One afternoon in 1978, Mark Mothersbaugh and Gerald Casale—the two prime architects of the band Devo—were fidgeting in Peter Rudge’s office, near the Warwick Hotel, in Manhattan, with Mick Jagger. Rudge was the Rolling Stones’ manager, and Devo had recorded an odd cover of the band’s hit “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction”—so odd that their label said they needed Jagger’s blessing to release it. Mothersbaugh put the tape in a boom box and pressed Play. As the sounds of the cover filled the room, Jagger sat stone-faced. What he was hearing didn’t sound much like the “Satisfaction” he’d written. Keith Richards’s iconic riff was gone, and the original melody was nowhere to be found. Was this a homage, Mick must have wondered, or were they mocking him? “He was just looking down at the floor swirling his glass of red wine,” Casale recently remembered, adding, “He didn’t even have shoes on, just socks and some velour pants. I don’t know what his habits were then, but this was early afternoon and it looked like he had just gotten up.”

For thirty seconds or so, the men sat in silence, listening to the weird robo-funk coming from the boom box. Then something changed. “He suddenly stood up and started dancing around on this Afghan rug in front of the fireplace,” Casale said, of Jagger, “the sort of rooster-man dance he used to do, and saying”—he impersonated Jagger’s accent—“‘I like it, I like it.’ Mark and I lit up, big smiles on our faces, like in ‘Wayne’s World’: ‘We’re not worthy!’ To see your icon that you grew up admiring, that you had seen in concert, dancing around like Mick Jagger being Mick Jagger. It was unbelievable.”

“We were less than nothing,” Mothersbaugh said. “We were just these artists that nobody had ever heard of, from Akron, Ohio.”

The description is an exaggeration, but only a small one. After forming, in 1972, Devo had spent the subsequent half decade building up a huge fan base in the Midwest, but had not made a dent beyond. To get gigs, they would lie to clubs and say they were a Top Forty covers band. Once promoters figured out that they were not, they were rarely invited back. One impediment to the band’s wider success was that, as far as Devo was concerned, Devo wasn’t a band at all but, rather, an art project, created to advance Casale’s theory of “de-evolution,” the concept that instead of evolving, society was in fact regressing (“de-evolving”) as humans embraced their baser instincts. Inspired by the Dadaists and the Italian Futurists, Devo’s members were also creating satirical visual art, writing treatises, and filming short videos. The first of those videos included the band’s first-ever cover, of Johnny Rivers’s spy-show hit “Secret Agent Man,” in which the band interspersed their grainy performance with decidedly odd footage of two people in monkey masks spanking a housewife. Devo’s version of that song provided a template for “Satisfaction.” It was a pop hit everyone knew, radically deconstructed. Devo’s secret agent was “more like a janitor than a gigolo,” as Mothersbaugh put it. They released their cover on a nine-minute film called “The Truth About De-Evolution,” which they would screen before gigs.

The band used to rehearse in their practice space outside of Akron, in an abandoned garage behind a car wash. They had no heat and would rehearse wearing winter coats and gloves with the fingers cut off, so that they could play their guitar strings. One January afternoon in 1977, Casale’s brother Bob came up with a guitar line, the robotic seven-note opening that would replace the original “Satisfaction” riff. The drummer Alan Myers joined in with a typically bizarre Devo beat. “It sounded like some kind of mutated devolved reggae,” Casale said, of the rhythm. “I started laughing, and I came up with a bass part that I thought was a conceptual reggae part. We just kept playing it, and Mark just started singing.” The song Mothersbaugh sang wasn’t “Satisfaction” but “Paint It Black.” (Mothersbaugh was a huge Stones fan.) But, as the band futzed around, they couldn’t get the lyrics to match their jerky rhythm. Then, Casale recalled, “Mark started singing ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’ to our jam, and that did it.”

The band soon realized that “Satisfaction” offered an ideal vehicle to bring their de-evolution philosophy to the masses. They weren’t covering the song, they would say; they were “correcting” it. “I think those are some of the most amazing lyrics that were ever written in rock and roll,” Mothersbaugh said, “dealing with conspicuous consumption and the stupidity of capitalism and sexual frustration all in one song. It pretty much encapsulated what was going on with kids at that time, much more than any of the hippie songs, as far as I was concerned.”

The more Devo played the song, the more it evolved—or devolved. Early videos show a version much slower than it would become—a mid-tempo rumble that wore out its welcome by the end. It was interesting conceptually, and no doubt a fun surprise for concertgoers, but not necessarily something you’d want to listen to repeatedly. “The versions that we were doing of all our songs in the early days were very slow and more bluesy, like Captain Beefheart material,” Mothersbaugh recalled.

“We started off at Akron speed,” Casale joked. “But then, once we went to New York and saw the amazing energy of the Ramones and the Damned, it just put a fire under us.” The quintet started getting some music-industry interest. David Bowie even introduced the group onstage, at one of their 1977 New York shows, calling them “the band of the future.” Their first single, “Mongoloid,” released earlier that same year, had got little buzz; now, the band decided to capitalize on its momentum by recording “Satisfaction” as their second single, releasing it on their own label. Soon after, as labels were bidding over the Ohio eccentrics, the band decamped to Germany, to record their début album with the producer Brian Eno and with Bowie, who wanted to help. Warner Bros. signed the band.

From the start, there was tension during the recording sessions. “They were a terrifying group of people to work with because they were so unable to experiment,” Eno later said. “When they turned up to do this record in Germany, they brought a big chest of recordings they’d already done of these same songs. We’d be sitting there working, and suddenly Mark Mothersbaugh would be in the chest to retrieve some three-year-old tape, put it on, and say, ‘Right, we want the snare drum to sound like that.’ I hate that kind of work.”