bands did, and then they blew it, you know, like like in six months and they'd have nothing. And so we were we never uh you know, we didn't. We weren't the band that went out and bought mansions and Cadillacs in the first the first time, you know,

with our first paycheck. So we were always and we always felt like, well, maybe we will never you know, maybe it'll never be bigger than this, and so we have to be. And the truth of the matter is, you know, it's like, you know, we're not anywhere near like the size of like somebody like the food fighters who followed you know later. You know, it's like those kind of bands are tight or even so much bigger

than us and play much bigger venues than us. But you know, I think we kind of I don't know, personally, I'm pretty thanks for what I've gotten to do.

in for everybody. But just jumping you know forward a few steps at this late date, are there devot royalties?

they did the deal. And so we've we've gotten like nice payoff off of that show, off of that uh uh you know, Royalty Stream. But you know it's like for the most part, you know, we're playing, we're going out. We're already planning on shows we're gonna play next year, and uh.

It's like everybody's standing there at the curtain. I go, the car was supposed to be here three minutes ago. You know, it's like everybody's got it. You know, you've already done it, You've been you already know that you're going to go to you know, Minneapolis tomorrow and you're

going to check into a hotel. You're going to have an hour or two before you go to soundcheck, and then you're at the venue all day and then you play your show and then you come back to the hotel and you pack everything up because the next morning you're taking off for another city. And so it's not as exciting as it was at one time. But I found ways like where I can do both art and

I write music. Like I was working on scoring a film on our last tour, and that so I was in different cities every day and I'd set up my computer and my keyboard and I could I could write for a film and that was that was kind of taking up my time making it enjoyable. And everybody loves the hour and a half you're on stage, you know.

The time you're on stage is like, you know, it's kind of like as close as you get to be in twenty five again when you're seventy five, you know, and uh, we enjoy that, and then it's like then you just figure out ways to enjoy the other hours.

Jerry has his thing. He he loves food. He's a foodie, so he's already booked restaurants and is concerned about if we're going to get done in time, if there's enough time for him to make it over to the restaurant before it closes, and and he's got his own thing. And for me, it's it's I it's like I draw on these cards and I've I'm that they're they're they're that that makes me happy. They're they're like my therapy and my simple, inexpensive way to uh to enjoy the world.

would go first. I'm pretty sure it would. I think Devo would be around for a long time.

the eye. My eyes were closed, so I didn't see it happened, but I got hit in the eye and it hurt so bad. I pulled the tube out of my throat. I said, what did you do to my eye? And I was looking at a woman who had a plastic faceguard on, and I heard a man that I couldn't see that was like moving me like in my bed, probably just you know, moving you around like a sack of potatoes, he said, sedate him and whatever drug they put me on, I remember before I passed out, I went, hey,

this is pretty great. And I don't know what it was. But I never take drugs. I never was I never really got into drugs. I don't think I even drank coffee till I was in my forties. And so they they kept me there way too long. They kept me there for like twenty days before they let me out, and they tried to talk my wife into letting them put me in a coma. And I feel like The only reason they did that was because they sent a lawyer down after they woke me up, after they gave

me that first sedation. They woke me up, and this lawyer is like writing things down, saying, so, what are you saying about your eye? And I go, I don't know, but my eye's not working and it was totally red bloated my eyeball basically, so I to this day it's like, ironically, my vision in that eye is similar to my vision when I was the first eight years of my life before I had glasses. And it's kind of interesting because I have one eye like that and then I have

one eye that's twenty twenty. But they, you know, they just they finally let me out, thankfully, and I've been you know, it's created problems for me, both for singing. There's a couple notes that are hard to sing, but I think they're coming back. I think everything's eventually coming back. I kind of changed some of the melodies and some of our songs to fit where I can where I can sing, and nobody notices it. Really, I mean, it's not like Devo Hat, you know, it's not like Harbor

Streisan or something, you know, or Pavaratti. You know, it's like, you know, I did a lot of ranting when I was singing, so so it kind of it's kind of all right. The vision is still a problem. It's like it's like hard for me to work with computers for long periods of time. My eyes get really tired. But yeah, that was it. That was my and I think finally when they did try a drug out on me, it was the one that they ended up using on Trump a year later or so. So I was a guinea pig for Donald Trump.

