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hallowed stage of the Howard Theater; and on the silver screens of “nabes,” like the Atlas,
Republic and Booker T.
There was even a Marvin Gaye/Curtis Mayfield-like arc showcasing Mingering Mike’s stylistic
progression from love ballads and dance tracks to songs with serious social and political
messages, reflecting personal, generational and societal travails.
All those album covers, which seemed somehow connected in both style and substance, were
inviting clues and Hadar, who fortuitously works as a criminal investigator, steadfastly chased the
mesmerizing mystery of Mingering Mike until he found the answer: it all existed in the artist’s
imagination, a long-and-closely-held secret that had necessitated neither risk nor reward, and
obviated questions of achievement or failure. Nothing ventured, nothing lost…except to time.
In fact, the legend of Mingering Mike only existed on these aging, one-of-a-kind cardboard
covers, in a parade of curious characters constituting his stock musical company, as well as
countless sure-sound-legitimate song titles and earnest lyrics, ever-so-curious liner notes, and sly
promotional ephemera. Inside many of the covers were “vinyl” records, also cardboard cutouts,
their painted grooves enameled to shine, track widths carefully spaced to match songs’ running
times. On closer examination, nothing was real but everything was authentic.
Yet, as invested with time and passion as the covers were, there had apparently been no plan
beyond the private act of creation, no desire to share the evolving fantasy, much less actualize it.
There was no expectation that the first album might lead to a second, much less a fiftieth, or that
a decade’s worth of factitious discography and fabricated autobiography could end up so
seamlessly intertwined.
In federal jargon, the Mingering Mike collection would have been designated Top Secret, For His
Eyes Only.
Which it was for almost thirty years. After 1976, Mingering Mike quietly “retired,” as his creator
moved on with his life after several years of living even further underground than his preferred
anonymity demanded (more on that later). The covers sat in a closet, and later in storage, until
an overlooked rental fee landed them at auction, and quickly on to the flea market, ripe for
discovery.
Terms like comeback and rediscovery don’t really apply here because they imply success or
exposure that simply never happened for Mingering Mike. On the other hand, restoration and
redemption do, and almost four decades on, it may be easier to appreciate the genial artlessness
of an expansive, handcrafted enterprise that displays innocence and naïveté common to
2
adolescence, tempered with adult dreams and desires. The lost decades have only amplified its
charm.
Certainly, Mike’s approach is unsophisticated. In the mode of folk or self-taught art these are the
works of an untrained artist whose genuine passion and personal vision outstrip his
craftsmanship and need to find an audience. But many “real” record covers by professional
graphic designers don’t exhibit the attention to emotional nuance and industrial detail that these
fantasy covers do.
And there is this surprise: you can look at the best of Mingering Mike’s covers and even though
there is no music attached, you’ll somehow hear it, feel it, and as you follow his timeline,
eventually you’ll buy into his story line, come to believe it actually did happen just the way he
drew it and somehow you missed it…the first time around.
Mingering Mike—the grudgingly public persona of a still-committedly private individual—has
described himself as an introvert, a loner even as a youngster, one who found refuge in drawing
at the age of seven. People seemed to enjoy his efforts at home and at school and, he admits,
“When you see your work on the walls, it’s impressive.” Those elementary school sketches—
nature scenes, portraits of presidents and comic book heroes—may have been the last time he
embraced exposure and feedback.
Growing up, Mike was more of an observer than a participant, and he has remained so
throughout his life. Mike called himself “the silent observer” of everyday people—his extended
family, fellow students and co-workers, and an ever shifting cast of neighbors, thanks to frequent
moves around the city. All along the way, he accumulated impressions, characteristics, and
details, all of which would eventually inform his portraits and fictions.
The wealth of variety shows and police dramas in the late 1950s and early ‘60s proved particularly
inspirational. He would also be swept up by AM radio and, later, live shows, soaking up the
cultural underpinnings of future fantasies. Though he would ultimately define his “career” in the
world of soul, his own tastes were always broad, inclusive and borderless.
Yet Mike remained a bystander, never devoting much thought or effort to learning an
instrument, or developing his voice and performance skills—the traditional paths to a music or
entertainment career. “Even today I wish I could play the piano or guitar or drums, but I’m
thinking that might take a good while and in this microwave world where everything’s instant
3
satisfaction, you can’t get that if you’re going to practice for years and then have to learn to read
music,” he says.
