"Be Stiff": Devo's Accidental Anthem

The story of Stiff Records' herky-jerky theme song

    There are some great rock songs about record labels: Graham Parker and the Rumour's "Mercury Poisoning," “Rough Trade” by Stiff Little Fingers, and the Sex Pistols' "EMI."  But those are all diss tracks.  Even Nick Lowe's "I Love My Label" bears more than a whiff of sarcasm, and Soundgarden's "Sub Pop Rock City" is a piss-take.  Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Workin' for MCA" is really neither here nor there.  But one of the coolest songs about a record label wasn't really about a record label.
    Akron, Ohio art-geeks Devo were always up for a corporate anthem — and their first UK label, London's fabled punk/new wave imprint Stiff Records, which launched Elvis Costello, Nick Lowe and Ian Dury, was always up for branding that verged on self-mythology.  It was a match made in... well, somewhere.

    Not long after they signed, someone in Devo offhandedly mentioned to label co-founder Dave Robinson that they had a song with the word "stiff" in the title, and that was enough to get them the green light to record the song.  And so, in 1978, Devo graced the world with their third single for the label, the Brian Eno-produced "Be Stiff."
    The thing is, the song had been written in 1974, two years before Stiff Records even existed.  It was, as the band's Gerry Casale later described it, "a satire of fear-driven, uptight people in America."  But it still works: one of Stiff's slogans was "If it ain't stiff, it ain't worth a fuck," and the song's gleefully deviant lyrics take the sexual connotations of the label name and run with them like a dog with something unspeakable in its mouth.  "Cucumbers ripe and rude," singer Mark Mothersbaugh yelps, "Bend over, fixed to shoot."  Even the track’s herky-jerky mien — both a punky rejection of the hip-swaying hippie grooves that Devo so despised and a sarcastic/loving lampoon of the increasingly mechanistic nature of modern life — is the sonic embodiment of "stiff."

    In short order, Stiff got every artist on their 1978 "Route 78" package tour — which largely traveled by train and featured rock & roll fundamentalist Mickey Jupp, singer-songwriter Jona Lewie, the wonderfully loopy new waver Lene Lovich (who would soon hit with "Lucky Number"), 16-year-old American wunderkind Rachel Sweet ("the little girl with the big voice") and winsome primitivist Wreckless Eric (you probably know his immortal "Whole Wide World") — to record a version of the song for a promotional EP.  Collectively, their variations on this weird little number end up forming an overview of Stiff's sources and directions: pub rock, punk, new wave and a little bit country.
    Almost everyone changed the lyrics, perhaps because it takes a special kind of person to deliver lines such as "Fruit ooze is wetly lewd so stay dry in rubber boots."  Veteran English pub rocker Jona Lewie pretty much avoids the lyrics entirely and, on his charming honky-tonkin' piano-and-voice version, mainly restates the title phrase.  The excellent power pop band the Records ("Starry Eyes," "Teenarama") backs up Rachel Sweet on her inspired, countrified total rewrite of the song as a fatherly lecture on resilience.  Mickey Jupp does a Jerry-Lee-Lewis-meets-Professor-Longhair twelve-bar blues take, almost completely rewriting the lyrics to celebrate the joy of sex, rather than revulsion, and giving the music the saucy, organic swing that Devo so pointedly disdained.  Wreckless Eric scores with his ever-winsome caterwhauling while someone ridiculously interpolates Hendrix over a crude, sky-sawing guitar riff.  They broke the mold when they made Lene Lovich, and only she is up to the task of singing the original words, not to mention working up an ambitious arrangement, hiccuping into a killer little sax-led bridge; by far the class of the field, Lovich also leads a romping live version featuring the entire bill, also on the EP.

    A couple of years later, the brilliant Toni Basil (who soon hit big with the MTV-era classic "Mickey") recorded a great cover of “Be Stiff” with Devo as her backing band.  And, since it's Toni Basil, the video is a must-see.  (Yes, the bass player in the video is indeed the great Spazz Attack, star of Devo's classic video for "[I Can't Get No] Satisfaction.")
    Jeez, I wish I could come up with a snappy kicker for this piece.  All I can think is, I can't believe that "Be Stiff" hasn't been used in a commercial for Cialis.