eMusic Selects: Mingering Mike
Featured Album
Mingering Mike is late.
I probably should have expected it. Mike is an R&B superstar with nearly 40 years in the business. He’s racked up a string of No. 1 hits (among them the astonishing “But All I Can Do Is Cry”) and played venues in cities as far away as Paris. He has a bevy of celebrity admirers and a book that details his rise, fall and rise again. A little tardiness comes with the territory.
He’s asked that we meet at Marvin, a hip, bustling restaurant near the Adams Morgan neighborhood of Washington, DC named after soul legend and local favorite son Marvin Gaye. There’s an enormous painting of Marvin on the rear wall, and a steady stream of ’60s classics — Curtis Mayfield, Donny Hathaway, Isaac Hayes — filters through the air.
They have a lot in common, Mike and Marvin. Both of them grew up on the hardscrabble streets of DC, two quiet kids born into atypical families and harrowing social upheaval. They both scored their first hits early in life — Mike at 18, Marvin at 23, and both of them first became famous for a series of duets — Marvin with Tami Terrell, Mike with the Big “D.” Both of them sold out DC’s legendary Howard Theater, running through their respective golden greats for an ecstatic and adoring public.
But it’s there that their careers diverge. Marvin recorded 24 studio albums during his lifetime, but Mike has released nearly twice that number. Marvin recorded mostly for Motown, but Mike put out records on countless regional imprints: Decision, Ming/War, Mother Goose and Nation’s Capitol, to name just a few. In 1972, Marvin Gaye released one LP. Mingering Mike released 15. In terms of productivity, dedication and sheer drive, Mike bests Marvin every time.
Oh, there’s one more key difference between Mike’s career and Marvin’s: Mike’s is completely imaginary.
There are so many entry points to the story of Mingering Mike it’s difficult to know which one to choose. You could start with Dori and Frank, the two crate diggers who fortuitously stumbled upon boxes of Mike’s homemade cardboard records at a flea market while in search of rare funk 45s. You could start with the internet — specifically, the SoulStrut message board — where Mike’s legend slowly grew to epic proportions. But, perhaps unsurprisingly, the best place to start is with Mike himself.
Mike — that’s as much of a name as he’ll give, and as much as I’m willing to push for — grew up in DC in the 1960s, raised by his sisters, first Cathy and then Ladosca, at the peak of the soul music explosion.
“It was fantastic,” he beams. “It just seemed like everything that was pouring out of the radio was great.”
We’re sitting at a table in the back of Marvin, directly across from the enormous, imposing portrait of The Man himself. Mike, when all was said and done, was only 30 minutes late, a delay due not to prima donna posturing, but the inability to find parking.
As is often the case during interviews and public appearances, Mike is accompanied by Dori Hadar, who is as warm and affable as Mike is shy and gentle. Mike’s current popularity is largely because of Hadar, and, in what could be read as a combination payback/apology, Hadar acts as a kind of publicist and agent. Call him the Mingering Manager. The two of them have a rare and natural chemistry. Any time Mike starts to talk about his life, Hadar leans in close. He’s surely heard Mike’s story countless times over the last four years, but his rapt attention and frequent questions make each telling seem like the first. It’s easy to understand his enthusiasm; hearing Mike speak is like heaving open a huge window across decades. Peering through offers a view of five-and-tens with plate glass windows, old green Fords coughing exhaust and blaring Motown, and legendary soul venues with lines around the block.
“My brother used to work at the Howard Theater,” Mike recalls. His voice is rich and low, a slight drawl seeping into slow-to-come words. “I was about 15 at the time, and I saw James Brown there, I saw Junior Walker there. At every show, they’d have local acts open up for the stars.” When Mike wasn’t using his family connections to score an audience with the King of Soul, he was spending his spare quarters on 45s. “I was the 45 king back then!” he says. “Because of the way the economy was, it was better for me to buy the 45s instead of the LPs. There used to be a bargain store that sold 45s for 25-cents apiece, so pretty soon I had stacks and stacks of them.”
