John Cougar Mellencamp: Working Class Hero In The Rumbleseat

Bill Holdship, Creem, February 1986

BELMONT MALL, John Cougar Mellencamp's beautiful new recording studio,
is located in a pastoral farm area not far from John's home in
Bloomington, Indiana. It's just down the road from the country church
John recently used in his 'Rain On The Scarecrow' video, and only
minutes from the porch where he sat and played guitar for his 'Lonely
Ol' Night' video. If you drive towards town, you'll see the old rural
stores, steakhouses and other images of pure Midwest Americana that
some believe went out with the 1950s.

Inside, the "Mall" looks more like a modern rustic home than it does a
studio or business office. Nice furniture, a kitchen, framed photos of
James Dean (some of the same that adorn John's home), a studio with
skylights, and a genuine picture window in the sound room that
provides natural light and a gorgeous wooded area view. In the office,
John's father, ex-wife and assorted family friends conduct the day's
business, although there is a peacefulness in these surroundings that
doesn't resemble the normal hectic pace of most business affairs. In
the studio itself, John's band is meticulously rehearsing for the
first leg of the Scarecrow tour, working with their newest member on a
country fiddle solo for the middle of 'Small Town'. During a brief
recess, John leaves the room, and the conversation turns away from the
tour (which begins in one week) to a discussion of that morning's
rerun of The Andy Griffith Show, a program some of these guys and gals
apparently never miss if they can help it.

It's a little ironic because people in this part of the country have
accents not unlike those of Andy, Opie and Aunt Bea – while the area
makes one remember that people like those characters actually do still
exist. We're not talking the country bumpkinism of Green Acres, Li'l
Abner or Elvis's unfortunate Kissin' Cousins here – but the type of
characters you see in movies like Places In The Heart, Tender Mercies
or The Last Picture Show; the same type of characters you can picture
in your mind when listening to John's very cinematic 'Rain On The
Scarecrow'. They're also the same people I see every time I return to
my rural Michigan hometown (pop. 3,000): farmers, factory workers and
bored high school kids (some in F.F.A. jackets) who hang out in front
of the Dairy Queen, smoking cigarettes and still trying to recreate
the romantic James Dean Rebel Without A Cause persona in 1985, just as
John himself was doing not long ago. Above all, despite the hardships
many of these people now face, they are extremely proud of their
decision to remain in these small towns. You won't see any "I LOVE"
such and such a place bumper stickers, but you can certainly feel the
pride. And it's to these people that John Cougar Mellencamp mostly speaks.

"I am not a 'cool' artist," John says with his characteristic
mischievous grin, "but I kinda like that. I've never judged a guy on
the kind of car he drives, and that's sort of the comparison. I've
just gotta do what I do and hopefully connect with my audience – which
is the working class. It really is the guys with the greasy hair.
That's who comes to my shows. And to me, they are the most important
people in the world as far as wanting to communicate with them goes,
which is what it's all about."

Ironically, Scarecrow, John's stunning new LP, seems to presently be
communicating to more than just his old audience – a fact that's in no
small part due to the exciting sound of the record's music. John
admits that he wanted to incorporate the sound of classic '60s rock
into the album, and he gave his band close to a hundred old singles to
learn "almost mathematically verbatim" prior to recording Scarcrow.
And, of course, the influences can be heard all over the place – be it
obviously and comically like the Troggs/'Wild Thing' ocarina solo on
'R.O.C.K. (In The U.S.A.)', which John reveals is a lift of Neil
Diamond's 'Cherry, Cherry', or subliminally like the hidden 'Back In
My Arms Again' riff on the bridge of 'Small Town' and the Animals'
organ-solo-transferred-to-guitar on 'Face The Nation'.

"Learning those songs did a lot of positive things," he explains. "We
realized more than ever what a big melting pot of all different types
of music the '60s were. Take an old Rascals song for example – there's
everything from marching band beats to soul music to country sounds in
one song. Learning those opened the band's vision to try new things on
my songs. It wasn't let's go back and try to make this part fit into
my song, but I wanted to capture the same feeling – the way those
songs used to make you feel. After a while, we didn't even have to
talk about it anymore. If you listen to the lead Larry plays on 'Face
The Nation', he never would have played that 'cause he didn't really
know who the Animals were. He's young, and he grew up on Grand Funk
Railroad. You hear it, and it's like 'where did that come from?' It
had to be from hearing those old records."

But then Cougar's band has always been terrific, while John's songs
(and image) haven't really changed that much over the years. He was
doing cool cover tunes as far back as his debut Chestnut Street
Incident debacle (which still doesn't sound that bad for a demo tape
of a bunch of country town kids), while the guy listening to Sam Cooke
on the radio in 'Ain't Even Done With The Night' is the same guy, a
little older and wiser, listening to the Four Tops on 'Lonely Ol'
Night'. What has changed on Scarecrow is John's newfound acceptance of
his social responsibility. His older fans always seemed to sense the
big heart behind the pissed-off, smartassed, preoccupied-with-getting
laid exterior, but what has finally changed is the difference between
someone who feels the world basically sucks and one who believes we
could make the world work. And it's the crucial difference that can
transform someone from a really good rock 'n' roller into one of the
very best. "I've always been just what I've been." says John. "And
that's constantly changing."

In the two years since I last interviewed him, a lot has changed in
John's life, and he has rapidly advanced from what he termed "a high
point in the career" to what now approximates superstardom. He's
worked with people like the terrific Blasters and Barbra Streisand,
who talked him into co-writing a song with her ("It was exciting for a
day," he grins). But the biggest press he received during this time
occurred when Reagan's people contacted him about using 'Pink Houses'
in a Presidential campaign spot. He downplays the incident's
importance now, but does say: "It makes no sense whatsoever. What
Reagan wants to do has nothing to do with Born In The U.S.A., 'Pink
Houses' or working class people. But Reagan doesn't appeal to logic.
He appeals to the emotional. Let's not forget the guy was an actor,
and he's not stupid. You even see this stuff in beer commericals right
now – 'Made the American way.' But it's a two-sided sword. Yeah, it's
kind of scary, but there's also the type of patriotism that says maybe
we can change things and make them better. That's my type."

John received a birthday present last year from a Florida girl who
claims that one of his songs literally saved her life. She had turned
up the radio so her parents wouldn't hear the sucide gun shot, and one
of his songs came on. Incidents like this, as well as the Presidential
request, are probably what helped influence John's decision to finally
accept himself as a role model. "I suddenly realized that whether I
liked it or not, I was a role model to some people – and that brings
responsibility, which I didn't want two years ago because it's safer.
But I was wrong. Just like it's Motley Crue's responsibility to maybe
clean it up a little bit. I've got a song that says 'the face of the
nation changes' – and it changes because of the men we admire. Rock
'n' roll would've never been what it is without guys like Elvis and
Jerry Lee Lewis setting the pace for all us latecomers. Our foresight
is so short that we forget 10 years down the road, there might be
people learning from us, so we gotta make it positive. It's the same
with government officials. It influences how we'll behave and sets the
tone. Just look at the ultraconservative wave sweeping the country
right now."

John seems to be more at peace with himself than ever, and he's only
using a fraction of the four-letter words that once seemed to pop up
every other sentence. He even speaks of Reagan's and Motley Crue's
"good" points. "I now believe in trying to find the best points and
trying to change the worst," he says. "I don't hate as much as I used
to, and I'm real proud of that 'cause I was the most hateful, cynical
person about everything. But then I just gradually found myself
becoming a happier person by not hating so much. Don't get me wrong. I
still feel hate, but I've made leaps and bounds."

It's as old as the "part of the solution or the problem" cliche – but
John currently seems to be experiencing the self-discovery process in
which hate turns to anger which later turns to action and commitment.
And the most important thing is that he's addressing it in a plain,
simple English that anyone can understand. John says his new lyrical
philosophy involves "showing a little bit of hope with a little bit of
humor" amid the sad realities – and this merger can definitely be
heard in the delightfully upbeat message of 'Rumbleseat', the
beautiful image of 'Between A Laugh & A Tear' (his personal fave) and
the old man's advice on 'Minute To Memories'.

"I wrote a song called 'Stand For Something'," he explains, "but I
never did say what you should stand for – except your own truth. That
song was supposed to be funny, too, and I hope people got that. But I
think that's the key to the whole LP – suggesting that each person
come to grips with their own individual truth – and try to like
themselves a little bit more. Find out what you as a person are – and
don't let the world drag you down. People should have respect for and
believe in themselves."

John has recently been closely associated with championing the plight
of the American farmer – not only on Scarecrow's title track, but,
along with Willie Nelson and Neil Young, as one of the organizers of
last fall's "all-star" Farm Aid benefit concert. Arguably less
pretentious and more common spirited than the apparent "We Are The
Stars" attitude of Live Aid, John is very pleased to have been part of
it, though the rock fan comes out and he seems equally thrilled to
have had the chance to meet a couple of his own heroes like John
Fogerty ("he's a bigger hillbilly than me!"), Lou Reed ("I told him
that I was basically here because of him – because if he could do
it...He said 'That's what I always tried to get across"') and Joni
Mitchell.

"I didn't want to make Farm Aid a show for rich people. It was good
having people like X and Lou. It changed the spirit of the thing, and
there wasn't any of this 'Am I going to get a prime time spot? Who am
I following?' – which wasn't why we were doing this. I really think
there was such community there. It was, in many ways, what the '60s
pretended to be for that one day."

Although he remains proud of the event, he was bothered by some of the
negative press Farm Aid received. "At first, they really tried to find
something to attack, but it was hard because it was so honest. ABC
even went to this little obscure town that received $300 for their
food bank. They said 'Does $300 really make a difference?' And the
woman said 'Well, this cupboard was bare two days ago, now look at it.'

"Listen, progress is a wonderful thing. I'm all for it when it's
positive and a good move forward. But when you look around and see
what we're going to is the same thing we have with AT&T or the oil
companies, that's not a positive move in farming. If you build a
better car, great. But if you build a 'better car' that's junky and
will kill you in the end, I won't get in the sonovabitch. Corporate
farming will drive more than just the farmers out of business, because
these corporations don't go down to the corner store for supplies. And
a corporate cattle farm, for instance, they're only interested in
maximum yield. What they do to get it isn't right. Like using
steroids. My kids' kids might grow to be 15 feet tall! Who knows how
it'll affect us all physically. And they will rape the soil until it's
of no use anymore.

"I'm not against automation and machines replacing people as long as
those people have somewhere to go. But it's the responsibility of
those companies to retrain these people. It's not right for U.S. Steel
to just let go of all those people – and not only do they not retrain
them, but they diminish their retirement pensions until nothing's
left. The difference in farming is the corporations want the farmers
to continue. They just don't want them owning their land. I'm not
trying to save heritage here, either. I don't really care about that.
It's like trying to save a Model T. There's comfort there. There's
comfort in seeing an old black & white Andy Of Mayberry on TV because
it reminds us of the comfort we knew as kids – but I'm not into saving
something just for the sake of saving it."

As of late, John has also been one of the most vocal opponents of the
move by a group of bored Washington wives to put a rating system on
rock LPs, and his name is frequently associated with the Musical
Majority, though he claims the "organization" is really just a list of
people who oppose censorship. He mentions that his 'Crumblin' Down'
video was actually cited as being "too violent" by a parents group
several years ago, and he's already demanded a contract from his
record company declaring that his records won't be rated. He compares
the ratings effort to how McCarthy blacklisting began in the '50s.
"It's a wolf in sheep's clothing. I don't really like 'Fuck Like A
Beast' – but if you look forward and backwards, you can see what's
coming. Before long, K-Mart'll say we got too many X and R records,
and then you'll be lucky to get Olivia Newton-John because her clothes
are too tight. We'll be lucky if we end up with the Archies."

With all this activism, John has recently been getting the expected
Bruce Springsteen comparisons. Of course, this is nothing new. The
first time I saw Cougar perform in 1979, a drunk guy insisted on
screaming "Springsteen!" throughout the entire show ("I'm not too
proud to say I'm a fan" was John's response that night). But he is
unhappy about the competetiveness the press builds between him and the
Boss, expecially since the release of Scarecrow. "I think you're
either trying to do something or you're not. And for people to blame
me for trying to do something just because Bruce is doing something is
unfair. But it doesn't really bother me on the other side of the coin.
I am connecting with people. And I've met Bruce now, and he's like the
nicest guy in the whole world, as downhome as John Fogerty – not
pretentious and he's a real individual. So listen, if that's my worst
crime, then I think I'm probably all right. I also think it's
sometimes easy for people to hate someone who cares because that makes
them have to care – and a lot of them don't."

Other than the Scarecrow tour – which will run in different legs
through spring '86, which has already rejected numerous corporate
sponsorships, and which at two-and-a-half hours promises to be perhaps
the best tour of the year – John's future could include a major motion
picture, that is if he finally gets someone to make it. He recently
wrote a screenplay which he claims "wasn't very good," but his friend
Larry McMurty (The Last Picture Show, Terms Of Endearment) liked the
characters and took them to incorporate into his own screenplay.
McMurty came to Bloomington to research the Mellencamp family, merged
it with his own family's story, and created what John calls "a
beautiful story about downward mobility, family relationships,
infidelity. The only problem is it's a downbeat movie. Hollywood
doesn't want to make downbeat movies. They want blockbusters like
Ghostbusters or Purple Rain. It's a great movie, and I don't know that
we'll ever get it made. Also, even though I play a country singer in
the script, I don't want to sing in the movie. That makes it hard when
the president of some film company is saying 'So we got John Cougar in
a movie, eh? Which one of his songs is he gonna do?' But I can see
their side, although I don't like it, and I'm not rejoicing over it."

