Lawrence
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Michael Yonkers Band
Jul 22, 2014, 07:57
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My new discovery. Friend of mine I was jamming with made me a copy of the Michael Yonkers Band album. Totally fucking amazing that this came out in the 60s!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqgT2r-j_gE
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Sin Agog
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Edited Jul 22, 2014, 19:54
Re: Michael Yonkers Band
Jul 22, 2014, 19:42
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He has a really wicked guitar tone, doesn't he? Think he was another member of that churlish "it's my party, I'll detune my guitar if I want to" camp of '60s outsiders (though he seems a bit more together than most. Lurve that album. I also have some folkier stuff he did which is actually really, really great. I was surprised to find he wasn't just a one-album oddity actually, like so many of his generation, and had a fairly prolific solo career. Grimwood doesn't have any of that unique guitar sound, but it does arguably do to acid folk what The Michael Yonkers Band did to garage rock...which is subvert the fuck out of it. Most of the songs have a weird, eldritch quality from the ever-present primitive synth drones throughout. It's one of my favourite private press releases ever (at least I think it's private press); Czech it oot!
ETA: Those parentheses shall remain unclosed forever bwahaha
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Lawrence
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Edited Jul 23, 2014, 03:33
Re: Michael Yonkers Band
Jul 23, 2014, 03:32
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Thanks for the suggestion. I wasn't too sure of what anyone would make of my post. Of course Outsider Music is kind of hard to talk about without raising the sanity issue, as I understand it. I don't like to think of Yonkers as being schizophrenic hearing his music, I just think he's more of a good person making sense of a harsh world the more I listen to it.
Of course it raises questions such as was Ian Curtis's brilliance really the result of his madness? And is Michael Yonkers more 'insane' than most of today's world leaders seem to be? I just enjoy such music as it is, really. Well at that I think Yonkers is the best outsider musical artist I've heard so far, and I mean that. I'm surprised Irwin Chisold (Songs in the Key of Z) didn't pick up on him actually...
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Popel Vooje
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Edited Jul 23, 2014, 21:18
Re: Michael Yonkers Band
Jul 23, 2014, 09:07
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As far as I know Michael Yonkers isn't schizophrenic, but he is disabled - he broke his back in a workplace accident then developed an allergy to the X-ray dye that left him with a degenerative spinal cord condition. Apparently that's the reason why he very rarely plays electric guitar anymore.
But yeah, regardless - it'a a great record. That solo in "Boy In The Sandbox" sounds like a million cluster bombs raining down on Saigon.. How he got a guitar to sound like that in 1968 is anyone's guess. Definitely a forerunner of some of the artier US post-punk bands like Pere Ubu and Sonic youth, and possibly some No Wave stuff as well. I first came across his music about five years ago in a Guardian piece about privately pressed records that have since attained cult status. The article mentioned him along with Bobb Trimble, George Brigman and the Roots of Madness, all of whom are pretty dashed good too, even if they don't sound particularly like each other.
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Lawrence
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Re: Michael Yonkers Band
Jul 24, 2014, 03:11
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What the hey, I guess I'm not the first one to write about this here...
http://www.headheritage.co.uk/unsung/review/887
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Lawrence
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Re: Michael Yonkers Band
Aug 08, 2014, 19:31
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Just got the earlier Mike and the Mumbles album on vinyl, which I'm listening to now... Sounds a little more conventional but cool all the same.
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