Mike McGonigal, YETI, and the Lord's songs

Aquarium Drunkard talks to YETI publisher Mike McGonigal about his magazine, his work with Mississippi and Tompkins Square records, his love for African-American Gospel, and the future.

"Earlier this month we caught up with YETI publisher Mike McGonigal, the man behind one of our favorite compilations of the year — the Tompkins Square release This May Be My Last Time Singing: Raw African-American Gospel on 45RPM, 1957-1982. A continuation of sorts to McGonigal’s initial collaboration with the label, 2009′s Fire In My Bones, the collection is a three-disc aural journey into the various corners of African-American gospel. Among other things, the below touches on YETI‘s beginnings, record hunting, tracking down source material and future reissue plans.

Aquarium Drunkard: How long have you been doing YETI now?

I started YETI around 2000. Now we do two issues a year plus publishing original books by the likes of Luc Sante and Erik Davis. I’d done a ‘zine called Chemical Imbalance from 1984-1993; I started that when I was sixteen years old with money I made mowing lawns in the neighborhood. Within a few years it was getting an international distribution and each issue had a hard vinyl 7” record with unreleased music from the likes of Sonic Youth, Opal, Faust and the Mekons.

AD: How did the project initially get started.

Mike McGonigal: I started to work on YETI in 1999, a year after moving to Seattle to work as a music editor for Amazon. A co-worker helped fund it initially. I spent much of the 1990s as a low-level hack writer, scribbling wherever I could for ten cents a word and also supporting myself as a bookstore clerk, museum guard, bicycle burrito delivery boy and a grant writer for a non-profit arts organization. When I found myself at a “real” job, even though I was often working ten to eleven hours a day at the job, I found I still wanted to do my own fanzine. I really missed that curatorial thing, the satisfaction I got from putting together an entire issue of a magazine myself—just stuff that my friends and I were interested in, no other considerations aside from that.

YETI hasn’t exactly taken off but there’s steady interest, I guess you could say? Initially there were CDs in each issue. With the new YETI, #12, out next week, actually, we’ve returned to that format – each issue will now bt 8” by 8” and have a 7” single with each one (though I might do a full color issue with a DVD inside it as well). This 7” has the last unreleased Fred McDowell tracks from the initial recording session he had with Alan Lomax, and Grouper covering Dead Moon, and a killer cover of a Duane Eddy song done on a boom box in the early ‘90s by Tiki Men. It’s a perfect little record I feel so honored to be able to release it!" 

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