After all is said and done, though, perhaps the finest attribute of
Scarecrow is that it finally vindicates the longtime fans of John
Cougar Mellencamp, a performer who has described himself as "the
biggest joke in the industry," and a performer who as late as last
year's Uh Huh tour was still paying for the Tony DeFries demo tape
folly of nearly a decade ago. I think a lot of fans are taking a
certain "we-told-you-so" pride in Scarecrow's critical and commercial
success, not to mention Mellencamp's triumph over in credible odds.
It's proof of what a lot of people have been saying for a long time:
John Cougar is a great rock 'n' roller.

But although he believes that Scarecrow is his best LP and one to be
proud of, John remains as self-effacing as ever when discussing
himself. He says he's "kinda disappointed" in 'R.O.C.K. (In The
U.S.A.)' and 'Justice And Independence '85' ("I don't think people are
getting the idea of what the song's about, so I must've not done a
very good job"). And even though he feels it's good that his fans
might feel vindicated, he personally doesn't see it that way at all.
"To me, I'm still struggling. I can't think that this record lived up
to any type of promise. I guess you can't be objective about yourself,
but to me, I still wanna do better and do more for other people."

So he may still be an American fool in the rumbleseat – but we should
be happy to claim him as one of our own.

I expect him to play about half of the new album and dig out some rarities from his past albums. For instance, John Cockers would be great in the "Sun Studios" set, "Play Guitar" would be great in the rock set, and "Another Sunny Day" is just screaming to be played in the solo acoustic set. He should also unearth some hits he hasn't played in years for the rock set, like "Rumbleseat" and "Get a Leg Up." Throw in a cool cover tune in one of the sets for good measure and you've got the makings of a great show. 

By the way, the reason the St. Louis presale wasn't working for me at first is because I copied and pasted the presale password into the ticket site rather than typing it in. About 10 minutes in I typed it into the field instead of pasting it in and then it worked fine. A cautionary tale for those whose preseale is still to come.

John Mellencamp
Words & Music

He's creative guy. When he's not writing songs and making records,
he's often busy painting. "When I finish a painting," he says, "I
turn it against the wall." He's much the same about his songwriting-
he likes to write songs, but he doesn't particularly enjoy talking
about them. Regardless, he made an exception for us and spoke at
length about the creation of his words and music. His is a career
that is exceptional. Starting as a singer singing other people's
music, he evolved into an ingeniously poignant and exultant
songwriter, selling more than 40 million albums and receiving 11
Grammy nominations.

By Paul Zollo

He was born on October 7, 1951 in Seymour, Ind. Like many of
America's great songwriters (Lennon, Simon, Springsteen, Berry,
Nyro and many others), he's a Libra, born with an innate gift for
balancing two disparate elements. In his case, and that of the other
songwriters, these happen to be the delicate elements of words and
music.

As a teenager he played in several rock bands. "Some people go
to a bar one night a week, maybe two," he says during our recent
interview. "I was in a bar every night playing with a band." He was
the singer, and sing he did, even without playing guitar. "I was a
Bob Dylan jukebox," he says. "I could play every Bob Dylan song."
In 1975, he moved to New York with the aim of making a living as a
musician. By the next year, he had landed a record deal, but his
managers decided they had to mold him into a different form and
renamed him "Johnny Cougar." The album that was released was
called Chestnut Street Incident, and it consisted of other people's
songs. His second album, The Kid Inside, also consisted of covers but
was never released. He was dropped from the label and soon signed
with another, which released an album called A Biography. It did
little to introduce Johnny Cougar to the world.

But it all shifted when his next album was released, at which time
he started writing his own songs. His first hit, which was also a hit
for Pat Benatar, was "I Need A Lover." Following that, he worked with
the legendary musician Steve Cropper, who produced Mellencamp's next
album, Nothin' Matters And What If It Did— which began to prove
to the world that this man was more than a pop singer. He was a bona-
fide singer/songwriter. He then went out on tour with a host of bands,
including KISS and the Kinks.

By 1982, he was writing the record that would put him over the
top in terms of authentic popularity. The album was called American
Fool, and it included two massive hits, "Jack and Diane" and "Hurts
So Good," both of which are discussed in the following interview.

In 1983 came Uh-Huh, which contained huge hits such as "Pink
Houses." By this time he was no longer Johnny Cougar, as he re-
embraced his true identity and became John Cougar Mellencamp. In
1985, painfully aware of the plight of American farmers, he not only
founded Farm Aid with Willie Nelson, but he put their dilemma
into art and conceived the seminal album Scarecrow. He considered
himself an American troubadour, as he says in the following, but
with folk songs that could be translated into pop-rock songs with
the addition of rock instruments. He called it "folk music with a
rock drum beat."

A succession of powerful albums followed, including The Lone-
some Jubilee (1987), which soared to the top of the charts, galvanized
by gritty songs such as "Paper in Fire" - featuring some of the most
burning violin playing ever to be captured on a pop record. Big
Daddy, containing the classic heartrending cut "Jackie Brown," came
in 1989—and then his first album in 1991 as John Mellencamp,
Whenever We Wanted—energized by the hit single "Get A Leg Up." Two
years later he returned with the masterful Human Wheels; which was
inspired by his life with new wife Elaine. And in 1994, he recorded a
wonderful duet with the eminently soulful MeShell NdegeOcello for
his Dance Naked album. NdegeOcello sang and played bass on the Van
Morrison gem "Wild Night," which became an immense hit and one
of VH-1's most played videos.

Mellencamp took a break from the madness of the music world
to retreat into a happy Midwest life with his wife—a hiatus that
was reflected in his next album. Mr. Happy Go lucky (released in 1996,
featuring "Key West Intermezzo (I Saw You First)" and other great
songs). Mercury released two more albums, The Best That I Could Do
(1978-1988), a partial career retrospective, and Rough Harvest, an
accumulation of unreleased songs.

Moving to Columbia Records,he delivered his first self-titled
album in 1998, John Mellencamp, followed by Cuttin' Heads in 2001,
which included the powerfully beautiful "Peaceful World." Trouble No
More came in 2003.

Now we're blessed with a massive 2-CD collection called
Words&Music: John Mellencamp's Greatest Hits. It contains 22 of his
Top-40 pop hits to date, as well as two new songs— "Walk Tall"
and "Thank You" (which he produced with Kenneth "Baby-face"
Edmonds). "I'm on loan now to Island Defjam Records," he says
happily. "And the guy who owns it, L.A. Reid, is a guy I love. He's
the first record company president that I really have respect for.
He's a musician, and he really understands the creative process ...
because he's a creative guy."

Our interview with Mellencamp was delayed a few hours
because, according to his publicist, he was "stuck on line." But he
wasn't on his computer, rather, he was physically waiting in line to
vote—as this was November 2, election day. Only days earlier, he
was out playing and campaigning for what he believed in: "To make
this a more tolerant country than the one we are living in now."

But now he's home in Bloomington, Ind., the small town he's
sung and written about and where he still lives with his family.
He's currently writing a musical with Stephen King, having com-
pleted about half a dozen songs for it. Called The Mississippi Ghost
Brothers, it takes place both in the 40's and present day, and is
about a family that goes back to its haunted summer home. And it's
"home" where our discussion commenced.

AS: Did you grow up in a musical home?

JM: Yes. My grandmother could play piano, string instruments and she
could sing. It was all Appalachian type stuff. And I had an older
brother who played guitar and was in the choir. I was exposed to a
lot of music. My dad is only 20 years older than me. When I was a
kid, he was into folk music. We had Odetta records around the
house. I loved folk music—from Peter, Paul & Mary to Woody
Guthrie.

AS: When you started writing songs, you already had a record deal?

JM: Yeah. Isn't that wild? That's why my first songs are so crummy.
[Laughter]

AS: You were John Cougar then.

JM: That was put on me by some man-
ager. I went to New York and every-
body said, "You sound like a
hillbilly." And I said, "Well, I am."
that's where he came up with
that name. I was totally unaware
of it until it showed up on the
album jacket. When I objected to it,
he said, "Well, either you're going
to go for it, or we're not going to
put the record out." So that was
what I had to do ... but I thought
the name was pretty silly.

AS: When you started writing your own songs, were your managers okay
with that idea?

JM: Yeah, I think so. There were always
managers wanting to put their two
cents in. But after that Johnny
Cougar debacle, I pretty much
rejected about everything they ever said. You know, I've always
been an outsider. I've never really been part of any New York-hip or
L.A.-cool scene. I've always been from the Midwest. I've stayed here
and done things the way I've wanted to do them. I listened to people
when I had to sometimes, but generally I just did things the way I
wanted to do them. I wrote a song called "Minutes to Memories" a
few years ago that says, "I do things my way and I pay an awfully
high price." And I still feel that way.

AS: When you started writing songs, did it come easily to you?

JM: No. Listen to my earlier records. You know, it takes a person a
long time to find his voice. I always marvel at guys whose first
records are so well-written and so well done. Take Elvis Costello's
first record. How did he do that?

AS: Yes. Or John Prine.

JM: Yeah, John Prine's first record. How did that happen? So, for me,
I was singing in bars. I was 14-years-old, playing at college
fraternities. I was singing Sam & Dave. I was the singer in the band.

AS: Once you started writing songs, did you write alot?

JM: I had to, because I had a record deal. I was in a band and
playing in bars when I first got a record deal, so my experience of
the world in my mid-20's was being in bars all the time. We played
365 days a year.

AS: Did you learn a lot about songwriting from playing all those
covers?

JM: I didn't at the time. But looking back at it, I see that I did.

AS: How did you learn to write? Was it trial and error?

JM: Trial by fire. [Laughs] Once I started
writing songs, and once I found my
voice, I knew what I had to do. I
saw myself as an American song-
writer in the troubadour fashion;
it's just that I happened to have a
rock band behind me. But if you'd
heard my songs when they were
originally written, they were just
fragile folk songs.

AS: Do you write words and music together?

JM: Yes. Generally. I write the melody
and the lyrics and the rhythm all at
the same time. It just happens. And
then sometimes I'll go back and rewrite. Sometimes I don't.

AS: So often you will get an entire song all at once?

JM: Sure. Not often. Most of the time.

AS: Are those the best songs-the ones that come all at once?

JM: Generally-speaking. But there are holes in those songs. I'll hear
a song I wrote many years ago called "Pink Houses" on the radio, and
I'll think, "Man, I wish I would have spent a little more time on the
last verse." I never really view my songs as done. I just think
they're abandoned. You think, 'Okay, well, I'm in the studio now, and
now it's time to think about what the guitar player is going to do,
and what the bass player is going to do, and what the drummer's going
to do.' So once you get to that point, the song is pretty much aban-
doned. You've got to be able to roll with what these musicians try to
do with the song.

AS: Nowadays, do you write songs all the time?

JM: Once you start writing songs, you write all the time.
Everything's a song now. It's just a matter of looking
out my window. I won't even want to write, but I'll
think of a good idea, and I better get that down. And
all of a sudden, I'll have two or three verses in my
head, and I'll think I have to put these down on
paper...because if I don't, I'll forget them pretty
soon. I have to say that I have to write 10 songs to get
one good one. I'll write 10,15 songs, and there won't
be a good one in the bunch.

AS: Do you finish those, even if you don't think they're good ones?

JM: I get to a point where I can see if they're going to work or not.

AS: How much do you have to write to make that judgement?

JM: A verse and a chorus. The first verse and the first
chorus always come easy to me. But then it's where
the song goes that I always start to make missteps. I
take it in the wrong direction or get too literal about
something. So it's hard to write in a vague manner
and still be poignant. It's very hard to do.

AS: Why vague?

JM: I've never really enjoyed getting too specific about
topics. I always feel you have to be a really great
songwriter to get specific and captivate the imagina-
tion of the listener. That's an impossible task.
There's only a couple of guys who can do that. It's
important for me to keep it vague, so that when peo-
ple hear it, they are able to put themselves inside
the song. I try to make my songs not about me as
much as possible.

AS: You've written some powerfully specific narrative story songs
like "Jack and Diane".

JM: Well, they're not story songs as much as vignette
songs. I'll go from vignette to vignette in a song and
then tie it together with a chorus. But a lot of times
my songs come out on the angry side, or the pes-
simistic side, or the craggly side, until you get to the end of
them.. .and then I'll try to write something, in the end, that gives
hope to the situation. Never try to answer any questions—only ask
questions.

AS: In "Jack and Diane" you sing 'Here's a little ditty..." But it's
more tha a ditty.

JM: From the perspective of a young man in His late-20's, when I wrote
that song, it was such a small story. It wasn't as much
about the song. It was the characters. They were just
so average. So the word "ditty" just seemed appropri-
ate. Even as you said it, it still does to me.

AS: That song became a big hit, as have so many of your songs. Does
it change your feeling about a song if it becomes a hit?

