When a ‘crate-digger’ found a massive vinyl collection at a flea market, he couldn’t understand how a soul star who’d released over 100 records could just disappear. But the truth turned out to be even stranger. Jon Ronson goes in search of Mingering Mike

This story begins with a record collector unearthing something extraordinary at a flea market one dawn in 2003. His name is Dori Hadar. He worked as a criminal investigator for a law firm in Washington DC and he’d been up all night with a client at the jail next door.

“It’s a miserable place to be, the DC jail,” Hadar tells me. “It’s stuffy and muggy and everything’s old and decaying.”

“Do you remember what your client had been accused of?” I ask.

Hadar shakes his head. “It’s basically drugs, guns and murders. Mainly.”

Hadar finally left the jail at 5am, just as a nearby flea market was setting up. He was a regular there – a “crate-digger” – for ever rifling through boxes of secondhand soul and funk albums, hunting for rarities. “It’s very competitive, the crate-digger world,” Hadar says. “People guard their boxes, they don’t want you to see, they pull the records out really fast.”

But Hadar had never been at the flea market at 5am before, and was thrilled to find no other crate-digger in sight. “And suddenly this enormous collection turned up. There must have been 15 boxes of albums.”

“As a crate-digger, that must be …”

“It’s the dream.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Outsiders are Back album sleeve. All artworks courtesy the artist/Smithsonian American Art Museum

Hadar was a true soul aficionado, with an encyclopaedic knowledge and 10,000 records at home. Which is why he was so amazed to discover 38 albums by a soul singer he had never heard of. His name was Mingering Mike. Hadar stared at the record covers. He read the liner notes. There was Mingering Mike’s 1968’s debut, Sit’tin by the Window. The cover art was a painting of a young man in a green T-shirt, good-looking, serious. The comedian Jack Benny had written the liner notes, calling him “a bright and intelligent young man with a great, exciting future awaiting him”.

So it transpired. There were greatest hits collections and a Bruce Lee concept album and movie soundtracks – including one for an action film called Stake Out. And there were live albums, like 1972’s Live from Paris, The Mingering Mike Review: ‘Their biggest show ever,’ read the liner notes. ‘What a night that was.’

Most of the song titles were upbeat and optimistic, like There’s Nothing Wrong With You Baby and Play It Cool, Don’t Be No Fool, Get Your Thing Together and Go Back to School. But other records had darker themes, like The Drug Store and Mama Takes Dope. Some were still wrapped in their original cellophane, price tags intact.

Hadar pulled out a few discs to see what condition they were in. Which was when he discovered to his enormous surprise that they weren’t vinyl. They were black-painted cardboard, with fake labels and hand-drawn grooves.

What had begun to dawn on Hadar was now totally apparent: Mingering Mike did not exist. He was somebody’s hugely detailed fantasy.

It’s 11 years later and the artwork to much of Mingering Mike’s vast fictional music career – around 150 records in all – is about to go on display at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington DC. When I emailed the museum’s public affairs specialist Courtney Rothbard to ask if I could meet Mike (Hadar had apparently managed to track him down), she sounded doubtful. Mike was “media-shy”. She didn’t even know his real name: “I don’t think anyone here does. But I do know it’s not any of the rumoured names out there.”

I had only one option: to email Hadar in the hope he might persuade Mike to talk to me.

A man is walking toward me – tall, mid-60s. 'Mingering Mike?' I say. He nods. As we say hello he’s avoiding eye contact.

And that’s how I’ve come to rendezvous with Hadar at the taxi rank of Washington’s Union Station on a Saturday morning. Hadar is alone. He bounds over to me, a big smile on his face. I can tell how much his discovery means to him. I suppose criminal investigators spend their lives tracking down horror and tragedy. It must feel great to unearth something mysterious and exciting for a change.

“Ah!” Hadar suddenly says. “Here he is.”

A man is walking towards me: tall, mid-60s.

“Mingering Mike?” I say.

He nods. I put my hand out and he hesitantly shakes it. He is, it is obvious, intensely shy. As we say hello he’s avoiding making eye contact. We catch a taxi to his old neighbourhood. He avoids eye contact throughout the journey. We find a coffee shop where, finally, he begins to loosen up. Before long he’s laughing and joking as he recounts his story.

When Mike was five, in 1955, his mother died of lupus. His father disappeared, to a psychiatric hospital, diagnosed with schizophrenia. And so Mike’s sister raised him. I ask him to describe his high school days and the story he tells is about his shyness: “I’d think of humorous stuff and I’d tell a friend, then he’d make out like he thought of it and get a big laugh.”

