During this time, he also started studying dance in earnest, having tried karate in college. ("'You move real good, but you just don't have a killer instinct,'" Yonkers recalls his instructor telling him.) He began dance lessons with Heidi Hauser Jasmin--he still takes her beginner class today--and soon was incorporating his new knowledge into solo electric-guitar shows with backing tapes, special effects, and theatrics at West Bank venues like the Coffeehouse Extempore and the New Riverside Cafe. Fogel remembers these frantic shows as "crazy and beautiful."
Recalling these performances in his apartment, Yonkers pulls out a tape he made in the early Eighties--one of several hundred "tiny dances" that he choreographed, scored, and often videotaped. In it, he wears a white leotard, and he glides and twirls to the music of Debussy. Long purple, teal, and yellow streams of light trail his moves, seemingly burning into the screen.
Diana Watters
Michael Yonkers: "I can't imagine living a more interesting life"
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"How did you do that?" asks Destijl's Simonson, amazed at the spectacle onscreen.
"Beats me, it's been a long time," Yonkers laughs.
Almost as amazing as the volume of this work is the fact that it ever got done at all. Back in 1971, a 2,000-pound pile of computers toppled on Yonkers while he was working in the electronics warehouse, destroying his back. After several years of severe pain, Yonkers submitted to exploratory surgery--which, in pre-MRI days could sometimes be worse than the original injury. Yonkers's first myelogram--a process where dye is injected into the spine so that X-rays may be taken--almost killed him. ("I grabbed the nurse so hard, she said my handprint was on her for weeks.") His allergic reaction to Pantopaque, the oil-based dye used in the procedure, led to arachnoiditis, a degenerative condition of the inner lining of the spinal cord. ("It's not a fear of spiders," Yonkers jokes with a sigh). Yonkers details the inevitable course of the disease rather succinctly: "First you lose [the use of] your legs, your arms, your sight, and then your life".
A chance meeting at a pain clinic in the late Seventies gave Yonkers a shot at slowing the progression of arachnoiditis--dance therapy. It was this treatment that helped Yonkers forgo the use of painkillers. He resumed dancing with gusto, beginning to take on character roles for the Continental Ballet and the Minnesota Dance Theater. He eventually performed with about a dozen companies in all. He also danced with Nancy Hauser's company (he'll appear in the upcoming 40th-anniversary show in May). Studying Middle Eastern dance in the mid-Nineties seemed to help his back--and also introduced him to his current girlfriend, whom he's been seeing for eight years.
Being on disability has forced Yonkers to be "frugal and clever," and to devise his own diet and exercise regimen to augment three to four hours of physical therapy every day. He demonstrates a few homemade traction devices. One is a pair of modified crutches, which he uses to prop himself off the floor while his feet rest on a board balanced atop a half-sphere. There's also a contraption with gravity boots hooked to a slanted board. Some exercises, he figures, he's done nearly a million times. While the diligence has helped Yonkers keep his body from degenerating for the time being, coping with the disease is still grueling. "I don't recommend it to anyone," he says wryly.
Over the years, Yonkers never gave up making music for his own enjoyment; he's got hundreds of tapes--"somewhere"--to prove it. But he stopped performing live in the mid-Nineties when standing and singing started to cause uncontrollable back spasms.
Around the same time Jordan, Minnesota-based collector and historian Jim Oldsberg started compiling a collection of unreleased Dove tracks and contacted Steve Longman, who still had a box of unclaimed tapes he'd acquired when Dove closed in 1970. The collection, released in 1997 on Pittsburgh's Get Hip label as Free Flight: Unreleased Dove Recording Studio Cuts 1964-69, garnered good reviews, particularly for the two Yonkers cuts at the end, "Microminature Love" and "Kill the Enemy."
Those cuts on Flight sent collector and Destijl Records head Clint Simonson on a four-year hunt to find Yonkers--who conceals his phone number about as carefully as the White House hides Dick Cheney. Combing the bins for the self-released discs and quizzing anyone who would listen, Simonson got a break when local free-jazz pioneer Milo Fine suggested he put in inquiries with local dance studios. A message was eventually relayed to Yonkers--perhaps the most extroverted recluse on the planet--who took a quick liking to Simonson. Yonkers had planned to issue the recordings on CD himself, but Simonson's offer of a vinyl-only release appealed to the musician's love of retro tech, clinching the deal.
In anticipation of a solo show at Treehouse Records to commemorate the LP's release, Yonkers has devised a special brace and a stand for his guitar. He put the equipment through a dry run in a recent KFAI studio broadcast. Still, Yonkers says that it's highly unlikely he'll continue playing out. Instead, more home-recorded music seems to be in the future.
During a telephone chat, Yonkers plays snippets of one such project, a disc with the working title Straight Through, which has him multi-tracking in real time. After sound-checking with a Mystikal CD (Yonkers calls hip hop "the single most important thing to happen to popular culture in the history of the Western world"), some lo-fi, blues-tinged, fuzz-laden rock begins to buzz through the phone. "Hear that noise? YEAHHHHHHHH!" Yonkers howls.
Clicking the player off, he says laughing, " I have so much fun playing anything with distortion. I'm sure there's some psychological profile of wacko-ness that that fits. But I'm not really trying for anything. It's just kind of what I've done for 30 years."
