my power pop addiction, no. 40 (112)

When I was a freshman in College, Steve Trejo, from Los Angeles, lived on the same floor as me in the dorm and turned me on to Devo. Steve had bleached platinum hair, wore loud colors - oranges, pinks, reds, yellows - and was almost never seen without sunglasses, even when we went down to the bars on Marshall street at night. He was a total California stereotype, at least in appearance, and I found his special brand of West Coast charisma to be quite alluring. Sometimes I think that Steve planted the initial seeds of my California odyssey, along with all the LA bands I liked so much, like Black Flag, Circle Jerks, the Minutemen and X. Steve was into that stuff, too, and knew far more about it than I did, so we really hit it off. He was very smart as well, a graduate of the Crossroads School in Santa Monica, and seemed from my perspective at the time to be the only other person at Syracuse University who was at all equipped academically and intellectually for college. He actually read books! (Naked Lunch, Sometimes A Great Notion, In Cold Blood...). We took a philosophy class together - 'Human Nature' - and would sit around his room, smoking pot, listening to cassettes, and discussing Hobbes, and Locke, and Marx, and Sartre. It was admittedly a little unsettling to have conversations about species-being and alienation with a dude wearing dark shades indoors, but I got used to it eventually and he opened my eyes to a whole different way of being in the world just by virtue of his curiosity, his generalized enthusiasm, and the way these things translated into how he carried himself. I was a cynical, hunkered-down New Yorker, and he breezed into my life, a bright-eyed life force who opened my mind. I eventually lost touch with him. That's how these things go sometimes. But I'll never forget him. ...Prior to meeting Steve, I had always thought of Devo as a novelty act and never took the music seriously because of their zany futuristic image. I tend to resist 'quirky' music. But with Devo it's different. The quirkiness serves to cloak their acerbic edge somewhat so that it becomes more subversive. And in spite of the music's punky dissonance, the tunes stay with you. This morning I listened to Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo, and for the rest of the day I was singing tonight's song to myself over and over again. I always think of Steve when I hear Devo, and so even though they're from Ohio, I always associate their music with this city of angels...