The long-running blog of American poet Thomas L. Vaultonburg: poetry, horror and cult movies, Rockford history, cryptids, art, humor, gaming, and cultural commentary.
I saw Devo perform live on Fridays in 1980. I flipped my lid. I was only 11, so the full context of what was going on was largely lost on me, but even then I knew it was something that applied to me and whatever it was that I am. By the time I bought Freedom of Choice at the Lincoln Mall in Freeport the next year I was savvy enough to know that a lot more was going on than just "Whip It." Thirty-five years later I drove to the post office on Harrison Street to pick up an original Club Devo energy dome. There are others like it, but this one is mine. And that was the last time I will ever put it on my head. Whipped it good.
MTV debuted on August 1st 1981. USA Network's overnight video and music show Night Flight debuted June 5th 1981, featuring not only a healthy dose of videos from alternative bands, but B movies, interviews with artists and cultural figures, cult movies, short videos, cartoons, and stand up comedy. It was a lifeline to those of us living in small towns where there was little to no access to anything alternative or weird. In fact, in the town I lived in MTV was banned until 1985, but since they couldn't ban an entire network I looked forward to Friday and Saturday nights and Night Flight.
The show began at 10 p.m. Central time, and lasted four hours. It was then reshown at 2 a.m., and the rising sun often found me sitting there watching that second showing in its entirety even though I had also watched the earlier showing.
There was no "host" in the early years, just the voice of Pat Prescott doing an introduction to the individual pieces. It was the first place I encountered the Church of the Sub-Genius in the segment Love That Bob, and most likely the first time I saw the Devo video for "Whip It." other segments included New Wave Theater, featuring punk and New Wave bands, Atomic TV, featuring Cold War era videos, The Video Artist, and Tales From Tomorrow. No doubt about 99% of it was going right over my head at 13 years old, but I knew I liked it and longed for a world that was more like Night Flight than the small town reality of conformity and Revenge of the Nerds type bullies I existed in. The 80's really were a lot like the high school John Hughes' type movies about cool kids and jocks and freaks and geeks. Despite current fashion standards that geek is sheik, and being a nerd is cook, it sure wasn't in 1983. And that's what made Night Flight such a lifeline to geeks like me who were so outnumbered and so isolated in small towns across America.
Night of the Living Dead, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Dementia 13, Eraserhead, and The Terror were shown in their entirety on Night Flight. There was nothing like it. MTV was nothing like it. Nothing like it existed before, during, or after its original run from 1981-1988. I guess you had to be there and know what it's like to live in a world without 24 hour access to every cool and new and interesting thing, and social media blasting out and sharing it all so we all virtually instantaneously can share in every new zeitgeist to understand what it meant to have just that one source of connection to someplace out there that contained people who thought and believed and created the way you did, and weren't punished or ostracized for it, they were revered.
By the time Night Flight left the air in 1988 the era of grunge was about to sweep out the long national nightmare of Reagan, hair metal, and blind conformity. By 1990, everyone in America was cool, and Night Flight was just one of dozens of ways one could access what was cool and hip and new. It was there for those who needed it at a time where there was almost no alternative.
The Police Synchronicity album was one of my favorites as an adolescent.
The vinyl album collection in our household was rather impressive. So much so that I wonder if my father still has it. Maybe shoved into a corner of the basement. I was always hounding my father to join one of those record clubs, and eventually he did, and let me pick some of the albums. This was the first one I chose. Oh No, It's Devo was probably the second.
I'm not sure how many boxes our communal record collection filled, but it was many. I haven't exactly bought a phonograph to play any of the new old records I'm collecting, and I'm not sure if I will, or if I'd play them at all. At least not the ones I am collecting that are first pressings. I don't miss the whole experience of playing vinyl records, and because I have a tin ear I can't really tell the difference between a vinyl record and a digital file all my musician friends keep explaining to me. What I love about these albums is the artifact itself. The cover, the liner notes, the various record label stickers I remember from my formative years. Mercury and Casablanca have to be two of the most evocative labels for me. For some reason I can tell you what record label released an album in 1975 from fifty feet away, but I have no idea what I ate for lunch.
The Synchronicity album is almost marred by the huge success of the Every Breath You Take single. The songs Synchronicity I and II are the ones I listen to mostly these days. But this was the album that made The Police, especially Sting, superstars.
Well, I've finally taken the plunge and started collecting vinyl records. At least a few vinyl records. Most likely there's less than 100 albums in the world I'm even interested in owning, again. Hell, I don't even have a turntable right now. I think as I acquire albums I'll post a little bit about why I bought that album and maybe what it meant to me when I bought it the first time as a teenager, and now as a middle-aged man. My first acquisition was The Monster Club soundtrack. I've already written rather extensively about that, so here's the first album I decided to buy for the second time...
Devo's Freedom of Choice LP is the first piece in my vinyl album collection.
One of the very first vinyl albums I remember buying with my own money is Devo's Freedom of Choice. As a younger kid I spent most of my birthday money on Kiss albums, so this is probably the first serious album I ever bought, although most people seemed to think of Devo as little more than a novelty band and a one hit wonder. To me that never seemed to be true. I just got it from the beginning. Even at 12 I knew this was some serious shit to be dealt with. I probably got almost none of the lasting significance of what this band was about back then, I just dug it more than I had previously dug anything else. I couldn't have told you what albums they had done before this one, but I was hooked. Oh No, It's Devo only solidified my affection for the band.