More probably, such challenges would have necessitated contact, community and commitment,
none of them apparently easy steps for someone solitary by nature. “I didn’t want to make
waves—that’s it,” Mike admits. “If I’d had a little more nerve back then—I don’t know…I could
have succeeded, but I didn’t.”
Except, ultimately, he did, illuminating aspirations on empty cardboard canvases and
transforming them into triumphs. In the 1960s and ‘70s, cover art was a big part of the emotional
sound-and-vision connection consumers had with their music. Before videos, covers were often
the only visual interaction with performers beyond concerts. Conversely, covers were musicians’
only way to express themselves visually, though usually as a final step in the creative process.
For Mike, it was the first, last and only step.
It was as a teenager that Mike started imagining triumphs in the manner of James Thurber’s
serial fantasist Walter Mitty, a connection both obvious and inescapable. The Oxford Dictionary
defines a Walter Mitty as “a person who fantasizes about a life much more exciting and
glamorous than their own” and who hasn’t been there. The American Heritage Dictionary is a
little harsher, describing “an ordinary, often ineffectual person who indulges in fantastic
daydreams of personal triumphs.”
But Mitty was an intermittent dreamer of episodic, unconnected adventures; Mike built his
private yellow brick road with graduated boldness, a cohesive underpinning and the energy of a
manic expressive. There would be thousands of songs, many just titles or fragments, and
eventually sheets of paper lined with carefully hand-written lyrics, at first mining familiar
territories of love and heartbreak.
Sometimes titles echoed existing hits (“It’s a Remarkable World,” “It’s a Boy’s life (but a man’s
world)”) and lyrics that are available suggest a pastiche of contemporaneous themes and styles.
And there are unwritten symphonies that beg for melodic substantiation even forty years on.
There were some homemade tapes, with Mike and his younger cousin Derrick beatboxing and
phonebook-thumping into reel-to-reel and portable cassette recorders, their rough, raw vocals
reminiscent of 1940s field recordings of rural bluesmen made by Alan Lomax and Samuel
Charters.
“I couldn’t write any kind of music, I was not trained in anything, which is why I recorded the
stuff and hummed the melodies,” Mike explains. “I couldn’t think of any kind of words or
anything at first and then all of sudden, around ‘67 or ’68, was I confident that I could write
4
something. So I just started writing and after I wrote, I said ‘I wonder what it would look like if I
was to make an album?’”
In this case, literally make an album, not record an album, though there would be some halfhearted stabs at the real thing: some home recordings transferred to acetate 45s but never shared;
purposely awful lyrics sent to a “we’ll provide a melody” song factory (they loved it; lesson
learned). There was even a demo audition at a local label where Mike’s efforts were dismissed as
“a bunch of noise.”
“I didn’t pursue it after that, started being more conscious of I need a job! And I put it on the
wayside: ‘I’m still going to write but I’m going to write and put it in the drawer.’ And that’s what
I did, the 9 to 5 thing.”
“Then I wanted to do the album covers and that’s how that all started. I got some cardboard and
felt-tip pens and magic markers [from a local drug store] and just started to make albums. I liked
what I saw but I thought that was it.”
Mike would cut the poster board to LP size, pencil sketching basic designs before filling them in.
From the start, he dated his creations—a la “June 1968 release”—making it that much easier for
Hadar to subsequently track “Mingering Mike: The Amazing Career on an Imaginary Soul
Superstar,” his delightful 2007 biography/compendium/explication du texte.
One sees a sensitive eighteen-year-old on that initial effort, “Sit’tin by the Window,” credited to
G. M. Stevens and showing a pensive Mike sitting by an apartment’s grated windows but,
revealingly, looking in, not out. A certain “Jack Benny” offers encouragement to “a bright and
intelligent young man with a great exciting future waiting for him.” There’s whimsy to the
handwritten liner notes (sly humor would remain a constant thread in Mingering Mike’s
tapestry) but also poignancy in the first of many self-portraits and, amidst assorted love songs,
the plaintive declaration, “Everybody’s goin’ somewhere except me.”
