‘cover’ songs

A few years ago I came across a fascinating, “ripping-yarn” style piece in the New York Times. It was a story about Mingering Mike, history’s most prolific recording artist, a soul singer with hundreds of albums to his name. The albums are the very definition of “rarity,” turning up only in flea markets and junk shops and unavailable online. There’s a book out now that collects the covers of some of his most famous releases, albums like Getting’ to the Roots of All Evils and Sickle Cell Anemia. There’s just one catch: none of these records actually exist.

The story goes like this: Dori Hadar and Frank Beylotte were combing through records at a Washington Salvation Army when they came across a box of hand-drawn, magic-markered record sleeves credited to “Mingering Mike.” The sleeves were incredibly detailed, going so far as to include catalog numbers and label information. When they reached into the sleeves to pull out the discs, though, what they found instead were cardboard albums, cut-out LPs with painted-on grooves and made-up track information. A few internet posts connected them to other people who had come across Mike’s “albums” in similar scenarios — junk shops, flea markets, yard sales — and were just as intrigued. They eventually tracked Mike down at his home in southeast Washington, and were treated to cassette recordings of a few ad-hoc Mingering Mike songs.

Mike apparently wrote lyrics for 4,000 songs but cassette-recorded only a few. His legacy are these truly awesome album covers — each one so detailed that they even include a fan club address and “re-release” information. Some of them even have gatefold sleeves.

You can get a look at some of the Mingering Mike covers here, and an even better look at them in a recently-released compendium of Mingering Mike album covers. The love, passion and attention to detail that’s evident even in these .jpegs is mind-blowing. It’s sad, too: as album art and packaging becomes more and more devalued, Mingering Mike’s work seems like a product of a parallel universe, a world where what went on the cover meant as much as what went on the album.