SAN FRANCISCO — “It’s not a farewell tour, it’s a welfare tour,” DEVO frontman Mark Mothersbaugh explains while sitting at a card table in the Golden Gate Theatre lobby a few hours before he’s scheduled to perform the first of two concerts in the city on the band’s 50th anniversary tour.

Clad in a black shirt and signature silver spectacles, he jokingly elaborates on DEVO’s trajectory and what’s next for himself and the band. For starters, it’s likely not a farewell; more on that in a bit.

“I like playing on stage again. … And everybody else wants to do it too, I think,” he says. DEVO played a run of shows in Europe and decided to see how it felt and everyone —including his guitarist-singer brother, Bob, bassist Gerald Casale and guitarist Josh Hager—enjoyed it.

The band’s most recent drummer, Josh Freese has since joined Foo Fighters, and Angeleno drummer Jeff Friedl (A Perfect Circle, Puscifer) has taken his place. 

“We’re going to play a bunch of Australian dates after we do these West Coast dates. And then we’ll start back up again next year, I think,” Mothersbaugh says.

In addition to the band, Mothersbaugh has worked extensively scoring for TV and film, working on everything from “The Lego Movie” to “Cocaine Bear.” He said he’s got four TV show and two film projects in the works, including a couple with lauded filmmaker Taika Waititi. The two worked together several times since “Thor: Ragnarok.” He’s also worked in music for video games, which he enjoys even though he’s not a gamer himself.

“People that are playing the game, they hear the music the way it sounds when you write it,” he said. “It might start off with just a bass … and then maybe some woodwinds come in and then maybe some violins and then a brass and then something playing double time on a synth… It keeps getting bigger until it builds the whole song.”

Mothersbaugh has also been busy readying a book of his art. “Apotropaic Beatnik Graffiti,” which will be released next month, is a collection of his drawings, nearly 600 of them on each of the book’s pages.

His keen artistic vision is the result of being born legally blind, he says. He got his first pair of glasses at 7 years old.

“I never saw the sun before, I never saw a cloud. I had never seen telephone wires. I’d never seen the roof of a house,” Mothersbuagh says.

Immediately, Mothersbaugh began making art, starting the very next day with trees. In class, a teacher who’d previously made him stand in a corner with a dunce cap and spanked him—”It was the ’50s … They did that stuff”—told him he drew trees better than her her. He went home and dreamed that he would be an artist.

In the early days of the pandemic, Mothersbaugh got COVID-19, which required three months on a ventilator. But more lasting than the disease for him was losing vision in one eye after he was struck in the face in the intensive care unit.

“Weirdly enough, before that I was doing things based on evil eyes and apotropaic eyes, which are like good magic to protect you from evil doers,” he says.

It’s like he saw it coming. And yet despite the recent setbacks, he doesn’t see an end to DEVO in sight.

“The first 50 years we were talking about humans being the one species out of touch with nature and … fucking up the planet,” he says. “And now the next 50 years is, ‘OK, everybody already knows that now.’ We were correct. I would have liked to have been wrong. But the next 50 years, I think our message is going to be more proactive. I could see our message as being, ‘mutate, don’t stagnate.'”

Although dubbed the band’s “Farewell Tour,” Mothersbaugh says that was the idea of one of the band’s promoters trying to spur more ticket sales. Ironically, this type of predatory capitalism has long inspired DEVO’s satirical skewering. Mothersbaugh was introduced to this deceptive advertising the moment he went to buy his first record: a Beatles album at his local Woolworth’s after seeing the Fab Four on “Ed Sullivan.” Stunned by the $3.99 price tag, he opted for a cheaper alternative, a nearby record with a similar black and white cover.

“I’m 12 years old, and I’m looking, and it says, ‘Meet the Bugs.’ I got totally ripped off,” Mothersbaugh says with a wry laugh.

Six years later, on May 4, 1970, Mothersbaugh and Casale were students at Kent State University when National Guardsmen killed four student protestors including Casale’s friends Jeffrey Miller and Allison Krause.

“It just turns out when you piss off the government enough, they just push you down and they teach you a lesson,” he says of what the tragedy taught him. “One of the things that experience taught us was that rebellion is obsolete and it really doesn’t work in this country.”

Mothersbaugh’s solution to the subversive stalemate came while he was working as a house painter. One day while working on an apartment in Akron, Ohio. The radio started playing “Pachelbel’s Canon,” but it had lyrics: “Hold the pickles/ Hold the lettuce/ Special orders don’t upset us”—a Burger King commercial.

In that moment, Mothersbaugh realized that advertising was the most potent form of mind control.

“I mean, they’re getting people to do the wrong things,” he says. “They’re getting people to eat food that’s bad for them and drive cars that are horrible and feel happy about it. But we could use the same techniques and feed them good information.”

Taking inspiration from marketing lingo, science fiction, and countercultural weirdness, Mothersbaugh, Casale, singer-guitarist Bob Mothersbaugh, guitarist-keyboardist Bob Casale and rotating cast of drummers turned music inside out, reveling in the awkward and uncomfortable elements normally edited out of polished productions. DEVO’s powerful visual component featured futuristic uniforms, robotic dance moves, plastic hair, partially deconstructed guitars and its trademarked energy domes, modeled after ripoff ads found at the back of pulp magazines for helmets that gave the wearer mind-reading or telekinetic abilities.

Despite the accuracy of DEVO’s dystopian predictions, Mothersbaugh remains optimistic about the future. His message?

“Hi kids. You’re inheriting a ball of shit. And you’ve got to figure out how to adapt to it. Humans are resourceful when they need to be,” he says. “I mean, that’s how we ended up with too many humans.”

He finds recent developments in AI intriguing and suggests that while it may not be easy to get rich and famous, now is the perfect time for people to use art to change the world.

“Kids, they just make up a song and they can do it on their phone. And if they like it enough, they don’t have to go to a record company,” he says. “They just go online and they post a song. And to me that’s a miracle. In some ways this is the best time artistically and musically. If … you want to be Taylor Swift and you want to make a billion dollars, then good luck. It’s kind of harder than ever to do that now. It’s like you got to hit the golf ball twice as far and it has to go right in a little hole like that and a mile away. But if you just are an artist and you have ideas and things you want to say, it’s such a great time.”

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