No place like Devo: Gerald Casale revisits childhood home in Kent

No matter what the lyrics to “Whip It” might suggest, it’s not easy to give the past a slip.

Memories lurked around every corner last weekend as Devo co-founder Gerald Casale, 74, revisited his childhood home in Kent. He dared to step back into the primordial soup, returning to that adolescent world before yellow jumpsuits, red energy domes and plastic hair pomps.

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Casale lived in the Highland Avenue home from 1960 to 1967, or as he put it, “my formative years from innocence to non-innocence.” He lived there with his working-class parents, Robert and Catherine Casale, and siblings Bob, Becky, David and Roger, while attending Davey Junior High, Roosevelt High School and Kent State University.

It was the right place at the right time, he said.

“Just so many memories are packed into this,” he said. “I can’t even believe it. Everything happened. Everything.”

Casale, who now lives in Napa, California, was in Ohio to attend the DEVOtional 2022 convention in Cleveland. He had stopped at the Kent residence unannounced last year, but no one answered a knock at the door. This year, Casale friend Lyle Hunger contacted the owner to arrange a visit.

Schoolteacher Kristin Canary said a real estate agent had mentioned a Devo connection when she bought the home 15 years ago, but she didn’t know the details. She and her boyfriend, Ricky Bochert, were waiting outside when Casale arrived Sept. 16.

“Nice to meet you,” Canary said.

Casale wore a red turtleneck under a gray suit with an atomic logo pinned to the lapel. Joining him were his brother Roger Casale, sister-in-law Kim Cool and music producer Jeff Winner. A handful of friends, including Hunger, also gathered for the tour.

“It’s interesting,” Casale said as he surveyed the 1924 house’s exterior. “Everything looks pretty much like it did.”

After a few minutes chatting, Casale asked Canary if it would be OK to walk up the driveway and go in the back door.

“I never went in the front door,” he explained. “Nobody ever went in the front door.”

Memories await inside

Seconds after entering the home, Casale had a painful flashback. He recalled the time he and a friend were talking inside the vestibule when his brother (and future Devo bandmate) Bob shouted: “Shut the damn door! There will be flies coming in!”

Bob Casale closed the door on his brother’s fingers.

“They’re smashed,” Casale recalled. “And I yell and pull them out. Two fingernails stayed there. I had bandages for two months.”

Welcome back, Jerry.

Moving into the kitchen, Casale applauded Canary’s decision to tear out the wall adjoining the dining room. He had always thought that should be done.

“It makes the whole place feel integrated and cool,” he said.

He and his brother Roger, the last surviving siblings, remembered how all seven family members crowded around the dinner table in the small kitchen. Their parents kept a freezer in the basement, so meat was usually on the menu.

“They loved beef roast, cooking it in pots until it was just obliterated, like dark brown through and through,” Casale said.

Memories bubbled up as the entourage traveled from the dining room to the living room.

Casale pointed to a spot where an antique credenza once stood. That’s where his parents used to keep liquor. He recalled stealing booze and adding water to keep the level the same.

“I got caught,” he said.

Near the front window, he remembered how the family used to huddle around a “crummy TV.”

“We all watched the same things,” Casale said. “What I remember actually liking is ‘Outer Limits,’ “Twilight Zone’ and ‘Star Trek.’ ”

Beware of the ‘Floor Monster’

As oldest brother, Casale was often put in charge of baby-sitting, and he wasn’t above terrorizing his siblings from time to time. One game he played was “Floor Monster,” and he still feels bad about it.

He’d lie down in front of the stairs, blocking passage to the bedrooms and bathroom.

“I was Floor Monster. I wouldn’t get up,” he said. “But they had to get by. I’d grab their legs with my arms.”

Roger pointed to a little dimple on his left cheek, a scar left by the Floor Monster.

“He tripped me. He got me,” Roger said. “I was trying to run across the room and jump, but he hit me with his arm and I fell.”

Jerry called a physician while Dave and Becky put Roger in the bathtub so he wouldn’t bleed all over the floor.

“I had the doctor’s number and he came over within a half-hour and he took care of Roger,” Casale recalled.

So many memories.

In the winter, the kids didn’t want to wear galoshes to school, but their parents still made them, so they’d hide the boots in the woods and pick them up at the end of the day.

When Casale was attending St. Patrick School in Kent, he would stare at the art-deco sconces on the ceiling. Years later, those ornaments inspired his design of the red hats in Devo.

There was a workbench in the basement where Casale “spent way too much time” putting together customized model cars. “I loved Testors glue,” he admitted.

Neighbor kids believed a house in the nearby woods was haunted. Beatnik graduate students lived there and hung disassembled clarinets from the ceiling as mobiles.

One Christmas, Casale made the mistake of planting a kiss on his girlfriend beneath the mistletoe just as his mother walked into the room. She lost it and started whaling on him until the embarrassed couple fled the house.

