Doc Pickles, (a.k.a. Duncan MacDonnell) beloved Wavelength M.C. and self appointed 'œlitzine'? poet, has finally decided to step off the WL stage in order to foist upon our fair city 'œYour Band Sucks'? with the help of Michelle Breslin and Steve Keeping. Expectations run high and they don't disappoint with their quirky, compact collection of weirdo love songs and strange mystic ruminations. Tyrone coaxed Duncan into talking about his relationship to Wavelength after resigning as M.C., the history of his musical experiences in Toronto, the upcoming France tour and what happens when you don't tip your barkeep. The epic, full-length interview follows.

I'll admit, I'm daunted by asking these questions'¦ I'm aware of how integral "Doc Pickles" is to Wavelength, with all your seen and unseen support of bands across this fine city. So going from there, I'll ask a loaded question; do you feel like maybe Wavelength owes it to you to automatically embrace your band?
I owe it to Wavelength to embrace everybody who has ever attended the series. I'm so happy for the experiences I've accumulated, but let's face it: Wavelength will never embrace my band as long as I'm the host, it's like having the Easter Bunny work on Valentine's Day.

I'm always going to be the guy who talks at the microphone during somebody else's show as far as Wavelength is concerned, and that's just fine with me. It's a one-of-a-kind position; it's been so much fun and it's been such an eye-opener to watch Toronto's creative world mature around me. Wavelength has given me a front row seat to a very important time in our creative history and I'll always be grateful to have had the opportunity to help lots of people grow into their artistic skins.

With "Your Band Sucks" are you presenting a side of you that maybe people haven't discovered, if they're already familiar with your "Doc Pickles" M.C. persona?

Nobody involved with Wavelength, and nobody who knows me as Doc Pickles the MC from Wavelength, will ever ask me to open for their band until I no longer host the series.

If I remain on as host they'll continue to believe I'm not a real performer. Seriously, if you add up all the "will you open for us" invites I've received from bands I love like Ninja High School, Republic of Safety, Creeping Nobodies, you'll get a nice round number of zero.

Same thing for ALLCAPS! events, Bummer in the Summer, or anything to do with Blocks Recording Club. They think I'm a laughs guy and would never consider taking me seriously enough to invite me to play. If you add up all the reviews of my CD or any of my shows from reviewers I love like Sara Liss or Tim Perlich at NOW, Stewart Berman at Eye, or Exclaim, or even WavelengthToronto.com, you'll also reach that same number.

Nobody in this town has seen me as anything other than a host at a music series since we founded Wavelength. The most I can hope for as far as the "classic Wavelength" audience is concerned is that they'll see me as a one-off novelty act, like when Bugs Bunny subbed for the Road Runner and took on Wile E. Coyote, and that's fine with me.

It's a big world out there, our CD reached #2 at CIUT so I know there's an audience for our stuff, but it's probably an audience that resides north of College Street, west of Bathurst, and east of Spadina, from Monday to Saturday.

This Wavelength show is going to be a symbolic Thank-You-I-Love-You, but it will never erase the simple caricature. If you ever want a copy of my CD, check the dumpster behind NOW or eye, I'm sure you'll find it there.

How would you compare your experience this band with your past musical projects "Tiger Bomb" and "Mason Hornet"?

It's all been a big continuum, a decade long songwriting workshop.

Tigerbomb was my first ever band, I had been a litzine poet but started listening to the Shaggs so on a whim I went down the street to She Said Boom! and put up a "band wanted" poster. The next day I met Emmit Rogan, who loved the same Sebadoh / Eric's Trip / GBV stuff that I did, he had a voice like an angel and once we'd learned each other's lyrics and songs we were all ready to be a really good band, but just when we were getting good he got into a skiing accident and hurt his vocal chords, for years he wasn't able to speak above a grumble.

He and I still jammed out songs, but we wrote Everley Brothers style harmony-heavy songs that didn't work without two singers so in the end I had to say goodbye to Tigerbomb. It was a hard goodbye. It was really unfair what happened to Emmit's voice, but it was too late for me to stop writing songs. I was hooked, there was no going back to poetry after tasting the sweet sweet indie rock nectar, and I took all those beginnings of songs, maxed out my credit card on karaoke equipment, and started multitracking songs by myself in my bedroom with a Casio.

