‘Hello Spud!’: How a Conversation About Potatoes Ultimately Led To Devo
https://www.spin.com/2024/11/hello-spud-devo-mark-mothersbaugh-interview/Casale happened to stumble upon one of Mothersbaugh’s postcards and soon approached him, asking “Are you the guy putting astronauts holding potatoes up around campus? My name’s Jerry Casale. I wondered what your interest in potatoes was.”
From there, they got into a long, philosophical conversation about potatoes, humans, and the hierarchy of vegetables. After all, Mothersbaugh always believed potatoes were the “proletariat vegetable.”
“They come from underground and they’re dirty but on everyone’s plate,” he says. “People ate potatoes every day regardless of where you are on the hierarchy, but they never thought about it. They had eyes all around, so they saw everything going on.
“Both of us come from working-class families, so we thought of ourselves as potatoes. We’d interchange the word ‘spud’ with ‘comrade’ and would use it pejoratively and as a ‘welcome comrade’ type thing. ‘Hello spud!’”