In what will come as no surprise to any avid record collector, as a teenager Mike was a bit of a loner. He often refers to himself as the “Silent Observer,” and even now, listening to him talk, it’s easy to hear the tentative tones of a quiet little kid, the kind who went to soul shows alone and who would soon begin to construct an elaborate career of his own. As Mike puts it, “Sometimes you reach a certain point in life where you think, ‘Well, I could do that.’”
For Mike, that point arrived at age 16.
“I had a small reel-to-reel player,” he explains, “and I would just record by myself. I wasn’t satisfied with the beat, I couldn’t do that too well, so I just concentrated on the lyrics and tunes. When I met up with the Big “D” and found out that he had the same interest, we started getting together and doing stuff. It seemed like that took it to a higher level.”
The Big “D” is Mike’s second cousin, and the two whiled away whole weekends pouring homemade soul songs onto reel-to-reel tapes, using their voices, an afro comb and a telephone book to create their own variations on the 45s Mike was so enthusiastically amassing.
“A couple of songs that we did, it was just me and him,” Mike says, “but it sounds like a group. Later on, other family members got interested, and they tagged along, too. They would just resemble the music. One of them would be a trumpet, some kind of horn. Big “D” would make the percussion with either his hands or an afro comb. We always recorded in the bathroom, because of the acoustics. We just threw a sign on the door that said: ‘Recording.’”
The products of these sessions are raucous and bursting with joy, stomping combinations of rhythm and blues, field hollers and gospel shouts. “Coffee Cake” is a delirious funk jam, Mike and “D” chanting the name of the titular treat over and over, creating a kind of jug-band thump. “Hey You” is a simple soul ballad, Mike coyly asking, “Hey you — how ’bout a date?” with an unaffected sweetness that would make Marvin himself proud. The tracks that comprise Super Gold Greatest Hits are the original artifacts — the songs Mike and “D” recorded in the bathroom in the late ’60s. And while they’re undeniably unpolished (most of them consist of little beyond some tape hiss, Mike’s soulful singing and “D” mimicking various instruments), they are also undeniably songs, songs with clear, hooky choruses, sturdy structures and passionate lyrics. To listen to “Sunny” once is to have its “guitar” line stuck in your head for weeks.
“I started out with the songs and tunes,” Mike says. “It wasn’t until two or three years later that I started developing the albums.”
Mike’s tunes are winning but primitive, but his albums are his masterpieces. For each batch of songs, Mike constructed covers out of cardboard, decorating them with magic marker illustrations that look alarmingly similar to the soul albums of the era. The cover of Do I Love You depicts Mike and D wooing a confused woman with flowers and a box of candy. His imagination didn’t end with the artwork: Mike slid some of the covers inside cellophane shrink wrap, affixing price tags and creating labels that boasted, “Free 45 in this one only,” and “Contains the Hit Single ‘Eat Myself Silly.’” On the flipsides, in addition to the tracklisting, Mike scrawled elaborate, often hilarious, liner notes. The back of Minger’s Gold: Supersonic Greatest Hits boasts, “Mingering Mike has shown you millions and millions of times of his capabilities as a successful songwriter, composer and, last but not least, singer. A true artist in every sense of the word.” When Mike noticed his empty covers wilting when he stood them upright, he cut out cardboard LPs, spraying them with a black lacquer paint to replicate the shiny look of vinyl. Each individual LP was properly labeled, the tracks perfectly timed to fit on one side of an actual vinyl record. Each cardboard LP has the passion and poetry of a love letter, the product of a person who cherished, studied, revered and often disappeared inside pop music. As Mike matter-of-factly puts it, “It was just something that had to come out. I used to go to the local drug store. I just bought color cardboard sheets. It’s an overwhelming thing, so sometimes I’d buy the material in advance, in case I thought of something later on.”
