As Mothersbaugh and his Devo bandmate Gerald Casale prepare to perform at Netflix Is a Joke’s just-announced 40th-anniversary celebration of Pee-wee’s Playhouse at Los Angeles’s Greek Theatre (on a lineup that also includes Pee-wee’s Big Adventure composer and fellow new wave pioneer Danny Elfman), I’m revisiting this interview I did with Mothersbaugh on July 31, 2023, the day after Reubens died.

“I’d never done a TV show before,” Mothersbaugh marveled over the phone, recalling when Reubens asked him to compose the theme song and weekly episodic music for the groundbreaking and subversive Saturday morning kiddie program Pee-wee’s Playhouse. “That took me into the world of film and television and video games. It totally changed the trajectory of my career.”

Speaking from his Mutato Muzika headquarters in Hollywood, Mothersbaugh was still processing the tragic news of Reubens’s death; like many of the actor’s friends and colleagues, Mothersbaugh had no idea that Reubens had been fighting a secret battle with cancer for the past six years. “He always had a good personality and a good heart. … It’s just shocking and sad that he’s gone,” Mothersbaugh said. “I really didn’t expect it. We’d even been talking about working on an animated version of Pee-wee’s Playhouse.”

But Mothersbaugh chose to mainly focus on his happy memories with Reubens and express his gratitude for the Playhouse opportunity, which could not have come at a better time.

Mothersbaugh and Reubens’s friendship pre-dated Playhouse by almost a decade. The two had met when Mothersbaugh was dating original Saturday Night Live “Not Ready for Prime Time Player” Laraine Newman, a founding member of the pioneering comedy improv theater the Groundlings. It was there that Reubens, along with future SNL star Phil Hartman, created the nerdy, childlike Pee-wee Herman character — a process that Mothersbaugh got to witness firsthand. “The character came from a [1950s] show that we both watched when we were kids, Pinky Lee. Paul wore something similar to what Pinky wore. I mean, there were three channels on TV in those days; there wasn’t much choice. You had Captain Kangaroo, and then later in the day, you had Pinky Lee,” Mothersbaugh chuckled.

“We were all just artists in L.A., a group of people that we kind of loosely associated as ‘Southern California lowbrow art,’” said Mothersbaugh, recalling how he and Reubens would hang out in the ‘70s and early ‘80s with painters and illustrators like Robert Williams, Ed “Big Daddy” Roth, Gary Panter (who later became Playhouse’s Emmy-winning set designer), Georganne Deen, and Neon Park; future Emmy-winning Playhouse animator Prudence Fenton; and pop songwriter Allee Willis.

“It was good times,” Mothersbaugh said, remembering their own real-life big adventures when they’d embark on road trips to Palm Springs. “Paul would search out all these theme hotels, like a log-cabin hotel or a Russian motel; most of the time they were pretty seedy and decrepit, but that made it all the more fun, and funnier. … We had a lot of similarities outside of business, where we all were collectors of kitsch. Paul and Allee would stop the car at a junk shop and both get out of the car, running, trying to get a Barbie lighter or something before the other one did.”

Paul Reubens and Mark Mothersbaugh with friends Prudence Fenton and Allee Willis (photo courtesy of Mark Mothersbaugh)

Mothersbaugh and Reubens’s first film collaboration of sorts was as surreal as anything that could have sprung from either of their imaginations: the 1980 cult flick Pray TV, with Reubens, in his first-ever movie role, playing a sassy aerobics instructor and Devo (as Dove, the Band of Love) performing a song called “Shrivel Up” while dressed in “Century 21 outfits.” Five years later, after building a buzz with his Pee-wee stage show and HBO special, Reubens was ready for his real big-screen moment with the Tim Burton-directed breakout film Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, and he originally approached Mothersbaugh to write the score. However, a conflicting touring schedule with Devo prevented Mothersbaugh from accepting that offer. (Rookie film composer Elfman, better known then for fronting Oingo Boingo, famously ended up getting the Big Adventure job instead, and his career trajectory of that eccentric was also forever changed.)

By the time 1986 rolled around, Devo had signed a “bad deal” with Enigma Records, which would go bankrupt and close its doors by ‘91, and the band was “kind of in a cocoon/slumber/siesta state.” So, Mothersbaugh was thrilled to get another shot at working with Reubens, and he was ready to try something totally new.

