It’s been a decade since Sub Pop’s reissue of Michael Yonkers’ blisteringly fuzzy *Microminiature Love—*recorded in 1969 and mostly ignored since—turned the Minneapolis obscurity into a cult hero. As later Yonkers albums have come to light, it’s reinforced the perception that Microminiature Love’s raving, avant-garage inclinations were just a blip. At heart Yonkers is a folkie. The decision to move in a less kinetic direction was partly made for him by the 1971 factory accident (and subsequent bungled treatment) that left him debilitated. But the Drag City reissues of two of his early-70s albums—the solo disc Michael Lee Yonkers and the team-up with his former bandmate Jim Woehrle titled Borders of My Mind—show just how much country and folk were part of Yonkers’s idiosyncratic musical worldview.
This is still Yonkers, though, so the stuff is still twisted. As on Grimwood, his first post-Miniature Love album, MLY and Borders were self-released in 1974 despite being recorded somewhat earlier. MLY was tracked in 1971 and 1972, and it continues with diminishing returns the lo-fi vibe he established in Grimwood, which was recorded in 1969. The 60s may have been over, but the trip wasn’t. Awash in the kind of thudding reverb that can only come from living-room walls, the disc is a scarecrow-stark affair, an assembly of acoustic lullabies topped with Yonkers’s goatlike cowpoke vibrato. “His bowels were trembling,” he croons crookedly on “My Sally,” and it’s as silly as it is skeletal. It feels more pastiche than anything else, though, and its Johnny Cash rumble rides off from time to time into Rawhide territory. Yonkers’s stab at a murder ballad, “I’m So Glad You Came", isn’t weird enough to be poignant or funny enough to be weird, but instead inhabits a holding pattern between lighthearted and halfhearted.
Borders fares better. Recapturing some of Grimwood’s quivering psychedelic headspace, it reunites Yonkers with Woehrle, who had been a member of Yonkers’s pre-Microminiature garage combo Michael and the Mumbles as well as the original lineup of The Michael Yonkers Band. Woehrle left the group just before the recording of Microminiature, but the alchemy between the two old friends is gloriously uneven. Relearning each other’s ropes as they go along, each half of the duo contributes songwriting duties. The result is rife with beautifully ragged seams. With Yonkers on feathery guitar and Woehrle on shaky piano, the twosome harmonizes in a near medieval mode on “Elaine", a “Scarborough Fair” for hungover hippiedom. But it’s the grainy, eight-minute “Lovely Lady Companion” that most tenderly demonstrates Borders’ hushed camaraderie. “Please be with me when I reach the end,” they sing together into the single microphone through which everything is being captured.
Neither album, however, hits the same outsider heights as Microminiature, let alone Drag City’s other 70s-folk finds such as Gary Higgins’ ghostly Red Hash. Playfully inconsistent, MLY and Borders help complete the sketch of Yonkers’s the traditionalist, someone who dipped his toe into the chaotic 60s avant-garde before realizing he’d rather put away his fuzz boxes and make nice with his guitar. These two albums have more depth and edge than that. Yonkers, after all, has an off-center perspective that fuses gaunt-eyed soulfulness with quirky perversity. But neither fully traps the weird essence of the time, the place, or, one suspects, the man behind them.
