On May 4, 1970, members of the Ohio National Guard shot and killed four Kent State University students and injured nine others during campus protests of America's involvement in the Vietnam War.

Impressionable art and poetry students Gerald Casale and Bob Lewis were among the throngs of protesters. The violence that erupted from what was meant to be a peaceful protest forever changed them.

Casale and Lewis stopped being about peace, love and happiness that day, and their satirical art pieces on the concept of de-evolution, an idea that human beings regress with evidence pointing to the collapse of democracy, became their weapon. They joined forces with another student, Mark Mothersbaugh, and formed the band Devo in Akron, Ohio in 1973.

Devo played its first show as a sextet ⁠— adding Gerald's brother Bob Casale on guitar, and friends Rod Reisman on drums and Fred Weber on vocals ⁠— at the Kent State Performing Arts Festival in 1973. Weber and Reisman left that same year.

By 1976, the remaining four had performed as a quartet with Mark moving to vocals and adding his brother, Bob Mothersbaugh, on guitar, and Alan Myers replacing Reisman on drums.

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When David Bowie saw their first music video "The Truth Of De-Evolution" at the Ann Arbor Film Festival in 1976, he brought them to Warner Bros., where they were signed.

The release of their first album "Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!" in 1978 was groundbreaking. American audiences and critics had never heard anything like it. Devo was a pioneer bringing unmelodious pop songs with science fiction and satirical political commentary themes to the masses. They were one of the major influences on new wave in the 1980s.

In 1980, their third album "Freedom of Choice" was released with the single "Whip It." It was their only successful hit single, reaching No. 14 on the Billboard Hot 100. The music video showed the band in black, sleeveless turtlenecks and shorts with their signature red energy dome helmets on a dude ranch, satirizing then-President Ronald Reagan's former film career in Westerns.

Following Myers' departure in 1986 and the critical and commercial failure of their 1990 album "Smooth Noodle Maps," Devo went on hiatus. They reunited in 1996, joined the Lollapalooza tour in 1997, and continued to perform sporadically throughout the early 2000s.

They started out the next decade with their first album in 20 years, “Something For Everybody,” in 2010. What followed was a string of bad luck and tragedies. Their label, Warner Bros., didn't promote the new album. Former drummer Myers died in 2013. Founding member and keyboardist Bob “Bob 2” Casale died a year later, and the band again took a break with an uncertain future.*

Devo will headline and play a one-off show at the Desert Daze festival in Lake Perris, Calif., Oct. 10-13. Though the set time has not yet been announced, this could be the last time they perform.

Bassist Gerald Casale discussed the band's upcoming set, and some of the band's history, in a phone conversation with The Desert Sun.

The following interview was edited for length and clarity.

THE DESERT SUN: The Desert Daze poster advertises your set as part of a “Farewell Tour,” but you’ve said in other interviews that is not the case.

GERALD CASALE: Devo would choose the time and place to announce such a momentous thing. It would probably be called “The Beginning is the End” tour. At this point, there are no plans for a farewell tour, so it could be the only show you see Devo play. I never know when (frontman) Mark Mothersbaugh will want to play another show.

Is Mark the reason why Devo isn’t as active as it used to be?

He’s obviously not driven to perform. I love playing. It’s what Devo was all about. It’d be different if we couldn’t hack it live, but anyone who sees us live walks away feeling very satisfied and wanting more.

Who will play drums at Desert Daze?

It looks like (A Perfect Circle drummer) Jeff Friedl. He toured with us during "Something for Everybody" and he's a great drummer. He's right up there next to Josh Freese.

Devo used advertising imagery and propaganda in music videos, and you have a background in advertising. What do you think of influencers on social media marketing products?

What’s happened with social media is it’s just a lot of people being more like they wanted to be. We’re finding out how many flakes there are, how crazy they are, how many con-men are out there, and it’s exponentially hyped up to the next dimension. People are no different than they were, they’re just more of what they were. I think people deserve what they get, don’t you? If people want to buy in to influencers, so be it, more power to them.

It’s like the (Devo) song “Beautiful World," which says "It's a beautiful world for you / it's not for me."

Look at the world we’re living in and tell me de-evolution isn’t real. We’re just the house band on the Titanic. Western culture is losing its mind and Trump is the pied piper, and everybody is following him off the cliff. It’s the end of democracy. We said in 1983, “Freedom of choice is what you got / freedom from choice is what you want.”* (Economist) Paul Krugman just wrote a piece I read today about how the people who should fear what’s going on the most are the cheerleaders, who will be the first to be adversely affected by an autocracy and the rule of law.

