Groundbreaking Twin Cities musician, dancer, electrician, and performer Michael Yonkers has died at the age of 78. A prolific artist who began producing music as a teenager, Yonkers came painfully close early on to a big break with Sire Records. In the early aughts, collectors rediscovered his work, and several of his albums have been reissued. A record titled Microminiature Love, which Sire Records had considered putting out in the late ‘60s, was released in the early aughts to critical acclaim.

Yonkers died due to complications related to cancer, a recent fall, and blood clots in his lungs on Monday, April 20, at Regions Hospital in St. Paul. According to his long-time partner Helen Voelker, he had been in and out of hospitals and transitional care for the past few months.

Death God Records, a label run by Thee Oh Sees frontman John Dwyer, published an Instagram post on April 28, that reads: “Rest In Peace Michael Yonkers. Today we have lost a true innovator, unique talent, lovely human being & friend. We are blessed to know him and will always have his music to get us through now more than ever.” Yonkers was living in St. Paul at the time of his death, according to public records.

Over his life and career, the prolific Michael Yonkers evolved creatively due to evolving musical interests — as well as finding drug-free ways to recover from a serious back injury.

Yonkers was born Michael Regis Yunker in October of 1947 and grew up just west of Minneapolis in the Morningside section of Edina. By his teenage years, Yonkers grew enamored with the early-’60s explosion of local surf rock groups like the Novas, the Chancellors, and the Trashmen, whose “Surfin’ Bird” was a national hit in 1963. His first group was the Vectors. By the mid-‘60s, Yonkers was the vocalist and guitarist of Michael and the Mumbles with his brother Jim Yunker on drums, Richard Paske on bass, and keyboardist Jim Woehrle.

“Michael turned me on to so many things, including classical electronic music, which has informed my work for decades,” says Paske. “We took different paths after Michael and the Mumbles, but I was gratified to see him get the recognition he deserved later in life.”

Woehrle had transferred to Edina High School his junior year, and Yonkers was one of the first people he met. They lived two blocks from each other, and struck up a friendship that continued for the next 60 years. “We did a lot of gigs around the Twin Cities and Wisconsin,” Woehrle says. “There were a lot of venues in the late ‘60s to play in the Twin Cities. It was a lot of our own material mixed in with Top 40 stuff of the day. We played for high school dances in southern Minnesota. It was a real potpourri of venues around the state, rural and the Twin Cities.”

Over time, more confrontational and experimental sounds filtered into Yonkers’ music. (For a taste, skip to the 3:00 mark in “Boy In the Sandbox” above.) Recorded in one hour in 1968, the moments of distortion and feedback punctuating the psychedelic rock tracks make Microminiature Love a revelatory listen. The droning, open tuned guitar sound heard on the record was a total accident, according to a 2002 City Pages profile of Yonkers. He had simply knocked his guitar off its stand.

The music was intriguing enough to bring New York-based Sire Records to Minneapolis to hear the band and to offer a contract, but the negotiations broke down. Yonkers was a student at the University of Minnesota at the time, and the label wanted him to move to New York and ditch his bandmates.

“He wouldn't do it,” says Woehrle. “He wanted the band or nothing, and he wanted to do his own thing anyway. So it was an easy decision for him. He didn't want to get pulled into the system, so to speak. So he didn't do it, yeah, which is typical for Michael.”

Yonkers’ drive to find sounds beyond what out-of-the-box equipment could provide led him to slit his speaker with a razor blade and experiment with circuitry to build an early distortion pedal, according to a 2010 interview with Dazed. “I wasn’t particularly practical; I was just trying to get a certain sound,” he said. “I’d start to play around, see what I could get, and just kept going.”

In 1971, catastrophe struck while Yonkers was working at the Minneapolis-based Acme Electronics warehouse. Thousands of pounds of computer equipment fell on him, which led to severe back pain. During treatment, Yonkers had an allergic reaction to dye injected into his spine and developed arachnoiditis, a degenerative condition that would drastically reshape the rest of his life. He sliced off sections of his guitars to put less strain on his back and took up dance therapy to slow the progression of his disease. (Eventually, he joined the Continental Ballet Company and Hauser Dance Company and spent many years performing in dance concerts.) As the 1970s progressed, he self-released a string of albums credited to either Michael Yonkers or Michael Lee Yonkers and continued collaborating with his brother and Jim Woehrle.

This archival video shows Yonkers and Woehrle performing “Borders of My Mind” from the 1974 album of the same name. “He was a true artist who wasn't in it for the money,” Woehrle says. “He was doing art the way he wanted to do it. That was it, bottom line. If people liked it, fine. If you didn't, that's fine too.”

Helen Voelker remembers meeting Yonkers in the early ‘90s. They met when she was applying his stage makeup when he was a guest artist at a Twin Cities dance performance at the Southern Theater. They later danced together a few times. “He was intellectually an incredibly curious person and could talk to anyone,” she says, noting that his interests extended far beyond music, and he was always watching documentaries to learn more about a wide variety of subjects.