JM: No, not really. Sometimes I'm disappointed that
some songs [that I thought were better than hits],
people weren't able to lock on to. But I don't really
have feelings about songs the way some people do.
You know, I paint. And I do the same things with the
paintings. I enjoy creating them, and I enjoy work-
ing on them, and I enjoy the problems that they cre-
ate for me to solve. But once I've done that, and
abandoned it, then I'm done with it. It's on to the
next painting. Or it's on to the next song. It's on to
the next thing to try to create. It makes things bear-
able ... doing that. Hanging on to a song like "Jack
and Diane," I really don't take a smidgen of pride in
that I've written that. I don't take pride in the fact
that one song was able to climb the charts and one
song wasn't. I take pride in the fact that I was able to
create these songs. That seems to be more important
than the fact that this song was a hit or that song
was a hit.

AS: Do you think of a title before writing a song?

JM: Very rarely. Generally, the title comes after the song
has been written, and sometimes even after the song
has been recorded. I don't hang much importance in
a name.

AS: It seems that sometimes a song is based
around the title, such as "Paper In Fire".

JM: A song like "Paper In Fire" ... I didn't really have to
title the song, it titled itself. That was the only logical,
creative choice. There's nothing else to call that song.

AS: When you say that a song titles itself, is songwriting more a
method of following a song than leading it?

JM: Oh yeah. I never try to lead a song in a specific direction.
Because then you start editing yourself. And I do do that, and I
think every songwriter probably does that. But, that makes life a lot
harder .. when you start editing yourself. The best creation is when
you're free with it and it becomes what it becomes. I know in my
paintings, if I labor over it too much, it gets ugly.

AS: But with painting you can create it without any literal ideas. Is
that a different process than creating songs, where you have to deal
with verbal thoughts?

JM: You're still dealing with reality. There are certain
things that have to happen in a painting. It's like a
language. If you don't use that language on the can-
vas, it won't work ... it won't look right. Then you
realize-you tried to sidestep that part of the painting
process and tried to take a short-cut that didn't
work. And you have to deal with it.

AS: Does music come easily to you?

JM: Melodies are very simple for me. I, for some reason,
have an unlimited amount of melodies in my head. I
very rarely feel that I am repeating myself. A lot of
the instrumental lines on my records are lines I've
given the musicians to play. Making up melodies is
the simplest thing for me to do.

AS: Do you come up with melodies in your head, or on a guitar?

JM: In my head. Then, I have musicians figure them out.
That's when I throw the guitar away. I don't like
being confined to an instrument. I'll sing a
melody—and the violinist or the guitar player or
the piano player, or all of them—will figure out that
line and help each other.

AS: Many songwriters write melodies generated by chord progressions
they play on guitar or piano...

JM: Well you have to follow a melody inside the chord
progression, so the chord progression can dictate
which direction the melody goes. But there are so
many notes that can go into a D-chord. It's limitless
how many notes will work inside that chord. I never
think about that. I never think of the math of it.

AS: The math?

JM: Yes, the math. Music is math. There are so many
beats in a measure. It's all math when you get right down to it.
Music is a mathematical problem. And I never, never try to look at
the math of a song until the song is over. And then I decide if the
math is correct. In many of my songs, I have crammed so many
lyrics into a melody and into a measure that mathematically it
doesn't work. Ah, but it does work if the next line doesn't follow
that cadence. There are so many things you can do. And I try to do if
more from feel than from the mathematical point.

AS: What kind of feel are you going for?

JM: That depends on each song. Each song has a different
cadence and a different rhyme and a different mes-
sage, so each song dictates that feel. If you take a
song like "Walk Tall" (the new single), when I play it .
acoustically, it's a folk song—in the tradition of
Woody Guthrie. But I knew right away that I wanted
to have an r£rb feel for that song. I played it for
Kenny "Babyface" Edmonds, who's a real r&b guy. I
said, "Listen to this song, and see what kind of r&b
feel you can put to it." I think I played one verse and
one chorus and he had already come up with the
feel. And that happened within, no exaggeration, 30
seconds of him hearing the song. He hadn't even
heard me play the song once, and he was already
playing that rhythm against my folk rhythm. So I
looked at him at that point and said, "I'll see you in •
Indiana in a few weeks."

AS: Where do you think your ideas for songs come from?

JM: I just look out the window and they come to me. I s
myself in the old tradition of the troubadour. I read
the papers. I watch the news. I talk to people. I'm
inspired by those things. There are so many things to
write about. Anyone could be a songwriter. I could
start writing today, and write two or three songs a
day for the rest of my life, and still never run out of
material.

AS: Can a song contain any content?

JM: Sure. If it's any good is questionable. That's the prob-
lem most people have when they start writing songs.
They expect to write at the level of songs that they've
heard on the radio. But that's all magic. When I start-
ed writing, I didn't know how magical "Highway 61"
was. How do you compete with that when you're 22-
years old and trying to write songs? You can't. There's
just so much that you can't even compete with. It's
like putting a grade-school football team against the
NFL champions. It's not going to work. There's no
level playing field for the songwriter.

AS: How does a songwriter reach that magic?

JM: He has to find his own voice. And that takes a long time. I admire
guys like Elvis Costello, who found his own voice [early in his
career]. Some songwriters stop at a certain point and don't keep
going forward. Elvis Costello was able to keep moving forward. He
might be the best songwriter of all of us guys who started out in the
70s. But when you put someone up against Bob Dylan, he is the only
singer/songwriter. With Bob, it's God's mind to Bob's fingers.
There's just nobody else. You know, I asked Bob how he did it. And
he just looked at me and said, "I write the same four songs every
time I write." [Laughs]

AS: I love your song "Human Wheels".

JM: That song was co-written with George Green. That was the eulogy
from his grandfather's funeral. He didn't intend for me to use those
lyrics as a song. He read them to me, and I said, "George, send those
over to me ... I'm going to put music to those ... those are so beau-
tiful." I wrote that song without a guitar or anything. I just sang
that melody. I figured out the cadence in my head, and then I went
to my guitar to figure out the chords.

AS: Where do good melodies come from?

JM: With me, and I don't mean to appear smug, it's innate. I'm just
able to do it. It's something I've never struggled with. The whole
point is writing simple melodies that people can sing along with.
That's what Lennon and McCartney were able to do. That's what Hank
Williams was able to do. That's what John Fogerty was able to do.
That's what Bob Dylan was able to do. I mean, "Stuck inside of
Mobile" . . . how hard is that to sing? It's not. It has just enough
movement that it creates this beautiful melody. Or "Knockin' On
Heaven's Door." His melodies are so beautiful.

AS: Is the meody more important than the words?

JM: I would say probably-to the general public-it is. It's not to me.
I think to your casual music listener, they have to relate to the
melody or they're never going to get the words.

AS: You've talked about writing vague songs, yet you've written many
specific songs, such as "Jackie Brown".

JM: When I'm writing songs like that, the melody really has to be
beautiful. I think that is a specific story. But if you get into the
details of it, you're back into the song being vague again. It paints
a picture, but you intend on the listener to fill in. I'm proud of
that song.

AS: "Small Town" is specific.

JM: I disagree. That's a vague song. "I was born in a small town." How
many small towns can you apply to that situation? Is that LaCrosse,
Wisconsin, or is that Bloomington, Indiana, or is that Collins,
Texas? "I had myself a ball in a small town." I mean, doing what?

AS: It's open-ended.

JM: It's so open-ended .. . it's so vague. But I think that's what
made the song work. And plus, I think I use the words "small town"
975 times in the song.

AS: Do you remember writing it?

JM: I wrote that song in the laundry room of my old house. [Laughs] We
had company, and I had to go write the song. And the people
upstairs could hear me writing and they were all laughing when I
came up. They said, "You've got to be kidding." What else can you
say about it?

AS: Do you remember writing "Hurts So Good"?

JM: George Green and I wrote that together. We exchanged lines back
and forth between each other and laughed about it at the time.
Then I went and picked up the guitar, and within seconds, I had
those chords.

AS: What is your favorite song that you've written?

JM: I haven't written that song yet.

BAD TO THE BONE

by Anthony DeCurtis

Rolling Stone: 9/8/94

JOHN MELLENCAMP STRIPS DOWN TO FIGHTING TRIM ON "DANCE NAKED"

IT'S RAINING, it's nighttime, and it's December in southern Indiana.
Under the big black, wet sky, Lisa Germano, master of all stringed
instruments, and her then boyfriend, producer Malcolm Burn, are
driving out of Bloomington down the road to John Mellencamp's studio,
in Belmont. Right now, what Mellencamp thinks he's doing is recording
six or eight new songs for a three-disc career anthology to be called
Nothing Like We Planned. Little does he know how apt that title would
prove.

A true daughter of Italy, Germano had whipped up a pasta and red-wine
dinner at her house on a 90-minute meal break from one of the
sessions that would lead not to a backward-looking retrospective but
to Mellencamp's latest album, the very in-the-present Dance Naked.

Our post-dinner dreaminess takes on an other-worldly air as the rain
pours, fog curtains the landscape, and Pink Floyd's "Interstellar
Overdrive" floats out of the car speakers. Syd Barrett has been one
of Burn's obsessions of late, and we're in complete emotional union
with the song's spooky ebbs and surges, hoping we don't arrive at the
studio before the musical trip ends. We don't.

Back on earth, the mood in the studio when we do get there is tense.
The day's work has not gone well -- at least by Mellencamp's rigorous
and highly personal standards. That morning he'd brought in a tape he
had made of a song tentatively called "Don't Want to Live Scared"; it
would eventually become the ironically titled "Another Sunny Day
12/25" on Dance Naked. It was the first time the band had heard it.

"This is played at a lot slower tempo than we're going to record it
at," Mellencamp says before letting the tape spin. "I'm going to have
to learn how to play this song again, because I wrote it so long ago,
I don't remember." The performance on the tape -- Mellencamp singing
in a kind of slurred folk croon over his own rudimentary acoustic-
guitar strumming -- is stark, chilling in the manner of songs
like "The Ballad of Hollis Brown," early Dylan at his grimmest. It is
so blunt and concise an expression of stoic faith -- or is that
despair? -- that it's hard to imagine how it could be successfully
embellished.

By evening, though, the song has strangely transformed into something
of a gospel rave-up with layers of background vocals and percussion
(some played on a tin Charles Chips can), a modified hip-hop
drumbeat, keyboards, an electronic zither and an extended feed-back-
laden guitar solo. It is an exciting evolution to witness, but with
each additional element, Mellencamp seems to lose his vision of where
the song should be heading, what it really is about.

At one point the proceedings get so confused that a take of the
chorus that Mellencamp wants to keep gets erased. He bets Germano and
guitarist Jimmy Ryser (who was sitting in to replace David Grissom
after he left the band to pursue a solo career) $50 each that the
part could be found. When Germano walks in after dinner, Mellencamp
takes out a $100 bill, rips it in two and hands half to her and half
to Ryser. Everyone laughs, but the message is dear that Mellencamp,
who doesn't like to lose or be proven wrong, isn't happy with the way
things are going, "Fuck my ass, I can't believe it," he says,
exasperated. "There was nobody driving this goddamn boat."

In search of perspective earlier that afternoon, Mellencamp had asked
Germano to call Burn, who had co-produced Mellencamp's 1993 album
Human Wheels, to see if he felt like dropping by the session. As
Germano held the phone to her ear, waiting for Burn to pick up,
Mellencamp shook his head sadly and looked at her with a sly grin,
saying, "Just back in town and Malcolm's already out fuckin' around.
Can you believe that?" Germano rolled her eyes, and when Burn finally
answered, Mellencamp grabbed the phone.

"Malcolm, what are you doin', man?" Mellencamp said. "We're making a
fuckin' record out here. Come on out we need some free help. What's
the name of the song? It doesn't have a name. Get your ass out here --
we need your vibe. We need somebody to pick on."

"Malcolm, they've got me tied up!" Germano screamed in the
background.

"She made me do it," Mellencamp said. "Get your ass out here. OK. See
you later on."

So after dinner, Burn, a tall, lean, quiet sort who seems alternately
dazed and amused by Mellencamp's characteristic bluster, slumps on a
couch as Mellencamp and the band try to pull the track together.
Suddenly, Mellencamp turns to him during a playback and asks, "Is
this beginning to sound too produced?"

Burn shrugs and starts to frame a suitably noncommittal reply, but
Mellencamp senses what's up. "You think it is, you cocksucker, you
just won't say so," he says, joking but edgy in the way people get
when their own dark suspicions have been confirmed. "I feel like
Peter Gabriel or something," In Mellencamp's world, art-rock
references are invariably negative, the epitome of self-conscious
artiness, of everything rock & roll should not be. After he learns
that we'd been listening to Pink Floyd on the way to the studio, he
repeatedly expresses his dissatisfaction with the track he's working
on by saying how much it reminds him of "Another Brick in the Wall."

And since no one escapes the lash, Mellencamp marks one especially
frustrating moment by sighing philosophically and saying "Well, as
long as it falls into that Firefall category." He pauses, draws on
one of his ever-present cigarettes and looks over at me. "Firefall --
wasn't that ROLLING STONE'S Band of the Year a few years hack?"

FIVE MONTHS LATER, a far more relaxed John Mellencamp kicks back in
his sumptuous beach house, in the posh resort town of Hilton Head,
S.C. Beyond the patio area and the pool are a short stretch of soft
sand and the Atlantic Ocean. Further contributing to the serenity of
the scene is Mellencamp's wife, his third, 24-year-old model Elaine
Irwin. Irwin's extraordinary beauty is not so much stunning as
calming: Looking at her face, you can't help but feel better about
the world. Not as serene but an equally powerful presence is
Mellencamp and Irwin's newborn son, Hud -- guess which parent picked
the name -- the 42-year-old singer's fourth child and first boy.

