michael yonkers: the neverending light-beam from planet 00's

"Do you know the numbers on people who are in it for life? They're small. Real, real small. Kids & jobs come along to make regular adults out of most musicians. Even the ones who get that glossy magazine coverage or score that signing bonus can usually be found selling insurance 10 years down the line. A select few balance against family time. Fewer still find jobs teaching, and often have no energy left for their own stuff. Nobody, and I do mean nobody, just keeps going. It's too hard. Michael Yonkers makes the energizer bunny look bad. He started making his own distortion (by slicing speaker cones) in the mid-1960s, built his own pedals, souped up his own guitars, and he's still making distortion now that he's in his late 60s. Even more unusual, his sound has gotten, if anything, cruder along the way. This is a collection that Yonkers put together from CD-s that he gave out to friends once a year between 2001 & 2008. What's here are hard rock songs, and they're goddamn well-written. Most of what you'll hear are huge, scratched up, convulsive whorls of distortion piled all on top of themselves until you can barely discern the pitch underneath. Wow...The guy also ran a record & ephemera shop named Loonland during the 80s. He's been a sheep breeder & a dance choreographer. He's built a home studio or two, at least one of which had to work while he was confined to a hospital bed that was installed in his house. Yonkers suffers from adhesive arachnoiditis, a nerve swelling that seizes up your back, brought on by a 1971 accident where 2000 lbs fell on him, and permanently exacerbated by a nasty dye used to get xrays of the spine.... His voice has aged a little, but It's still got a vibrato to it, mostly masked by the guitar here. But it's better suited for these lyrics, as they're a kind of burned & haunted you rarely hear." --excerpt from Angela Sawyer's liner notes. Silkscreened and hand-painted covers. Limited edition one-time pressing.