So many memories.

Flashback in the attic

The stairs squeaked and groaned as the group moved upstairs.

“Were these steps as loud and creaky?” Canary wondered.

“Yeah, nobody could get up here by accident,” Casale said.

The second floor wasn’t quite as recognizable to Casale because the house had once been converted into a duplex, but he pointed out Becky’s room and the closet to his parents’ bedroom.

“This is where they hid all the Christmas presents,” he said. “But, of course, Bob and I would find them and we’d know everything we were going to get before we got it.”

The group continued up to the attic bedroom that Jerry and Bob had shared.

“It’s still really recognizable,” Casale gasped. “Unbelievable.”

And just like that, it was the 1960s and he was a kid again.

A turntable and speakers used to be over here.

“This is where I first listened to the initial Beatles record, the initial Rolling Stones record, early Bob Dylan,” he said.

A big plastic radio used to be over there.

“AM radio back then was fantastic,” he said. “It would play new music.”

Over there was the spot where he learned to play an acoustic guitar.

“I had one of Bob Dylan’s early records and I was picking out all the songs,” he said.

He could almost smell the Canoe and English Leather that he used to wear when he was going to school dances. He could visualize the empty bottles that he used as room decorations. And he could hear the scratching in the walls.

“When Bob and I were up here, there was a bat problem,” Casale said. “Oftentimes, bats would show up. … My dad would try to do something and they’d escape into the room and my mother would be screaming.”

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Casale entered Kent State on an honors scholarship in 1966 and gravitated toward art classes. He used to walk to campus on Main Street past the fraternity houses.

“Now my hair was Beatles length,” he said. “That was enough to get you beat up by all the frat guys.”

Fraternity members would scream at him and sing “Are you a boy or are you a girl?” as he walked past.

Inevitably, Casale would mouth off to them and have to run to campus.

“The guys chased me more than once, but their hearts weren’t in it,” he said.

Tensions erupt at home

Tensions escalated across the country — and in the Casale home — during the Vietnam War..

“I was in the middle of one of the most rebellious decades in history,” Casale said. “Every value was being challenged. And the war was the dividing line. That was the line in the sand.”

He came to loggerheads with his parents in 1967 over his hair length and his opposition to the war.

“As long as you’re in this house, you’re going to do what we say,” they told him.

“OK, I’m not going to be in this house,” he replied.

And he left.

Casale found other places to live while attending Kent State. He eventually moved in with a girlfriend.

At Kent State, he met Bob Lewis and John Zabrucky, who were central to hatching the de-evolution hypothesis that humans are evolving backward into a more primitive form. Later, he met Chuck Statler, who would create Devo film shorts and videos.

Casale was there May 4, 1970, when National Guardsmen opened fire on antiwar demonstrators, killing four and wounding nine. His friends Jeffrey Miller and Allison Krause were among those killed.

After that, de-evolution seemed like more than a theory.

He met Mark Mothersbaugh that year — and the rest is history. Their performance art somehow became a quirky band that achieved international fame. Casale described Devo as “a creative response to illegitimate authority.”

Revisiting an old haunt

Before the home visit was over, Casale walked up the hill to peek at “the haunted house” of his youth. Its residents, Liz Smith-Pryor and Richard Pryor, took it in stride when a tour group unexpectedly showed up in their yard. The couple have lovingly restored the home and were happy to chat with Casale about its history.

“I like the way this looks now,” Casale decided. “It’s haunted no more.”

Perhaps the same can be said about his own home.

After revisiting the past, Casale will turn his attention to the future. He has a new solo EP titled “The Invisible Man,” which will come out Nov. 25. Visit https://www.geraldvcasale.com/ for more information.

As the group prepared to go to Bar Lucci to continue socializing, Casale took pictures in front of his childhood residence with his brother, Canary and Bochert.

“I really think it’s very interesting hearing the history of the house,” Bochert said.

Canary said it was a unique opportunity for the couple.

“Not many people can say that someone famous grew up in their home, let alone have the opportunity to walk through the house with them,” she said. “Being able to hear his stories and see the memories flood back as he walked through each room was something really special.”

They had spent the previous two weekends ripping out the kitchen floor, putting in a new one, adding trim and cleaning everything up so the home would be in order for the celebrity visit.

“Going into all of this, we really didn't know what to expect, but to see the joy and appreciation it brought to Jerry and his brother to be able to walk through their childhood home made all of the work in preparation worthwhile,” Canary said.

Growing up in that home on Highland Avenue helped shape everything that followed.

“Needless to say, it was a life-changing half-acre of action,” Casale said.

Mark J. Price can be reached at [email protected].

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This article originally appeared on Akron Beacon Journal: Devo's Gerald Casale revisits childhood home in Kent