"It's gonna be a boy," Mellencamp had announced proudly back in
December, having just returned from a visit to the doctor with the
pregnant Irwin. "I saw his dick. I said, 'I recognize that
part.' "Happy will probably never be a word that leaps to one's lips
to describe Mellencamp, but in this setting he seems as dose to
contentment as he is likely to let himself get.

And nobody -- not even the singer at his most acerbic -- is drawing
comparisons between Dance Naked and the songs of Firefall As lean an
album as you will encounter in the digital age, its nine songs --
recorded in two weeks, docking in at a shade over 30 minutes -- are
all but unfinished. The mixes are essentially nonexistent; some tunes
don't even include bass parts; and the emotions the songs capture are
fleeting evocations of passion, not attempts at grand, eternal
statements.

"Another Sunny Day 12/25" is back to being a virtual folk song with
subtle guitars and percussion the only adornments to the arrangement
on Mellencamp's original homemade tape. "When you were there, you saw
guys beating their heads against the wall, trying to get an
arrangement on a song that really didn't need one," Mellencamp says
while seated behind a desk in an upstairs study at the beach
house. "We spent two days on that song and I went back and listened
to it a week later and thought, 'What the flick is this?' The song
could stand on its own. That was it."

If the title Dance Naked captures the freedom Mellencamp felt while
stripping his music down to its essence, the album's cover art -- a
nude male body wrapped in barbed wire and struggling to free itself-
suggests that the process was not as easy as the album's effortless
swing might make it seem. Central to the genesis of Dance Naked --
and the temporary abandonment of Nothing Like We Planned -- was
Mellencamp's reconciliation with drummer Kenny Aronoff, who had
fallen out with Mellencamp and left the band last fall after playing
with him for 15 years.

At the time, Mellencamp did not take the break with equanimity. "The
truth of the matter is that the reason Kenny's not here is that he's
doing a Hank Williams Jr. session," he said in December with barely
concealed condescension. "I don't really understand that. It would be
easy for me to go get a session drummer, but I don't want one of
those -- and I guess in the case of Kenny, I don't want one in the
band. I wouldn't think it would be that challenging for him, but
Kenny really has a desire to be a big sessionman. And I think that
desire is more important to him than being in this band. That's what
it boils down to."

As if to make a point about his expendability, Mellencamp replaced
Aronoff- widely recognized as one of the greatest drummers of the
rock era -- with Michael Dupke, a 19-year-old undergraduate from the
Indiana University School of Music who earned academic credit for his
work with the band. Talented as Dupke is, he was no substitute for
Aronoff.

By January, however, Mellencamp and Aronoff had made up. "What
finally happened was Kenny called me up and said, 'What time's
rehearsal?' " Mellencamp recalls with a smile of huge delight. "I
said, There's no fuckin' rehearsal, quit calling me, man!' Then it
was like 'Oh, fuck it, we can make this work -- we have for years.
Why am I being so demanding? And, Kenny, why are you being so
reckless?' "

The band got pared back to its core: Mellencamp; Aronoff; guitarist
Mike Wanchic, who co-produced Dance Naked; and bassist Toby Myers.
Guitarist Andy York came on board as a permanent replacement for
Grissom. (For his tour band, Mellencamp has also brought in Mindy
Jostyn to sit in for Germano, who is on hiatus promoting her solo
album Happiness. "Lisa is still part of this band," Mellencamp says.)
Mellencamp wrote a bunch of new songs. There was the feeling of a new
beginning. Nothing Like We Planned went out the window. "We
said, 'Let's just make a different record,'" Mellencamp says, "'Let's
become a rock & roll band again.'"

Assisting in that effort on Dance Naked is Me'Shell NdegeOcello, the
singer and multi-instrumentalist whose Plantation Lullabies album was
one of the most provocative debuts of 1993. Mellencamp and
NdegeOcello's spirited duet on Van Morrison's "Wild Night" -- a song
with which NdegeOcello was unfamiliar before Mellencamp played it for
her -- has become a Top 10 hit.

At first glance the fortysomething rocker and the twentysomething R&B
poet might seem like an odd pairing, but "she was great, she just fit
right in, everybody loved her," Mellencamp says. And there was
another surprise.

"After she'd been in Bloomington about a day and a half she
asked, 'John, who won that pink house?'" Mellencamp says. NdegeOcello
was referring to an MTV promotion Mellencamp did in 1984 for his
song "Pink Houses." "I said, 'I don't remember, some girl from
Seattle Then Me'Shell says, 'You know, I entered that about 14 or 15
times.' I couldn't believe it. She was about 13 years old when that
song came out. I didn't know she knew who the hell I was. As it turns
out, she knew all my records."

For now, with Dance Naked behind them, Mellencamp and his band are in
the midst of a 35-city North American tour that will run through Oct.
1. Nothing Like We Planned will be completed some time, possibly as
early as next year, but it is not on the singers schedule.

"I'd rather have the feeling and be playing shit than be playing
presentable stuff and not be into it," Mellencamp says about the
journey that led to Dance Naked and his streamlined touring band, "I
remember -- whether you like the song or not -- playing 'Hurts So
Good' in a club and thinking, 'Man, this is kicking ass!' Whether it
was or wasn't is not the fucking point -- the point is, I thought it
was. I was livin' it.

"With Dance Naked, we were livin' it," Mellencamp says in
conclusion. "There weren't any long heady discussions about what
needed to happen -- everybody just went in and played. Which is what
I think this is about. It's about the feeling."

JOHN MELLENCAMP
GRAND RAPIDS, MICH.
The Orbit Room, Jan. 14, 1995

Sometimes I look in the mirror and think, 'I had a heart attack,' "
said John Mellencamp minutes before taking the stage at the Orbit
Room, a 1,650-capacity club in Grand Rapids, Mich. "Let's face it,
man: We're not kids anymore."

That admission provided a dramatic background to the nearly two hours
of ferocious rock & roll Mellencamp unleashed. These two shows --
Mellencamp, 43, also performed the previous night -- were his first
since a minor myocardial infarction forced him to cancel a third of
his tour this past summer. The idea was to see what it felt like to
be onstage again. The band -- guitarists Mike Wanchic and Andy York,
bassist Toby Myers and drummer Kenny Aronoff -- rehearsed a wide-
ranging selection of covers for nine hours at Mellencamp's studio in
Belmont, Ind., then boarded a bus for Michigan.

The night kicked off with a salute to one of Michigan's finest, a
blistering version of the Stooges' "No Fun." That deemed the
evening's defiantly unsentimental tone, as raw renditions of John
Lennon's "Cold Turkey," Bob Dylan's 'All Along the Watchtower," Neil
Young's "Down by the River" and the Rolling Stones' "You Can't Always
Get What You Want' (which featured side trips through the Velvet
Underground's "Heroin" and "Sister Ray") explored themes of
mortality, physical suffering, self-destruction and redemption.
Seeing the singer light a cigarette between songs -- he's under
strict orders to stop -- take a couple of drags, grimace and throw it
to the floor made it clear that such concerns are far from abstract
for Mellencamp now.

That serious subtext aside, this was also Saturday night in a
Midwestern bar, and Mellencamp didn't shirk his responsibilities as
the Orbit's weekend house band: Van Morrison's "Gloria," Count
Five's "Psychotic Reaction" and Mellencamp's own "Lonely Ol'
Night," "R.O.C.K. in the U.S.A.," "Hurts So Good" and "Authority
Song" shook the night to a close.

"I have no plans -- maybe start another album soon, probably play
some more shows like this," Mellencamp said after the show. Whatever
comes next, this explosive set demonstrated that despite his heart
attack, John Mellencamp's rock & roll heart still beats hard and
strong.

--ANTHONY DECURTIS

Rock 'n' Roll's Brat Boy Grows Up
December 9, 1985
By: Richard Harrington, Washington Post Staff Writer

There was a time when John Cougar Mellencamp would tell you his
songs were about nothing and meant nothing, an appropriate stance
for a midwestern rock poseur whose defiant "Wild Ones" esthetic was
summed up on one album as "Nothin' Matters and What If It Did."
Mellencamp was a rock 'n' roll brat, nicknamed the Little Bastard,
the embodiment of the petulant small-town punk finding release
through noise.

Some folks bought the act, though his debut album sold fewer than
12,000 copies.

But things began to change with 1982's "American Fool." Buttressed
by "Jack and Diane" and "Hurts So Good," two catchy and concerned
teen anthems that became top-five hits, it ended up as the year's
bestselling album. Last year's "Uh Huh" had three more hits,
including the bracing "Authority Song" ("I fight authority,
authority always wins") and "Pink Houses," a sobering vignette of
mounting unemployment and farm foreclosures in Mellencamp 's
Indiana -- concerns that would lead to his organizing September's
Farm Aid concert with Willie Nelson and Neil Young.

Mellencamp 's identification with the working class was reinforced
by the recent release of "Scarecrow," one of the best albums of 1985
and a commercial success as well (it's now No. 3 on the charts). Its
raw, emotionally direct songs deal with the plight of farmers and
factory workers, America's disappearing ideals, family and small-
town values, the importance of tradition.

Suddenly, Mellencamp 's songs are about something and mean a lot. As
he sings in one, "You've got to stand for something or you're gonna
fall for anything."

"For a long time I was just a guy in a band in a bar, right?," he
says quietly. "We had pierced ears, black leather jackets and
tattoos. My only responsibility was to myself." He was resting up in
the Plaza Athena one afternoon last week before a sold-out Madison
Square Garden concert. (He ended up playing that concert for free.
After a 25-minute delay to get the sound system to work, Mellencamp
told the crowd, "Listen, everybody. I feel so bad about this, the
show is on me. If you have your ticket stubs, you've got your money
$17.50 per ticket back." He played the Baltimore Civic Center
Saturday night.)

" 'Jack and Diane' was the first thing that made me think maybe
somebody was listening. People were coming up to me and
saying, 'This means so much to me' and I was going 'Ah, come
on . . .' It was hard for me to take it seriously, because I'm not
Bob Dylan -- that's who you pay attention to. Then serious things
started happening and I quit playing in bars and started having more
time to myself and realized I wasn't that happy doing what I was
doing."

Mellencamp 's unruly hair still drapes across his face, but he can
see clearly now. "I had a big chip on my shoulder about everything --
don't get me wrong, I still do. I was ready to beat up anybody,
argue with you, walk off your TV show" (as he did on "Nightwatch"
when he felt the interviewer was asking stupid questions).

Ironically, "Jack and Diane" -- a moving ditty about "two American
kids growing up in the heartland," trying to hold onto the spirit of
being 16 and finding that "life goes on long after the thrill of
living is gone" -- almost didn't make it onto "American Fool."

"I felt it was too corny, too stupid, too pansy," Mellencamp
remembers. "I had a hard time with that because I saw myself as some
romantic macho, a cowboy coming into town on a silver bus, yelling
the loudest and getting the hell out when the trouble began. It was
a dumb, romantic idea of what I thought rock 'n' roll was about.

"Someone once said, 'There's always one loudmouthed kid with a
guitar ready to screw everything up.' I thought, 'That's me.' " And
of course it was, which locked Mellencamp into his minor talents --
until he could find a major voice.

How did it happen? "I'm just a guy from Indiana. I don't have a lot
of talent, never professed to have a lot of talent," he says
bluntly. "But I've had the opportunity over 10 years to make records
and be in front of people, and I'm getting better at what I do."

Over the past three albums, as his lyrics became more populist and
direct, as his music eliminated its pretentions and stripped down to
basics, and as the blue-collar identifications became stronger,
Mellencamp has found himself portrayed as a kind of straw Boss. "I'm
not great," he insists, "I'm not Bruce Springsteen, I'm not Bob
Dylan. I'm John Mellencamp and until I can get that point across,
then that's my problem.

"People want to like me, but it's not cool," he laughs, referring to
his entrance into the record business 10 years ago under the
tutelage of idolmaker Tony Defries, who turned David Jones into
David Bowie and who tried to turn John Mellencamp of Seymour, Ind.,
into "Johnny Cougar, the cat of rock 'n' roll." They soon parted
company, and Mellencamp has since dropped the "ny" and reclaimed his
surname, but the hype remains burdensome.

For years, Mellencamp 's albums and behavior reinforced rock's worst
conventions. Now that he's 34, he has reassessed his
responsibilities, progressed to adult concerns. "I've written a lot
of songs about teen-agers," he says, "but it would be very
untruthful to continue writing songs about the street . . . I'm
married, I've got three kids. The only street I see anymore is what
my 15-year-old daughter Michelle tells me about, and her reality is
very different than mine was."

The change is perhaps most evident in the distance between the
caustic "Dream Killin' Town," one of his early songs, and the new,
near-elegiac "Small Town," a coming to terms with the characters and
situations encountered growing up in any small town, even one that
became a toxic dump site and at one time had the highest per capita
murder rate in the country.

Reminded of "Dream Killin' Town," Mellencamp laughs. "I haven't even
thought of that song for years. Perhaps I'm starting to understand
my own reality and not Bob Dylan's reality; that's where I stole the
idea for that song, all those words running together . . . 'Small
Town' is from me, has nothing to do with Bob Dylan or anybody else.

