Michael Yonkers
Microminiature Love

I just can't understand Michael. Now that we're running in the streets and taking back the city. Now that even the milkman's boy, who used to always bow his head under the dull gaze of his boss, is breaking windows. Now that we're lighting fires in the streets as if it were New Year's Eve on the beach, he's locked in the basement. Now that we're changing the world, he's modifying the telecaster. Now that we're exploding and letting out all the rage, he keeps the anguish inside and repeats the same chord for hours, swaying on the guitar like an autistic child.

I went by to call him for the sit-in but to no avail. The garage shutter remained down. I pressed my ear against the metal to listen and could no longer distinguish between the distant echo of the riot in the street and the reverberated, muffled, and rough sound of the band. For a moment, I wondered if the musicians in there were listening, ready to mimic the sounds of the flaming street with their instruments.

Except from such a distance, the imitation can only be out of focus. I don't mean weak, because Michael and the others really go for it, I can't deny it, but frozen, yes, a kind of disillusioned revolt. If Michael came out to the street, he'd see that while we're charging at the cops, we're smiling like children... oh my, if I listen from here, the screams coming from the street sound more like desperate moans, the slogans sound funereal, but maybe it's Michael's music making me feel this way. I shouldn't let myself be influenced. He's always been the one for sad drunks and bad trips.

There he is singing. My goodness, Michael, you scare me, you seem ready to spit out your soul any moment now. We're here rebelling, rejecting Vietnam and apartheid, and you're pining as if Vietnam were a woman loved and beaten out of too much jealousy. I know, I know, for you the private and the public are one and the same, that the revolution can only happen inside us. They teach these things in universities, too. But when you say it, it sounds as if you think a real revolution will never come.

Well, I'm leaving now. Otherwise, they'll disperse the sit-in before I even sit down. Hey, wait a minute, what's this piece? Still the one about your girlfriend? Michael, it's an obsession. I know she cheated on you. I know I'm your best friend and we shouldn't have done it. But then hit me, no? You can't just sit there torturing the strings. With the drums sounding like a hammer hitting the same nail over and over and the suffering growing with each repetition of the riff.

The pain can't be sustained for so long, Michael.

And not sustaining it, I wake up, soaked in sweat. I go to make myself some hot milk in the kitchen and I think back to those days of '68, when I deluded myself and Michael understood everything. I look at the "revolutionary" records released this year, where revolutionary means understanding that there is no future, and that we are in a sort of devolutionary prehistory. I look at the new LP by these Pere Ubu and smile, aware that Michael's guitar already sounded in '68 like Allen Ravenstine's eml synthesizer. And when I read in an interview that in Cleveland David Thomas is crazy about surf, I think of Michael who in '67 built his electronic junk to mimic the reverb of the echoplex over which surf groups galloped like a wave. And I remember when he further modified it because he had listened to the Gibson Maestro fuzzbox in Satisfaction, getting no satisfaction at all! as he used to say, and wanting to radicalize its insights.

And then I think of him locked in the basement, focused and bent over the instrument, while our world was wasting its energies in an aimless rage.

I wonder where you are now, Michael...

*"Microminiature love" was recorded in just one hour in 1968 by a three-member band. First take's the charm! But at Sire Records, the first take didn't seem good at all. They didn't understand that the cavernous sound wasn't the rough shell of the record, but its exteriorized heart. They wanted to re-record it in their studios with luxury session men. Michael declined the offer. He didn't feel like moving.

The record re-emerged like radioactive waste in the 90s.