Search - Michael Yonkers And The Blind Shake :: Carbohydrates Hydrocarbons

Michael Yonkers and the Blind Shake Michael Yonkers must rank as one of the oddest figures in the already pretty-damn-odd story of American garage and psychedelia. Back in 1968, Yonkers and his friends had been busy gorging themselves on the sort of garage psych and surf that a couple of decades later the Nuggets compilations would rescue from 1000 damp garages and dusty lofts. Excited by the rough DIY feel of the records they heard they decided to have a go at it themselves. Yonkers got things off to a flying start by taking a saw to a perfectly good guitar - unhappy with his telecaster's too-pretty sound he cut down the body to a plank, slacked off the strings and drove it's chiming clashing tones through homebrew fx units and layers of distortion. The resulting sound was not pretty - somewhere between Sonic Youth and Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music, but somehow hot on the back of major label deals for Beefheart, Zappa and the Fugs Yonkers was picked up by Sire Records. With two friends on bass and drums, Yonkers shaped his racket into Microminiature Love - a series of pulsing garage rock tracks which took the raw energy of Link Ray and the Trashmen and upped the distortion tenfold. The result, classic proto-punk tunes swathed in head-spinning echo, reverb, feedback and layer upon layer of fuzz sounds like a roll call of out-there and influential music to come - Iggy Pop's strut, Pere Ubu's oddness; even hints of the Birthday party and Shoegazing swell up and disappear back into the murk surrounding Yonker's hectoring snarl. There's no doubt that this should have been one of those endlessly name-dropped, seminal records and that it ought to have spurred later generations of outsiders and wierdos on to make their own rackets, but somehow, for reasons that aren't altogether clear, the deal with Sire fell through and the record was never released. Languishing in obscurity for the next 30 years, Yonkers carried on developing his unique noise, releasing records in tiny editions to local friends and fans. Eventually some of his tapes made their way to De Stijl records who were sufficiently impressed to spend over a year trying to track Yonkers down before finally putting out Yonker's lost album in 2003. The response justified the effort; the record sold out, the 70s self releases became collectors items and Yonkers found himself gigging with bands like Wolf Eyes, Low and Six Organs of Admittance. Soon indie majors Sub-Pop picked up on the record and gave it a well-deserved large-scale release. Not content to rest on past acheivements Yonkers has since released 2 records with all the drive and oddness of Microminiature Love, the second of which is a collaboration with Minneapolis' heavy-hitters The Blind Shake. Fram-Girl records' Carbohydrates Hydrocarbons takes Yonkers' classic psych-garage squall and hectoring snarl and sets it atop driving riffs and a scalpel sharp rhythm section. If most resurrected rockers sound like pale shadows of their former selves, Yonkers' time out of the limelight has left him sounding harder and keener than any of the guys who, had Sire Records only given them the chance, would now be ripping him off.