"I hated Seymour," he continues. "The first time I came to New York
I was embarrassed that I was from that town because the first thing
everybody said to me is, 'What kind of accent is that?' Accent? I
didn't know I had an accent. But let's face it, I'm a hillbilly and
there's nothing I can do about it. I tried to hide that and disguise
it. But in the last 10 years, this country's changed a lot. I think
it's people my age realizing that you can go to any town in the
world, but you're still home inside your head."

Growing up in a blue-collar town, Mellencamp seemed to inhabit an
S.E. Hinton novel. Like his fellow Hoosier, James Dean, he was a
rebel without a pause, gleefully following all the conventions and
rituals -- skipping school, drinking, smoking grass, drag racing,
girl chasing. At 17, he was married, at 18, a father.

He used to think his Hoosier neighbors were "a bunch of bumbling,
foolish people, 'cause surely there's a better world somewhere else.
But the more I went around and the more I had a chance to look at
them and myself and other people, the more I realized that just
wasn't the case. I had some adolescent idea of what they were like
and I was wrong about it. What a surprise it was to find that the
most interesting people I've ever met live in my back yard."

The stripped-down focus of the last three records reflected another
change. "Woody Guthrie said, 'Everybody should be able to play my
songs,' and I agree with that spirit," Mellencamp says, "the spirit
that the Human Beinz had on 'Nobody But Me.' I understood that
spirit, I felt those songs when I was a kid, the energy. I
understood a lot of the American things. I'm finding out now that I
don't understand the Who anymore; they were a lot more British than
I ever thought. I don't understand 'My Generation' at all anymore; I
wonder what the hell that song was about. 'Everyday I get in the
queue.' I didn't know what the hell a queue was. I'm obviously
influenced by the Rolling Stones, but I understand less about their
songs now than I ever did.

"Garage -- that I understand. I ought to."

With their refocused lyrics, Mellencamp 's new songs resonate with a
deeper truth, but he claims not to be convinced of their
worth. "It's not an inferiority complex, it's just knowing
yourself," he insists. "I'm not the most talented guy in the world,
let's face it. I flunked sophomore English three times. My way with
the language is not that great. It's not as passionate as Bruce, not
as intelligent as Bob Dylan, but what it is, I think, is very
honest. And I think that is the connection I make with people."

Although Mellencamp was one of the key Musical Majority figures
speaking out against censorship of song lyrics, he's cleaned up an
act whose flow of obscenities once left a trail of outrage. "I've
got a cruddy mouth. I was brought up around men who swore. I swear.
That's always been part of it. Not any more. I don't like to have my
picture taken smoking, I don't allow guys to bring alcohol on stage.
Even little things that used to not concern me in the least -- I
used to smoke while I sang. That's what rock 'n' roll was to me;
it's not that way anymore. And to play like it still is, I'd be a
big fool."

Even as he rejects corporate sponsorships of his tours, he's looking
for projects. There's a script he cowrote with Larry McMurtry ("The
Last Picture Show," "Terms of Endearment"), but the studios say it's
too downbeat and Mellencamp won't sing in a movie. Still, film is
something he wants to slip into.

"Movies can say a lot more and say it better. There's not all the
wrong connotations being put on the words, like 'Hold On to 16.' If
I'd shot that in a movie I could have made it very clear what I
wanted to say. Movies like 'Hud' mean a lot more to me now
than 'Street Fighting Man.' "

So Mellencamp 's all-American now; no longer self-centered, just
centered; living and working out of Bloomington, Ind. He's focused,
putting aside the music business at a certain time each day to be
with family and friends -- a strand of real life running through the
fantasy of rock 'n' roll.

He named his new daughter Justice, after one of the songs
on "Scarecrow" ("I wanted to name her Baby Doll, after Tennessee
Williams. I thought, well, they'll just call her babe"). The album,
and his concerts, open with a lullaby sung by his 85-year-old
grandmother. His father works for him, as does his first wife,
Priscilla. Priscilla is a close friend of his current wife, Vicki,
whom he married five years ago. Symmetry.

He's even at ease under the ever-present shadow of Springsteen. "I
can't help it," Mellencamp shrugs. "I'm not going to change. I'm
going to do what I'm doing and hope I get better at it. If that's my
fate, it's the same fate the Small Faces had with the Rolling
Stones, the same fate James Dean had with Marlon Brando.

"It ain't that bad. Don't act like it's the end of the world. I'm
doing fine."

REBEL WITH A CAUSE

By Timothy White

EVERYWHERE HE LOOKS, HE SEES THE high and haughty giving short shrift
to the humble American, and John Cougar Mellencamp is in a slow burn.

Within the space of two weeks, the rock singer has shuttled from the
stifling hearing rooms of the United States Senate to a simmering
back alley in the poorest black neighborhood in Savannah, Ga., and
the things he has seen have inflamed his notorious Hoosier ire. (It
is not without reason that the 35-year-old singer and songwriter has
awarded himself the sobriquet of ''Little Bastard.'') ''This street,
one of the last unpaved places in this thriving town, is a sad
comment on the local government,'' he states flatly, surveying the
dust-strewn shanty site for the video of ''Paper in Fire,'' the
ferocious first single from his new album, ''The Lonesome Jubilee,''
which has risen promptly to the top 10. ''Do you know a film crew
came through this area . . . and dressed a block of this lane to look
like a shambled Vietnamese village! Talk about lending insult to
injury.''

For his part, Mellencamp arrived the day before at this hoveled tract
between Price and Broad Streets, asking door-to-door permission of
the locals to depict in the video their neighborhood and its
inhabitants exactly as he found them. They could participate in any
manner they cared to, he explained, and would be paid generously for
their time and contributions.

Suspicious and frightened at first, but drawn to the rough-hewn
warmth of the singer, they discussed the offer among themselves for
several hours and ultimately - and enthusiastically - agreed.

So it is that on a cloudy and sultry day, filming is about to
commence. All told, there are perhaps 40 citizens, crew and band
personnel gathered around Mellencamp's small microphone
stand. ''O.K., everybody settle down and listen in!'' hollers the
puggish Mellencamp. ''There's no script,'' he assures with a
beguiling grin, ''so just be yourselves, enjoy each other's company
and have some damned fun.''

''I ain't left this ol' street for 40 years,'' remarks one elderly
gentleman, looking on in amusement as the music commences, ''and this
is the first pleasant surprise I seen on it in that whole time.''



MEET THE NEW JOHN COUGAR MELLENCAMP - the former enfant terrible of
heartland rock. This is the man who once stormed out of a
CBS ''Nightwatch'' interview because of what he considered baiting
questioning. This is the same man who, in 1982, threw an equipment-
clearing tantrum onstage in Ontario, Canada, when technical problems
became disruptive (he later gave a free concert by way of apology).

He did all this, however, when he was known as John Cougar - a name
foisted on him by his first manager. Today's Mellencamp (he restored
his Dutch-German surname in 1983) has retained his wildcat
moniker. ''I was well-known as a failure,'' he explains, ''so I
figured I'd fight to fix, rather than deny, my sorry reputation.'' It
is a fight that the singer appears to have won. Late last year,
Billboard magazine, the music-trade bible, announced the three top
pop artists of the year: glamorous Whitney Houston, sexy siren
Madonna - and craggy-faced John Cougar Mellencamp.

Last June 18, it was the new Mellencamp who appeared before the
Senate Subcommittee on Agricultural Production and Stabilization of
Prices. The singer is a member of Farm Aid, a movement based in
Cambridge, Mass., to help alleviate the economic crisis facing small
family farms throughout the nation. Once a year, since 1985, he and
the country singer Willie Nelson have headlined a Farm Aid benefit
concert. It was as representatives of Farm Aid that the two singers
were testifying in support of the Family Farm bill, sponsored by
Senator Tom Harkin, a Democrat of Iowa.

''I am an entertainer playing rock music,'' Mellencamp told the
committee in his intense, raspy drawl, ''and Willie asked me to be
involved in Farm Aid about two or three years ago. In Seymour, Ind.,
the town I grew up in, there used to be a John Deere dealership - it
is no longer there. . . . When I am out on tour and I am talking to
people, they are afraid. Their vision of the future is: What is going
to happen to my children in 20 years when, all of a sudden, three
farmers are farming the State of Indiana and they also own all the
food-processing plants!''

''It seems funny and peculiar,'' he continued, ''that, after my shows
and after Willie's shows, people come up to us for advice. It is
because they have got nobody to turn to.''

As Mellencamp spoke, there was a steady exodus of those against
Harkin's Family Farm bill. Shortly before the singer began speaking,
Senator Rudy Boschwitz, a Republican of Minnesota, leader of the farm
bill's opponents, had taken the floor to inform Mellencamp and
Nelson: ''I thought I was going to come here and listen to Willie
Nelson and his friend Mellencamp sing. Instead, I am listening to the
Senator from Iowa, whose song I have heard before.''

''You know,'' whispered Mellencamp into Willie Nelson's ear, ''this
kind of behavior really brings out the juvenile in me.'' But the
Little Bastard held his temper.

It is this new self-discipline and focused fire that have enabled
Mellencamp to reclaim rock - which has in recent years become largely
frivolous - as a vehicle for social commentary. Rock-and-roll is a
billion-dollar industry, so such a move by a singer of Mellencamp's
status is nothing if not provocative. Politically, the songwriter is
a left-of-center populist with no love for what he views as the
current ''monolithic forces'' of big business. ''They're willing to
exploit John Doe,'' he says, ''and let America become a third-world
country economically if it benefits them.''

The current rock scene has been largely dominated by the working-
class fervor of Bruce Springsteen, whose showmanship and
compositional splendor have been offset by an ambiguous thematic
voice and an equally enigmatic personality. A Springsteen hit such
as ''Born in the U.S.A.'' greets the ears like the sound of Caesar
entering Rome, yet its lyrics are actually the lament of a Vietnam
veteran who sees himself as a beaten dog. Springsteen is a
melodramatist whose personality is deliberately disguised by his
theatrics. He carefully restricts contact with the public and is
rarely seen offstage. Mellencamp, on the other hand, is an open book,
with no larger-than-life bravura -even though the deeply personal
side to his music has been little known. Springsteen's flamboyant
sound is all flesh, but Mellencamp's more accessible rock is all bone.

Mellencamp has gained stature as a scrappy musical spokesman who
doesn't broadcast mixed signals or an underlying message of defeat.
Like Springsteen, he declines to permit his defiant brand of rock to
be used for car commercials or ketchup ads. He was particularly
pungent when aides of President Reagan considered the use of ''Pink
Houses'' - Mellencamp's paean to the simple economic hopes of the
heartland - as a campaign song for the President's 1984 re-election
drive.

''I made it clear from day one that he just had to forget it,''
Mellencamp said at the time. ''I couldn't bear gettin' involved that
way with any politician, least of all Reagan, and corrupt what is
essentially a basic, humble dream of contentment he can't even
understand.''

Mellencamp himself understands that successful rock stars have
customarily retreated from controversy as their fortunes have risen.
Yet the songwriter is taking a bolder approach. In ''The Lonesome
Jubilee,'' he says, ''I want to create songs that include a lot of
ordinary people, that raise their self-esteem.'' This album, his
eighth, is his most ambitious attempt ''to report on my boomer
generation's bruised optimism,'' as he puts it. ''The title refers to
ordinary victories, the private ones that are usually very solitary.
In the past, I've tried to sing about overlooked Americans. On the
new album, I'm trying to speak for them.''



MELLENCAMP'S previous three albums of grass roots social commentary -
''American Fool,'' ''Uh-Huh,'' ''Scarecrow'' - each sold a solid
three million copies. The singer himself believes that their appeal
lies in his merging of two major influences -James Brown and the
Rolling Stones - plus a folkish enthusiasm all his own.

In ''Lonesome Jubilee,'' which has won immediate critical acclaim for
its artful instrumentation and searing imagery, Mellencamp takes
heartland rock one step further. He augments the larger intent of
this album with a new musical vocabulary. At his behest, his eight-
member band has expanded its flinty hard-rock approach by employing
such traditionally rustic instruments as fiddle, hammered dulcimer,
autoharp, accordion, banjo, mandolin and lap steel guitar.

''With John's music, you work on the emotional essentials,'' says
Larry Crane, Mellencamp's guitarist and right-hand musical confidant
for 20 uninterrupted years. ''He always insists on an authentic band
sound when he's recording, which has become unusual in this time of
endless studio gadgetry. He's also not willing to sacrifice that band
feel for the sake of an idea, or vice versa, so he makes it our
responsibility to keep up.''

Crane practiced tirelessly on a lap steel guitar. Kenny Aronoff, a
classically trained percussionist, was dispatched to consult with
Malcolm Daglish, the noted hammered dulcimer expert, to tackle that
vintage instrument. Mike Wanchic was urged to master the dobro.

''Some critics have said these instruments on 'Jubilee' have an
Appalachian flavor, but that's wrong,'' says Crane. ''Appalachian
music, as John and I both know, is a certain cross between folk and
bluegrass. What John said he wanted was a 'real spooky sort of gypsy
rock,' and he used trial and error with us to find it.''

Lyrically, the bulk of ''The Lonesome Jubilee'' seems an extension of
the underdog themes of Mellencamp's preceding album, ''Scarecrow.''
Titles such as ''Hard Times for an Honest Man,'' ''Down and Out in
Paradise,'' ''We Are the People'' and ''The Real Life'' reflect a
continuing interest in America's troubled countryside. However, the
heavily atmospheric musical settings have an eerie vividness that
makes them more than topical.

