you in first and second grade. I wanted to be like them. I remember thinking that. She sent me on a mission."

That mission continued when Mothersbaugh entered art school at Kent State University. Back in those days, Kent State used to give away partial scholarships to kids who hadn't planned on going to college. He was told he could receive financial help, so he enrolled in 1968.

"In school, I was doing these decals, which was my version of graffiti," he says. "That's how I met [Devo's] Jerry Casale. He came up to me and asked if I was the one putting up pictures of astronauts holding potatoes while standing on the moon. I was, and we started talking. He was a few years older, and we just hitit off right away."

***

In the midst of a grad school project that involved blowing up the portraits of all the people who hated him in high school and then distorting their images, Casale enlisted Mothersbaugh's help.

"We collaborated on visual things," says Mothersbaugh. "We worked on posters and other things together. We were both musicians and we started writing music together."

When the shootings happened at Kent State on May 4, 1970, Mothersbaugh and Casale were both shocked.

"We started talking about what we were seeing," says Mothersbaugh. "We decided it wasn't evolution but devolution. I had this cynical attitude about religion but the same with science. They had ideas but a lot of it seemed not worked out. They would say that the universe is finite but they don't know