The other day, while bored out of my mind, I was reading various artist profiles on allmusicguide.com. I'm a huge fan of live music, and somehow, one link led to the next, and I found myself staring at the entry for Devo -- Live: The Mongoloid Years.

The description was pretty good, and I dig early Devo, so I picked it up. It's split into 3 shows, and the 3rd show on the CD is the most amusing live performance I've ever heard.

Apparently Devo secured the gig, which was to open for Sun-Ra, by posing as a band that could do Bad Company covers. So you've got an audience of stoned hippies expecting bad company, and instead, they get Devo.

The liner notes say that the band "tortured stoned hippies" at that show, and that isn't far from the truth. It doesn't start off as torture tho, unless you count starting songs off with "Here's one by Gerry and the Pacemakers", then playing your own music as torture. I certainly don't.

Things start to crash down is during "Jocko Homo". Ya know, the song with the famous "Q:Are we not men?", "A:We are Devo" question and response bit. The audience really didn't get that they were supposed to respond to the Q: bit, and well.. they're hippies. They probably couldn't figure the whole thing out.

Anyhow after a few choruses with no response, the band starts to get agressive and angry. After about 4 minutes of sonic rape, and that's the best way to describe this, an audience member shouts something about the band being a bunch of assholes, and you can hear a small scuffle breaking out.

I'm not sure what happens after that... the power goes out in the middle of the next song, and I swear I heard something like "get those assholes down here...". I'm sure someone in the audience wanted to beat the hell out of them.

But it brightened up my friday at work. Good music and humor at the expense of hippies. What more can you ask for?