As with ''Scarecrow,'' whose association with Farm Aid encouraged
oversimplified interpretations, ''The Lonesome Jubilee'' also
threatens to be understood only on a superficial level. Mellencamp
readily concedes that ''Scarecrow'' was a ''double-barreled
shotgun.'' ''Farm Aid,'' he says, ''made it easy for people to deal
with the title track poetically, romantically, but they often didn't
hear the personal shots fired on the record's other 10 songs.''

''See,'' he adds bluntly, ''a lot of the time I write in the third
person, but I'm mostly describing my own ordeals. When those
unsettled struggles prey on your mind, you become haunted. To get
free, you must defeat your ghosts.''

In that light, ''Paper in Fire,'' the first hit single from ''The
Lonesome Jubilee,'' takes on an ominous immediacy:

There is a good life
Right across this green field
And each generation
Stares at it from afar
But we keep no check
On our appetites
So the green fields turn to brown
Like paper in fire.
(Copyright 1987 Riva Music Inc.)

Is Mellencamp perhaps singing about his own past?

''Let me put it this way,'' he murmurs, seated on the brick stoop
outside his beachside summer house, less than an hour's drive from
downtown Savannah. ''Remember that sweet old guy in the alley who
said he hadn't been out of there in 40 years? Well, he took me aside
to tell me he'd also been drunk for most of those 40 years. Because
if you come from that place, people mark you for life, won't hire
you, want no part of you. That's a lot of pain to surmount all by
yourself.

''In my corner of the world, I've experienced those attitudes, and
the rage they create. 'The Lonesome Jubilee,' like 'Scarecrow' and
the rest of my best stuff, is about me and my family tree grappling
against both the world and our own inner goddamned whirlwind.''



AT BIRTH, ON OCT. 7, 1951, John J. Mellencamp was found to have a
potentially crippling defect of the spinal vertebrae known as spina
bifida. A corrective operation was a success, but Mrs. Mellencamp
would later wonder if the trauma had a lingering effect on her
cantankerous offspring.

Not that the Mellencamps were known for their benign dispositions.
The former Marilyn Joyce Lowe, a runner-up in the 1946 Miss Indiana
pageant, first encountered her handsome brawler of a husband, Richard
Mellencamp, during a hectic Saturday afternoon in the late 1940's.

''Dad knocked Mom over as she was walking out of a store,'' says the
singer with a wide grin. ''He and his big brother Joe were running
from the cops after pummeling four guys in retaliation for a whupping
my father had gotten earlier. The police caught . . . Joe, but Dad
pitched Mom on her butt and kept on going. It was love at first
sideswipe.''

And it was of a piece with the temperamental exploits of John
Mellencamp's elders. ''I've often wondered where the family got its
anger from,'' he says. ''I can tell you that, for as far back as
anyone can care to remember, there has been a rigid petty small-town
class system in Seymour.'' Seymour, Ind., has long been a tough
agricultural town with some light industry. It was in the outlying
farmland that Mellencamp's great-great-grandfather, Johann Heinrich
Mollenkamp, a German-Dutch peasant farmer from Germany, settled in
1851.

In the town's social hierarchy, at the top ''were the people who made
their money during the Industrial Revolution,'' continues
Mellencamp. ''In the middle were the sometimes poorly educated wage
earners, and at the bottom were the folks in shacks. The elite didn't
like any meddling with this pecking order.

''My Grandpa only knew one solution to any belittlement or perceived
slight - a fight. A guy who comes on macho is probably the most
vulnerable person in the world, and he was. After the sudden death of
his father, the family farm had to be sold, and Grandpa was forced to
quit school in the third grade to make his way as a carpenter. He was
barely literate, couldn't speak English well, and felt deeply
ashamed. Grandpa went to register to vote as a young man and told the
clerk, 'I'm Harry Perry Mellencamp.' She laughed, poked fun at his
name, and he walked out. He never voted in his life, due to that
mortifying incident.''

''We were always hearing talk that 'You low-class Mellencamps will
never amount to anything,' so from the instant he was able to
swagger, Uncle Joe did,'' says Mellencamp. The 6-foot-2 Joe became a
star running back at Seymour High and Indiana University, and he
built up a successful concrete and construction business. Women and
brawling were Uncle Joe's undoing.

''Joe married, but he . . . was never faithful to his wife,'' the
singer continues. ''In 1967, he got so bored he was briefly involved
with the John Birch Society. That woke me up to the ugliness of his
overall outlook.''

Meanwhile, Joe's younger brother Richard - an electrician's
assistant - was crafting his own future, moving from contracting jobs
to Robbins Electric, a company with customers as diverse as Disney
World and the nuclear-power industry. His bullish ambition served him
well, but he could not buck Seymour's rigid hierarchy.

''My Dad went into the Cadillac dealership to buy his first nice car,
and the salesman refused to wait on him,'' says Mellencamp. ''Their
attitude was 'You Mellencamps can't afford these.' '' Undeterred, the
senior Mellencamp moved his wife and five children to nearby Rockford.

Richard Mellencamp, recalls his son, was ''a complete tyrant.'' ''Dad
and I would have fist fights, and then we stopped communicating
altogether.'' At 14, John Mellencamp was a beer-swilling truant. The
next forbidden plunge was into rock-and-roll, ''particularly the
popular music of blacks, which -since the region still had signs
reading 'Black man, don't let the sun set on you here' - was
something my friends and I calculated that the right people would
hate. I was raised with a near-oblivious disregard for racial
differences, but when I learned the town elite frowned on these
viewpoints I embraced them all the more.''

His first record purchase was Chubby Checker's 1960 hit ''The
Twist,'' but at 15 John Mellencamp found grittier fare. He and Fred
Booker, a 17-year-old from one of Seymour's 28 black households,
formed a boisterous eight-man band called Crepe Soul. As 1960's teen
culture evolved from the Beatles and rhythm-and-blues to acid rock
and the sexual revolution, John discovered dizzying new avenues for
parental aggravation. ''A narcotics agent came to school and busted
my friends and me for amphetamines - we'd been high for the whole
week when the principal got suspicious.''

Back home, Richard Mellencamp administered the ritual drubbing, then
stripped his delinquent charge of his long tresses and hippie mufti.
John retaliated by parading around the neighborhood with a hand-
lettered sign around his neck that read: ''I am the product of my
father!''

When he was 18, John's 21-year-old girlfriend, Priscilla Esterline,
became pregnant. Indiana law did not permit an 18-year-old to get
married without parental consent, so the couple eloped to Kentucky.
John enrolled at Indiana's Vincennes University, a two-year
institution willing to wink at his D average. After commencement, he
found employment installing equipment for Indiana Bell, but was
discharged after he accidentally disconnected all the phone service
in Freetown, Ind. The failed lineman returned to his first passion:
music. His early albums, Mellencamp recalls, were full of ''selfish,
reckless boy-wants-girl stuff, songs I meant then but surely wouldn't
write now.''

In 1976, the singer allowed his manager at the time to recast him as
John Cougar - a Midwestern clone of the glittering pop surrealist
David Bowie. The comparison was ludicrous. Four lean years later,
John was in Los Angeles cutting his last-ditch LP ''Nothin' Matters
and What if It Did,'' when reports trickled in from Australia
that ''I Need a Lover,'' an earlier single of his, had gone No. 1
Down Under. Shortly thereafter, the same single went top 30 in the
United States.

Meanwhile, John had fallen in love with Victoria Lynn Granucci,
daughter of a veteran Hollywood stuntman. He was hurriedly divorced
from his first wife, and two months after he and his new love were
married he became the father of a daughter, Teddi Jo Mellencamp.

By the close of 1983, Mellencamp was a family man living with his
wife and two daughters in Bloomington, Ind. He was also one of
America's most successful rock stars. But life remained unsettled. He
was changing management again, searching wearily for a business plan
to solidify his belated success. What was worse, his supposedly
indestructible grandfather - the man he always turned to when he had
a problem - was succumbing to lung cancer. ''Just before his death,''
the singer remembers, ''he called everybody into his bedroom, and
although he wasn't a religious person he said, 'You know, I'm having
a real bad beating of a time with the Devil.' He was saying that the
Devil wouldn't let him say a prayer to save himself. He'd built up
this 'I am a rock' pose and where had it gotten him? It stopped me
cold to see my Grandpa so scared. Six hours later, he was gone.''

A BLEAK EARLY-morning breeze penetrates the stand of trees
surrounding John Mellencamp's split-level home in Bloomington
backcountry. The summer is spent, and the family is back to its
normal routine. The kids fret over homework, and Vicky Mellencamp
prepares for a board meeting at the area's progressive primary
school. John Mellencamp sits in the tiny kitchen that is his lair.

''Let's face it, you are your parents, whether any of us like it or
not,'' he says. ''I believe the personal history I address
on 'Scarecrow' and 'The Lonesome Jubilee' is the same. I think it's
tragic when families don't grow up, when they don't get past
adolescence.''

Mellencamp wrote a lot of songs over the summers of 1983-85, good-
time material with titles such as ''Smart Guys'' and ''The Carolina
Shag,'' but none of it found its way onto the album that
became ''Scarecrow.'' Instead, he began to sift through his
grandfather's legacy, wondering what it would take to call a halt to
the Mellencamps' undeclared war within themselves.

''My Dad changed completely when we buried Grandpa, went from being a
screaming dictator to the nicest person you ever met, and he
apologized,'' says the singer, his voice unsteady, ''with his whole
heart for the way he'd behaved. Even Uncle Joe grew up at the age of
54, and became the kindest soul you could imagine.'' Richard
Mellencamp left his job as the executive vice president of Robbins
Electric to become his son's financial manager.

Thinking of his troubled family and his own untempered nature, John
Mellencamp wrote a song for ''Scarecrow'' titled ''The Face of the
Nation,'' with the stark refrain: ''You know babe I'm gonna keep on
tryin'/ To put things right/ If only for me and you/ Cause the devil
sleeps tonight.''

Just as ''Scarecrow'' was haunted by the specter of his grandfather,
so ''The Lonesome Jubilee'' is shadowed by the death last year of his
Uncle Joe. '' 'Paper in Fire' is about Joe and the family's ingrained
anger,'' says the songwriter. ''I figure rock-and-roll's a far better
way to blow off steam.''

''Paper in Fire'' is the sound of a soul in desperate flight, running
either from or toward its destiny. The choir of screaming fiddle,
banjo and squeezebox creates a chilling aura of suspense -but leaves
the conclusion to one's imagination.

''I'm more content and happy with myself than I've been in the last
two decades,'' says Mellencamp, his soft tone slowly rising, ''even
though I sometimes babble stuff that I regret, or wrestle with an
impulse to tell off the U.S. Senate.''

Mellencamp rises to prepare for a band rehearsal, then pauses.

''You know, my smallest girl was born two summers ago in Bloomington
Hospital. Vicky had gotten awful sick with chicken pox and the
doctors said the illness might result in deformity of the fetus. We
were so terrified - maybe the way my parents were with my spinal
problems at birth -that we never had time to think up a damned name
for the child. As the doctor began the delivery, we decided that if
there was any justice in the world the baby would be healthy.

''So now,'' he says, smiling faintly, ''as I think about family
truths and consequences with 'The Lonesome Jubilee,' I try to remind
myself that there really is a little justice in this world.''

Your tip worked and they refunded my early purchase and let me get the better seats. It worked out great. Thank you so much for all your help. I really appreciate it.

When I clicked the fan club premium ticket link, it took me to a page where I could buy pit seats for $125 -- they are the best and there was no $250 option. I already bought VIP tickets because it said that pit seats were not available, so now I could get the best seats in the house for the same price but I've already purchased VIP seats. I'm stuck.  

That confuses the heck out of me!

If you entered a password you should have ended up (using either link) for the pre-sale with top price of $125. We initially did not have a way to link to the Premium Packages at $250 but about 10 minutes into the presale we added that link:
http://ev6.evenue.net/cgi-bin/ncommerce3/SEGetEventList?groupCode=FOX06NOV10VIP&linkID=metro

For the first 10 minutes of the presale our link was ONLY to the presale with $125 tickets available.

I assume you give them a call and see if you can drop your Premium Tickets for the standard $125. Their purchase system wasn't nearly as simple and clear as Ticketmaster's.

Charge-By-Phone 314-534-1111 • 800-293-5949

When I clicked the fan club premium ticket link, it took me to a page where I could buy pit seats for $125 -- they are the best and there was no $250 option. I already bought VIP tickets because it said that pit seats were not available, so now I could get the best seats in the house for the same price but I've already purchased VIP seats. I'm stuck.  

I decided against the premium package and now it's letting you buy them for $125 instead of $250. What gives?

St. Louis not working.

Please refresh Mellencamp.com TOUR page and try the new links we posted.

http://www.mellencamp.com/tourarchive.html?n_id=77
PRE-SALE TICKET PURCHASES CLICK HERE
Please note St. Louis has seating sections called VIP that are priced at $125 and $92.50. Those are NOT our Premium Ticket Packages, those sections DO NOT include any of the merchandise of our Premium Ticket Packages.


