Mingering Mike is a soul superstar
Mingering Mike is a soul superstar. On paper. In the late ’60s and early ’70s, he wrote more than 4,000 songs and made 50 albums. He did movie soundtracks, benefit albums and a tribute to Bruce Lee. The album covers were painstakingly hand-drawn with track listings, copyrights, price tags and fan club information. [Via Swindle Magazine]
The thing was, they weren’t real. This was a music career—and a wildly prolific one at that—fashioned entirely from cardboard.
Dori Hadar, 33, is a criminal investigator in Washington, D.C. He is also a DJ and an avid record collector. His tastes run to funk, soul and R&B from the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s.
In 2004, his work required him to be at the D.C. jail around four in the morning for an interview. He was done by six, which was just when the vendors started unloading their inventory at a nearby flea market. The old maxim about early birds catching worms applies in the cutthroat world of vinyl collecting. On that morning, one junk dealer had about 20 boxes, or a thousand records, which Hadar dutifully rummaged through.
It was the last crate that contained the career of Mingering Mike. The artwork was crude, done in marker, paint, pen and pencil, but lively, evocative and carefully thought out along themes. The Mingering Mike Revue All Decision Stars’ Live From Paris featured a jaunty man in a sport coat and beret. On Frustrations, a man’s head is surrounded by things like a policeman blowing his whistle, a construction worker with a jackhammer and a blackboard that reads “Good Morning Class.” Tight Squeeze is the soundtrack to a nonexistent movie of the same name.
“I had no clue what they were,” he says. “It just made no sense whatsoever. So I’m pulling them out one after the other, going, ‘What the…?’” he says laughing. “Mingering Mike, what kind of name is that?” He sat there with the box for a while, which the other record collectors, who by now had arrived on the scene, dismissed as garbage.
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