Last week we learned that Devo’s Mark Mothersbaugh was recovering from a near-deadly case of COVID-19 and that the TikTok influencers down the street were greatly disturbing that recovery by throwing wild parties that disregarded public health advisories and sent his Hollywood Hills neighborhood spiraling into chaos. In a new LA Times interview, Mothersbaugh vividly describes his symptoms when the disease was at its worst.

Mothersbaugh said at first he didn’t believe the nurse who told him he needed to be in the ICU. He’d been avoiding in-person recording sessions for his various cartoon scoring projects, but in late May he unintentionally came into contact with a group of people he didn’t know at the headquarters of his commercial music company Mutato Musika. (Mothersbaugh, as many readers pointed out last week, wrote the Rugrats theme.) Days later he started to feel exhausted and developed a fever of 103. An in-home visit from a nurse the next day quickly turned into an ambulance ride to the hospital, where Mothersbaugh spent 18 days in isolation.

As his illness worsened, Mothersbaugh began to hallucinate: “There’s a bookstore I love there where I get stationery supplies, and in my mind I had been there. I was convinced for about two weeks that I had been hit by a brick by somebody in Little Tokyo.” Grabbing for his temple, he continued, “I felt blood from being hit. I was handcuffed to a parking deck downtown. I had this whole elaborate story of how these kids sold me to an ambulance company that then got some sort of a payment for delivering COVID patients to their ICUs. I totally believed it.”

Mothersbaugh also imagined an entire Devo production to be performed on the streets of Hollywood through augmented reality: “I wrote a whole new Devo album and put together a whole live show. We were standing on top of these projections, which were growing somehow.” He said the only thing that tethered him to reality was FaceTime calls from his wife, Anita Greenspan — pictured above right — and their teenage daughters. He remembers a moment when he felt like he could just detach and drift away forever, but a call from his family assuring him that he’d be coming home soon startled him back from the brink.

Mothersbaugh, 70, says he felt like a 50-year-old before COVID and a 90-year-old during it. Now he’s feeling 70 again and hoping to get back to 50. Speaking of fleeting youth, he sadly does not offer comment on the TikTok influencers in this feature, other than oblique reference to coronavirus skeptics: “Everything’s become more devolved than I would have imagined possible. For anybody that’s doubting whether the coronavirus and COVID-19 is real, it’s really real.”