THE RECORDAHOLIC:

A Well-Imagined Star (NEIL STRAUSS, 2/02/04, NY Times)

"I went to a flea market, and there was a huge record collection there, at least 20 boxes," Mr. [Dori] Hadar said, recalling the morning of the discovery. "I was going through that very happily when I came across this box full of strange hand-painted album covers. I realized they were fake and was about to put them back, but then I looked at them more closely."

Pulling the records out of the sleeves, he was surprised to find that they were made not of vinyl but of cardboard. Each had been cut in the shape of a record, with grooves and a hand-lettered label painted on. Nearly all the albums were credited to an unknown black musician named Mingering Mike, and dated from 1968 to 1976.

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.

"There are quite a few folk art collectors that are salivating to get their hands on this collection," said Brian DiGenti, the editor of Wax Poetics, a leading journal for record collectors. "I think without a doubt that when all this settles down, this collection will be in a permanent gallery, and it will probably be one of the more important folk art collections there."

As Mr. Hadar examined the albums, a crowd gathered. He knew what had to be done: he bought all 38, for roughly $2 apiece. Excited on returning home, he posted his findings on soulstrut.com, a digger Web site. A fellow collector, Mr. Beylotte, responded, telling him that he had been to the same flea market and had seen similarly decorated seven-inch singles and eight-track tapes along with cassette tapes and reel-to-reel recordings. He believed there might be music to accompany the conceptual albums.

"A lot of times flea-market vendors acquire their wares from a storage facility that's auctioning off the possessions of someone who hasn't paid their bills," Mr. Beylotte said. "So we're used to digging through these windows into personal lives through records."

He and Mr. Hadar returned to buy the rest of the Mingering Mike stash, including photo albums and correspondence. Afterward they put a cassette tape in the stereo and heard their quarry's music for the first time. It was mostly a cappella — a cross between doo-wop, field hollers, gospel, the soul and blues — accompanied by what sounded like sticks on a bucket keeping a beat. Though they lacked instruments, Mingering Mike and his collaborators — known as Joseph War and the Big D — seemed to have the arrangements in their heads and would mimic string glissandos, trumpet blasts and bass lines vocally. For words, Mingering Mike and the Big D talked and sang, mostly about how they wanted to become famous.

"We should be stars," went the chorus of one song. "Stars in the eyes of man."

Only in America...

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 2, 2004 11:17 AM