The covers, which can be viewed at the Mingering Mike website or, better still, in Hadar’s book Mingering Mike: The Imaginary Career of an Amazing Soul Superstar are spectacular, meticulously designed and expertly drawn. Mike issued “albums” on countless imprints — Decision Records, Fake Records, Mother Goose Records. Each record had its own catalog number, and each label boasted a roster of dozens, all of them based loosely on Mike’s friends and family. In addition to Mingering Mike & the Big “D,” there was Ramblin ‘Ralph, whose debut album In My Corner features such hits as “Think I’m Going to Have to Pawn My Set or Eat My Pet.” There was Joseph War, whose debut album proudly proclaims, “Joseph War stands for peas and hominy.” And there was On the Beach with the Sexorcist, the cover of which featured two teenagers cavorting behind a giant beach ball. Mike’s imaginary success wasn’t just a local phenomenon. The back of Can Minger Mike Stevens Really Sing? (which, collectors will want to know, was issued on Fake Records in 1969, catalog number 5-2158) contains a testimonial: “With a look of success, singing and dancing, boy he’s a mess.” The quote is signed, “James Brown.”
That the records are made of cardboard are almost beside the point; Mike’s covers are an artifact from a time when a record’s lineage and presentation was just as important — if not more so — as what was etched in the grooves. Ditto Mike’s stage name, which came to him when he saw a street sign that read “Merging Traffic” and fiddled with the first word a bit; it’s perfect, the kind of near-sense non-word that conveys heaps of implied meaning without an iota of the literal kind.
Viewing Mike’s records chronologically offers a kind of History of Soul in miniature. Early Mingering Mike platters, loaded with love songs like “There’s Nothing Wrong With You Baby,” slowly give way to records that are spiritually searching and socially-conscious. The cover of Mercy the World by the Outsiders shows Earth slowly being submerged in boiling water. The cover of Joseph War’s Ghetto Prince is ornamented with ominous needles and pills. A drawing of an enormous skull adorns the inner sleeve of The Drug Store; across its cranium, Mike scrawled a poem. It opens with the line, “More death’s in the neighborhood.” (When I ask him what inspired him to make so many records about drug abuse, Mike laughs and replies, “The 1970s!”)
“That work is instantly recognizable to any of us who have imagined ourselves as singers with a great band but haven’t quite got all the pieces in place yet,” David Byrne says when I ask him about it a few weeks later. “Mike instinctively knew that the cover art, the song titles and the narrative that is revealed as one record historically follows another are in some ways maybe not equal to, but at least parallel to, the actual songs.”
“If you go through them all one by one, you can see a person grow,” Hadar says. “It tells the story of the city I grew up in at a time I wish I’d grown up in.” The covers are so intricately detailed, it’s difficult to believe Mike ever spent time doing anything else.
“I never worked on them at work,” Mike explains, “because I needed to keep things separate. I didn’t really tell anyone about them till the ’80s.”
“What did they think?” Hadar asks.
“They liked ‘em,” Mike slowly responds. “They thought they were kinda strange, but they liked the artwork. But this mainly was something I just did for personal satisfaction.”
This seems as good a place as any for a brief clarification. When an artist produces this much singular work in such a short period of time for an audience of less-than-five, a temptation arises to label their work “outsider art.” This appellation, besides being condescending and cruel, generally implies some kind of deep emotional disturbance. In fact, to a man, almost every person I’ve told about Mingering Mike, almost immediately asks if he’s “like Daniel Johnston.” The short answer to that question is “no.” Mike is not mentally or emotionally handicapped. He doesn’t break out into fits, he doesn’t swear compulsively or drift off into some private, unreachable space. He is warm, soft-spoken and a little shy, preferring to display his enthusiasm — as he says again and again — “on the inside.” Hadar has described him as “one of the sweetest people I’ve ever met.” It takes all of three minutes to agree with his assessment.
Which makes the fact that, in 1968, Mike was drafted to fight in the Vietnam War that much more ironic. Even now, 40 years later, Mike still seems blindsided.