And I went and saw him, and while we're talking, he put a camera up my nose, down into my throat and he said, oh, you have a acid reflux, I think. And so I was like, oh, what do you do about that?

tissue about halfway through on one side. And I don't know, I'm slowly getting that back. My singing in the in those notes is slowly coming back. So that's the good news.

kind of we're just kind of programmed. We are who we are, you know, and it's like we come out and do it.

beginning of aides. So we were at the very last years of the sex, drugs and rock and roll by the by eighty two eighty three, it's like you were. You had to be really careful who you and you know who who you let in your room and it but it is crazy. There was a time where people were like just knocking on your hotel room door or sticking pictures of themselves underneath the door asking you to let him in. It was a We were part of that crazy era for a while. Unlucky none of us ever got sick.

big thing is grocery shopping. I hate to say it, but it's like I'll I'll go to maybe three grocery stores to get the different things that we want for dinner that night, because there's there's a one grocery store that has the best produce and one that has other things that we really that my kids like or my wife likes a lot, and and so I kinda I kind of enjoy that. I don't really enjoy clothing shopping anymore. It's like I'm not into fashion that much.

more than they ever did. It's pretty rare to see somebody walking around, you know, in a suit, or at least they still do. But you know, it's it's it's that number's gone down, and then there's really fashion is just kind of at a strange place. I'm hoping that that all the craziness that's going on now is going to inspire artists and inspire stylists and inspire creative people in every walk.

I better get a book to put them in. They still make that same book all these years later, at the exact same book, archival book. And so I've been I think I'm up to around seven hundred and fifty of these books that each have one hundred pieces of art, pieces of poetry, pieces of collage, were sketches, all different kinds of things.

seventy eight. It was like his beautiful handwriting of all the eqs and all the effects and everything. But I'm looking at I'm seeing things like there's channels and it says Brian's guitar part. Then I see another channel called David's vocals, meaning David Bowie. And I'd see these on like almost every single track. There were all these, and then I remembered that when we were mixing them, he would he was like trying to put you know, other things into the songs, you know, synth parts, and and

we did use some of it. I mean, we did use David and Brian's backup vocals on Uncontrollable Urge, for instance, and he put like monkey chants in Chockohomo and we tried to like make a tape of that and then recreate it live, and it was impossible because it was back before the days of midy and so there was really no way to sync up with you know. We were playing in seven four time, you know, and then switching over to four four time, and there was just no way to get it to match exactly. It always

sounded slightly ugly. So we didn't really do that, but he said he he once said he was kind of unprepared to work with us and didn't know how to

talk about it. So I was doing things like, you know, we'd hit record for recording from the twenty four track over to the two track stereo master, and everybody'd be looking straight ahead at the speakers, but I'd be standing next to Brian and I'd just reach up and pull down the tracks that said Brian guitar and David vocals and just keeps looking straight ahead and out of my peripheral vision, I could see his head snap and look at me. But he never said anything. He never challenged

me about it, and so that was odd. And but Bob Martyloff was great to work with. I have to say, he was really great and he taught us a lot about engineering that I hadn't expected. And he also his concept about how to be a producer was different than a lot of people. It's definitely different than Ken Scott, for instance, or or Roy Thomas Baker. So so it

was it was I really like him. He keeps saying, we mark, we have to do something again, and I'm like, you never know, Bob, you never it could happen.

