READING FRENZY: Mike McGonigal reads from his 33 1/3 series book on My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless. Inset: The forthcoming seventh volume of Yeti magazine (cover art by Mingering Mike). IMAGE: Mike Baehr

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.

The seventh volume of Yeti hits the streets next month, and from the sounds of it, McGonigal’s ability to get “good shit” has not wavered. The new issue features unpublished work by photojournalist Robert Frank, fiction by postmodern storyteller Lynne Tillman, and interviews with the likes of cartoonist Jim Woodring and the psych-folk group Wooden Ships. (The band is also headlining what was originally slated as a party celebrating the publication of Issue 7, but due to production delays, the party has transformed into this Friday’s Yetifest, which features appearances by Wavves and Eat Skull and a DJ set by McGonigal himself.)

What McGonigal is most excited about, though, is a series of cartoons, drawn for Yeti by a group of adults with developmental disabilities who participate in the Full Life program here in Portland. “It’s a facility that allows these people to express themselves creatively,” he says, sounding suitably awed. “And they did some artwork for us in the form of comics, and it is just unbelievable.”

The accompanying CD also features a song written by a Full Life client, a charmingly ramshackle folk number titled “Oh Liz.” “The song is about Liz Harris, who plays under the name Grouper,” McGonigal says. “She’s been a director of [Full Life] for a while now, and one of the guys she works with decided to write this little ode to her.” The song is appropriately followed by a new Grouper track.

McGonigal is already looking ahead to what he gets to share with the world next, including the gospel-blues primer he’s been writing and a book collecting the decadelong run of Chemical Imbalance, all under the imprint of his publishing company, also called Yeti.

“I’m not into this weird stuff just for the sake of it being weird and obscure,” McGonigal insists. Like any good grown-up music geek, he simply wants it all to find its way into people’s hands.