Dave Rodgers heard some of the songs one day and went apeshit, he went to Long & McQuade, rented a 4 track, and force fed me bottle after bottle of Grower's apple cider and cheap wine coolers (we lived closer to a Wine Rack than a Beer Store) while he coaxed my songs out onto tape. The songs became Mason Hornet once Dave and I added four other musicians.

The wheel turned again, and the performers' interest in the band started to wane. I kept on writing songs, but wasn't able to get the band to sit still long enough to learn new material, they kept wanting to play the same dozen songs on my first ever demo. They were good songs, and our live shows were great, but I was sitting on close to 100 ready for prime time songs but nobody wanted to learn them. I started going into the practice space and hammering out song after song on a 4 track in the hopes that the band would listen to the tapes and feel compelled to want to play new stuff. Eventually I stopped giving the tapes to Mason Hornet and gave them to friends instead as "AudioZines" since I was, after all, a litzine poet who put his poems to music.

Long after breaking up the band I continued to hole up with the 4 track, jamming out songs with a partner whenever possible and soldiering on by myself. Alastair MacLeod did a lot of work with me for a while and a few of our songs appear on the second Folk Festival Massacre CD, but for the hundreds of songs I was laying down only three or four ever made it out on a release. While I was sweating it out as a candidate to be the programmer for the opening-soon Drake Hotel I would come in and blow off steam jamming out songs with Jeff Peers (from Cuff the Duke in those days, currently in Anagram).

My stage shows were a sporadic mess and as my self-confidence finally began to disintegrate and life entered a falling-apart cycle and the Drake decided to replace me with a five headed programming structure and my girlfriend became my ex-girlfriend and it seemed like everything was about to come apart completely, I was invited to play a Wavelength.

Tell me about the current lineup of "Your Band Sucks."

I had taken a sabbatical while we launched the Drake, so this Wavelength show in September 2004 was kind of like a homecoming for me, I'd been working 70 hour weeks launching the venue and it was the first time I'd been able to come up for air, creatively, in a long long time.

I still wasn't good enough to be all alone on the stage and in retrospect had no business playing a Wavelength, but while I was playing I heard people stomping their feet in time to the music '“ it was Jonny Dovercourt and Robin Paterson, two of my favorite people in the world '“ and that's when the penny dropped. Michelle Breslin and Steve Keeping (sadoceanspacebear, Moe Kellogg, Rusty, Squirrel, Peaches, Fifth Column, It's Patrick, and on and on and on...) were also there, and it turns out they'd been there for many of my shows over the years, and I think they saw something in the music that I wasn't able to see while Robin and Jonny were stomping their feet.

I think it was because for the first time in many years I wasn't just struggling through life solo, but for a brief moment I was performing with accompaniment. They asked me that night if I would join their AlienGirl label and if Michelle could produce and record a CD.

Michelle was very careful to have a simple, strict rhythm for everything I put down, they're too polite to mention it but I can say it's because without people around me to keep me grounded I don't have the ability to maintain any sort of believable rhythm, literally or metaphorically. After all those years of grinding out tunes I've developed timbre, harmony, melody, and structure, but the fifth element of a song is rhythm and I don't have that skill if I'm all by myself.

I remained a solo artist though all through 2005, and it wasn't until January 2006 when I showed up to play the Secret Handshake CD release show (now Secret Handsnakes) when the drummer from Pinko Cronkite wrote Your Band Sucks in the listings as a joke, when my band name was gift wrapped and handed to me on a plate by the universe.

Once I'd re-christened "Doc Pickles" as "Your Band Sucks" then suddenly I was a real band, and people I performed with became band members rather than support performers to a solo musician/poet guy. Dave from kQuattro came and drummed for me during a monthly residency at Smiling Buddha, and during non-Buddha shows Michelle and Steve came and started beatkeeping with me.

Once that separation occurred between the Doc Pickles persona and the Your Band Sucks persona then the die was cast, and looking back now I see it as inevitable that I'd have to give up on my Doc Pickles life if I was really going to commit to being in an honest to goodness band.