She describes Yonkers as a well-rounded performance artist who always found new ways to push the envelope. A Minneapolis Aquatennial performance that involved whipping a cross-painted inflatable until it burst was so edgy that it got him banned. A dance performance piece, The Happy Camper, was about the Holocaust.

In the late 1990s, two of Yonkers’ ‘60s-era songs appear on the compilation Free Flight: Unreleased Dove Recording Studio Cuts 1964-69, which came from sessions at the Richfield-based studio. When De Stijl Records founder Clint Simonson heard the songs, he knew he wanted to put out the material on his label, and he spent more than a year tracking down Yonkers. De Stijl put out Microminiature Love on vinyl in 2002, and Sub Pop released it on CD the following year. Subsequent reissue campaigns by De Stijl, Drag City, and Sub Pop brought more of Yonkers’ ‘60s and ‘70s work into circulation. Treehouse Records’ Mark Trehus also put out several Yonkers projects — including a noise collection titled Circling the Drain — via his hobby label Nero’s Neptune.

“He and I changed one another’s lives in a profound way,” Simonson says. “And we were both very lucky for that, but I was especially so, in the sense that had I not found Michael, someone else surely would have. Michael created a very singular, awe-inspiring world of sound, and I’m very thankful for the time and experiences I had with him.”

While many of Yonkers’ works are listed at discogs.com, he reportedly amassed hundreds of tapes over his lifetime, and was always creating. “Right now, my daily thing is focused on physical therapy,” Yonkers said in a 2007 interview with Vice. “I spend about three hours a day on stretching, strengthening, traction and hydrotherapy. Then I have to spend about another three hours encased in a plastic body cast. After that, I typically play and sing for a while. If I am in the mood, I might write a song or go through some dance type activities.”

In the mid-’00s, Mike Blaha of Twin Cities punk-rock group the Blind Shake had a chance run-in with Yonkers in downtown St. Paul, and a creative friendship soon formed. Yonkers and the Blind Shake performed together several times, including at the experimental music showcase Heliotrope Festival, and put out the collaborative full-length albums Carbohydrates Hydrocarbons in 2007 and Period. in 2011. “For a six-year period, we worked with him a lot,” says Mike Blaha’s brother/bandmate Jim Blaha. “We were in each other's lives a lot. And it was so fun. Just a great storyteller and a really warm, fun guy.” Hey Hey What, a 2011 documentary by Colin Frangos, showcases their collaborations.

Another 2007 project for Yonkers was Unbroken, which he recorded with local creative Chris Strouth (also a contributor to The Current). During the sessions, Yonkers had to minimize the weight he could hold, so his guitar was sawed down to the neck and secured to a tripod. “One of the best moments was when we were recording the last song and asked him what he would love to do that he hadn’t,” Strouth recalled in a tribute posted to Facebook. “To wit, he took the guitar off the tripod and did a sort of dance around the studio while playing. It was insanely powerful.”

Over the past decade, Woehrle and his wife, who live in northern Minnesota, visited Yonkers periodically at his apartment in downtown St. Paul. They’d walk around and listen to his latest creations. Voelker says there were hours and hours of tape, as well as lyrics and chord progressions in Yonkers’ belongings that he created long after he could perform publicly.

Over the past six months, Yonkers’ condition worsened, and he was hospitalized several times. According to the people close to him, his positive spirit remained.

“He was always optimistic, always doing stuff as much as he could,” Woehrle says. “He was always looking ahead. I never heard him say, ‘Why me?’ He never got into drugs or anything to numb the pain. He took care of himself as best he could. And right to the very end, he did as much as he could. He did not give up at all, ever, until he had to, and he was a real inspiration that way. Michael was a very gentle, kind, generous person. You don't know the man behind the music necessarily, but that was him.”

In 2020, Thee Oh Sees frontman John Dwyer (as Damaged Bug) released Bug on Yonkers, a compilation of Michael Yonkers covers. Years before, Dwyer’s group Coachwhips performed with Yonkers in Seattle, and the two struck up a friendship. The two emailed each other often, and Bug on Yonkers was a surprise gift. “I see his music and his lyrics as vessels of humanity, love and positivity,” Dwyer said in an interview with Reviler. “I think I’m drawn to him because I don’t have a lot of positivity in my music. I’m not entirely negative, but I don’t necessarily share his capacity for hope and positivity. He is an inspiration to us all, and I learn from him in order to grow more in this direction.”

Jim Blaha says that there are discussions about having a little memorial gathering for Michael Yonkers to get friends together and to listen to his records, but nothing is scheduled at this time. (“It’s in the wind,” Woehrle says. “It could happen.”) Yonkers’ younger brother Jim Yunker, who played drums on Microminiature Love and several other Yonkers projects, died in 2008 at the age of 60.

“I've done so much already that everything else is cream,” Yonkers said in his 2002 City Pages profile. “In my own mind, I'm already a success. Not financially, not in status, not anything like that. But I can't imagine living a more interesting life."