“I was used to writing 12 songs, the band learns ‘em, goes into a studio, records them, starts rehearsing for a tour. Then we go out on tour for six or seven months, come back, and write 12 more songs a year later. We did that six or eight times, and it was starting to feel like Groundhog Day to me, because the fun part for me was writing the music, not going out and playing the songs we’d written years ago,” explained Mothersbaugh. He soon found out that he loved working at television’s much brisker pace. “[Pee-wee’s Playhouse producers] would send me a three-quarter tape on Monday, I’d write 12 songs’ worth of music on Tuesday, record on Wednesday, put a tape in the express mail on Thursday, they’d mix it into the show on Friday… and on Saturday morning, we’d all watch it on TV. And then the next Monday, I’d get another tape in the mail. I was like, ‘Sign me up for this job!’”

Mothersbaugh’s most iconic Playhouse composition was, of course, the Spike Jones/Esquivel/Martin Denny-inspired theme song, the perfect soundtrack for Pee-wee’s own space-age bachelor pad. The song’s vocals were credited to an unknown mystery singer named Ellen Shaw, but it turns out that familiar-sounding squeak belonged to another new wave sensation of the era: Cyndi Lauper. Mothersbaugh chuckled recalling what happened on the “very odd day” that Lauper secretly recorded the theme.

“She had agreed to sing the theme song for it. She was all into it, because she does a great Betty Boop voice, and that’s what we thought would sound so cool on the song,” said Mothersbaugh. “So, we get to New York and we’re in the studio, and she comes in and sings. And meanwhile her boyfriend/manager [Dave Wolff] goes into the next room with Paul’s manager, and while we’re recording her voice, we’re hearing all this yelling coming out of this other room. They were fighting about something. And when they came back in, [Wolff] said, ‘All right, I’m telling you what’s going on. Cyndi is a serious singer now. We don’t want her associated with kids’ shows. We’re gonna take her name off of this.’ And Paul and I were going, ‘Um, wasn’t she just on MTV with that blond-haired wrestling guy [Hulk Hogan] last weekend? What is he talking about?’ We were kind of all in shock.

“Cyndi just kind of looked at us like, ‘Eh, what am I gonna do?’ Like, she thought it was silly, but she said, ‘We’re going to Hawaii to get married tomorrow.’ And we’re like, ‘Er, OK. Sorry for you!’ [Editor’s note: Lauper and Wolff never married.] So, I put an effect on her voice and it just kind of garbled her voice so you couldn’t tell it was her. And then they had us put the name of her assistant down as the singer. But when she left, we just took the effect off the voice — and nobody even noticed!”

Mothersbaugh revealed that he “got to put in subliminal messages and a lot of in-jokes between Paul and me in the songs,” along with a lot of “Devo references — if you knew to listen to it for it, you would find it.” But there was one funny message, after the Lauper incident, that stayed between Mothersbaugh and Reubens. “I don’t think we played this for anybody,” Mothersbaugh laughed. “You know how on the theme song, Paul goes, ‘Why, Chairry?’ Like, after there’d be a line about Chairry or the Countess, he’d say their names in all these little voices in between every line? Well, we did an [unreleased] version — and I still have it — where he goes, ‘Hey, is that Cyndi Lauper? I think that’s Cyndi Lauper! I’m sure it’s Cyndi! That’s Cyndi singing!’ That was definitely our own private in-joke.”

There were really no rules when it came to creating the Pee-wee’s Playhouse score. “When I got the first episode slot, Paul said, ‘Here’s my only notes. When it’s something sad, make it really, really sad. When it’s something happy, make it really, really happy. When it’s something shocking, make it really, really shocking.’ He just wanted everything to be done to extremes. That was the only request he made,” Mothersbaugh chuckled. As a first-time TV composer, Mothersbaugh didn’t realize then how unique this working environment truly was.

“Maybe with a different television show, I might have said, ‘I never want to do this again!’ But it was such an ideal, perfect situation. We were all thinking outside of the traditional box. Paul had never done [a TV series] before, so he had no reason to be worried or think maybe it’d be a bad idea to take a chance on somebody who’d never scored a TV show before. It was one of those shows that I don’t know if it could ever happen again. They gave him so much artistic leeway. They don’t do that anymore, and they haven’t done it since. It was kind of funny, because people would hire me for shows after that and they’d go, ‘This is the new Pee-wee’s Playhouse!’ That’s how they’d pitch their shows. And then you’d see it and go, ‘That’s not anywhere near as good as Pee-wee’s Playhouse!’ Maybe the closest show to creating an energy and enthusiasm like that was Yo Gabba Gabba!. You don’t see that very often.”

