Proving once again that no, they don’t need a bassist.

(Just helmets.)

I came across these recently at Amoeba Records in Hollywood.

Unintentionally ironic? Or the ultimate eff-you, sneering at the mob while sticking us up for cash? In the postmodern age, it could be either. Or both.

In 2014, does the notion of selling out even exist any more?

As for me, I kind of like them. But to be true to the spirit of the band, you’d have to steal them, and that’s where I draw the line.

When I was 15 and unexpectedly editing a rock and roll newspaper that was distributed free around Atlantic County, New Jersey, free records were shipped to my home by record companies with delightful regularity.

One day I opened a thin square box and pulled out an album with the odd title Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo! . I slapped that record onto my stereo, was jolted and thrilled by a sound I’d heard nowhere else, and played that record over and over almost until the groove on each side wore flat. To this day, the Devo version of “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” is the right one, and those Rolling fellows are pretenders.

So imagine my thrill that someone is, finally, making what I hope will be a definitive documentary about Devo. Here’s a five-minute preview, covering the origin of the band as a reaction and response to lackadaisical hippies. (Which just makes me love them all the more.)

A few days ago, I advised seeing acts you care about (and even good ones you don’t), while you still can. And then today guitarist Bob Casale of Devo, pictured second from the right above, dropped dead from a heart attack.

I had the enormous pleasure of seeing Devo twice in recent years — in November of 2009 at the Henry Fonda in Hollywood, and August of 2011 at the intimate Canyon Club in the LA suburb of Agoura. On stage, Casale was a big, rambunctious, gleeful personality, sweating profusely in a Devo “radiation suit,” putting everything he had into a lively performance that belied his size and age. I have loved Devo since their first album, almost as much as he clearly loved being in Devo.

I don’t know if Devo will continue performing, without their founding guitarist (who was also the brother of one of the band’s guiding presences, bassist and songwriter Gerald Casale). But I’m glad to got to see them with him. I should also add that Devo’s first new album in 20 years, Something for Everybody, which came out in 2010, is pretty terrific. I’m glad Bob Casale got to make that.

Pere Ubu is playing here in Los Angeles on December 17th. I’ll be there, and I hope you will be too. Here’s the link for information and tickets.

Sometimes we are lucky enough in life to find an art product that truly suits us. We’re not always clear why it is that it suits us, it just does, and we are sometimes bewildered why it doesn’t suit more people because that thing is so palpably astonishing to us. I’m passionate enough, and naive enough, about Pere Ubu and what I believe to be their extraordinary catalog that I can’t help but feel it impossible to understand why more people haven’t embraced it. In their 35-year career, they’ve proved that they can do, well, almost anything: they are post-punk pioneers who have also produced sophisticated but appealing pop albums, explored the blues, embraced their own form of Captain Beefheart-infused jazz, and experimented at every turn with introducing new sounds and new ideas into what in different hands would be a hidebound endeavor of album-tour-album-tour-album-tour, liberally laced with old ideas executed in old ways. (For one example of that approach, consult any of those 90’s hair bands. Or Rod Stewart.) I can only assume that it’s their very experimentation and the shock of their difference that has kept them on the commercial margins. Because they are not singleminded or simpleminded in their tastes and explorations, few have followed. That is a shame.

It is also a shame, to me, that the ticket prices for the concert above are only $13 – $15. That’s right — for one of America’s most important bands, the band that forms the bridge between the gleaming Brian Wilson / Van Dyke Parks partnership and everything alternative that’s interesting since then — the ticket price is the cost of the latest incoherent blockbuster spectacular at your local megaplex. The ticket price for acts no one wants to see starts at 20 bucks — but Pere Ubu (!) is 35% off that. I don’t know how that price got set, but I’m concerned that it’s low enough to be more insulting than attracting.

I can only hope that whoever reads this buys a ticket and shows up.

In the meantime, those relative few of us who savor Pere Ubu will be there.

The four of you hunched over laptops does not equal performance, just as that cacophony of sound effects does not equal music.

My theory about why you’re the opening act: You’re so bad that the headliner will seem like The Beatles by comparison. So your transparent failure has been encouraged.

If you can see me back here, now you know why I’m typing into my phone. As is everyone else back here.

