Mar 12, 2024
Mark DeVito, co-owner and COO
of Standard Deviant Brewing, wouldn't last
a day in a police lineup. But it might not be his curly handlebar
mustache that gave him away. Mark has an outsize personality, to
put it mildly. And back in December, I sat down with him and one of
the SDB dogs, Beans, at the Mission brewery for what turned
out to be quite the wild ride of a recording.
In Part 1, we learn about
Mark's upbringing in smalltown New Hampshire—Hopkinton, to be
specific. It's still a town-with-no-stoplights small. The summers
were hot and the winters cold and snowy.
After hearing about two rather
unfortunate stories from Mark's elementary school days, we move on
to his teen years. He learned to play drums from a neighbor who
taught music at his school. His parents placed him in a preparatory
boarding school for high school, where he found an entire room full
of instruments where he and his friends could play. And play they
did. They formed a band that started playing around the
area.
We go back a little so Mark can
share his Italian grandparents' story of migrating to the United
States and landing in Boston, where his dad grew up and where Mark
soon found himself after high school. The gigs, mostly Grateful
Dead covers but eventually more like jazz improv with a Miles Davis
influence, were stacking up for Great American (named after a
grocery store chain and having nothing to do with
9/11).
After his college years, some
band members went their separate ways. But Mark and one of his buds
decided to take a chance on San Francisco. Mark had visited and was
blown away by the natural scenery and human creative energy here.
Which, duh.
And so, in 2004, he moved here.
From 2005 to 2010, Mark would spend around five months a year
touring the country from his new hometown. The story of how he
found a place to live—where he's still at today with his wife—is
remarkable only in the sense that it doesn't really happen that way
anymore. He was walking around the Mission taking down phone
numbers written on "for rent" signs in windows when someone leaned
their head out one of those windows and asked Mark if he wanted to
see the place.
We recorded this podcast at
Standard Deviant Brewing in the Mission in December
2023.
Photography by Jeff
Hunt