by Daniel Colussi | San Francisco is undeniably a rock ‘n roll city, steeped in the lore of Bill Graham’s legendary concerts series, the Grateful Dead’s all night jam outs, the Dead Kennedys violent re-appraisal of the rock ‘n roll form, and so on.

More recently, however, the city’s been home to the strong reign of Nuggets-inspired garage rock. One exemplar of this was Sic Alps, a band with an aesthetic that brought together a demented form of 60’s pop with wobbly home recordings and a preference for sudden, unexpected jolts of guitar mangling and noise. It was an interesting and original amalgam that stood on its own feet, confident and forward thinking in its re-appropriation of traditional pop tropes.

The band featured a revolving cast of players through the years, but it was primarily helmed by Mike Donovan. Then Donovan abruptly closed the book on Sic Alps and announced a solo record, Wot. While Sic Alps records often sounded slightly demented and held together by duct tape, Wot is a surprisingly traditional, Americana-influenced affair that expresses its left turns and hooks with a more obvious maturity.

I recently caught up with Donovan and spoke to him about balancing the old ways with the new…

Tell me about the first Mike Donovan solo tour. The band is Eric Park and I. We made the record together and we’re playing a couple acoustic guitars through amps. William Keihn, who did the cover art for the record, is on the drums. Most of the overdubs on the record are just a bass drum or a tambourine, so we’ve kind of fleshed that out a bit more with a snare drum and a weird kit with some bongos and a bass drum turned on its side, and an old box and stuff like that. We’re doing it with overhead mics. We’re not doing the close-mic’ed drum kit thing. It’s sounding really great and I’m really happy with it.

So you made this record with your friend Eric Park, and you had this old band together called Yikes. Do you have any reflections on that era of playing with him in the early 2000’s versus now? Yikes was a band that was very chaotic. I loved that band. It was just kind of hard…I think it was John Dwyer’s most misunderstood project. There would be like twenty people who would come to our shows and just be like, What are you doing? (laughs). It didn’t exactly set the world on fire.

William Keihn has done a lot of great record covers that I recognize. How did he become involved in the live band? He’s a visual artist who does show posters in San Francisco and he’s done record covers, too, like Ty Segall’s Melted cover and the cover for Wot. But basically we were just broing down and he was just an obvious choice as someone to play with.

This approach is in contrast to the Sic Alps’ touring method, which was to bring your own PA and have this monolith of gear. This is different. Yes, it’s definitely a pretty minimal set up. It’s been fun.

So what prompted this turn towards something more acoustic and stripped down. Was it spontaneous? Not really. During one of the Sic Alps tours I reached out to Eric Park, who I’d played in a band called Yikes about ten years ago. I said, hey, we should play some music together, and he’s always been in bands that were noisy and pretty far out; always noise rock or whatever you want to call it. But when we got together we ended up talking about what we’d been listening to and it was all Bobby Dylan and country western music, so we decided to try to make music like this together and all the songs kind of headed that way.

How long was the gestation period for writing this album and the recording? It was probably three or four months, and then we recorded the record in February. The record has been finished for a while. We did a lot of practicing the performance of the record and I’ve never done that before. So that was really fun to just work really hard on preparing the playing of the record, and then going in and just nailing it all down in one go. We played all the guitars at the same time in one room. And I’d never done that before. Sic Alps was always layered one track at a time. I guess the Sic Alps recordings were always piecemeal, whereas this was much more of a ‘live’ recording. That’s why it sounds so together compared to the Alps stuff.

I’m a big fan of the Pangea Globe 7″ and I definitely got into Tronics through that. I’m wondering if Tronics mainman Zarjaz had an influence on your solo approach? Oh, cool. Yeah. Maybe, you know, maybe even the next stuff we do might be even more influenced, not even consciously, but maybe the next stuff may be more like that. We actually got to play with Zarjaz in London. He came up on stage at the last Sic Alps show in London and we did a cover of Shark Fucks. It was insane.

Do you have any Zarjaz anecdotes? Do you keep in touch with him? Yeah. He’s great. He’s a really far out dude, a soft-spoken gentleman. Super smart and very thoughtful guy. We talk on the phone sometimes even though we’re in different countries. He’s a unique individual.

Sic Alps toured quite a lot. Will you be touring a lot for Wot? I’m going overseas for a bit and the guys are going to meet me over there in a few months and we’ll do a tour over there. And in the meantime I’m going to some solo shows in New York. Same kind of thing. Take it easy a little bit this year.

And what does the future hold, recording-wise? We have some stuff in the bag already. We have some songs that Barrett from Sic Alps recorded. And some of that stuff will be used for the next record. Down the road a bit I’m planning on doing recordings with the guys I’m with now and with Barrett and some other folks. Looking forward to doing that.

The last thing I wanted to ask was why you decided to put the Sic Alps thing to bed. What is it about officially ending Sic Alps rather than carrying it on that appealed to you? We weren’t even going to officially end it. I was going to make this solo record and we were going to keep going with Sic Alps. But then I just decided that it’d be nice. I mean, there was a bunch of changes happening with me at the time and I was interested in more change, I guess. And it just seemed like a really good time to end it in terms of logistics…in terms of the whole story in respect to everybody who’d been in the band and where we’d gotten to. We were really happy with all that and it just seemed nice to have a happy ending.

Ending the story rather than dragging it out. Yeah, for sure. I think that’s important when the story ends and we reached a point where it seemed like a good time to end.

Well, I’m hoping you make it up to Vancouver soon. That’d be cool. I will. I’ll try to make it happen.

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Daniel Colussi is the Music Editor of Scout Magazine and a contributing writer to Ion Magazine. A veteran employee of Zulu Records and tuneage aficionado, he DJs on an infrequent basis (about four times a year) and is a musician around town who plays in several ensembles.