In fact, unbounded dreams would soon take Mingering Mike to the top of the world he loved,
after a hesitant “Can Minger Mike Stevens Really Sing?,” mixing his creations with covers of The
Temptations, Beatles, and James Brown. It’s the only album to feature a photo of the artist as a
young man, smiling, as if he knows what’s ahead, or at least what’s in his head.
The settled persona and surrogate superstar finally emerged on 1969’s The Mingering Mike
Show—Live from the Howard Theater, reflecting many hours spent observing the great stars who
strode across the hallowed stage of what had been called “the largest colored theatre in the world”
when it opened in 1910. It was later an anchor of the so-called Chitlin’ Circuit for black artists in
5
the era of racial segregation. By the 1960s, the main fare was soul, usually multi-act lineups with
extended runs and multiple shows per day.
“The first time I went, it was the Motown Revue,” recalls Mike of his initiation at fourteen (an
older brother worked there—frequent access encouraged). The specifics elude him, but one 1964
Howard lineup featured Marvin Gaye, Mary Wells, the Contours, the Marvellettes, Marv
Johnson and Martha & the Vandellas, and bandleader Chocker Campbell “With His Big Motown
Sound.”
Such shows clearly informed Mike’s cover fabrications: sharp-dressed vocal trio the Monitors,
the frenetic Sam & Dave–style duo Ron & Antone, Miss Lora Little offering the Honey Cone
rarity “While You’re Out Looking for Sugar,” and Mingering Mike himself, supported by the
crackerjack Colts Band, a whirling center-stage doppelganger for Gaye, James Brown, Jackie
Wilson, Otis Redding and other wizards of soul.
Mike also recalls seeing the Temptations on a Wilson Line cruise to the Marshall Hall
amusement park—Motown in the moonlight—and he caught shows at Loew’s Palace Theater,
where Jackie Wilson had a week-long residency in 1971, and at the segregated Carr's Beach in
Annapolis, where acts playing the Howard and Baltimore’s Royal Theatre would offer weekend
matinees before heading down South.
Motown of course, was the perfect inspiration with the perfect roster and the perfect game plan
(though even Berry Gordy didn’t wear as many hats as Mike!). In 1965, the Motortown Revue
recorded a live album at Paris’s Olympia Theatre. A few years later, so would Mike—a triple
album entitled The Mingering Mike Revue All Decision Stars, featuring “34 performers…their
biggest show ever,” each act with its own live album in the pipe line.
Berry Gordy had multiple labels, and so would Mingering Mike. Some were as transparent as his
enterprise—Mother Goose, Fake, Hypnotic; others had the ring of classic independents—Ramit,
Gems, Decision, Gold Pot, King Cobra.
Hit compilations with gaudy titles? Mingering Mike had several, including “Minger’s Gold
Supersonic Greatest Hits,” which noted that “all the above recordings have exceeded the three
million mark, in record sales.” Seems most of Mingering Mike’s records routinely sold millions of
copies and there would undoubtedly have been a “Minger’s Platinum Supersonic Greatest Hits,”
except that sales category wouldn’t be invented until 1976, the same year Mingering Mike retired.
6
Born in 1950, Mike would grow up in a capital city undergoing substantial social and political
change (as was the country, of course). Washington was not quite a Deep-South city where, only
two years before, the Supreme Court had declared racially restrictive housing covenants
unconstitutional. Its schools, restaurants, parks, and recreation facilities remained segregated
until 1953, when the court ruled that segregation in restaurants was unconstitutional, affirming
laws that had actually been on the books since 1872 and, while never repealed, had been covertly
removed from the city code in the early 1900s.
That ruling was followed a year later by Bolling v. Sharpe, in which the court unanimously
declared separate education unconstitutional (it was decided the same day as the landmark
Brown v. Board of Education decision).
In May of 1957, 25,000 people attended the Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom in front of the
Lincoln Memorial, urging the federal government to fulfill promises laid out in Brown v. Board of
Education. At the time, it was the country’s largest organized demonstration for civil rights. It
was also the first time Martin Luther King Jr. addressed a national audience; his “Give Us the
Ballots” speech established voting rights as a crucial tactic of the emerging civil rights movement.
