Mingering Mike is the unknown folk-artist responsible for the astonishing hand-painted record albums Xeni wrote about here last month. Today, the NYT features a report from a journalist who tracked him down and got his amazing story.
He said he would spend as long as a week making his album jackets. He originally put the cardboard records inside because the covers were too flimsy otherwise. And then he began adding fake promotional stickers, seven-inch singles to accompany the records, lyric sheets, gatefold sleeves, fan club information and nearly every other detail imaginable. "I wanted everything to be my own stuff and my own ideas," he said, "and not copy from anybody else."
Mingering Mike's dream, he said, was to be known for his music, and for his songs to inspire people. Thus, he tackled subjects like the growing drug problem in the United States on the cover of "The Drug War" and compulsory military service in his apocryphal reissue of an apocryphal soundtrack to the apocryphal film "You Only Know What They Tell You."
(Thanks, Star!)
