Mingering Mike revealed: A thriftshop digger who discovered 20 boxes of records made of cardboard and promoting the fictitious soul singer Mingering Mike tracked down the creater of this funky outsider art in Washington DC. In today's New York Times, Neill Strauss writes about meeting the man behind Mingering Mike (a twist on "merging traffic") and what drove him to write some 4,000 unreleased songs, packaged in painted album sleeve and cardboard disks painted with grooves and labels. Strauss writes:

Eventually he gathered family members to help record the music. When asked what he used for percussion, he laughed and replied, "You wouldn't believe it."

The music was not recorded with an overturned bucket after all, he said, but from either beating an Afro comb on a bed or hitting a telephone book with hands. Occasionally, he said, his cousin, the Big D, would roll up a piece of paper and blow through it to replicate the sound of a trumpet.

But just writing and recording music wasn't enough, Mingering Mike said, so he started making the album jackets so that "if it all came together one day, I'd be ready."

Also: Mingering Mike becomes a net phenomenon.