Four months later, President Eisenhower signed the Civil Rights Act of 1957, the first piece of
federal civil rights legislation since Reconstruction. (That same year, Washington’s African
American population surpassed 50% of the city’s total, making it the first predominantly black
city in the nation; this number peaked at 71% a decade later).
Mike may have been too young to fully understand those monumental changes, but the thirteenyear-old was riveted to his television set during the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and
Freedom, a day when 250,000 people gathered once more at the Lincoln Memorial. At the time, it
was the largest demonstration ever seen in the nation's capital and one of the largest human
rights demonstrations in American history, contributing to the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights
Act and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
The civil rights movement would also impact the rise of soul music during the 1960s, evident in
the emergence of Motown, Stax, and Hi and in the continued growth of Atlantic, Chess, King,
Specialty and other independent labels. Mike’s idols and influences included Solomon Burke,
Sam Cooke, Otis Redding, James Brown, Marvin Gaye and particularly Curtis Mayfield.
After the March on Washington, Mayfield started writing what he called “sermon songs,” which
offered messages of black pride and perseverance in the face of oppression: these include the hits
“Choice of Colors,” “Keep On Pushing,” “We're a Winner” and “People Get Ready” as well as
solo tracks like “We The People Who Are Darker Than Blue” and “Move On Up.” “People Get
Ready” and Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come” in particular became anthems of the movement
7
and continued the tradition of freedom songs sung by protestors, activists and civil rights leaders
at mass meetings and demonstrations.
“The message was not there in R&B in the same way,” Mike notes. “[What was] popular didn’t
resonate with me like the stuff by Curtis Mayfield or James Brown did. It was different, it made
you think more.” Brown was a long-time favorite whose seminal “Say it Loud—I’m Black and I’m
Proud” and “I Don't Want Nobody to Give Me Nothing (Open Up the Door, I'll Get It Myself)”
both came out as Mingering Mike began his career.
By the early 1970s, Mike was thinking more, and not happily, the result of receiving his draft
notice in 1969 and going through Army basic training in 1970, at which point he realized he was
not military material, particularly as part of what he considered an unjust war in Vietnam. Rather
than shipping out, Mike went AWOL. With his lifelong ability to melt into the background, he
was able to hide in plain sight for seven years, working odd jobs and giving an increasingly
serious, topical cast to such albums as The Two Sides of Mingering Mike, Channels of a Dream,
and You Only Know What they Tell You. Those first few years in hiding would also be his most
productive.
“It was like the James Brown song, ‘Escape-ism Part I,’’ Mike says. “It was just a way to escape
from something that could turn into jail time or whatever if they were to catch up with me. I had
to do something and I was prolific in writing and drawing album covers.”
The Two Sides of Mingering Mike offered a double self-portrait facing in opposite directions,
reflecting polar positions: civilian v. soldier, one hand reaching for a microphone, another for a
machine gun, captioned “Which one would you want him to grab for—one is for the better and
the other is for the worst.” The soundtrack for You Only Know What They Tell You referenced
Mike’s induction into a “United States of America Puppet Force,” with images, song titles and
commentary underscoring his anti-war, anti-military stance.
While song selection and subject matter on subsequent albums would include love songs and
lighthearted fare, there would also be commentaries on urban chaos and despair from drugs,
alcohol, unemployment and housing inequities in the manner of Marvin Gaye's seminal What's
Going On and Inner City Blues albums, Sly and the Family Stone’s Stand and There's a Riot Goin'
On and Stevie Wonder’s Innervisions.
Mingering Mike’s takes included Get’tin to the Roots of all Evils (with a gatefold literally limning
those evils) and The Drug Store, as well as the Outsiders’ Mercy the World and Joseph War’s
Ghetto Prince.
8
But Mingering Mike’s covers also mirrored upbeat pop culture trends including the
blaxploitation and kung-fu films that emerged in the early 1970s. The former kicked off with
Melvin Van Peebles’ “Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song,” quickly followed by “Shaft” and
“Super Fly,” with epic soundtracks by Isaac Hayes and Curtis Mayfield. Mike responded with
Stake Out and Hot Rodd (Takes Revenge).
