Songwriter, guitar innovator, private press legend and man Michael Yonkers has passed away at the age of 78. We join his fans to send our condolences to his other friends and family. He will be missed, but more importantly, Michael’s music, his DIY musical experimentation and his singular approach to conveying his songs over several dozen independently released recordings throughout his life, will be remembered.
 
Inspired as a teenager by the hair-raising freedom rock of The Trashmen’s “Surfin’ Bird” and the degraded electric sounds he heard in old blues recordings, Michael played and recorded mostly in his native Minneapolis in the late sixties and seventies, not being widely heard until 2002, when those geniuses at de Stjil issued The Michael Yonkers Band’s previously unreleased 1968 album, Microminiature Love. This provoked Micheal back into activity, and he reissued his catalog with several labels (including Drag City, fuckin’ A!), while collaborating with The Blind Shake, Plastic Crimewave Syndicate playing shows and making new solo recordings over the next couple decades.  
 
Michael’s remembered for the blunt, bewildering post-garage/pre-power-trio attack of Microminature Love, highlighted by idiosyncratic vocal phrasing, a raw guitar presence in the style of The Kinks’ Dave Davies/Pink Floyd’s Syd Barrett and an interest in electronics. There’s much to be said as well for his subsequent 60s-70s releases, which continue down a quirky path in an entirely transformed, one-man-band setting, exploring his brooding and playful sides in an entirely transformed one-man-band setting, their psychedelia expressed more sensually, on an almost spiritual level.
 
Drag City’s corner of the lore, with the releases Lovely Gold, Micheal Lee Yonkers and Borders of My Mind (with Jim Woehrle), is an enduring source of pleasure around our good ol’ ivory bunker. Michael Yonkers was just the kind of artist our label was formed for. May he rest in peace.