In the past 10 days I’ve seen three performances that were simultaneously spectacular and enervating — Robert Wilson and Philip Glass’s Einstein on the Beach at LA Opera; Robert Wilson delivering John Cage’s Lecture on Nothing at UCLA; and Brian Wilson in concert last night with some of the Beach Boys and with Jeff Beck.

All three of these are going to inform my thinking for a while, in a number of ways. Because all three of them balanced performance elements of the highest level with stretches of tedium that leave me asking, “Is that intentional?”

I haven’t fully synthesized my thoughts about this yet, but here’s the condensed version:

Einstein on the Beach is a masterpiece. The stage images, often featuring performers moving ever so slightly, when matched with the repetitive, minimalist music of Philip Glass, frequently left me in a trance. I was enveloped with this music and with the visuals. When I wasn’t in a euphoric or trance state, i.e., when I was able to reassert my intellect, I started thinking about things, such as:  “What does this mean? When will something happen? And is this why Rich Roesberg once told me the only music he can’t listen to is Philip Glass?” I was so expectant of something happening — and lots did, in sometimes astonishingly small ways — that the intermissionless 4.5-hour opera went by without my ever thinking I needed to run to the bathroom.

Lecture on Nothing includes the infamous section where a piece of spoken word is repeated 13 times. The piece is a “lecture” composed on a complex time signature — words “performed” as music — but I have to admit feeling like the woman at the first reading of it who said she couldn’t stand it any more and ran out. At the same time, the silences and pauses were somehow breathtaking — because our lives are so often filled with clutter (of noise, of sound, of music, of language, of advertising) that its absence is startling. Wilson also brought a level of staging to it, in his trademark minutely observed motions, that increased my hyperawareness.

The show last night at the Greek Theatre left me wondering again if Brian Wilson isn’t a counterprogramming genius. The last time I saw him (sans the Beach Boys name) was at the Hollywood Bowl in 2007. For that show, he had a laughably bad  would-be symphonic-choir band open for him; honest to God, our entire section was beside ourselves with laughter and mocking. After that, Wilson seemed like a genius, even though he had all the affect of that guy we’ve all seen at one point or another, on a subway or a bus or a street corner, whose mouth moves wrong and whose body isn’t in sync with whatever his mind thinks is going on. Last night, he put in an exceptional first set, performing much of Pet Sounds, and with Al Jardine in tow, to the incredible delight of everyone in the venue. Astounding doesn’t begin to convey the feeling of hearing that music performed so well by two of the guys who produced it almost 50 years ago. After a few more Beach Boys songs, including a wonderful rendition of Sail On Sailor, Jeff Beck and his band were given the stage for a 45-minute set. In my analysis of these three events, the set by Beck and company would be the purposely tedious section that renders a specific counter-response (in this case, further enhancing Brian Wilson’s reputation and the impact of his performance). Forty-five minutes of noodling around on a guitar, no matter how self-indulgently, doesn’t constitute a concert or, at least, not one I want to see. I now understand how my wife felt the last time she gamely accompanied me to a concert by King Crimson — except they actually have songs. As I said to my companion last night, the only thing Jeff Beck needs is a singer, and some songs.

I’ve got two more concerts this year — Thomas Dolby, and Police, both in November — and I’m hoping to get to that Magritte show this week in New York.  The “mystery of the ordinary,” indeed.

Renaissance man Steve Martin premieres the first hymn for atheists. It has none of the soaring beauty of “Amazing Grace,” but a lot more comedy.

Here’s Jonathan Franzen on what’s wrong with the modern world. You’ll have to read this twice, or, at least, I will have to (and intend to).

I’m wary of what a playwright friend calls “old poopism,” and Franzen, a novelist I admire tremendously, does come across here as an old poop. Whether or not we have the time to read impenetrable writers like Karl Kraus (of whom I’d never heard, even after reading I think five biographies of Franz Kafka), we have little or no access to his writing or his ideas. Or, at least, we never did — until the Internet, which is one of those pesky new-world developments Franzen seems to be deploring.

(Full disclosure: I make my living almost entirely via these newfangled things associated with the Internet. But whether or not that contributes to my bias, I’ve always been more interested in the future than the past.)

