Come Back Jonee

Forty-eight years ago today, Virgin Records released Come Back Jonee by Devo. August 25, 1978. The single came from the band’s debut album, Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!. The song references Chuck Berry’s Johnny B. Goode in name and in the guitar fills that open it. The same notes. The same forward momentum. Filtered through a band that believed rock and roll was evidence of something going wrong. Come Back Jonee does not celebrate Chuck Berry. It deconstructs him. It uses the most optimistic music in the American songbook to argue the opposite point.

Devo formed in Akron, Ohio in the early 1970s. The lineup was two sets of brothers. Mark and Bob Mothersbaugh. Gerald and Bob Casale. Plus drummer Alan Myers. Mark Mothersbaugh and Gerald Casale met as students at Kent State University. On May 4, 1970, the Ohio National Guard opened fire on student protesters at Kent State. Four students were killed. Casale knew two of them. The event did not break them. It focused them. The concept of de-evolution became the framework for everything that followed. The idea that mankind was regressing rather than progressing. They were not being ironic. They were being precise.

Brian Eno produced Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!. David Bowie had seen Devo perform and called them the band of the future. The album was recorded primarily at Conny Plank’s studio in Cologne, West Germany. Come Back Jonee was tracked at Different Fur Studios in San Francisco. The finished album sounded like nothing else being made in 1978. It predicted the shape of a decade ahead. The cold surfaces. The mechanical rhythms. The ironic distance from American mythology. Forty-eight years later, the question the album asks has only gotten harder to answer.