Mingering Mike: The Amazing Career of an Imaginary Soul Superstar is something that you just have to see to believe. The story of Mingering Mike, now on display at Hemphill Fine Arts, is an unforgettable one, crammed with baffling outsider art, obsessive imagination, and music-induced parallelism. The District, during the 60s and 70s, serves as its backdrop. It follows a Washington, D.C. man and his drawn-out fantasy of being a famous musician. Mike’s story was in danger of being lost forever, only to become a long-passed, make-believe chronicle never to be heard. But thanks to the curiosity and persistence of Dori Hadar and Frank Beylotte, this amazing collection was saved from its bleak flea market fate.

The two record-collecting bargain hunters snatched up what they found, nearly 200 fake LPs and 45s stashed away and mistaken for actual vinyl records, and they went searching for the creator of this treasure trove: the mysterious Mingering Mike. They posted digital photos of the collection on SoulStrut to get leads on his whereabouts. Mike quickly became an intriguing character in the record collecting community, and now that his artwork is being shown in a gallery setting, Mike is fast becoming a figure in self-taught visual art as well.

Mike’s world of pretend vinyl covers (and rough-cut acapella home recordings on headphones) line the walls of Hemphill in full color, finally bringing Mike to the adoring audience he always imagined. It’s a gold mine for audiophiles, soul aficionados, and outsider art groupies, displaying replica album covers complete with paper liners to protect the “delicate” surfaces of his cardboard records, detailed liner notes, and extensive catalogue numbers of an imaginary system. He forged grooves with marker, crayon, or pencil – each held by a hand-scrawled album cover, drawn with careful thought and wild imagination. His cover art, line drawings, done in now-fading marker scribbles, show Mike and his entourage of characters acting out the star life.