Culturally, here’s where I most often hear old poopism, and no, it isn’t with regard to technology. Most of the people I come across all over the country embrace technology; those who don’t, want to but don’t know how to. I have a friend who is 84 and exceedingly interesting (he went from the CIA into real estate, and then Democratic politics; there is some joke waiting to be made there); another friend and I were trying to teach him how to text when we were all out of town together, and then discovered his shortfall: an ancient cellphone with all the computing power of an Etch-a-Sketch that turned texting into a hard-fought endeavor. He hasn’t gotten a smartphone yet (Ken, are you listening?), but he’s a regular on Facebook and email. My mother, at age 88, wishes she could understand some of these things, because she sees the benefits — long-distance interaction with relatives that includes more than just a phone call. So, again, whether it’s with clients or friends or relatives or colleagues, I don’t see any resistance to technology.

No, it’s music where I see it.

If I hear one more person proclaim the musical superiority of the ’60s or ’70s, I’m going to throw up. Because never before in the history of humankind have we had so much access to so much music, a lot of it really really good.

I could point you to some current musical favorites — and, in fact, I will. TV on the Radio is a terrific rock n’ roll band, one that acknowledges the past of straight-ahead rock n’ roll while bringing into play harmonic inventiveness and studio wizardry and the sort of oddball sounds and buzzes that to my ear always lend an extra dimension. Danger Mouse, whether recording with Gnarls Barkley or Broken Bells or on any of his innumerable other projects, is perhaps the foremost production talent since Brian Eno. Like Eno, Danger Mouse brings a distinctive sound and a sharp intelligence to everything he touches; unlike Eno, he can also play guitar, and drums, and keyboard, and bass — as I witnessed when I saw Broken Bells in concert two years ago. Gnarls Barkley especially shows that he, partnered with Cee-lo Green, can effortlessly summon up the best of Motown and make it fresh and danceable. Finally, I’m smitten with Of Mountains and Men, a merry alt-folk group from Iceland. Their sound is cheery and pours out of the radio like a perfect poolside cocktail.

I could go on — I like AWOL Nation and Polica as well, to name just two more — but I take the time to make this point because I guarantee you most people you run into over 35 are expressing their belief that music was somehow “better” as recently as… their early 20s. And it wasn’t. It just had a different emotional impact for them because they were in their early 20s. It is that way with technology (see Franzen, above, who seems to be extolling the virtues of the 19th century equivalent of a German literary fanzine) and it is that way with politics, and it is that way with culture.

Here’s my feeling: The past is past, and it isn’t coming back. One thing we know for sure about the past is this: No one lives there any more. If you’d like to shape the future, in your daily life or in the world, it’s better to make a clear-eyed assessment of its potential rather than to knee-jerk reject it for a prior era you’re romanticizing.

In my adolescence, I was fortunate to meet the right person at the right time. I’m speaking of my mentor, Rich Roesberg.

There’s no one who has made a greater influence on my cultural life.

Growing up in the Pine Barrens and surrounding environs of southern New Jersey made artistic and intellectual engagement hard to come by. People who, last decade, abhorred the encroachment of big-box chain bookstores, to the supposed detriment of small independent bookshops, had no idea what it was like growing up in a place with no bookstore nearby. If there had been a Borders bookstore anywhere near me when I was growing up, it would have been a godsend.

As it was, though, I had my own godsend. One day my mother went into a Hallmark greeting-card store in a strip mall to buy some cards. The store also carried books — in fact, it was called Blatt’s Books — and I found in the back some secondhand comic-books. What I discovered when I took them to the front counter was the assistant manager, an elder in his late 20’s named Rich Roesberg, and a conversation about comic books that over the 35+ years since then has broadened into art, music, politics, and much, much more. “Uncle Rich,” as my gang and I started calling him, became my oasis.

Here’s an abbreviated list of what I found through him during my impressionable adolescent years:

1. A deep admiration for Brian Wilson, Van Dyke Parks and the Beach Boys
2. An appreciation for dada and surrealism
3. R. Crumb
4. John Cage
5. Cut-up (Brion Gysin’s technique)
6. Soupy Sales
7. The Bonzo Dog Doodah Band
8. Jean Shepherd
9. Bob & Ray
10. Steve Ditko (it was Roesberg who made me see how wonderful his work is)
11. Bill Irwin
12. Ernie Kovacs
13. Steve Allen
14. Uncle Floyd
15. Charles Bukowski
16. John Fante
17. Alfred Jarry
18. William S. Burroughs