We rarely watched Saturday Night Live in our house because my father was off work and if he wasn't dragging us off somewhere to drink beer and work on cars, he just didn't like the show very much, but on Friday night there was a comedy show called Fridays, and that one we did watch. I remember seeing Devo perform "Gates Of Steel" and "Girl U Want" before the album ever came out, so "Whip It" wasn't even the first song I heard from this album. Fridays developed a reputation for showcasing a lot of the alternative and new wave music of that era, bands that weren't established enough for SNL. It was just the more cutting edge show, and skits like "Diner Of the Living Dead" were proof of that. Where did I buy Freedom of Choice? At the Ben Franklin store in Byron, Illinois. Same place I bought most of my albums. I believe albums generally cost $8.99 then, so I don't feel too badly about paying roughly twice that much for the album 25 years later. The owner and his family lived across the street from us, and for 25 years I've wanted to unburden the guilt and confess we nicked AC/DC's Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap album from his store the night of my 12th birthday party. Sorry. We played it 27 times that night, and that's not even possible. We always had a pretty high end setup in our house, with expensive Kenwood and Pioneer products, so it's likely unless I invest in some expensive gear that I'll never hear this album the same way I did when I first heard it. I'm hoping to save enough money this month to buy an original energy dome, but that seems a little extravagant. I'll probably pass this year and wait until they come around again next Halloween. It makes me happy to have this album again facing outward from the shelf into the room like a monument to the enduring power of geekdom.
August 10, 2026 update:
In our family we had a communal record collection that seemed to begin when the family did. My parents bought records, my brothers and I added our own as we got older, but nobody thought much about whose album was whose. They all went into the same collection. Those records were simply part of the household, and consequently part of my childhood.
When my mother died, we lost access to that record collection. Strangely, I didn't think very much about the records themselves at the time. Records disappear pretty easily when a household disappears. Years later, though, vinyl came back, and I started thinking about those albums again. Not just the music, but the objects themselves—the covers I had stared at, the labels I recognized instantly, the records somebody brought home and put into the family collection forty or fifty years ago.
I had said I would never buy vinyl records again. Eventually I started buying back some of the albums that had meant the most to me. That's really what these posts were about. I wasn't trying to assemble the world's greatest record collection. In some way I was trying to reconstruct ours.
Of course, I eventually realized that's impossible. I can buy another copy of Freedom of Choice, Jailbreak, Abraxas or In Search of the Lost Chord. It can be the same pressing, have the same cover and make exactly the same sounds. But it can never be that copy. It isn't the record my uncle brought over on the weekend or the one my brothers and I put back on the shelf. It wasn't sitting in our house when I was seven or twelve or fifteen years old.
Those records are gone. These are replacements. I suppose collecting them again was my way of discovering that there's a difference.
When I served my time as a schoolkid in the seventies and eighties things were different. Parents weren't cool. There were no MILF moms and 40 year old dads in punk rock bands. Hell, in the entire frickin' universe there probably only 700-800 people tops who were considered "cool." And they had done extensive work to become so. Lunch boxes proved it. You got the wrong lunch box you took a beating. In 1978 it was Evel Knieval, John Travolta and The Fonz. What's my point? I'll tell you my fucking point. If you wore Chuck Taylors to school in 1978 it meant you couldn't afford blue Adidas with the three stripes and you took a beating. If you wore brown Toughskins to school in 1978 you might as well have รข€¦. well, something bad. You remember Toughskins from Sears. A fucking robot couldn't wear them out so what chance did you have to ever be rid of these monstrosities. What's my point? I was recently forced to attend an event at a "trendy" night spot. Everyone there was significantly cooler than me. I know this is true because they drank nothing but Pabst Blue Ribbon and wore the same awful military style black frame nylon glasses I was issued as a defenseless seven year old and wore until I was sixteen. More than this they had managed to find a lost consignment of brown Toughskins somewhere at a forgotten torture facility and were sporting Old School Chuck Taylors. I suffered flashbacks and had to remove myself from the suarez before I started stabbing everyone in the jugular with the shards of an Appletini glass. What's your point, Thomas? I'll tell you. In 1978 I wasn't cool in my brown Toughskins, Chuck Taylors and black nylon military style glasses and neither are you in 2006. Pabst Blue Ribbon is horse piss and always has been. My father drank PBR for forty years and he's far from being one of the cooler people on the planet. So, The Fonzarelli Effect. What is it? As I mentioned in 1978 no one on the planet was cool. 700-800 people tops. And the rest of us accepted that. There was only one cool table and we weren't at it. When Dungeons and Dragons came out we played it. When Devo made albums we bought them. We were known as geeks, dweebs and nerds and treated accordingly. There were no television shows glorifying us. Flash forward to 2007 and of the 6.5 billion people on Earth roughly two-thirds of them are now "cool." Everyone gets it. Everyone has a cell phone and a blog and a My Space site. Pretty much everyone in the entire world is in a punk band and everyone else is a tattoo artist. Every trend is transmitted to everyone simultaneously so no one has to do the hard work of being an individual. Everyone gets it. Even the last examples of uncoolness on the planet, the nerds, geeks and dweebs are now hip. The Fonzarelli effect states that if everyone is cool no one is cool. Cool isn't the right lunchbox, awful pants, bad music and deluding yourself into thinking Pabst Blue Ribbon is a palatable beverage, cool is a T-shirt with The Fonz giving you the thumb and saying "AAAAAYYYYYY" just be yourself. Cool is not getting that dumbass tattoo and looking to past generations for ideas and slogans and trends to steal instead of creating your own. You know what else isn't cool? Harley Davidsons. The entire biker culture. Not cool. It's a medival costume party for over the hill middle managers. Here are a few other things that aren't cool: lists, Hooters, Green Day, storm chasers, crocodile hunters, profilers, mobsters, gangsters, athletes, The Onion and Emmylou Harris. If you're on this list you ain't cool. When did everyone decide sharing a small part of a global brain and identity was preferable to living a large and adventurous life at the periphery of societal norms and standards? When did everyone become too clever for the room?Pin It