Pee-wee’s Playhouse ended its five-season run on CBS in November 1990, but reruns continued to air — until Reubens was arrested for exposing himself in a Florida adult movie theater in July 1991. Reacting to that scandal, CBS pulled the remaining reruns from its schedule, and it seemed like the show’s legacy might be ruined forever. “It was an awful time. It was so awful. I remember when he first told me what happened, he goes, ‘You know, Mark, I have nightmares remembering being at the police station,’” said Mothersbaugh. “It took him a while to go out again. We stayed friends through the whole thing, and we talked about it if he wanted to, but most of the time he didn’t want to. It was just a horrifying thing that kind of put a speed bump in his career.”

But fortunately, fans rallied around Reubens, and that incident turned out to be just that: a speed bump, not an irreparable career-derailer. “It was just terrible to see everything happen, but it was wonderful to see him make a comeback,” said Mothersbaugh. And even though that animated version of Pee-wee’s Playhouse­ sadly never came to fruition, Mothersbaugh will always fortunate that, in a full-circle moment, he was able to compose the music for the Judd Apatow-co-produced third and final installment in the Pee-wee film series, which turned out to be Reubens’s final film role.

“I ended up dong Paul’s last movie, Pee-wee’s Big Holiday, in 2016. We had a really great experience on that,” Mothersbaugh said fondly. “There’s some sweet, emotional moments in that movie, and I liked that I got to make him cry.”

This interview originally ran on Yahoo Entertainment.

In 1981, Devo’s “Whip It” music video — a deliberately offensive and over-the-top send-up of Reagan-esque cowboy machismo, featuring singer Mark Mothersbaugh sadomasochistically whipping a stuntwoman on a rowdy dude ranch — was in high rotation on MTV. But just a year later, when the new wave band released their video for “That’s Good,” MTV, which at that point was ironically saturated with sexy videos featuring plenty of female flesh, strangely refused to play it without a re-edit.

The reason? An animated scene of a French fry being inserted into a donut’s hole was deemed too suggestive by network censors.

“You were hurting a woman [in “Whip It”], so that was OK. Think of the ‘80s — think of the misogyny, think of the prevalent imagery and the position of women in rock,” says Devo co-founder Gerald Casale. “If it was misogynistic and dumb, they didn’t have a problem with that. But we had something [in “That’s Good”] that was to them symbolic and humorous, so they were really disturbed by it.”

This was just one of the many misconceptions that Devo had the deal with during their ‘80s heyday — as Casale states in the cold open of their new eponymous Netflix documentary, they were the “most understood band in the world,” and possibly still are. But the Chris Smith-directed Devo might finally clear everything up… and prove that Devo, for better or worse, were right all along.

“I think it’s easy for people that don’t know about Devo to look at this documentary and go, ‘Oh, they did do something different. They were about something other than sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll. They had a message connected to them,’” muses Mothersbaugh.

“We just kept saying what we’d been saying [for decades] in the documentary. And people finally listened,” Casale shrugs.

Back in the day, Devo’s matching energy-dome hats, yellow boiler suits, and plastic JFK wigs had critics dismissing them as a novelty act or, as Casale recalls, “Nazi clowns”; they were even once dubbed “the thinking man’s KISS” by “some snarky reviewer” at a U.K. music tabloid. “At the time I was really offended and really bummed out by that, but 20 years later I thought, ‘God, I wish it had happened that way!’ Because that means that a band that isn’t dumb could have been as big as KISS,” Casale chuckles ruefully.

Devo got their start in their native Akron, Ohio (where Mothersbaugh approached likeminded Kent State art student Casale with the best opening line ever: “What do potatoes mean to you?”), and even then, most people didn’t understand their high concept of “de-evolution” or their warning that post-WWII society was beginning to regress.“We would have to lie [to Akron club bookers] and say we did all Top 40 music. And then after the first set, they’d ask us to leave,” says Mothersbaugh.

