#michael yonkers

[nobrashfestivity]

RIP Michael Yonkers

[musickickztoo]

RIP Michael Yonkers 

October 3, 1947 – April 20, 2026

[hermit792]

[pshcydelia]

here’s a playlist i’ve created of my favorite experimental music from the late 1960s and early 1970s:

Bruce Haack - War (1970)

Silver Apples - Anasazi Noodle (1970)

Blues Magoos - Dante’s Inferno (1967)

CAN - Soup (1972)

Brainticket - Brainticket Part II (1971)

Fifty Foot Hose - Bad Trip (1968)

Tonto’s Expanding Head Band - Timewhys (1971)

Amon Düül - Der Garten Sandosa im Morgentau (1969)

Michael Yonkers Band - Boy in the Sandbox (1968)

The Queen’s Nectarine Machine - The Seance (1969)

Bruce Haack - Chant of the Unborn (1970)

Silver Apples - A Pox on You (1969)

Fifty Foot Hose - If Not This Time (1968)

Blues Magoos - Tobacco Road (1966)

[dustedmagazine]

Damaged Bug — Bug on Yonkers (Castle Face)

Bug On Yonkers by Damaged Bug

There’s never been another rock guy like Michael Yonkers. He built his own guitars and amps to produce an instantly recognizable, cavernously echoing sound. He started recording in the 1960s, but due to bad luck and a freak accident (he was working in a warehouse and had some shelves fall on him, bad enough, but the doctors gave him a treatment that made him much worse and he’s lived in pain ever since) never got a big commercial break. He’s best known now for the otherworldly freakbeat/alterna-drone masterpiece Microminiature Love reissued in the early aughts by De Stilj and again in 2011 by Sub Pop, but he also dabbled in eccentric acoustic folk music, foreshadowing the New Weird America movement by a couple of decades. Last I caught up with him, for Dusted (old Dusted, unfortunately, the piece has disappeared), he was gracious enough about talking about the past, but really, mostly on fire about his new collaboration with the Blind Shake.  Anyway, lovely guy, singular guy, late life fame could not happen to a better person.

John Dwyer of Coachwhips, the Ohsees and, in this instance, Damaged Bug, is likewise, a singular force. He is one of the best and most demented of all punk front men still working, but also a thoughtful curator of current and older music. Pretty much everything on the label he co-heads, Castle Face, is worth a listen, ditto to the man’s own output, which is prodigious. And, here comes the Reeses Peanut Butter moment that I’ve been winding up to this whole review so far: put them together and it becomes something very special indeed.

In Bug on Yonkers, Dwyer’s Damaged Bug revisits nine Michael Yonkers songs. Four are from 1968’s Microminiature Love, Dwyer’s point of entry into the Yonkers catalog (and, honestly, almost everyone’s point of entry). One is a very early (1966) cut from Yonkers’ pre-Microminiature Love outfit, Michael and the Mumbles. Two are from his psych folkie experiments Lovely Gold (1977) and Grimwood (1968), and one is a previously unreleased song. Yonkers has never played live much because of his damaged back, but he and Dwyer did one show together around the time of the Sub Pop reissue and kept in touch by email. Dwyer, thus, had access to lots of Yonkers rarities, on CDRs made by the artist himself. He says in an interview that he roughed out about 40 Yonkers cuts, then got high and cut them down to nine.  

With the Ohsees, and now Damaged Bug, Dwyer has evolved a psychedelically expansive, motoric-ly propulsive rock and roll sound that is both elementally simple and familiar and deeply, mind-shiftingly strange. As such, he and his crew (Tom Dolas, Nick Murray, and Brigid Dawson) are almost ideally suited to interpret Yonkers, whose rock material shares these very same characteristics. The two cuts that elicited the first listen, “holy shit, what is this?” from yours truly were “Sold American” and “The Thunder Speaks,” two pounding, howling, vortex-staring cuts that set up a short hypnotic riff, then implode it from the inside with explosive drumming and big guitar chords. They are both insanely great songs, both from Yonkers’ great defining 1968 record, both delivered hot and raw and without reverence.

The odd acoustic folk songs are somewhat more of an acquired taste, but Damaged Bug does justice to them as well. Bridget Dawson takes over the vocals for “Sunflower,” the lone cut from Grimwood, an airy, lullaby sheathed in echo with a sax blowing softly in the background; it is as pretty, and as unusual, as the Yonkers original. “Lovely Gold” written a dozen or so years later, pumps harder, but with whimsy, a Roky Erikson-like jug sound percolating in the interstices.

