“Welcome to the everchanging landscape of early 21st century musical excavation,” began Karl Ikola’s liner notes to Michael Yonkers Band’s Microminiature Love. The album cemented the relationship between Sub Pop and psychedelic archivists DeStijl, demonstrating the former’s strength in finding and reissuing little-known gems from the psychedelic explosion. DeStijl’s Clint Simonson searches cut-out bins and Goodwills around the country for private presses, regional eccentricities and ignored basement experimenters. Often times, he finds, and conversely exposes, inventive psychedelic albums, undermining the exorbitant collector prices.
With Yonkers’ first effort, Simonson unveiled a hidden classic suppressed by major label follies and Yonkers’ subsequent music industry-spawned disillusionment. The Yonkers Band was like a coat of black paint over paisley rhythms with raw pre-punk psych-blues. By any means, the album would have never climbed American charts in the ‘60s but Yonkers believed in progression and fell for Sire’s promises. The label rejected the masters to Microminiature Love and Yonkers became another major label casualty. Instead of retreating or killing his producer a la Charles Manson, he grew a beard over his John Lennon mug, locked himself in the studio and produced a dark, dreary folk album with mystical overtones. Under the influence of Leonard Cohen, Yonkers lowered his voice, stripped down his sound and constructed Grimwood, a very personal album.
Yonkers risks coming off like a prima-donna as he bears his fears to the listener but his earnestness and stern delivery ensures the message’s integrity reaches the listener uncompromised. His masterful basement production sense assures each word’s perfect instrumental accentuation. He either fingerpicks or strums with due respect to the lyrics, adding echoing flute, droning synth and creeping harmonica to further the dark psych feel. “Lonely Fog” lists off complaints like “I will never shine again/’til I feel the daytime sky” with a chorus of “I am lonely, fog/Very lonely.” Yonkers processes his vocals to sound like a transmission from a lonely pirate radio operator and inserts a buzzing electric sound, further blackening his sparse instrumentation. His homemade guitar effect boxes, such as the wah-wah on the “Tripping through the Rose Garden,” lend his electric guitar an otherworldly voice. Though darkness engulfs the album, it contains a few bright points. Yonkers shares a joke with studio musicians “The Day is Through” and the chuckling begins the dark tale. On “And Give It to You,” he relays what actions he would take for his lover.
“And Give It To You” also reveals Yonkers weakness, as he tosses off the occasional dud of a couplet. The corniness of the tune’s basis lends itself to parody but Yonkers only fans the flames with lines like “I’d ask my guardian angel/If it would be okay/To rent a room in heaven/If only for the day.” However, a loose barroom chorus of “And give it to you” saves the song from mediocrity. On “The Day is Through,” Yonkers rattles off a few weak couplets like “I will stay here for the hour/I will pick the only flower” but most of the time poetry is crisp and concise. Even when presenting weak couplets like “There is an answer/It lies in the dance,” Yonkers’ conviction allows the listener to oversee his lyrical shortcomings much of the time.
Michael Yonkers still creates chunks of primal psychedelica and his vast back catalog still warrants reissuing. He proved ahead of his time, as both reissued albums sold poorly upon initial release. An artist with no outlet, Yonkers is pictured throwing copies of Grimwood in the air on the back of Microminature Love feasibly out of frustration with its sales. With the reissue of Grimwood, Yonkers may just find the audience he panned for almost 40 years ago.