“I was super sad,” he recalls softly. “Super sad. In fact, I recorded the song ‘But All I Can Do Is Cry ‘on the very last day before I shipped out.”
The song is as primitive as it is affecting. Against a dry, shuffling rhythm track Mike — his voice cracked and wounded — sings, “Oh, it hurts so to say goodbye/ When you see the tears falling from my eyes/ I never like saying goodbye/ But the man told me to come on and to take a ride/ Kiss your family and friends goodbye/ …So all I can do is cry.” It’s haunting, a kind of R&B last will and testament, pure gospel soul poured out from the depths of a broken heart. “When I came back, Big “D” told me, ‘That song was really sad, but really nice. I really liked it,’” Mike recalls. “It turned out that I’d left the reels in the recorder, and he heard it after I shipped out.”
In Hadar’s book, there is a picture of Mike in the barracks during the early part of basic training. His face says it all: he looks dazed and distant, trying to smile but inside shriveled and throbbing with hurt. “There’s a line in the song that goes, ‘I might die. ‘That’s exactly what I was thinking: I might die. They have you in basic training, and there’s bullets flying over your head and you’re crawling on your belly — I just knew that wasn’t for me.”
So Mike did the only thing an imaginary soul superstar can do when they’re faced with a situation that threatens to damage both their art and personal well-being: he went AWOL. But returning home, too, turned out to be a nightmare. “Every night on the news the Army would announce who they were looking for,” he said. “And one of my family members told me they saw my name. My cousin Ralph, he used to come by the house and bang on the door real hard, and I’d jump out of my skin.”
Holed up in his house, unable to work outside of small, off-the-book gigs at a cousin’s gas station, Mike took comfort in his life’s one constant: his albums. The records he drew during those years are a combination of passionate protests and heartfelt pleas for peace. The cover of The Two Sides of Mingering Mike displays a pair of profiles. Facing left is Mike the soul singer, eyes wide, mouth open. Facing right is Mike the soldier, green hat pulled down low over his brow, eyes narrowed in anger. Similar is the soundtrack to Mike’s imaginary film You Only Know What They Tell You. The cover depicts an American soldier, strung up like a marionette, kicking a Vietnamese soldier in the chest. The image Mike drew on the flipside is even more chilling: that same puppet soldier, deflated and helpless, his pained face colored in a rainbow of red, yellow, black and white.
Mike created a new imprint to house these more political works: Decision Records. “If you look at the logo, there are two hands,” Mike explains. “One is reaching for a rifle, the other is reaching for a microphone. The caption beneath says, ‘Which would you choose?’” For Mike, the decision was obvious. “I wanted these records to have a message — like they were for the whole world. I was using them to communicate silently.”
In 1977, Mike received a pardon from President Jimmy Carter, but those years still loom large. Later in the afternoon, during a photo shoot in front of the White House, Mike refused to get too close to the building. “They’re going to see me,” he protests. “I know some of those Secret Service guys, and they’re going to recognize me.” At first, it seems paranoid, the kind of overreaction that can fuel those “outsider artist” speculations. After a bit of thought, though, I realize it’s actually a perfectly natural reaction from a man whose government once tried to kill him.
Dori Hadar is a criminal investigator. He works for a firm of defense attorneys, a career he says he “fell into” after moving back to DC from Seattle. More importantly, though, he’s a record enthusiast, a hobby that found him at flea markets and thrift stores at odd hours, flipping through endless towers of vinyl in search of the odd rare treasure.
“I had to go to the jail really early one morning to talk to a witness,” Hadar recalls. “I got out at like 4 am. There’s a flea market about two blocks away, so I thought, ‘Well, I could go home and sleep for a couple of hours, or I could go down to the flea market.’”
The flea market was a regular haunt for Hadar, and his timing turned out to be fortuitous. A delivery truck packed with crates from local auctions had just arrived and, as the driver told Hadar, “I got records.”