Concurrently, Bruce Lee’s The Big Boss, Five Fingers of Death and Enter the Dragon enjoyed
major box office success and kicked off a nationwide martial arts craze. Mike’s takes included
Brother of the Dragon and A Tribute to Bruce. In fact, you could guess Mike’s movie-going habits
by matching up a popular film like 1974’s The Exorcist with his contemporaneous variations, The
Dark Side of Regan and On the Beach with the Sexorcist.
Mike’s musical emporium had become something of a family affair early on when Mike recruited
his cousin Derrick, then fifteen, and turned him into a faux-star, The Big “D.” (Another cousin,
Warren became Joseph War, and yet others became Audio Andre and Rambling Ralph. A sister
transformed into Lora Landtree.) Sort of Sam and Dave-meet-Holland-Dozier-Holland,
Mingering Mike and The Big “D” co-featured on an array of projects, from the angsty “3
Footsteps Away from the Altar” and the genre-fusing “Fractured Soul and Other Wise” to the
anti-war themed works and comedy albums like Boogie Down at the White House, Let’s Get
Nasty, and a take-off on the classic Crosby/Hope comedies, the 1976 The Road to Bombay.
It was one of the last covers Mike would create and was never really finished, though Mingering
Mike’s stellar career soon would be. The day following his January 1977 inauguration, President
Jimmy Carter fulfilled a campaign promise and granted amnesty to thousands of young men who
had evaded the Vietnam War by failing to register, leaving the country, or going AWOL, whether
or not they had been convicted. His position, controversial at the time, was that “reconciliation
calls for an act of mercy to bind the nation’s wounds and to heal the scars of divisiveness.” Mike
received a pardon and after doing some extended community service, took a job at Sunny’s
Surplus in South East Washington, where he worked for the next decade.
This time, it was the albums that went undercover, waiting a quarter of a century to be rescued
from obscurity.
BLACK RADIO BOX
Black radio in Washington wasn’t much older than Mike. In 1948, Memphis WDIA-AM became
the first station to move to a round-the-clock R&B format (many stations previously set aside
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certain times for black-oriented shows) and Washington’s WOOK was close behind, billing itself
as “THE WORLD’S ONLY 24 HOUR A DAY NEGRO PROGRAMMED STATION.” Still, a
1948 article in Ebony magazine noted that of 3,000 DJs working at 1,200 stations, only sixteen
were black, including Hal Jackson, the first black announcer to host a continuing network radio
show, and host of Washington’s first regular black radio show at WINX in 1939.
Mostly white-owned, these stations’ programming was driven by post-World War II economic
prosperity in urban markets. Black DJs quickly became important and influential voices in their
communities, mixing in socially conscious music and social commentary in an era of nation
building and black empowerment; Washington’s AM band would become home to several key
stations and outsized personalities. In the 1950s, WUST had star DJs John “Lord Fauntleroy”
Bandy and “Terrible” Thomas broadcasting from the Republic Theater on U Street; it would be
programmed in the early ‘60s by the legendary Al Bell, who later ran Stax Records.
WOOK had Bob King, Willie “Moon Doctor” Bacote, Cliff Holland, as well as others, and also
served the community through WOOK-TV, which in 1963 became the country’s first blackformat television station. That year it also introduced “Teenarama Dance Party,” the country’s
first all-black dance show. WOOK and WUST would be Washington’s dominant black stations
until 1965, when WOL switched from Top 40 to soul.
“July 14,” Mike recalls. “I’d started out with [Top 40] WEAM the Lively One and WPGC,
WOOK and every once in a while WUST. When WOL came along, it was basically all WOL…”
The Big OL featured “The Soul Brothers” from early morning through late night: Sonny Jim
Kelsey…Jerry Boulding, “The Master Blaster, Jolly Jerry B”…Fred “Soul Finger” Correy…Bob
“Nighthawk” Terry…Carroll Hynson, “Mr. C” …Bobby Bennett, “The Mighty Burner” …and
trailblazing talk show host Petey Greene, who spoke out against racism and poverty and
championed social reform and racial pride.