In retrospect the whole year of 2006 seems to be an accidental conspiracy launched by Spencer Butt to replace me as host at Wavelength. This thread of story started in January 2006 at his CD release show and will come to a climax at the last Wavelength of 2006 where I officially hand over the MC mic to Spence!

I love Spencer and I know he'll be brilliant as MC, I can't wait to come to Wavelength and see life from the other side of the performing spectrum.

Is the live incarnation of the band different than the recording lineup?

It wasn't intentional at first because we thought we were going to record No Fire Day as a solo Doc Pickles project, but the live version has exactly the same lineup as the recorded version. I think it's because I work so well with Michelle, while we were holed up in there scrubbing the tracks to make them shine we realized we kept filling in each other's thoughts, answering questions before the questioner had actually formed a question. I've been so lucky to have a foils to bounce work off of over all these years, first Emmit Rogan, then Dave Rodgers, then Alastair MacLeod, then Jeff Peers, and working with Michelle and Steve is eerily comfortable to me because they're all about intuition and never waste time with cold rational logic.

They're able to accept the fact that as a performer I'm never going to be able to rehearse and arrange cue-to-cue performances, and somehow that frees us up to sound good. One time Steve said "hey why don't you write a set list for this show?" so I wrote one, but I didn't tell them what was on it, or even look at it during the set. It's the same lineup live but a very different approach.

Making a proper studio recording takes a lot of grunt work and takes a lot of rational energy, but making a proper live show means killing off those qualities and relying on ears and instincts.

What kind of artists or bands influence the sound of "Your Band Sucks"?

Lately I'm listening to a bunch of French and nearly French pop / grindcore indie bands like Annabel's Poppy Day, Fairguson, Mum and Son, Charlotte etc, Bastien Marel (Swiss), COEM (Belgian '“ aka Coin Operated Entertainment Machine).

For some reason, every second friend request on our myspace site is from France, and our music seems to resonate over there. So we're organizing a Eurorail tour of France / Belgium for July 2007 to coincide with the release of Mont Aventure and it should be a lot of fun, we'll get to play with all of the bands I'm currently most interested in. My dream is to release Mont Aventure at the foot of the Matterhorn at a Swiss ski lodge that would otherwise be closed for the season. I've never played north of Bloor Street before and the streets are all beginning to look the same to me so I'm really looking forward to a shift in perspective.

Lately I've been rediscovering classic modernist poetry like T.S. Eliot's perfectly fit together words or the huge rumbling spirit of Wallace Stevens. And I think I'm finally beginning to appreciate William Carlos Williams' Paterson. I also love Dave Newfeld's brilliant maniacal approach to exploding songs into form, we've worked together on some stuff over the years and watching him operate first hand really opened me up to the possibilities of recording. He's currently overseas producing Super Furry Animals and I can't wait to hear what he does with them.

How much emphasis do you place on lyrical content? On your Myspace site, you've described your "bird" method, but what other secrets are hidden in the creation of your new album, "Mont Aventure"?

It's all about the lyrics, this all came out of little self-published poetry zines that became songs. If I can't relate to a character sketch or a story fragment, I can't perform it convincingly. If the end of the world happens in 2012 and all the music tapes and CD's are wiped off the face of the earth, if archaeologists find my lyrics a thousand years from now I want them to recognize it as literature, and not as phonemic filling in the blanks.

The one thing I've learned from hosting Wavelength for all these years is that nobody actually pays much attention to the words, so the sound of the lyrics is important for the moment to work, but if the tune is going to have legs then it has to mean something, or at least use symbols that point to a deeper meaning.

What can the eager audience expect from a performance of such epic proportions and implications as WL344?
It's all right to laugh while you cry.

What kind of effect do you want to have on listeners? How would you complete this sentence: "I just saw "Your Band Sucks" and I __________________!!!"

I just saw Your Band Sucks and I've decided start my own band!!!

Finally, tell me what would happen in this world if patrons did not tip their barkeep?

Curses come home to roost. Treat a barkeep like dirt, and you may not see it coming, and it may take many years, but the laws of karma dictate that a bad tipper gets shafted in the end.