Michael Yonkers' agony and ecstacy
When he's asked what in his life matters most, what he could never ransom however dear the price, Michael Yonkers doesn't flinch.
"Health," he says. "It's what I think about from the time I get up to the time I go to bed. You're seeing me on a great day. If you'd seen me last summer, you would have been very disturbed."
St. Paul's lion of guitar noise has spent the past half-century quietly renovating the music world in the deep shade of an outland, and since the 2003 Sub Pop reissue of his 1968 masterpiece "Microminiature Love," Yonkers' name has at last been dragged into broad daylight.
But at 62, Yonkers is a man in visible agony. He seems a phantasm, with rice-paper skin and a tuft of pale hair. When he breathes, his chest rattles like a carburetor, and his gait is tender and pained, as if he were a glass man in a world of stone. They call it arachnoiditis, a spine condition he developed after breaking his back in 1971. It's a condition he's battled mightily, one which has cost him years of musical activity, has brought him to death's door numerous times, and which forced him to announce his retirement from the stage last summer.
"I can't tell you how bizarre it is," he says mildly. "It's all over, full body pain. People who it happens to are at a loss to describe it. The body was not meant to feel this kind of pain. Over the years, I've gotten used to it. Most people don't know I'm suffering from it. I am right now."
And yet, his demeanor is nearly beatific, betraying a gentle spirit unpolluted by the decades of pain. He is as placid as a pastor, as endlessly intrigued by the world as a child, and despite being musically hamstrung by his disease, he has another "new" album, "Lovely Gold," released last month on Drag City. The album is a tangle of recordings Yonkers made in the late '70s, tracks that find him mashing blues and pop tropes through handbuilt effects units and a jury-rigged four-track recorder, emerging on the other end like so much beautifully wrecked chrome.
The release marks the second time in a decade that Yonkers will enjoy major attention for works he made as a young man, but to Yonkers, an artist who abandoned commercial and critical courtships when Paul McCartney was playing Buddy Holly covers in Hamburg, the fame and respect is a trifling byproduct of his life's avocation -- proof positive that his humility is anything but an act.
"I guess now I do feel vindicated," he says, "but in my everyday life, I don't even think of it. So many people for so many years told me that if I didn't approach my music seriously, I'd never have anything. Blah blah blah. There were moments where I thought, 'what am I doing here?'" He takes a pensive pause, and smirks. "But yeah," he says, a specter of ego glinting in his limitless modesty. "I think I deserve to be here."