Hadar set about rifling through the stacks, astonished by what he was finding. “It was a fantastic collection,” he says. “It was all stuff I’d been looking for, and all of it in great condition. I was just happily like, ‘Oh my God!’”
It was near the end of his search, when the sun was creeping up outside and other diggers had begun to filter into the stacks, that Hadar made his most valuable discovery.
“The last box I looked in — and it just happened to be the last box I looked in — contained all these albums.” Tucked in at the end of a long row of record crates sat the full Mingering Mike discography.
How Mike’s records ended up in a flea market at four in the morning is itself a tiny tragedy. After he moved out of his sister Ladosca’s house Mike had been keeping his records in a storage locker in downtown DC. He’d made friends with the owners of the facility, and they never minded if he was a few days late in making his payments. Over the years, though, the facility changed hands, and the new owners did not take as kindly to Mike’s periodic payment lapses.
“I went to go make a payment one day, and they were closed for the Christmas holiday,” Mike says. “I called them when they re-opened, and they told me they’d had an auction and sold it all. I was so upset. Every time somebody brought it up I’d just fly off about it. I would have looked for them myself, but I had no idea where to go.”
The rediscovery of the records is so fortuitous it’s almost unbelievable; they could have turned up in some podunk thrift store or been trashed as valueless by a cynical store clerk. Instead, they ended up in the hands of a record enthusiast who just happened to be a private investigator.
“I was completely puzzled over what these things were,” Hadar explains. “Mingering Mike? What’s a Mingering Mike? Why have I never heard of Mingering Mike? Why are these records made out of cardboard?” Hadar asked the other crate diggers in the store, but none of them seemed to share his fascination. Flummoxed, he posted pictures of the albums on the record enthusiast website SoulStrut — and that’s when the legend of Mingering Mike took root. The thread quickly became the message board’s most-viewed, racking up thousands of pageviews and generating both rabid enthusiasm and curiosity.
“Someone made the suggestion, ‘go back to the flea market and just buy the whole lot. ‘So I went back and I bought the reels and some paperwork — bills, stuff like that — and using the addresses I found there along with some resources at work, I was able to find Mike.”
Hadar and Frank Beylotte, another digger who had also discovered some of Mike’s cardboard records, turned up on Mike’s doorstep, tentative and apprehensive.
“He was very calm and collected,” Hadar remembers, “and very hard to read.” Mike offers an explanation:
“When they knocked on my door, the first thing I thought was, ‘Uh-oh! More bill collectors!’”
Their first meeting was pleasant but stilted, but a few weeks later Hadar and Beylotte sat down with Mike and his cousin, Joseph War, and explained the situation.
“What I wanted to convey was, ‘People really, really love this,’” Hadar says. “‘People are moved by this. They’ve never met you, but they look at these albums and they love you.’”
What followed was a rocket ride to regional stardom. Stories appeared in the New York Times, the New Yorker and the Washington Post. A small record label called the Vanguard Squad, owned and operated by Soul Strutters, contacted Hadar, interested in issuing a limited edition Mingering Mike 45. And DC’s Hemphill Fine Arts Gallery organized a show for Mike, putting a decade of painstaking work before the public at last.
“The albums were displayed chronologically,” Hadar says, “and so people would just stop and read them. Just watching these people who’d never seen these before — or who didn’t know what they were — just the expressions on their faces. They were totally drawn in.”
“There was another exhibit downstairs, but all the people were coming upstairs to look at my work,” Mike beams.
“And every single person had a smile on their face,” Hadar finishes.
“I never thought too much about it when I did it. It was just something that had to come out,” Mike said. “But seeing they’ve been out for a little bit and seeing that people love them — that’s just overwhelming.”
“They’re records you really wish were real,” Hadar added. “You look at the song titles and the liner notes, and you just want to hear those songs.”
