When you’re a teenage music geek—trust me, I speak from experience here—you have two goals in life: to get your hands on as many good records as your allowance will afford you, and to share them with anyone who will give you five minutes of their time.
These goals are, obviously, a lot easier to put into practice in our super-connected age. In the time it takes to read this sentence, you could have set up your own MP3 blog and racked up 300 hits.
But music geeks in the early ’80s really had only one recourse: starting a fanzine. And in 1984, Mike McGonigal did just that. Using an early Apple computer and a pocketful of money he earned from mowing lawns, the young Floridian published the first issue of Chemical Imbalance at 15 years old.
Like so many protean publications of its time, Imbalance grew into a full-fledged magazine over the course of a decade. As it grew, issues boasted submissions by the likes of Greil Marcus, Art Spiegelman, Matt Groening and Nick Tosches—and free 7-inches featuring rare music by artists ranging from Sonic Youth and Pavement to Sun Ra and Faust.
It’s quite a legacy, but one that McGonigal, now one of the country’s foremost music critics and a Portland resident of 11 years, is matter-of-fact about: “I just had a lot of enthusiasm and was able to get good shit from people. And I got people to at least pretend to take me seriously.”
No one needs to pretend with the 40-year-old writer and publisher any longer. Especially after flipping through the pages of Yeti, the thick, irregularly published arts journal he has overseen for the past nine years: “Someone captured the tone of Yeti so perfectly in a review. They called it ‘a general interest magazine for people with marginal interests.’”
This means, in any given issue, you might find an article on a long-lost gospel singer, a tour diary written by Okkervil River’s Will Sheff, or a collection of rare Australian crime-scene photography. And, of course, each issue comes with a CD of related songs and material curated and sequenced by McGonigal (his favorite part of the job). Yeti isn’t a moneymaking venture, McGonigal says, but it tends to break even, and even in the much-ballyhood “end of the print era,” advertising goals have been met as of late.
These goals are, obviously, a lot easier to put into practice in our super-connected age. In the time it takes to read this sentence, you could have set up your own MP3 blog and racked up 300 hits.
But music geeks in the early ’80s really had only one recourse: starting a fanzine. And in 1984, Mike McGonigal did just that. Using an early Apple computer and a pocketful of money he earned from mowing lawns, the young Floridian published the first issue of Chemical Imbalance at 15 years old.
Like so many protean publications of its time, Imbalance grew into a full-fledged magazine over the course of a decade. As it grew, issues boasted submissions by the likes of Greil Marcus, Art Spiegelman, Matt Groening and Nick Tosches—and free 7-inches featuring rare music by artists ranging from Sonic Youth and Pavement to Sun Ra and Faust.
It’s quite a legacy, but one that McGonigal, now one of the country’s foremost music critics and a Portland resident of 11 years, is matter-of-fact about: “I just had a lot of enthusiasm and was able to get good shit from people. And I got people to at least pretend to take me seriously.”
No one needs to pretend with the 40-year-old writer and publisher any longer. Especially after flipping through the pages of Yeti, the thick, irregularly published arts journal he has overseen for the past nine years: “Someone captured the tone of Yeti so perfectly in a review. They called it ‘a general interest magazine for people with marginal interests.’”
This means, in any given issue, you might find an article on a long-lost gospel singer, a tour diary written by Okkervil River’s Will Sheff, or a collection of rare Australian crime-scene photography. And, of course, each issue comes with a CD of related songs and material curated and sequenced by McGonigal (his favorite part of the job). Yeti isn’t a moneymaking venture, McGonigal says, but it tends to break even, and even in the much-ballyhood “end of the print era,” advertising goals have been met as of late.
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