Do we need Devo now more than ever?

We get amazing offers. It’s like a Ferrari with eight cylinders, only if Mark and I aren’t firing, the interest wanes. It’s getting everybody on board. I completely understand. Devo was about something and what we were talking about dealing with has come to pass. It’s not a polarizing argument ⁠— nobody has an argument because they know it’s true and things are devolving quickly. It wasn’t just about style, there was substance.

What was it like to be a band in Akron, Ohio during the late 1970s?

It was an economically depressed and culturally stultifying place. All the rubber companies were gone and it was gruesome blue collar stuff. As a kid, I remember when all the rubber companies were there and my parents would drive to Akron and visit relatives. All the factories were spewing out that sulfuric smoke at 5 p.m., and that was back when everything was hustling and bustling and there were huge department stores and it just died. It felt like we were in a morgue. When you're dealing with artistic endeavors, that adversity focuses and galvanizes you. We got to develop and hone what we were doing without somebody watching our first gig and running it up the flag pole of some hip magazine like a cultural center in New York or Los Angeles. It was a real collaboration and experimental period of camaraderie, working together every day, and developing so when we showed up on the radar, it was a polished presence. That wouldn't have happened if we were from a good city.

When you recorded the first album, "Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!" with (producer) Brian Eno, he wanted the band to use more synthesizers and you refused. Why was there hesitation, considering they appeared on your following albums?

It wasn’t about synthesizers. He wanted it to be less brutal and less industrial. He wanted us to sound more melodic and pretty. That’s not what we were back then, and we walked in there with a body of work we lived with and developed that was three years old at that point. When you’re trying to establish who you are, you don’t want to sound like what someone else wants you to sound like. We resisted him on the melodic stuff that sounded lush.

Out of all the music and music videos Devo made, how do you feel about "Whip It" being the only hit song in the band's history?

That's what happens when you don't get a lot of radio play. We were an alternative act before there was a name for alternative acts. Our popularity was based on word of mouth, coming to our live shows, people buying our records, and people playing our records for their friends who also had to have the record. "Whip It" was the only thing to break through into the mainstream world where you had to have a top 40 hit.

"Something For Everybody" was your last record almost 10 years ago. What were the problems with Warner Bros. after it was released?

It had been so long since Devo put out a new record. Let's say the music world is Planet Earth and Devo is Mars. How do you get Mars and Earth to communicate? We put a lot of work, thought and time into that record. We liked what we were doing and it was a great hybrid of Devo now, but with something the classic Devo fans could relate to. Warner Bros. failed to bring it to market. They were a company that was imploding and we didn't know it. They didn't have any clout, they didn't take our record to radio, and they didn't have a plan. We brought them to Mother, the hippest New York ad agency. I directed commercials for them over the years, and we told Warner to give the money in our marketing contract to them. Warner started pushing back because they got paranoid and didn't understand a staged mockumentary we made where Mother hired people to play the people at Warner. They pulled the plug and we were out there playing shows with nothing to support and no help.

Do you find social media offers a way for creative people to effectively promote and sell their work?

The conventional wisdom in propaganda is that's what social media does and empowers the artist to be free from onerous record company deals, and they can control their own fate. It's a belief system. For all the talk of how evil record companies are, what they used to do, was actually invest a lot of money in you so that they had to try and recoup it, you weren't in the hole and you had money. Ok, so maybe you have to get it back, but you're in the game. Now I watch artists struggle and die on the vine. Great musicians and great bands no one knows are there and no one pays attention. How do they break through on social media? How does it really work?

Have you ever been surprised by who comes up and tells you how Devo influenced them?

Most people tell me they got beat up for wearing a Devo shirt. These are people who work for NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, at tech startups, as dentists, or a doctor in Beverly Hills that does colonoscopies and has an amazing guitar collection that includes Devo.

You owned a mid-century modern home in Palm Desert built by Ross Patton and Albert Wild. Why did you sell it?

I owned it with a friend who is a partner in my wine business. He decided he wanted out because I'm living close to the bone and Devo isn't working, and I couldn't take over full ownership. So, we had to sell it after owning it for 15 years, and I miss it.

Desert Sun reporter Brian Blueskye covers arts and entertainment. He can be reached at brian.blueskye@desertsun.com or (760) 778-4617.

*Correction: An earlier version of this story misquoted the lyrics “Freedom of choice is what you got / freedom from choice is what you want" and incorrectly referred to founding member and keyboardist Bob "Bob 2" Casale as "Bob 1."