Devo, Rubber City Rebels, and the New Liverpool

In the late nineteen-seventies, as the rubber plants were shutting down one by one and the economic foundations of the city were crumbling, something unexpected happened. Akron became famous for music.

A band called Devo had been forming since nineteen seventy-three, built around two sets of brothers, the Mothersbaughs and the Casales, along with drummer Alan Myers. They had grown up in and around Akron and Kent, just east of the city. Their concept centered on a theory they called de-evolution, a deliberately absurdist idea that humanity was not progressing but regressing. The flower-pot hats, the matching uniforms, the robotic choreography, the synthesizer-driven rhythms were all part of a unified artistic statement. Their nineteen eighty single Whip It became their only top-forty hit, but by then they had already changed what rock music could look like.

Before Devo broke internationally, a cluster of Akron bands was attracting serious attention from music journalists. British music writers compared Akron to Liverpool in the late nineteen-seventies, a comparison that meant the city was producing a genuine scene rather than isolated acts. Tin Huey, the Bizarros, the Rubber City Rebels, Chi-Pig, the Waitresses, and Rachel Sweet all emerged from the same small circuit of bars and clubs in a collapsing rubber city.

The venue at the center of it was called the Crypt, a failing rubber workers' bar near downtown that members of Devo, the Rubber City Rebels, and the Bizarros essentially adopted and ran. A rubber workers' tavern became the home of art punk. The contradiction was intentional.

Devo has said that growing up in Akron, watching a city built on one industry, witnessing it come apart, shaped everything about their worldview. The de-evolution concept was not only a joke. It was a response to a specific place at a specific moment.