Although Mike’s neighborhood wasn’t terrible, it was rough – and, in 1965, he was mugged. “I came out of a store and a guy came up to me. ‘Give me your wallet.’ I said no. So he attacked me with his fingers. Poked me in the nose.” Mike pauses. “I didn’t have any street sense. I didn’t know what to do.”

Mike found himself staying in more and more, watching the world from his window. Then one day he drew the cover art for Sit’tin By The Window – and Jack Benny’s notes about the ‘great, exciting future awaiting him’ – and that’s how Mingering Mike began. (The word “mingering” was an amalgamation of mingling and merging. Mike got the idea when he saw a road sign that said Merge.)

“I think a lot of writers write so they get to stay home and present the best version of themselves to the world,” I say. “Is that how it was with Mingering Mike?”

“Yeah, that’s exactly how I felt about it,” Mike replies.

‘As real as possible’ ... a hand-drawn cardboard vinyl

At first Mike concentrated on the cover artwork, but his cousins told him they were too flimsy without a record inside, so he added cardboard discs, drawing the groove lines with a pencil and a compass. He’d always double-check that the number of bands tallied with the number of song titles on the cover. Vinyl discs tended to hold “38 to 43 minutes of music”, Mike says, so he’d estimate how long his imaginary songs would last, and made sure they stayed within that limit.

“I just wanted to be as real as possible,” he says.

Sometimes he’d sing his imaginary songs into a cassette recorder, which made them no longer imaginary.

And that was how Mike spent 1968 and 1969 – designing album covers like Can Minger Mike Stevens Really Sing? and Minger’s Greatest Hits (volume one). Then, in 1970, his world caved in.

The letter arrived in the mail soon after Mike “released” his double album, The Mingering Mike Show: Live From The Howard Theatre (featuring The Colts Band, the Mailavar Dancers and Miss Laura Little singing Baby I’m Yours).

“The letter said, Greetings,” Mike says. “That’s the first thing it said. Greetings.”

It was from the army. Mike was being drafted to fight in Vietnam.

The night before he was required to report for basic training, he wrote But All I Can Do Is Cry:

“Cause when I get to war I might die/

Kiss your friends and family goodbye/

They want to keep me here strong and alive (me too).”

Mike tried to miss the bus. “I was doing everything possible to be late, lying across the bed, thinking …” But the bus driver knew all the terrified draftee tricks and waited for him. At basic training the commanding officer, seeing how frightened Mike was, took him to one side and promised him he could be in a military band instead of in combat, but Mike didn’t believe him. It couldn’t be that easy. And then, suddenly, Mike was told he had 30 days left before being shipped to Cambodia.

And so Mike became a deserter.

Audio Andre’s Tuxedo Styled ...

“You just went home?” I ask.

“Yeah,” Mike says. “I thought, ‘I can’t do this. I can’t take this trip.’ So I went underground.”

That was when Mingering Mike entered his most prolific period. He released 15 LPs and more than 20 singles in 1972 alone. There was the soundtrack album to an anti-war film, You Only Know What They Tell You. There was the LP The Two Sides of Mingering Mike. Its cover art depicted two Mikes – the superstar singer on stage in front of fans and the anonymous draftee, barely noticeable in formation on a military base. Of course, neither Mike was the real Mike. The real Mike was alone in his room in Washington, terrified of being arrested.

“My cousins used to knock on my door real hard,” Mike says.

“Pretending they were the military police?”

“Yeah,” Mike says.

“That’s the worst practical joke I’ve ever heard,” I say.

“Oh my God, my heart just dropped down to my feet,” Mike says.

(The sentence, had he been caught, would have been five years in jail or a $10,000 fine. So five years in jail.)

From his window Mike saw his neighbours returning from Vietnam with limbs missing, their personalities changed – everything Mike had feared would happen to him. Some turned to drugs, and then to crime to pay for the drugs. The neighbourhood became much more dangerous. Mingering Mike’s albums turned darker. The Drug Store was dedicated to “the one that deserve to be noticed – the junkie”. His cover art for records like The Shooting Gallery was no longer of soul singers dancing on stage, but skulls and guns and drugs.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest You Only Know What They Tell You, Mingering Mike’s anti-war movie soundtrack.

And then, one day in 1977, Mingering Mike’s career suddenly ended.

