Baffled, he posted pictures on Soulstrut.com, a forum for those seekers of rare vinyl known as diggers. The reaction was astonishing.
As news of the enigmatic Mike spread, and fellow digger Frank Beylotte joined the search, Hadar used his investigative skills to find an address in an insalubrious area of DC. The man who greeted them, first with suspicion, then with delight, was Mingering Mike. "To be perfectly honest, I thought he would be a little loony," Hadar admits.
"I was pleased to discover that's not the case at all. He is a normal guy - he works two jobs, he likes to keep to himself. He is one of the nicest people I've ever met.
" The story that unspooled inspired Hadar to produce a handsomely illustrated book called Mingering Mike: The Amazing Career of an Imaginary Soul Superstar. Mike started out as a soul fan, acquiring stacks of vinyl and catching shows at the local Howard Theatre. Then he started writing songs (he claims around 4,000 in all) and recorded some on a reel-to-reel tape recorder with his cousin, The Big "D", singing or humming the instrumental parts.
But he never made it into a recording studio. Instead, he mapped out his career with posterboard and paint. Drafted for Vietnam in 1970, he went Awol and was forced to become officially invisible.
Working part-time jobs under the radar freed him to indulge his imagination. The vivid, elaborate sleeves relate a shadow history of soul's most eventful decade. When blaxploitation boomed, Mike produced soundtracks to fictitious films with titles such as Stake Out and Hot Rodd (Takes Revenge).
When Motown stars protested the war in Vietnam, he responded with I've Got the Battlefield Blues. When funk got salacious, he put out Let's Get Nasty. But after President Jimmy Carter pardoned all Vietnam deserters in 1977, Mike finally got a full-time job and the imaginary soul superstar had to bow out.
If, 26 years later, Mike hadn't fallen behind on payments to the storage depot holding his work, that would have been that. "Losing all of his albums was a blessing in disguise," says Hadar. "Had he not, no one would ever have seen them.
" Since the discovery, Mike has been hailed as an outsider artist, and his work will be exhibited in DC this June. He has begun writing songs again, too, but he maintains a little mystery, refusing to publicise his real name or to be photographed, for fear the attention would upset his routine. Despite his fantasies of stardom, he was never cut out to be public property.
Hadar was initially amazed by the interest in Mike's curious story, but now he thinks he understands what draws people in. "Everybody had a fantasy, when they were a kid, of being a superstar athlete or a movie star or what-have-you. And here we have this kid with a vast imagination, who delved so deeply into his imaginary career, far beyond what any of us would ever have thought of.
That's beautiful." Mingering Mike: The Amazing Career of an Imaginary Soul Superstar is published by Princeton Architectural Press
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