WOL published a weekly playlist with its Top 16 hits and another forty “happening songs.” Mike
would occasionally amend the hit list with one of his songs substituted, “one of the Top 10.” Of
course…
The audio landscape shifted to the FM band in late 1971 with the advent of WHUR, donated by
the Washington Post to Howard University as a result of new federal rules prohibiting newspaper
companies from owning broadcasting outlets in the same city. WHUR’s slogan, “360 Degrees:
the Black Experience in Sound,” was evident in a more expansive music agenda and news, public
affairs and cultural programming closer to Pacifica than AM could have supported. Four years
later, the station became a commercial juggernaut by emphasizing the “Ebony Lifestyle” and
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introducing the popular Quiet Storm format that would have been a bit staid for Mingering Mike
had he not already been heading into a stormless quiet.
COVER ME
For many, the peak era for album art was from the mid ‘60s to the mid ’70s, when browsing in a
record store’s bins was almost as much an adventure as hearing new music. Mike’s own cover
fascination began at Circle Music, an appliance store in his 11th and H St. NE neighborhood,
with albums in the display window and a few bargain record bins up front (he says he never
made it to the back).
It would be cemented in great downtown vinyl emporiums like Soul Shack, Record City and
Waxie Maxie’s, whose flagship store was at 7th & T NW, just a block away from the Howard
Theater.
“I didn’t see beyond the fantasy of the album covers and they were so vibrant,” Mike recalls. “A
lot of the time, if the cover was impressive, you’d just go ahead and take a chance. And if it’s a
well-known artist, you’re going to go ahead and take a chance anyway. I thought ‘I wonder if I
could do something like that on my own?’”
Record stores were always offering promotional gimmicks, but the best were at Waxie Maxie’s
which ran animated trailers in neighborhood movie theaters and stickered albums with a
distinctive orange “Waxie Maxie’s Discount Price” (Mike would offer variations of this graphic
on his covers, sometimes simply transferring the actual stickers). There were live radio
broadcasts from the 7th & T store’s front window, known as the “goldfish bowl.” In 1966, WUST
DJ Willie Bacote and singer James Brown promised a free record to anyone who came into the
store carrying a toothbrush, creating a line almost as long as that for a Howard matinee.
One sensed hours of packaging analysis and osmosis in Mike’s covers, occasionally produced as
expansive gatefold interiors and back covers crowded with handwritten lyrics, explicatory liner
notes that could be thoughtful or playful, even fan club pitches. Song and album titles suggested
explorations of love and heartache or, especially later, spoke to Mike’s loneliness, isolation and
frustration—though there was plenty of humor as well. Like Pedro Bell’s funkadelic covers,
careful reading was rewarded.
The craft was just as meticulous on cleverly illustrated label logos, picture sleeves for numerous
45s and even the occasional eight-track tape, a format that remained popular until the mid ‘70s.
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“I liked them myself,” Mike says of these details. “I wanted it to be real as possible”
Still, Mingering Mike didn’t show his covers to anyone outside of his family, and he suggests they
were generally more amused than impressed. “In a sense, I was kind of ashamed or embarrassed
that I’m trying to create something that’s already out there. But it’s out there in the real word and
people are doing it in the real world, it’s not a fantasy word. I didn’t think people would go along
with that too well, so that’s why I kept it to me and my family.”
CODA
Almost four decades on, Mingering Mike’s oeuvre may not be certified gold or platinum but the
late-blooming validation is incalculable. Discovery has led to Dori Hadar’s lovely book and loads
of media attention (mostly about the art, given the artist’s penchant for continued anonymity),
gallery and museum shows here and overseas, and new album art opportunities from actual,
albeit late-arriving fans. Despite his awkward celebrity, Mike seems to share the same dreams as
Mingering Mike and he’s pointed out that should a recording career and musical success come
his way at this late stage, well, the artwork is already done.
There are all sorts of terms that seem to fit Mike’s story—an interrupted fairy tale, a very tall tale,
a long-lost legend, a figment of his imagination—so why shouldn’t there also be a happy ending?
“It’s nice to be able to contribute positive-ness and people really pick up on something from 30,
40 years ago,” Mike says proudly. “I’m the same person but I’m in a different body now. When I
look back at the stuff and the renewed interest that somebody sees something, I’m just having a
good time and trying to express myself. I didn’t want the whole world to see it at that particular
time but now that they see it and they enjoy it, OK, then they got it. If it had to be, that was the
right time for it.”
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