“Why?” I ask. “What happened?”

“President Carter pardoned the draft dodgers,” he shrugs. “So I could get a job.”

Mike began working as a security guard. He put Mingering Mike’s albums into storage, where they remained for 11 years. But then Mike missed a payment and the owner – after sending him a terse warning letter – auctioned them off to a record seller from the flea market next to the jail, which was where Hadar happened to be that dawn in December 2003.

Hadar always knows, when he rifles through records, that he’s probably rifling through someone’s personal tragedy.

“Somehow these possessions end up here on the ground with people rummaging through them,” he says. “Are they dead? Are they homeless?” Usually he’d put those dark thoughts to the back of his mind. But not this time. This time he knew he had to try and find Mingering Mike.

There was a fan club PO box address on the back of albums like Get’tin To the Roots of All Evils (1971), but it was fake – a fake fanclub for a fake star. So Hadar asked the internet for help. He posted pictures of the records on a forum for soul fans called Soul Strut. The response was immediate and extraordinary. The website crashed with the number of soul fans trying to view the art. People loved them. Another DC crate-digger named Frank Beylotte posted that he’d spotted more Mingering Mike records at the flea market. So the two men rushed back and, joining forces, bought the lot, including letters with names and addresses.

“They were blowing away,” Hadar says. “I was having a really hard time keeping them together, chasing things down …”

And that’s how Hadar ended up at Mike’s front door one morning a few days later, excitedly telling him: “I’ve got your stuff!”

“You got my stuff?” Mike replied.

“From the storage!” Hadar said.

Now Mike turns to Hadar. “It was the way you said, ‘I’ve got your stuff!’”

“It made you suspicious?” Hadar asks.

“Very,” Mike says.

After Hadar left, Mike telephoned some police friends.

“This guy is going to try to get a lot of money out of you somehow,” they said. “Don’t mess with him. Don’t even call him.”

Hadar never heard from Mike after that. So he tried a second approach: he mailed Mike photocopies of the album covers.

“My babies!” Mike thought when he opened the letter. “He’s got my babies!”

And so a hugely reluctant Mike agreed to meet Hadar at a Denny’s fast food restaurant.

“It was one of the strangest and most awkward interactions I have ever had,” Hadar says. “Frank and I were sitting across the table from Mike and his cousin, and it was clear they were worried, maybe even upset.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The gatefold from one of Mingering Mike’s album sleeves

Mike nods at the memory.

“What did you tell them?” I ask Hadar.

“I said, ‘We’ve shown your artwork to thousands of people on the internet and they love you! People love your work!’”

“How did you feel when you heard that?” I ask Mike.

“Violated,” he replies.

When Hadar got back home, he pulled all the pictures off Soul Strut: “It occurred to me for the first time that this was someone’s life. And he’d had no say in the matter.”

But by then word of the mysterious Mingering Mike had spread. The New York Times ran a story. Suddenly David Byrne was on the telephone to Hadar. “He said, ‘I see a Mingering Mike tribute album with bands like the Beastie Boys and Amy Winehouse playing his songs.’” I said, ‘Whoa! That’s crazy!’ Then I asked, ‘How will this work? Will Mike be involved in the process?’ The answer I got from David Byrne’s people was, ‘We don’t discuss anything until a contract is signed’. And the contract gave his company the rights to all the artwork, the music. It was, ‘Sign or don’t.’ And that was it.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Mike’s double album, The Mingering Mike Show: Live From The Howard Theatre

So David Byrne went away. But by now Mike no longer felt violated. He felt flattered and excited. So Hadar quit his job to look after Mike’s legacy full-time. And now the endeavour has culminated in the Smithsonian show, which Hadar and Mike hope might travel around the world.

I ask Mike how all this has changed his life and he says not at all. This is because nobody knows who he is. “None of my friends know I’m Mingering Mike. Not even my girlfriend.” He’s going to attend the opening of the show in disguise.

“Why all the caution?” I ask him.

“I still live in a not so good neighbourhood,” Mike says. “The dollar bills aren’t there but people wouldn’t know the dollar bills aren’t there. I don’t want to put a little beam in someone’s head. So I’d rather stay here in the dark and let Dori do everything.”

“Mike,” I say as I turn off my recorder and we stand up to say our goodbyes. “I don’t even know if your real first name IS Mike.”

“It isn’t,” Mike says. He smiles. Then he goes home.

• Mingering Mike’s Supersonic Greatest Hits is at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, from 27 February to 2 August