He taught us this way to record, where you put your you would record your like a bass or a guitar into two different You'd send a line into two different rooms, and you'd record it over two different amplifiers so that it sounded totally different in both rooms. And then you'd have a direct in also, so you could always, you know, go back and use the original guitar sound to adjust that sound. And he was really empathetic. He was a very empathetic producer. I would recommend him for

anybody that was looking for somebody like that. He was very easy to work with and he was always he had a good attitude about things.

uh Dennis Hopper and Russ Tamblin people like that. I I really enjoyed joined them and they all had different personalities and they had all done different films, and you know, I liked hanging out with him, and Tony was Dean Stockwell's girlfriend at the time, and then somehow her and Jerry started kind of they hit it off and and she was one of the early fans of Devo out in.

got those tapes to them to him and Iggy. When they went back to Germany to record LUs for Life, h Iggy was digging through a suitcase full of demo tapes and pulled the Devo one out and they listened to it and they all were laughing. They said, this isn't a real band and uh. And he says that that some of the a couple of days while they

were recording. They would just start off the day with, uh, you know, hunting Tony Sayles and David and Iggy jamming on Devo songs before like uncontrollable urgent stuff because and and so. Anyhow, so she told Iggy because they were friends,

I guess through Bowie. Uh she told When Iggy came out to stay in l A for a while, she said, Hey, Devo's playing this next weekend, you got to come see him with me, and so so she she brought uh Iggy over to see us, and uh, that's that's kind of how that happened.

at that time. But I would say that by being artists and being conceptualists and thinking about our music from a totally different angle than most bands ever, did I think I think it gave people. I think it gives us reason to be to be remembered, to have a legacy to because people can think differently about how and why you do a band. I mean, all the bands when we were first doing it, it was all sex, drugs and rock and roll. Yeah, you know, it was

like I'm snorting whiskey and drinking cocaine. Think I'm going to go in saying, you know, that's what rock and roll was when we first got into it, and and we would already missed you know, we already missed all the artists that were like you know, like even you know, like uh one, two three, what are we fighting for? You know, even stuff like that was gone after the after the government, you know, like shut down all the protests.

It's like things got really strange after nineteen seventy one, and and music pop, you know, rock and roll music went two directions that went into like corporate rock. You know, it was like bands that were named after countries and cities and stuff that, and it was like white guys that were massogynistic, took too many drugs, were conspicuous consumers and proud of it, you know, and and the other the other uh direction, music went at that time was was disco and it was like Jerry said, once, I

thought it was really funny. He said, disco. To me, it's kind We loved all the sounds in disco because they use these great synth sounds and it was like amazing sounds. And he said, yeah, but it's like a pretty woman with no brain. That was his take in disco, and I thought that was really good. And then then then, you know, then the punk things started up, and I was really interested in that because it was it was

rebellion again. But then it was nihilistic and it was just you know, they just all fell apart, you know, and they all self destructed. And we thought, well, that's not what we are. You know. We just really thought we weren't any of those three things. And that's that's how we hit on on the evolution. You know. There was a movie from the fifties called Inherit the Wind, and it's the person first place I ever saw the word divo, and it was because there was you know,

it was for the Scopes monkey trial. The movie was about it, and and there was like a it turned into a carnival outside of the courthouse where you know, people were in this little town were like selling whatever they could, hawking their wares. And this one guy that was like a circus barker, he's going he had a he had a chimpanzee smoking a cigarette sitting on a on on the table next to him, and behind him

it said the de Evolution Man. And at one point he's like going, e people, do you believe that this is your uncle up here? Do you believe you're related to.

have the values of the seventies. What I mean by that is the perspective which started in the sixties, and you're true to that when almost I can't think of anybody else who is so A that's stimulating, and B it's like, yeah, you got the ideas out. Once you get into your groove and you're starting, I can listen forever. I'm only cutting it off for now, I say, you know, as I say, there's a lot of other questions I had if you and me were like, these are some

of these just basic? Well what really something would really happen with the draft. I'm sure ultimately if you went for a physically ye had the eye thing whatever. But you know, digression is a spice of life, and your digressions were great, So I don't think you were being fake self deprecating and you really think you're not that articulate, But once you find your groove, it's pretty good and it's a lot more meaningful and rich than it is from the average person.