My chilling legs stamping up and down along Sherbourne street, breathing the fresh new ghost out of my mouth into the cell phone.

Devo was in Toronto tonight. I could not miss it, I’d be dishonouring myself and everyone who thinks they know me. I couldn’t deny it any longer, friends. I must come out, I cannot live this lie anymore. I am Devo. And so are you.

“Hey Alex, I’m here. Sorry if I’m late, unless you are late, then I regret nothing. I’m in line, are you also in line? I’m standing next to this British guy in a striped sweater. He says he’s seen Devo before back in the UK, so I guess his return trip is a vote of confidence.”

“Yeah King, I’m just inside. I’m standing by a bunch of tall people. You probably won’t be able to see me. Oh wait there you are.”

“Oh, there you are.”

And sure he was, strong, sturdy, mustachioed. Excellent.

I was wondering how much the beers were, and whether it was worth it to squeeze my way through the crowds towards the bar, and while there`s one at three of the four ends of the Phoenix`s room, all seemed miles away from my vantage point peering over the landscapes of human heads. I had never seen the Phoenix so absolutely packed with living human people before. Every time a new sliver of space opened up between us and the stage I would motion Mister Armstrong to move ahead.

So then we waited and I relaxed, having absorbed the orgones.

“How much for that plastic energy dome? Got it at the merch booth?”

And we continued to wait.

“Thirty bucks? Man, that’s moulded plastic. That is a profit margin.”

And then the opening act came on.

Instead of a band of middle aged miscreants dabbled out a single soul in a blue suit and fake beard. In a corny fake voice he addressed us, thanked us for coming, and taking full advantage of our confusion led us into his act. He was JP Incorporated. He ran a fake TV station. Which ran fake TV shows. All which have fake TV theme songs. And fake TV advertisements. With fake TV advertisement jingles. All of the aforementioned which requires rhapsody he sang live for us on stage with the accompaniment of a screen to his left.

“Wait, the Phoenix has a screen?” I would long later question after the screen rolled up.

“What do you want?” Huh? “You want it all!” Well yeah. “You want a cool new TV show” Of course.“But that’s not all. It’s gotta have a monster truck” Yeahh. “That robotically transforms” Okay. “But since we’re adults shouldn’t it transform into something more mature and sophisticated?”

“LIKE JAZZ”

I found myself compelled to holler and fist pump to a photoshopped image of a monster truck with flaming saxes for horns. Like I had suddenly become a puppet to this man’s reality. He sang songs about shows about transgendered basketball coaches, time traveling breakfasts and the people who work at the internet. Every individual in every video had the same face, JP Incorporated’s face. While these sort of off kilter gags make for good Youtubing, marathoning the joke in front of an impatient crowd waiting for their fifty dollar band caused a storm. A cold front of old no nonsense goers started to indirectly clash with the warm front of open minded youngsters/weirdos. JP Inc is brave. As half the crowd booed and hissed, the other half tried to overpower the singes with cheering and woots, JP had no delusions. He knew the shriveled up had no patience for him. He thanked us all for having him. Each and every one of us. Then he finished with a song about spicy noodle hot ramen and left the stage. Then we waited in the well lit darkness.

While waiting some real tall Devoid motherfuckers came and stood right in front of us average-heighted dudes.

I remember that one specific dude, with the Devo glasses and brown leather jacket, fate dealt him an obnoxious height.

Obnoxious as well, or maybe just noxious, were the buxom spudbabes he carried on his right and left shoulder, who were not quite as tall, but equally Devoed and Devoid.

“Do you think people dressed like this in the 80s or is Flickr lying to me?”

“Are we close enough to the front? There are a lot of larger people in front of us.”

“I don’t know, maybe a mosh will break out, there are some rock and roll looking dude’s squeezed in around here.”

“A mosh pit? Here?”

“Alex, ‘balding’ isn’t the same thing as ‘pussy’.”

And eventually.

"Hello Booji boy, do you have the papers the china man gave you?" Robert Mothersbaugh, Sr., says to his son Mark wearing a baby mask and orange jumpsuit.

"In the past this information has been suppressed, but now it can be told. Every man, woman, and mutant on this planet shall know the truth about de-evolution."

"Oh Dad," the son replies, "We're all Devo!"

This lead to a bizarre boardroom performance of the band's signature tune, Jocko Homo, in which they chant hypnotically the title of the album that we were there to see: "Are We Not Men? WE ARE DEVO!"

Surprisingly, the band did not take the theatrical distraction to sneak out on stage, and in fact, there was still some dead air in between the video and the set, but not much. The massive light stands came to life, finally. The room erupted in illumination, as a million eyes were blinded by luminous flow and a million ears tingled to a harmonious welcome.

And thank spud, the band rushed onstage and jumped right into their car-commercial hit, "Uncontrollable Urge." This tune always excites the Freudian in me, with its sense of urgency and id-driven chorus: "yeah yeah yeah yeah YEAHYEAHYEAHYEAHYEAH YEAH YEAH!"

YEAHYEAHYEAHYEAHYEAH

I’M OUT OF CONTROL NOW

They were dressed in clean yellow jumpsuits, separated by black belts, black glasses and gray hair. They seemed jazzed about everything. I hope they were jazzed about being in the city. It’s been 25 years, said the paper. I don’t want to date myself, but that’s longer than I’ve existed.

