Sunday, June 29, 2008

Mingering Mike



Record collecting may be like digging for gold. A lot of work and you never know what you'll find. Dori Hadar is a real digger, and in 2003 he found a lot of rare records by the soul star Mingering Mike, at a flea market in Washington DC. Well, they weren't real records, but products of the fantasy of a young kid, who made covers and records from cardboard and paper for 10 years, starting in the late 1960s.
Hadar (both a DJ and a criminal investigator!) and a friend managed to track down the real Mike too, and we get his story and a complete discography in the book "Mingering Mike. The Amazing Career of an Imaginary Soul Superstar" (Dri Hadar, Princeton Architectural Press, 2007). The book is just fantastic!
The preface is written by Neil Strauss, and you get the story in New York Times too. But I can't stop wondering. How real is the real Mike? Here he is at a book signing, fake hair all over the place!

And just to remind you, here are six imaginary editions of "Sea Song" by Robert Wyatt too (1,2,3,4,5,6).

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