“In Ohio, all we did was meet with derision and rejection. People thought we were stupid. They hated us. They couldn’t believe it. And we kind of returned that sentiment to them — the kind of people that didn’t like us actually motivated us to keep doing it,” states Casale.

In one of the more chilling segments of the Devo documentary, Mothersbaugh and Casale recall how the band’s formation was inspired by the murders of their two friends by Ohio National Guardsmen, at the infamous Kent State shootings of 1970. But unlike their future friend/collaborator Neil Young, who responded to that tragedy with “Ohio,” Devo found their own less overt — and, as it turned out, often less easily understood — way to protest.

“By being at Kent State and seeing what happened when you protest in the U.S., we didn’t really think protesting was the way to go,” Mothersbaugh explains. “We didn’t want to be nihilists, to be the Clash or Sex Pistols or somebody like that. Our interest was to infiltrate, to use subversion to affect people. And so, we adopted the techniques of Madison Avenue.”

And eventually, against all odds, Devo realized that mainstream vision, actually getting on Top 40 radio and American Bandstand with “Whip It,” playing “That’s Good” on a very special episode of Sarah Jessica Parker’s CBS sitcom Square Pegs, starring in a Honda scooter commercial, and for a short while dominating MTV — even though executives at their record label, Warner Bros., initially thought music videos were a complete waste of time and money.

“They were confused why we even wanted to make a film for a song. They’re like, ‘What do we do with that?’” laughs Mothersbaugh, while Casale recalls, “They almost felt sorry for us, or irritated by us. They wanted us to spend our discretionary money on in-store displays at record shops, like cardboard standup displays and bigger posters. And we wanted to take $5,000 and make a video.”

Rock’s elite always grasped their de-evolutionary message, however. Early Devo adopters included Mick Jagger, who personally approved the band’s bonkers cover of the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction,’” and Iggy Pop, after Casale and Devo’s Bob Mothersbaugh managed to hand the ex-Stooge their demo tape at a Cleveland gig. Pop later passed that tape on to his pal David Bowie, who was equally impressed. “Both David and Iggy told us, ‘Yeah, we didn’t think it was a real band,’” Mark laughs. “They were very interested even before they knew it was a real band.”

Things got real after Bowie expressed his support; in one of Devo’s amazing archival-footage scenes, he’s even shown introducing the band at their Max’s Kansas City show in 1977, literally declaring them the future of rock ‘n’ roll.

“We didn’t have a manager that called [Bowie] up and said, ‘Get over there,’ nothing like that. It was just purely organic at the time,” says Mothersbaugh. “We’d played a couple times already in New York City, and because we made films from the very beginning, we’d hang up a sheet and we’d pick up a 16-millimeter projector from the Akron library, bring it with us to CBGB or Max’s Kansas City, set it on a table, and we’d show [director] Chuck Statler’s [short film] The Truth About De-Evolution that had two Devo songs in it. And people would say, ‘You’ve gotta go see this band! They put out a projector and show them playing songs before they start, and then they come out and play the songs!’ So, we had these guestlists of all people we didn’t know, loaded with the Dennis Hoppers and the Jack Nicholsons and Rolling Stones and people that all just were curious back then. We kind of became a little phenomenon in a way, in ‘77 in Manhattan, which was totally opposite of getting a job at a club in Ohio at that time.”

“And then we go in the summer to L.A., and Toni Basil brings Iggy Pop and Dean Stockwell to the show, and they get the stuff to Neil Young, and it just starts building like a snowball,” says Casale. “It’s vindication. … When you’re finally accepted by people you respect, artists you respect, like David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Neil Young, it’s pretty exciting.”

However, by Devo’s third album, the Warner Bros. powers-that-be were no longer impressed by the group’s famous friends and artsy admirers; they demanded a radio hit that would appeal to the masses. And they thought “Girl U Want” would be that single. No one, including Devo themselves, thought “Whip It” would be the breakthrough, and it was only when powerful Florida disc jockey Kal Rudman started playing “Whip It” for what Mothersbaugh calls “all the wrong reasons” — because it “sounded the closest to what he was playing in discos at the time” — that things turned around.

“[Rudman] grew it from a regional thing straight up the coast, and when it hit New York, it went national,” says Casale.