PREMIUM TICKET PACKAGE PURCHASES CLICK HERE

Please re-read the above. The Fox Theater has seating sections TITLED VIP. I am trying to be clear, those sections ARE NOT OUR PREMIUM PACKAGE TICKETS. They are regularly priced.

ONLY THE $250 priced tickets on here are the Premium Package Tickets.
http://ev6.evenue.net/cgi-bin/ncommerce3/SEGetEventList?groupCode=FOX06NOV10VIP&linkID=metro

I decided against the premium package and now it's letting you buy them for $125 instead of $250. What gives?

St. Louis not working.

Please refresh Mellencamp.com TOUR page and try the new links we posted.

http://www.mellencamp.com/tourarchive.html?n_id=77
PRE-SALE TICKET PURCHASES CLICK HERE
Please note St. Louis has seating sections called VIP that are priced at $125 and $92.50. Those are NOT our Premium Ticket Packages, those sections DO NOT include any of the merchandise of our Premium Ticket Packages.


PREMIUM TICKET PACKAGE PURCHASES CLICK HERE

John Mellencamp does it his way on Trouble No More, his laid-back tribute to some great American music. There are some rules everyone knows. Never make the last out at third. Never disrespect the flag. And when recording an album of classic Americana, keep things simple and don't try to recreate the original arrangements. That John Mellencamp understands and endorses that last dictum, at least, is clear from his new album, Trouble No More (Columbia), a beautifully played and recorded, largely acoustic collection of Delta and Chicago blues, folk, old-time country, pop, R&B and standard tunes. Eclecticism has never sounded so seamless, thanks to Mellencamp's laid-back approach and the stellar guitar work of Andy York, who channels the spirit of the original tunes through his own instrumental personality.

Die-hard Mellencamp fans certainly will accept John singing songs written byor associated with the likes of Robert Johnson, Son House, Hoagy Carmichael, Skeeter Davis and the Carter Family. Unfortunately,tightly formatted album rock stations probably won't give this effort the exposure it deserves. John Mellencamp knows this, as it was he who, back in the days when "Cougar" was still his middle name, acknowledged, "I fight authority, authority always wins."

GUITAR WORLD ACOUSTIC Why did you decide to do this project of other people's songs?

JOHN MELLENCAMP After a good friend of mine, [longtime Billboard editor] Tim White died, I took part in a couple of benefit shows for his family. One of the songs I performed was Robert Johnson's "Stones in my Passway," and people said to me, "Hey, you ought to do a whole album of this kind of material." And I thought, Yeah,that'd be great, but record companies don't usually like you to do that stuff because they have to look at publishing and all that kind of crap. Then, although I had left Sony, [Sony Music U.S. president] Don lenner called me up and said, "Hey, man, why don't you make a record of this stuff?" That was an opportunity I couldn't say no to.

GWA The album is so eclectic. It's not just blues or rock and roll oldies or country songs you cover a very wide range of styles.

MELLENCAMP You could think you know everything about music history, but once you jump into it you find out you don't know much at all. Because the more you dig,the more of it there is. Doing research and finding these songs turned out to be a much tougher job than it would have been to just write-new ones. But it was awfully interesting.

GWA The key person in your band on this album is clearly the guitarist, Andy York. How did you work out the material together?

MELLENCAMP When I was making my last record, [2001's] Cuttin' Heads, Andy and I started listening exclusively to artists like Hank Williams and Robert Johnson. It was not so much to copy them, but to figure out how they were able to sound so real and natural, to be so plainspoken on their records. I said to Andy, "Man, youhave to listen to this Robert Johnson stuff, because white people have really destroyed the blues over the years. They have boiled it down to 'dunta-dunta-dunta-dunta' you know, that sixteen bar blues boogie." I really hate the blues when it's performed that way, and I'm as guilty as anyone else for doing it. The parts are always the same, the riffs are always the same, and I have been hearing it my whole life. Then you go back to the origins of it and realize they're not doing that at all. It's happening in there somewhere, but that's not really what they're doing. Johnson played ahead of the beat, behind the beat,and figuring out how he fucking did that, not to mention his fingerpicking and histunings, was just so interesting.

GWA So you and Andy actually took it apartand put it back together again.

MELLENCAMP We disassembled it, and a lot of the other older stuff we later recorded, to figure out why it works.

GWA Judging from the album, you and Andy did a great "disassembling" job. You managed to capture the spirit of the old songswithout trying to play them note-for-note.

MELLENCAMP Andy, of course, was the realdisciple. He's just like a sponge; he just soaks this stuff up. He's the guitar player.

GWA You also play guitar on many of the tunes. How did you work out your backup parts?

MELLENCAMP Oh, you know me, I did the same thing I always do. I just bang around on the acoustic guitar. Generally, anything that sounds pretty sloppy is me.

GWA What guitar did you use on the songs?

MELLENCAMP The same one I always have the Gibson Dove I've used since I started making records. I also played a little 3/4-size Martin built in 1951.

GWA How did you record them?

MELLENCAMP I just put my mic in front of 'em.

GWA I understand that the entire recording process was low-tech.

MELLENCAMP We used a 16-track machine;nothing there had a transistor anywhere near it. If we had taken a photo of the drum setup we had only three old RCA rhythm mikes on the whole drum kit and sent it to a modern recording magazine, they probably would've laughed at us.

GWA Along with your versions of relatively familiar blues tunes like "Stones in my Passway" and Son House's "Death Letter Blues," and the traditional country song "Johnny Hart," you covered some fairly obscure, or at least unusual, material. For instance, your take on the old Hoagy Carmichael song, "Baltimore Oriole." You're not known for your interpretations of standards.

MELLENCAMP Well, I live in Bloomington, Indiana, and so did Hoagy Carmichael.When I found that song, I thought, "Wow." The first time I listened to his version I didn't get it because the arrangement was very jazzy, but then on second listening I just fell in love with the song. And Andy and I went from there.

GWA Where did you find "Diamond Joe"?

MELLENCAMP That's one of those field recordings made in a prison by Alan and John Lomax for the Library of Congress that wererecently reissued [on Deep River of Song: Mississippi Saints and Sinners (Rounder) It was sung by a prisoner, along with another guy who claps his hands and screams along in the background. Our version is a little different [laughs].

GWA Then there's "The End of the World,"which Skeeter Davis sang in a real torchy style back in 1963. You guys turned that into something that sounds a little like a British Invasion tune.

MELLENCAMP I have to give a lot of credit toAndy, whose acoustic guitar playing madethat song work. The arrangement on the original record was precious, very beautifully done by Chet Atkins. When we started messing with it, we started trying to play it preciously too. I remember just stopping and saying, "Guys, we can't do this song ifwe are going to play it this way. We've got todo it more rhythmically and more in arock/folk vein."

CWA There's that "folk process." You've transformed it into something that is more you.

MELLENCAMP That was the goal of the whole project. I don't know if we succeeded with every song, but we tried to make each one our own song, as if I had walked in the studio, wrote them and said, "Let's do it." When I was a kid I was so surprised to find out that Cream hadn't written "Crossroads." I discovered Robert Johnson from that record. And the same thing happened when the Stones did "Love in Vain." I didn't know that was a Robert Johnson song it sounded like the Rolling Stones to me. So, because I'd seen other people do it, I knew that it was possible to take these songs and make them our own.

GWA You did write entirely new lyrics for thesong "To Washington," which I believe is based on "White House Blues," recorded in the mid 1920's by the country string band Charlie Poole & the North Carolina Ramblers.

MELLENCAMP Yeah, although the song actually goes back at least to 1908. Everybodywho's done this song took credit for it, andI did the same. That was the "tradition" of the song to take it and steal it.

GWA Musically, your arrangement is based on the traditional version. But where the original is about the assassination of President William McKinley, your lyrics have to do with the global economy, the 2000 presidential election, oil and the war in Iraq. It works beautifully.

MELLENCAMP People consider it an un-American song, and this shocks me. I don't think it was extremely mean or judgmental. The only judgment is that the economy is worse since Bush came in, and that isn't really even a judgment; it's just fact.

GWA Thirty years ago the song might've gotten some solid airplay. Not today.

MELLENCAMP With the radio stations being the way they are now, corporately owned and big business, they can't afford to offend anybody. If you remember, after 9/11 Clear Channel actually banned some of my songs, in particular one I wrote in 1983 called "Crumblin' Down," which had the line,"when the walls come crumblin' down." They thought it might be offensive. Ând I thought, "That's a stretch, isn't it?"

I think "Home on the Range" was mis-titled -- they meant "Old Rugged Cross." Also, from the sound of things, "Save Some Time to Dream" was played live with the band for the first time ever. Would love to hear that. 

“I got dreams, and they’re bigger than this…”
Posted by Amanda Faith Moore On August - 9 - 2010

    “I got dreams
    And they’re bigger than this”
    - The West End-

To most people the “homeless” are nothing more than vague faces of poverty reflected in the mirror of a society afraid to even look, much less help.

Over a career spanning 25 albums John Mellencamp has written about who he is. Then, more importantly, John Mellencamp has always walked his talk. This is called integrity.

Thrust into superstar status by the music machine in the 80’s, he got a taste of the soulless part of the music business. So he said “Whoa, screw that! That’s not who I am, ‘Cougar’ out!”

Rejecting this money-making machine, his walk tells us he cares more about people than money.  He has always worked for those without a voice. Everyone matters! That’s why John did this interview.

There were no conditions for this interview, nor the pubic service announcements for 1Matters and World Homeless Day, October 10th. None. He literally said, “I will do what ever you need.” Complete unconditional trust.

Why here instead of the mainstream press which would have garnered much more publicity? His single and absolute intent here is to talk to those in the middle of the struggle directly. His hope is vendors of street papers worldwide, having an exclusive interview no one else has, will achieve financial and domestic autonomy.

His hope is each one of the 640,000 people on the streets of the United States and in its shelters on any given night never give up. He hopes they do whatever hard work necessary to overcome any and all obstacles between themselves and domestic autonomy.

His hope is all reading this interview will support your local street paper with your time and dollars.  If there are none in your city, you can direct your support to the North American Street Newspaper Association (NASNA). Your support today allows us, those currently and formerly on the streets, to encourage each other and share the hope of our successes in one collective voice. 

These are his hopes.

Why?

Because every 1Matters.

    “Oh, but ain’t that America for you and me;
    Ain’t that America, somethin’ to see, baby;
    Ain’t that America, home of the free…
    Little pink houses for you and me.”
    - Little Pink Houses –

Ken Leslie: On behalf of 1Matters, Toledo Streetsand the street paper movement, and everyone who has lost domestic or financial autonomy in our country, thank you for your time today.

We first met two years ago or so when you made an un-promoted stop at the annual Tent City, Project Homeless Connect in Toledo. You just wanted them to know they matter. Bob Merlis (Mellencamp’s publicist) told me you were touched by the experience. How so?
John Mellencamp: When you see what progress can produce, and also what progress can discard, it makes a feller wonder if some of the progress, let me put it this way, calling it progress does not make it right.
In this country right now there is no middle class, no place for middle class. You are either really rich or you are really down and out. It’s hard times in this country right now.

KL: You brought your wife Elaine and son Speck with you to Tent City. When you had your private talk with some of the unhoused, at first Speck stood back, but by the end of your conversation he was in the circle listening to every word. Compassion is a pretty cool thing for a father to pass on to a son. Did he share his thoughts on the experience before and after?
JM: I don’t remember exactly, but I will tell you he is a very activist type of kid. I found that out when he was pretty young. He did some research at school on some chocolate company and he wrote them a letter and it said, “You cheapskates, why don’t you hire and why don’t you pay fair, ya so-and-so.” And he almost got me into trouble last year, too.

KL: How so?
JM:  He had a petition on Facebook to try to get me to stop smoking. He had, I think, about a half a million people sign up and he had to get a million. The whole conversation was just at Thanksgiving last year. We had completed our Thanksgiving dinner and I lit up a cigarette at the table. He looked at me and he went like, “Really, Dad?” And I said, “What do you mean, ‘Really Dad’, I smoke all the time?” And he said, “Yeah but it’s Thanksgiving, I’m not done eating.” I said “OK, I’ll go somewhere else; it’s a big house.” So I went into another room.
 A couple hours later he walks up and said, ”Hey Dad, if I get a million people to sign up on Facebook would you stop smoking?” And I said, “Yeah, go ahead.” That was the end of the conversation.
By the time the thing had started, ya know, a couple weeks into it, Larry King wanted him to come on, Good Morning America asked him, and of course I wouldn’t let him go on anywhere. First of all, I don’t want him talking about my bad habits; and second of all, ya know, I knew he’d reach his mark.

KL: And then what?
JM: And then I’d have to stop smoking.

KL: Would ya? Have you tried? How many times have you tried?
JM: Listen, I have no desire to stop, so there’s no reason to even have that conversation. If I would have wanted to stop smoking I would have years go.

KL: Took me like 32 times of quittin’ to finally do it.
JM: Yeah, well, you wanted to stop. I’m confirmed.

KL:  And your other son Hud?
JM:  He’s 16 years old and he fights tomorrow night.

KL: Boxer or Extreme?
JM: Boxer. He holds five state championships right now. He just got back from Annapolis. They want him to be a boxer for them and he went up and trained for two weeks.

KL: Was that nerve wracking to see him box?
JM: No, I know how much Hud trains, he’s ready to fight. His record is 20-2. He’s a bad-ass, I can tell ya that.

