Issue 13
Mingering Mike
By Julie HairePhotos By Brian Liu
Illustration By Damien Correll
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.
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.
“They were so cool that you wanted them to be real,” he says, “like it was really upsetting they weren’t real.” One in particular was called The Mingering Mike Show Live at the Howard Theater. Hadar knew of the theater as the premiere venue for live Black music in D.C., with Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, and later, James Brown and Motown stars passing through its halls. But it was no more, so he was unsure why these fake albums incorporated a real venue from long ago.
He was confused but intrigued enough to hand over a couple dollars for each record. He sat on it for a week, until he decided to post some scans on Soulstrut.com, a website for DJs and vinyl collectors. He asked, “Who is Mingering Mike?” and the response was immediate. “People were freaking out,” he says, pausing for effect, “like, Dude. Folk. Art. Find of the decade.”
Rick Smith, aka RAJ, who runs Soulstrut.com, was away the weekend the Mingering Mike post went live. “When I arrived home, I was dumbfounded to see all this newfound traffic on the forums,” he says, “all congregating in the Mingering Mike thread.” The buzz snowballed, with loads of blogs picking up the story. When Smith finally got a moment to download and digest the scans, he was duly impressed, but “most of all, I wanted to know who this guy was!”
The idea of an impossibly cool, elusive—and fake—recording star enhanced Mike’s allure, along with Soulstrut.com’s page views: “The Mingering Mike story turned out to be a landmark thread and really put my website on the map,” says Smith. Tanya Heinrich, the editor of Folk Art magazine, which did a piece on Mike, says it’s not unusual to “encounter a collection so fully developed or imbued with make-believe.” However, Mike’s attention to detail is unique: “Personas have been adopted and depicted but perhaps not packaged quite to this degree.”
Mingering Mike approached his fake career with diligence: He created over 30 record labels, among them Decision, Nations Capitol, Sex and Mother Goose. He had his own stable of artists, made up of family members who he created names for—Audio Andre, The Big “D,” Rambling Ralph—and wrote songs from their perspectives. (See The Big “D” Sings Mingering Mike.) He was a wordsmith too, with such inventive song titles as “She’s Not a One Guy Girl,” “T.V. Dinners of Mines,” and “Yawl’s Hot Pants—Part 1.” He even created the cardboard records, complete with paintedon grooves.
Hadar knew he had to find the mysterious Mike. He and another collector named Frank Beylotte went back to the junk dealer and bought anything that could help identify Mike. With Hadar’s background in locating hard-to-find people, some albums and letters were all they needed. They first came upon Mike’s cousin, the famed Audio Andre, then they found Mike himself, living alone in a cramped two-bedroom apartment in northeast D.C.
Mike was suspicious of their intentions. He thought they were bill collectors or cops. But when he warmed up to them, he told them his story. It turned out he didn’t pay the rent on his storage unit and all the contents were auctioned off. He explained he was a huge music fan, a songwriter, and making records was his outlet, something he had to do so he didn’t, as he put it, “explode.”
“So many times, over the course of the day, you might have things in your mind, and [if] you don’t settle them, it will actually feel like exploding, or [losing] your mind or something,” Mike says. “It’s just like when there’s something you want to tell somebody and you see that person every day, wouldn’t it just feel like it’s eating you inside out if you didn’t express yourself to the person?”
He also wanted to have them all ready in case one day he got his big break. “He did actually have a dream of being a soul superstar,” says Hadar. “I don’t think he ever had any real expectation of anyone discovering him. It was like his own little world. But now that it’s happened, it’s like a dream come true, and he never in his wildest dreams thought that anyone would even see it. So it makes him very happy.”
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