The only problem was, Warner wanted a few more “Whip Its” after that, and Devo were already moving on. “We definitely butted heads with the prevailing culture during [the 1981 follow-up album] New Traditionalists,” says Casale. “There was this empowerment of all the evangelicals, and we were skewering that, the way a Trey Parker and Matt Stone might skewer it now. We had that same sensibility.”

Devo left Warner, and disbanded in 1991 after releasing a couple of critically and commercially disappointing albums on Enigma Records — “We had our batteries charged up and we went as far as we could before we ran out of gas, but we got quite a bit accomplished,” says Mothersbaugh — although they eventually reunited and have enjoyed a renaissance of sorts over the past decade and a half, starting with 2010’s heralded comeback album Something for Everybody, which Casale boasts contains tracks that “hold up to any good Devo song, ever.” And that renaissance continues with the Devo doc, which gives the pioneering, visionary band the treatment they have always deserved, and delivers their message (which Mothersbaugh and Casale say is most prescient on the classics “Freedom of Choice,” “Gates of Steel,” and “Beautiful World”) at a time when that message is perhaps more relevant and needed than ever.

“What you see [in the documentary] is the tip of the iceberg of what we might’ve been able to do, opportunities we might’ve had, mediums we could have worked in,” says Casale. “But obviously the thing we got right was the big picture, because it’s withstood the test of time. The reason people are interested right now at all isn’t because we sold a hundred-million albums like Elton John. It’s not that. It’s the ideas and the art. Art stands up. Like, $5,000 was well spent on a video. It costs more than that to restore one video that was shot in 16-millimeter film in 1978, but now we have that content, and it’s 50 years later.”

Half a century ago, Devo were coming out of an era, having been raised in the post-war 1950s, of great optimism, an era filled with the promise of progress and a bright future. “I mean, the ‘80s were kind of the end of that; there was still a bubble of freedom and individuality and diversity in the culture that was real, actually, and then it was over,” Casale points out.

“And it wasn’t supposed to be that way. We were hoping that things would right themselves,” laments Mothersbaugh. “And instead, we’re in a time that is very peculiar right now. You wouldn’t even be able to guess that we could be where we are now, back in the ‘70s.”

“In the early days, our posture and our pose was, ‘This is a genetic imperative. We’re compelled to do what we’re doing.’ It was just a ha-ha, student, smartass position. But in the end, it’s actually true,” sighs Casale.

“My feeling is that Devo’s message has changed a little bit in the last few years,” Mothersbaugh continues. “While we were just trying to warn people about the way it looked like things were going, now it’s kind of more like, ‘OK, well, we’re here.’ And kids are the new Devo. They’re the new people living on this planet that have to figure out how to solve things. So, I think our message now is: ‘Mutate, don’t stagnate.’ … I’m hoping that our kids, everybody’s kids, all keep the Devo message at heart. And then do something about it.”

“There will always be originality and creativity and a robust, creative response to tyranny, to suppression, to illegitimate authority and authoritarianism and the way we live now. Basically, when Mark said the times are ‘peculiar,’ that’s a very nice way to say ‘fascism.’ That’s what we’re living under. And just [Donald Trump’s] latest executive orders took it further. You can expect that. You can expect now for it to go all the way,” warns Casale.

When asked if Devo might write and release any new protest music to respond to these current “peculiar” times, Casale answers, “Never say never. Maybe a new Devo song would be enough. Just one great song.” But when asked if he might ever go into politics and run for office — surely plenty of disenfranchised Devo fans would vote for him — he just says with a smirk, “I don’t want to be assassinated.”

Fair enough. But the subject of voting then brings us to the subject of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. The Hall, which is actually based in Devo’s home state, has disgracefully snubbed Devo after three nominations, despite all of the band’s achievements and innovations that are laid out so compellingly  and convincingly in their new film. It seems mainstream American institutions still don’t quite get it when it comes to these Akron activists — and perhaps they never will.

“I don’t think we ever really cared about [the Rock Hall] as a goal, but it’d be disingenuous to say that to be recognized doesn’t vindicate you somehow, or that you wouldn’t like it somehow,” says Casale. “But after three snubs, I can only speak for myself. I think we’re done with caring one way or another, because I have to believe those three snubs tell me one thing: that there is someone that actively, on a conspiracy level, doesn’t want Devo in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.”

“Maybe we don’t fit in with those other bands,” Mothersbaugh adds with a grin. “And that might be a good thing.”

This interview originally ran on Gold Derby.