“I was nervous at first because they were so personal,” Mike admits. “But people were coming up to me and saying, ‘It reminds me of my childhood! ‘That really made me feel good. So I said to myself, ‘Man, I’m bringing joy to people — out of my misery, out of my loneliness. Well, that’s OK.’”
“Loew’s Palace used to be right there, where that bank is.”
Dori and Mike and I are in central DC, taking a slow drive through the quiet Sunday city as Mike points out his childhood hangouts. “York’s Haberdashers was over there, and further up was Lynn’s Music.” I’m starting to get used to the past tense. Earlier in the afternoon we’d driven by the Howard Theater, where Mike spent so many teenage nights. In its heyday it was proud and glorious, but now it’s sadly crumbling. The marquee had rusted over, the windows were either blown out or boarded over and the walls have faded to a sickly shade of orange. I’d wanted to photograph Mike standing in front of the building, but the large barbed-wire fence and the building’s embarrassing disrepair immediately make it clear that this is a terrible idea. It becomes a kind of afternoon trend: the drug store where Mike bought his supplies, even the flea market where Hadar first found Mike’s cardboard chart-toppers, are all lost but to memory.
“When was the last time you were in Loew’s Palace?” I ask as we roll slowly past.
“That would have been to see James Brown.”
“Did your brothers go with you?”
“No, I mostly went by myself. They were older than me, so they liked different music.”
“How much did that show cost you?” I ask.
“It was expensive!” Mike exclaimed — he cranes his neck around and smiles. “Five dollars and fifty cents.”
“There’s a toy manufacturer that had expressed some interest in doing a Mingering Mike doll,” Hadar says.
“How would you feel,” I ask, “having a doll of yourself?” Mike was typically reserved. “It’s alright,” he allows.
“Has it been hard, balancing your personality as Mingering Mike with your day-to-day life?”
“I seem to be balancing the two pretty well,” Mike says. “Only the people I’ve told know, and they’re keeping it rather secret.” He chuckled. “It’s funny. I used to sit back and observe — but now I’m the observed!”
“That’s the price of being a soul superstar,” I say.
“It was bound to happen!” Mike laughs. “I should have known!”
Some 40 years after his first cardboard release, Mike’s made-up catalog numbers now correspond to a bona fide album. Songs that, until now, were just thin wisps of cellophane and etchings on an invented album cover are now actual, playable, hearable songs, the first tentative steps in transforming an imaginary soul star into a real one. “Who knew that he actually made recordings of the songs that were to fill the vinyl in that universe?” Byrne wondered during our correspondence. “Alright, there still ain’t no band, but we’ve all done this at some point, yes? I myself used to walk home from school humming guitar solos that I imagined would put Clapton to shame. Mike did one better, and actually wrote lyrics and melodies to flesh out his young fantasies. It turns out Planet Mike is more complete than one would have thought.”
But as thrilled as I am to be working with Mike, it seems like a bitter irony that his first record is being released in a format that can’t be held in the hands, whose artwork can’t be pored over, whose liner notes can’t be studied and learned and recited. I feel strangely complicit, for the first time, in a kind of bait-and-switch — like a guy who sells 3×5 postcards of Starry Night. As we drive away from downtown DC, a city Mike remembers as tiny record stores and packed soul venues but which I see now only as steel and concrete and Coldstone Creameries and H&R Blocks, I’m struck by an exchange Mike and I had at Marvin a few hours earlier.
“Are you going to make any more records?” I asked him. Mike nodded.
“Well, right now I’ve got the foundation for The Return of the Magnificent Mingering,” he said, “but I only have it as a blueprint, so I can finish it when I have the time.”
“So will you still make the covers look like vinyl LPs, or will you switch to CD?”
“I’ll do both,” he said. My brow furrowed. He continued. “The reason I’ll do both is so you can see how it used to look — a big, full-sized record — and you see how it is now with a CD.”
Then he leaned a little bit closer, brown eyes twinkling, smile creeping across his face. “Now,” he said, “you tell me: Which one would you want?”
