Michael Yonkers Band – Microminiature Love
(Recorded 1968 / Released by Sub-Pop, 2003)

Recorded by the exceptional Mr. Yonkers in 1968, and now available to the masses for the first time via the auspices of Sub-Pop, this is an album which pretty much exemplifies the narrative of the “lost underground freak-rock classic” archetype. I’m sure you can turn to google etc. if you want the full story.

The first thing that enters my head when I put this one on is the bit in the sleevenotes about how Sire records were planning to release the album and to try and market Yonkers as a ‘new Hendrix’ figure, but the deal fell through at the last minute. So I ponder that, and I listen to the sound emerging from my speakers, and I think, c’mon man, I don’t know who told what to whom when, but *no fucking way* would a major record label in the 1960s come within a thousand miles of releasing… THIS… even in the glory days of the cash-in psychedelia boom.

I’m still undecided as to whether ‘Microminiature Love’ is actually a good or bad record, or whether such terms even have any meaning with regard to an artefact this far off the accepted cultural map, but I am certain that it is genuinely deranged – as damaged a document of musical fucked-ness any connoisseur of such things could ever hope to find.

Yonkers is perhaps best known (amongst the kind of people likely to know of him at all) as the guy who combined his love for DIY electronics with rock n’ roll, sawing up his guitars and reassembling them as a weirdly tuned, doublenecked Frankenstein creation incorporating a theremin, at the same time as building his own fuzzboxes and echo units from scratch. Which all sounds pretty intriguing I’m sure you’ll agree, but it must be said that this sonic invention is certainly not as much in evidence on the LP as might be wished.

Yonkers and his band play a kind of nightmarish, claustrophobic garage-blues of a distinctly primitive caste, the guitar slowly navigating it’s way through wobbly, repetitive riffs that tend to sound like perverse variations on the Batman theme (so much for the new Hendrix!). Listening closer, it often sounds as if two or more guitars have been layered on top of each other, sometimes clean, echoed and jangly, sometimes deep, rumbling and fuzzed out, but always ever so slightly wonky and out of tempo/key, creating weird droning / overtone effects that hover in the background, occasionally emerging in the mix like rotor blades or croaking frogs. Interesting! Meanwhile, a rhythm section flounder around somewhere, stoned in the far background. Rendered in the kind of low fidelity you’d expect from a ‘60s basement tape, the whole thing has a weird Joe Meek kind of vibe about it, baked in wanton echo and reverb, and a certain, indefinable sense that nothing is quite the way it should be. The simplistic wrong-ness of the compositions, combined with the murk and slipshod violence of their execution, actually begins to sound quite post-punky after a while, perhaps recalling early stuff by The Fall or Butthole Surfers…. which I guess renders it ‘ahead of its time’ by default, by way of gloriously lolling in the same primordial waters of incompetence somewhere BEHIND everybody else’s musicianly time.

Yonkers’ nasal croon of a voice, utterly earnest and uncomfortably bellow-y at all times, is pushed to the forefront of the mix, where he proceeds to let rip on what some will consider a treasure trove of cracked outsider poetics, holding forth via cack-handed, childish rhyme schemes and lunatic repeated fragments on subjects such as depression, despair, escape from reality into odd personal dream worlds, and above all the horrors of war and governmental indoctrination. Songs such as ‘Smile Awhile’ seem almost obsessive in their bleakness, prefiguring the brute cosmic nihilism of Black Sabbath, whilst ‘Kill The Enemy’ sounds like a monotonous forced march straight to the cemetery, ending a blood-curdling shriek and disorientating tape echo.

Yonkers manages to sound deadly serious and deeply unhappy at all times, even then singing stuff like “Navigate your boat / keeping it afloat / round and round and round and round / round and round the moat”. You get the feeling that he has taken up the ‘60s counter-culture baton of free expression for all and naively run with it, although I suspect the San Fran tastemakers and hirsute folkies weren’t really counting on getting hit full in the face with the soul-baring of a paranoid, suburban shut-in like Yonkers when they told the world to let it all hang out.

Track 3, ‘Boy In The Sandbox’ is perhaps the album’s most astonishing moment, as Yonkers sings the story of a boy being indoctrinated from childhood into life as a soldier (fairly corny protest song stuff were it not for his insane delivery), slowly building up the tension and anger and culminating with the image of his young wife crying over the letter announcing his grisly death by bayonet in Vietnam as his baby son sits in the sandbox playing with toy soldiers. And only then does Yonkers let loose and deploy his homemade distortion pedal for the first time. You can actually hear the click of his foot hitting the switch, and then…. whoa! Holy hell! You can have a listen to the results below.

Modern day noise-freaks will relish this bit for sure, and patiently wait through the rest of the album for him to do it again, but in 1968 it must have knocked people out of their seats – a completely unprecedented flying leap into the jaws of oblivion.

So if all this sounds like your chosen pint of wine – well, it’s out there, go get it. Yonkers certainly lends a completely unique and genuine feeling to everything he does here, and I know I’ll be playing this at least a few more times trying to make sense of it all. But at the same time I wouldn’t blame you for reacting to this stuff the same way I suspect some bigwig at Sire probably did when faced with an eager young A&R brandishing a tape recorder: “Get the hell out of my office”.

Mp3> Boy In The Sandbox

Buy link> Amazon

Labels: 1960s, album reviews, Michael Yonkers Band, Proto-Punk, Psychedelia, weirdness