The disc closes with a Michael Yonkers song you’ve probably never heard, an unreleased ballad called “I Tried” which Damaged Bug plays slowly and sweetly with a steady undercurrent of cello sound. “And I have found a way, and I will be okay, and I can be around the lights, that I don’t understand,” intones Dwyer. You can hear one artist reflecting on another’s accumulated art and wisdom and nodding in recognition.

Jennifer Kelly

[ozkar-krapo]

Michael YONKERS

"Lovely Gold"

(LP. Drag City / Galactic Zoo Disk / My. 2010 / rec. 1977) [US]

[ozkar-krapo]

SUN RA & His SOLAR ARKESTRA "The magic City" (LP. 2001 / rec. 1965) [US]

SUN RA & His SOLAR ARKESTRA "Art Forms of Dimensions Tomorrow" (LP. ? / rec. 1961-62) [US]

SUN RA & His ASTRO INFINITY ARKESTRA "Holiday for Soul Dance" (LP. 20?? / rec. 1960) [US]

SUN RA & His MYTH SCIENCE ARKESTRA "Interstellar low Ways" (LP. 2002 / rec. 1965) [US]

WOO "Whichever Way you are going, you are going wrong" (LP. 2013 / rec. 1978-81) [UK]

Howard SHORE (dir.), Ornette COLEMAN, London Philharmonic Orchestra "Naked Lunch (complete original Soundtrack)" (2xLP. 2016 / rec. 1991) [US / UK]

[rec. Miles COPELAND] "Sea Organ" (LP. 2016 / rec. 2009) [HRV]

The INSTANT AUTOMATONS "Sincerely making a Noise" (LP. 2016 / rec; 1979-82) [UK]

Kim FOWLEY "Bad News from the Underworld [Son of Frankenstein]" (LP. 1985 / rec. 1981?) [US]

Boyd RICE "The Way I feel" (LP. 2009 / rec. 19??-??) [US]

LITTLE HOWLIN' WOLF "Cool Truth" (LP. 2015 / rec. 1979-83) [US]

Jean-Jacques BIRGE, Francis GORGE, SHIROC "Défense de" (LP+DVD. 2013 / rec. 1975) [FR]

Michael YONKERS "Lovely Gold" (LP. 2010 / rec. 1977?) [US]

Yoshi WADA "Off the Wall" (LP. 2016 / rec. 1984) [JAP]

V/A "Unzipping the Abstract (Bands of the Manchester Musician's Collective)" (LP. 1980) [UK]

Oscar VARGAS LEAL y David ESPEJO AVILES "Cromometrofonia No.1 / Cometa 1973" (LP. 1973) [MEX] 

[ozkar-krapo]

SNAKEFINGER'S VESTAL VIRGINS "Night of the desirable Objects" (LP. 1987) [UK/US]

Daniel SCHMIDT & The BERKELEY GAMELAN "In my Arms, many Flowers" (LP. 2016 / rec. 1978-82) [US]

SCIENCE FICTION "Terrible Lizards" (LP. 2016 / rec. 1980) [US]

David PRESCOTT "Walking in slow Circles" (LP. 1987) [US]

The WIND HARP "Song from the Hill" (2xLP. 1972) [US]

UNREST WORK & PLAY "Sound every Day" (12". 1983) [UK]

The BOX "Secrets out" (LP. 1983) [UK]

[L'Equipe technique des Studios d'Enregistrement de Pathé-Marconi EMI] "12 Tests pour (bien) régler votre Chaîne Hi-Fi" (LP. 197?) [FR]

John FAHEY "The Voice of the Turtle" (LP. 2012 / rec.1968) [US]

Michael YONKERS "Grimwood" (LP. 2015 / rec. 1969) [US]

Jacques DUDON "Erosion distillée" (LP. 2016 / rec. 1969) [FR]

Hüseyin ERTUNC Trio (feat. Phil MUSRA & Michael COSMIC) "Mûsikî" (LP. 2016 / rec. 1974) [TUR / US]

V/A "Rupert preaching at a Picnic" (LP. 1981) [UK]

CRAWLING CHAOS "The Gas Chair" (LP. 1981) [UK]

Dominique LAURENT, PINOK & MATHO "Les Pays de Tout en Tout" (LP. 1978) [FR]

I.P.SON GROUP "I.P.Son Group" (LP. 2016 / rec. 1975) [ITA]