How Devo's Mark Mothersbaugh Was Tricked Into Buying the Wrong Beatles Record

As it turns out, John and Paul never sang "You got me bug, bug, bug, bugged, hey little ladybug."

Mark Mothersbaugh as Booji Boy, from his 2014 book Myopia.

In this edition of “WHAT’S IN YOUR TAPE DECK,” I talked to Mark Mothersbaugh, the frontman and principal songwriter for Devo (short for “de-evolution”), a band that David Bowie once called “the band of the future.” We discussed The Buggs, The Beetle Beat: The Original Liverpool Sound (1964), a record that he thought was something else entirely.

MARK MOTHERSBAUGH: The first 45 I ever bought was called “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polkadot Bikini.” I apologize, I was twelve years old at the time. 

ERIC SPITZNAGEL: Why are you apologizing? That sounds like a great purchase.

MM: I’d heard the song on the radio, I think. This was back when 45s were about forty-five cents or something. They were really cheap back in the sixties. 

ES: What about your first long-play album?

MM: Well, that’s a long story. I grew up in a big family. There were five kids in all; I had two younger brothers and two younger sisters. To keep pandemonium at a minimum during dinnertime, [my dad would] put a tiny black-and-white portable television set on the end of the table, and we’d watch The Ed Sullivan Show. It was a lot of Chinese plate spinners and Topo Gigio, the little stupid Italian puppet. There were also musical acts, but at the time I hated music.

A young Mark Mothersbaugh (far right) with family at Christmas.

ES: You hated it?

MM: I felt like music was invented to torture me. My parents forced me to take piano lessons from Mrs. Fox at two dollars a pop. She taught me “Bone Sweet Bone” and things like that. I had to learn the Schaum book, the basic book of learning how to play piano. Sometimes she’d sing along with me and it was never in tune. I’d play as loud as I could while my family was sitting in the living room; we had this horrible organ, a little Hammond M-3 organ. And I’d play it as loud and slow as I could, so that Mrs. Fox would be going “Boooone Sweet Boooooone!”