A Bag Of Golf Balls
Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo! by Devo - Everyone assumes that face was designed from scratch. It wasn't. It came from a bundle of golf balls.
I hate golf. I've never played a game of golf in my life. I have gone out with my friends to watch them play, but I just don't get it. The one time I tried mini golf with my nephews I lost a ball in a fake volcano. So it feels fitting, somehow, that one of the strangest album covers in my collection began with exactly the kind of golf merchandise I'd walk straight past in a shop.
Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo! has that warped, waxy face staring out from the sleeve; not quite human, not quite anything. I always assumed it was designed that way from the start, some deliberate bit of "we are de-evolved" art direction dreamed up in a studio. Devo were nothing if not a concept band, after all, with a whole philosophy behind the name. Turns out the truth is dumber and better than that.
Album Anatomy
| Album | Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo! |
| Artist | Devo |
| Released | August 28, 1978 |
| Label | Warner Bros. Records (US) / Virgin Records (UK) |
| On the cover | A digitally morphed composite face, blending a photo of golfer Chi-Chi Rodríguez with the faces of four U.S. presidents |
| Format | Illustration (airbrushed photo composite) |
| Design | Devo (concept), reworked by Warner Bros.' in-house art department |
| Decade | 1970s |
A Headshot On A Bag Of Golf Balls
Founders Gerald Casale and Mark Mothersbaugh were shopping for supplies when they wandered past a pack of golf balls with a cardboard flap on the packaging. It was a headshot of golfer Chi Chi Rodriguez, framed inside a giant golf ball. Mothersbaugh loved it immediately. Casale saw something in it too: Rodriguez's loud shirts, his famous hat, and golf itself as this perfect little symbol of naff, bourgeois consumerism. Exactly the kind of "lowest end of ad graphics" they were drawn to. It ended up on the cover of their "Be Stiff" single early in 1978, no dramas.
Where It All Went Wrong
Then they wanted it for the album, and that's where it fell apart. Warner Bros.' VP of business affairs, David Burnam, was a golf fan, took offence on Rodriguez's behalf, and worried he might sue. Devo wrote to Rodriguez asking permission properly and while they waited to hear back, they had a release date to hit, so they had to invent a replacement fast.
Four Presidents And A Golfer Walk Into A Photo Lab
Mothersbaugh's fix was somehow weirder than the original problem. He'd found an image in a newspaper of a composite face blending John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford; one of those "what would four presidents look like mashed into one" novelty images. The plan: take that face, then mutate it further with Rodriguez's features on top. Illustrator Joe Heiner did the actual work of turning Chi Chi into something unrecognisable as Chi Chi.
Rodriguez's letter of approval arrived too late anyway, the record was already pressed. Mothersbaugh later described the end result, fairly accurately, as "a mutilated potato face."
The Accident That Proved The Theory
This is a cover people have spent decades reading meaning into. De-evolution made visible, the face of a species in reverse and it was actually a legal scramble stitched together from a golf ball wrapper and a newspaper novelty image, finished under deadline pressure. Except that's sort of the point, isn't it. Devo's whole philosophy was that culture doesn't move forward on purpose, it just mutates from whatever's lying around and calls it progress. By complete accident, their own album cover proved the theory.
So no, I still can't hit a golf ball straight. But I'll never look at a bag of them in a shop the same way again.
