Mingering Mike Mingering Mike, though not a Kentuckian, is exactly the kind of artist that we here at the KTF worship, and spend our every waking hour trying to discover and promote. In a nutshell, the story is this: Two record collectors, Dori Hadar and Frank Beylotte, enter a Washington flea market to rummage through the record albums in search of goodies. What they found was an entire collection of surreal handmade album covers that contained fake cardboard records, all dating from the late 1960s and early 1970s and all by a mysterious funk/soul artist calling himself "Mingering Mike". From the 2/2/04 New York Times article by Neil Strauss: The front covers were intricately painted to look like classic funk albums; on the spines were titles and fake catalog numbers; the backs had everything from liner notes to copyright information to original logos; the inner sleeve was often a shopping bag meticulously taped together to hold a record; and some actually opened to reveal beautiful gatefold sleeves. A few albums had even been covered in shrink-wrap and bore price stickers and labels with apocryphal promotional quotes. What Mr. Hadar found was a cache of seemingly nonexistent music: soundtracks to imaginary films, instrumental albums, a benefit album for sickle cell anemia, a tribute to Bruce Lee, a triple-record work titled "Life in Paris," songs protesting the Vietnam War and promoting racial unity, and records of Christmas, Easter and American bicentennial music. He had discovered, perhaps, an outsider artist. After some detective work, the pair have actually tracked down Mingering Mike, and it turns out that the music to these fantasy records really did exist. Mike still possesses scores of old reel and cassette tapes of his homemade music, often made under the most primitive of conditions: some feature people mouthing bass parts and even entire string sections. Some feature people beating on a bed with a comb or thumping telephone books for percussion. Some feature someone playing a kazoo-like trumpet made out of crumpled paper. Mike claims to have written over 4,000 songs, on everything from legal pads to matchbooks to diaper boxes. Now that Mike has been rediscovered, there are plans for CD releases from his catalogue of albums that never were. Life is beautiful. Read the New York Times article here View some Mingering Mike album cover art here

thanks to Timothy Stamps for alerting us to Mike's mingering greatness.