MINNEAPOLIS — Three decades after a brief flirtation with the music business, Michael Yonkers suddenly found himself getting write-ups from national rock publications in the early 2000s and landing a record deal with the famed Seattle record label behind Nirvana and Soundgarden.

The Minneapolis native accepted the unexpected attention with the same grounded, unflappable attitude that got him through years of debilitating physical ailments.

“You can’t imagine what it’s like as an artist to sit on something for 35 years and finally have it be validated,” Yonkers told the Star Tribune in 2003. “I can die now.”

Yonkers, 78, died April 20 at Regions Hospital in St. Paul, more than two decades after his strange, visionary brand of psychedelic rock was “validated” when Sub Pop Records reissued his 1968 album “Microminiature Love.”

Suffering from multiple myeloma and pulmonary embolisms in recent months — in addition to the severe back pain and nerve damage he had endured since a 1971 on-the-job injury — Yonkers reportedly maintained his positive outlook until the end, friends and family said. He apparently kept making music, too.

“I found a lot of written-down lyrics and boxes of tapes,” said Helen Voelker of Minneapolis, his partner of 34 years. “For all I know, he was recording up until a few months ago.”

The fact that he was still making music even as his health declined underlined why he did it in the first place, Voelker added.

“He never did it for fame or money. He did it because, like so many true artists, he was driven to create. He just had to create.”

That artist’s instinct made Yonkers an odd fit growing up in Edina’s Morningside neighborhood, according to his sister, who remembered him being the first boy with long hair and first to dabble in rock music among their neighbors and friends.

Then named Michael Yunker, he was raised with three other siblings by Patricia and Regis Yunker, the latter a manager for Lunds grocery stores. Michael would recount seeing a performance by Minneapolis surf-rock heroes the Trashmen of 1963’s “Surfin’ Bird” fame around age 14 and wanting to become a musician, testing his family’s patience.

“We used to get mad because we couldn’t talk on the phone when he was doing his music because it was so loud,” recalled his sister, Kathleen Esh of Hopkins. “We’d have to take the cups and saucers down or they’d rattle off the shelf and break.”

Younger brother Jim would join him on drums later as Michael started forming bands, including Michael & the Mumbles. Eventually, he garnered interest from Sire Records, the Los Angeles label for which he originally recorded “Microminiature Love,” but Sire ultimately shelved the LP. (“I still don’t really understand what happened,” Yonkers said in 2003.)

A seven-song hodgepodge of oddly tuned, distorted guitars and wigged-out, psychodramatic vocals, the record’s reissue turned the technocratic guitarist, songwriter and singer into a Twin Cities version of the “Searching for Sugar Man” story, an innovative musician pulled out of obscurity decades later for making music ahead of its time.

Late Sub Pop Records Vice President Andy Kotowicz said in 2003, “If this stuff had been heard, we think it would have influenced the Stooges, Velvet Underground and the acts we love.”

The prominent music site Pitchfork wrote of the album, “There’s a point at which this record shifts from wacky historical curiosity to full-on psych-rock excellence.”

In the years that followed the Sub Pop reissue, some of Yonkers’ other long-lost recordings were unearthed by other record labels. Chicago’s Drag City Records dusted off the experimental 1977 collection “Lovely Gold” in 2010. Twin Cities label De Stijl — whose founder Clint Simonson actually reissued “Microminiature Love” before Sub Pop — put out a much quieter but equally cosmic 1969-made record called “Grimwood” in 2007.

Not long after he made “Grimwood,” Yonkers was crushed by a ton’s worth of equipment that fell on him while working in a computer warehouse in 1971. During the treatments for his damaged spine, he suffered an allergic reaction to dye injected into his spine and developed the nerve condition arachnoiditis, which affected his physical abilities the rest of his life. He took up modern dance as part of his rehabilitation and had to saw off guitar pieces and create custom instruments to be able to perform his music.

Among the last performances Yonkers gave were after 2009’s “Michael Yonkers with the Blind Shake,” his first of two albums with a kindred fuzz-rock trio from St. Paul, where Yonkers lived in recent decades.

Though never a prominent fixture in the Twin Cities music scene largely because of his physical limitations, Yonkers was revered by many other musicians who are.

Robert Wilkinson of the Flamin’ Oh’s said, “Michael was a beautiful and unique light. He had an untamed musical aesthetic. He had an unconventional spirit and energy. He was also a very sweet and loving man.”

Treehouse Records owner Mark Trehus, a close friend of Yonkers, said, “Michael was very matter-of-fact about his sudden rise to fame, [35] years after the fact — neither particularly buoyed by the much-delayed attention nor bitter that it took so long."

Similarly, Trehus said, “throughout his lifetime of monumental health problems I never heard him complain.”

Sub Pop Records paid tribute to Yonkers on social media, writing, “He was an incredible, truly singular artist, AND one of the genuinely sweetest people we’ve ever met. We loved him and will miss him.”

Yonkers did not want a memorial service, Voelker said. Instead, she suggested he would be happy “just having people listen to his music.”

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