If I was high on the orgones of the audience before, the energy leaking out of their powerdomes, I was completely ripped at this point. The air vibrated. The audience jerked like robots. King Frankenstein belted many brash laughs at the onstage hijinx of the band.

“Who wants to see in 3-D?” Shouts out Mothersbaugh. The whole cabal tosses out their glasses in sync, hands fluttering about to be the lucky grip. Mark would toss out giveaways like Halloween treats. Guitar picks were scattered about like confetti. Each Devo member shredding off slivers of their shirts, though given the momentum cloth gains in the air, it tended to be the same row of people scoring each time. Eventually Mothersbaugh gave away himself, diving into the crowd, jumping about, being touched, acting like an ape while two roadies awaited on stage to help him back up.

One change (or possible mishear) I particularly liked during their cover of "I Can't Get No Satisfaction": "I'm watching my TV/and a man comes on to tell me/how white my CHICK could be." For the rest of the show Mark punctuated his best lines by smoking an invisible cigarette.

Mark appeared to have rehearsed being freaked the hell out. He would constantly press his hand against his head until it lifted his hair like he had been slowly struck by lightning. Though it would make sense, he was probably keeping the sweat out of his eyes. The guys were sweltering more than me. I was wearing three layers, while they had it whittled down to one (if that).

Praying Hands, a song which accurately connects masturbation guilt and organized religion, roped the audience into a game of body-echolalia. The best Devo lyrics come off like instruction manuals for strange actions: "You got the left hand diddling/while the right hand goes to work... Okay, relax, and assume the position/go into doggie submission/Wash your hands three times a day/Always do what your mom and dad say/Brush your teeth in the following way..." The praying hands of the song refer to a particular style of pleasuring oneself. But maybe I am now getting too far away from the review at hand.

Devo got to their first two singles, Mongoloid and Jocko Homo. Mongoloid sizzled and said some un-PC things. Jocko Homo sent the crowd into a full-on punkoid frenzy. And of course we all responded to "Are We Not Men?"

“We are Devotes”

It usually doesn’t feel this good to sing along. All other times you have to drink away that guilt of being a total dweeb. Maybe it was how the words came out like a motor function, maybe it was paying fifty bucks to go, but there was nothing stopping me from jabbing the punch lines along with everyone else.

All of the songs that they played were written over 30 years ago. These songs are older than the King and I. Not our ages combined, mind you. The point is, Devo knows what they are doing. They know exactly how to do these songs so that they are awesome every time. They have been doing it for years. This is what their reputation is built on. The problem is that once you've done something for this long, it loses its edge. The concert was great, but obviously Devo-by-the-numbers. In the 70s and 80s these guys were raw and somewhat dangerous. Now they are nearly a nostalgia act. I will give them credit though, they did rearrange some of the songs and are certainly more fresh and relevant than most "comeback" bands you see touring around these days.

I don’t want come off as soggy, but there was something about the whole affair that felt too well practiced, too by the books. Maybe I haven’t seen many, if any other acts who had been at it this long and I can’t even construct in my head doing the same thing for so long. But there wasn’t that grizzled filter that you see in most other acts. They came, they rocked, they did just that, but only that. I wanted to throw a wrench in the system, I wanted something more personal or reflexive. It was more Harlem Globetrotters than new age. There’s something about the song "Gut Feeling" that feels more like a “classic rock” song now, rather than something “weeeiiird” of yesteryear. Maybe it’s the pace, or progression, but while amazing live, it suddenly felt like a trucker’s ambiance. What happened to oddity? God, what standard am I holding things up to...

Nowhere was it more apparent that the boys of Devo, and most of their fans, are old men than the concluding song, "Shrivel Up." This song, which closes their classic album, serves to remind the listener of the facts of life, death, and decay. Devo was looking a little gray, there's no denying. It's a good song, and maybe I was thinking too deeply about the lyrics, and maybe the orgones were hitting me hard, but I was left depressed.
And so came the end of the album, Q: Are We Not Men, which was what we were going to get, promised by the ticket.

And then

Luckily

Yessss

There was an encore, which kicked ass.

I waited for Alex to get his ticket before I got mine. Even after transacting I felt torn between the two nights. Both albums have so many stellar songs, but they weren’t coming to the city just to play my customized set. Or so I should think. Oh Devo, you cards. You took one of the songs I was feeling shamed to miss, and another no one saw coming.

It was only two songs, but in my opinion, it was the two best choices they could have made. The first was "Smart Patrol/Mr. DNA," the epic centrepiece of the aforementioned and unplayed "Duty Now For the Future," which posits Devo as a band of time bandits set to save the world. Following this, and closing the show, was "Gates of Steel," a fantastically catchy tune from "Freedom of Choice." I am very thankful they played it, considering that I could not make the following night. This song hit King Frankenstein so hard he danced like there was no tomorrow, nor nerdlingers surrounding him.

I did this shoulder jerk I saw Mothersbaugh do in an old live recording during the chorus, though he didn’t.

I left the show feeling disoriented.

I left the show and lost Alex, being washed around in the masses of Devo funneling through the Phoenix’s narrow exit halls like a flushing toilet. The old people kept popping up again, popped up on other things. I’m pretty sure for some of these seniors it was the first night on the town in a while. Uncles and aunts, slurring about, high on whatever for the first time in decades. Laughing with the kind of hysteria that looks like they only now discovered joy.

As we were walking down the street, a fat monkey-ish man in a powerdome was hiding behind a fence. He scared the spunk outta me.

We spent hours trying to get it back.