KL: Did you ever box?
JM: No, I could fight in the street, but this is a sport to him, he’s very good at it. I’m proud of them both.

KL: When you were on stage at Tent City, you spontaneously decided to invite everybody there to your concert, all of the unhoused people.
JM:  Right.

KL: 60 – 70 people went and I understand you talked to them from the stage about hope. As you know, one of the guests came back from the show and said “Ken, John talked to us from the stage – I guess I really do matter.” That was the founding moment of 1Matters and actually that’s why we’re here today. Your whole career, you’ve had the compassion for and worked for those with little or no voice. What is the root of that compassion in John Mellencamp, where does it come from? Was there something in your childhood maybe that started this feeling of compassion?
JM: Well for me, it started with race. I was in a band when I was 13-14 years old and it was the mid-60’s and it was a racially mixed band. I was the lead singer and this black kid was a singer he was a couple years older than me, really good. We’d play every weekend at fraternities and in hotels and stuff like that. It was a soul band. And I saw the way people treated him. Ya know, it was like wow, really? Wait a minute, you loved him on stage, but now he’s gotta go wait outside? And so I think that made quite an impression on me as a young guy.

    “An all white jury hides the executioner’s face
    See how we are, me and you?
    …Oh, oh, oh Jena,
    Take your nooses down”
    - Jena -

KL: How’d you respond?
JM: Well, there were times that there were fist fights. I remember in a little town in Indiana there was a fist fight in between one of our breaks because of his race. So, ya know.

KL: And since then you’ve carried on standing up for farmers, for the people, I remember Jena, you stuck up for people there and actually put a lot of your work and effort into that.
JM:  Well I’m Sisyphus myself; I’m always the guy who’s rolling the rock up the hill. Ya know, and every time I get too close to the top I either let it roll back down on purpose or it just rolls back, catches on fire and rolls down at someone. So I know what it’s like to have to work at something. My struggle is obviously different than some folks’ struggle, but, nevertheless, we all have our problems.

KL: How would you define your struggle?
JM: Um, well I’ll answer it like this:  A man writes to what he strives to be, not what he is.

    “Out there somewhere
    You know there’s gotta be a place
    Where a man can live
    With a smile on his face
    And every day something
    New begins.”
    - The West End -

 KL: The crucible that caused me to get involved in this movement in 1990 was a result of performing in comedy clubs all across the country in the late 80’s and seeing more and more people on the streets. It was the statistic that 60% of them were families with children that forced me to act and do something. For you, with Farm Aid, tell me about that one moment that caused you to be a part 25 years ago and to maintain it even today.
JM: I had written a song with a friend of mine called Rain on the Scarecrow and I had just made an album about what I had seen. Ya know, what prosperity had done to the small towns. How they had leveled them out and devastated small town America. So we made this record called Scarecrow and then when Willie called, there was like, it took me about a second to decide I wanted to be a part of Farm Aid. When Willie called up, he had like a vague notion of what Farm Aid was gonna be. It was no more than just a vague notion and we really had no idea it was gonna last. We have our 25th anniversary coming up October 2nd.

    Well there’s ninety-seven crosses planted in the courthouse yard—
    Ninety-seven families who lost ninety-seven farms.
    I think about my grandpa and my neighbors and my name,
    And some nights I feel like dyin’, like that scarecrow in the rain.”
    - Rain on the Scarecrow -

KL: What was Willie’s notion?
JM: Ah he didn’t really have much of a notion, it was a bunch of maybe’s and guesses and I don’t know’s, ya know.

KL: Did that start because of Bob Dylan’s comment at Live Aid?
JM: Ah, that’s what he said, you know, that Bob had said something about, you know, that we should try to take care of our own people. I think that inspired Willie.

    “Save some time to dream,
    Save some time for yourself;
    Don’t let your time slip away
    Or be stolen by somebody else.”
    - Save Some Time to Dream -

KL: One of the things that I’ve always admired about you is your courage in social justice. You take a huge pile of truth, dump it in front of them and say, “Smell this.”  Based on your lifetime of fighting for the truth, has your position changed in the sense that does authority always win?
JM: Oh, I’m a hypocrite, there’s no question about it. Don’t you know a hypocrite when ya see one? You’re looking right at him? Ah yeah, I’m in the wind all the time because ya have to be in the wind all the time. If you’re steadfast on your commitments… I have a new song, it’s called “Save Some Time to Dream”, and I address that and it says always keep your mind open and always question your faith. You can’t just say that this is my position and this is my position for life because, ya know, you discover new information, you see, you grow up. You see things through different eyes. So, you know, I suppose that in the world’s eyes, I’m a hypocrite because I’ll say one thing and do another, but I said one thing 25 years ago and being judged for an action that I did today. So, ya know, things change, man.

KL: How so? I hear more respect for you and your work in fighting authority and I see you winning over time in the things you’re taking on. Is that an illusion?
JM: I guess that’s an illusion, ‘cause I don’t feel that way.

KL: How do you feel?
JM: I feel like you’re dammed if ya do and damned if you don’t – so to hell with it. That’s what I feel about it.

KL: Just go with your spirit then.
JM:  Yeah.

KL: In the past few years there have been people talking about drafting you to become an authority, to get you involved with politics. I see you as too honest for that.
JM: Oh, I couldn’t do that at all. My “c*ck-s*ckers” and “mother-f*ckers” would probably not fly very well in conversation in the congress, ya know.

KL: I could see you on the floor: Your honorable son-of-a-bitch…
JM: “Ya’ lying c*ck-sucker.” Yeah, I don’t think it would go very good.

KL: Which is a real good segue to…
JM: Besides, why was that job open? Cause the guy that was doing it couldn’t stand it any more. He wanted to quit because the hypocrisy was too great for him so he said, “I can’t do this anymore.” Not me.

    “You know the devil,
    He thinks he’s got me.
    But he ain’t got me…
    …… No.”
    - Right Behind Me -

KL: You’ve always fought convention in your work, your life, and your music. And “No Better Than This” is the perfect example of busting convention to shreds. It’s so not the McMusic they play on the McRadio today. This is a tasty CD. What was your inspiration for the whole premise?
JM: Well, I knew I was gonna go on tour, Bob [Dylan] and I did a tour last summer and I knew I was gonna come close to all these places. It was kind of a leisurely tour, so I thought, well hell, at the time, let’s make the most out of this – we’re gonna be in these places and that was just how it started. And then I wrote the songs and I wrote all those songs in about in about 10-15 days, I don’t’ know. It was just I’d get up every morning and I’d write. I’d write two or three songs in a day and I let the songs write themselves, as opposed to sometimes when you write songs you try to steer them a way that you would like them to go. But these songs, I just, they kind of wrote themselves really, I just let them go wherever they wanted to go and that’s how they ended up.

KL: What about the idea of the recording process, recorded in Mono?
JM:  ell, of course, it was a rebellious act of, ya know. There is a song on the record called “The West End” and it says “it’s worse now, look what progress did.” So I decided that, you know, to go just as far away from the popular culture of music as I possibly could and just go back to where it began. The whole record was recorded on one channel and, ya know, one tape machine (a 1955 Ampex), and the whole band played it once and there was one microphone.

KL: It is such a pure sound.
JM: There are no over dubs, no echo, there’s no anything. It’s just what the room sounded like and it was fun because it was musicians actually playing music, as opposed to building a record or constructing a record.

KL: How did you choose the locations?
JM: By the way the tour was routed. I knew that I was gonna be close to Memphis, and I knew I was gonna start in Savannah and I have a house in right outside of Savannah on an island, so it  gave me an opportunity to stay there and work a couple days, and then we went to Memphis. Then we tried to go to Texas to the building where Johnson also recorded, but it was condemned and they wouldn’t let us in. So we ended up having to go to San Antonio, which was kind of out of the way, but we were only there two days.

KL: We absolutely love “Right Behind Me” – the sound, the feel. From the very start with Miriam Sterm’s attacking strings…
JM: It’s that corner, that’s the same corner that Robert Johnson recorded “Hell Hound’s on My Trail” in San Antonio, Texas, Gunter Hotel. And like T-Bone [Burnett] said, that’s the best sounding corner I ever heard.

KL: Right, that is such a great song. And the hook, the hook is incredible you know, “You know the devil, he thinks he got me, he ain’t got me”…..
John and all in the room: … “No.” (Laughter)

KL: Last question, I can tell you that from when I was unhoused and living in my car, you nailed the feeling of hopelessness in “Graceful Fall.”

     “It’s not a graceful fall from dreams to truth, there’s not a lot of hope if you got nothing to lose.” 

Since 2007, foreclosures and job losses increased the number of families in shelters nearly 30%. Each night there are 640,000 unhoused Americans who have lost domestic autonomy and are living on the streets and in shelters, 15% are veterans.
Some of those will be selling the very street papers which are carrying your words right now. As you did from the stage in Toledo, what are your words of hope to all of our brothers and sisters who are living on the streets of our country?
JM: Wow, that’s a big question, that’s an awfully big question. I wish I had something that I could say that seemed to address that question, but I’m not sure I really do at this point in our country. So, I don’t know, you know.

KL: You’ve always been a fighter, you’ve always had hope.
JM: Well, I’ve always, ah, I’ve always had a bunch of dumb cliché things that my family taught me that I always passed on to my kids. My grandfather passed them on to me and they’ve always provided some sort of hope in my life.
They’re not very eloquent, but the greatest advice I ever got in my life and, it’s not very eloquent, but “If you’re gonna’ hit a c*ck-s*cker, kill him.” And what my grandfather meant when he said that was if you’re actually going to do something, don’t talk about it, don’t brag about it, just go do it and do it to the best that you can possibly do. And that’s what he was saying, don’t be threatening, don’t be talking, don’t be bragging. I think that as un-eloquently as it was said, it was probably one of the most important things said to me in my life.

KL: Which is a perfect thing to say to the people on the streets, because if you’re gonna get off the streets, you can.
JM: You can, you need to! See the problem is most people give up too early and I’m not talking about just the people on the street, I’m just talking about people in general. They give up on relationships too early, they give up on themselves too early, they give up on life too early. I mean I’ve been writing that since I was a kid. In the song called “Jack and Diane” you know they were only 16 and already giving up. People just give up too early, they just quit, you know, “this is too hard,” or, “I don’t wanna do this anymore.”
I think that’s a problem, and I think that’s a problem our country has. Over the decades it was allowed to happen by the work ethic and through capitalism, a lot of things that affect this country that allow people to think that way, that the world owes them a living. And as soon as you start thinking that somebody owes you something, forget it man, you’re done. And as soon as you start thinking you’re right and everybody else is wrong… It’s like the guy who was married six or seven times, hell, I think it might be me – I think this could be me, I’m starting to think this is my problem.

KL: Amen. Thank you, John.
JM:  Well, thank you.

    “Save some time to dream,
    ’Cause your dream could save us all,
    Oh yeah,
    Your dream might save us all.”
    - Save Some Time to Dream -

http://toledostreets.org/2010/08/i-got-dreams-and-theyre-bigger-than-this/

Mellencamp Hits the Road with Dylan, Plans Fall Tour

By Jesse Stanek and Jeff Vrabel

Bob Dylan and John Mellencamp kicked off their summer tour in Lincoln, Nebraska, yesterday, delivering two sets of spirited Americana nicely suited to Haymarket Park and its Midwestern surroundings. Mellencamp last played the venue as part of a Farm Aid benefit "100 years ago," he joked to the crowd. (The concert, for the record, was actually in 1987.) While his set favored crowd favorites and enduring deep cuts like "Pink Houses" and "Paper In Fire," Mellencamp also brought the crowd into the here-and-now, unveiling songs from his new T Bone Burnett-produced disc No Better Than This. One, "Save Some Time to Dream," was a gorgeously spare, Neil Young-ish country tune featuring tight rhythmic backup from his six-piece band. Meanwhile, Mellencamp reinvigorated classic tunes like "Cherry Bomb," which he freshened with an off-the-cuff a capella arrangement.

Dylan, sporting his trademark black suit and white cowboy hat, had nothing new to play. But he delivered an energetic set of classics, some with striking new arrangements. Soaring pedal steel guitar lent "Lay Lady Lay" a newfound vulnerability, "Just Like a Woman," became soft and reflective, and "Cold Irons Bound" sounded bold and jammy. The latter two showcased Dylan’s inimitable balance of the meditative and aggressive.

Dylan and Mellencamp's tour wraps in September, but Mellencamp will continue on this fall with sixteen Midwestern dates in support of No Better Than This. Unlike his immaculately produced '80s albums, Mellencamp wrote this record quickly, on acoustic guitar, and recorded it in mono on a 55-year-old Ampex tape recorder. "I looked at T Bone and I said, 'What the fuck were we doing in the '80s?'" Mellencamp told RS. "I made a record once that took almost a year. I spent millions of dollars dicking around with songs, and in the long run it paid off because it sold millions of copies. But I go back and I listen to the record today, and it was...more of a craftsman thing."

No Better is Mellencamp’s latest rootsy record in a series that began with 2003's blues and folk covers disc Trouble No More.To get the proper vibe, Mellencamp and Burnett cut the new disc in the legendary Sun Studios, San Antonio; Texas' Gunter Hotel (where Robert Johnson recorded tracks like "Terraplane Blues"); and the First African Baptist Church in Savannah, Georgia. The latter location — the oldest black church in America and a one-time stop on the Underground Railroad — struck a spiritual chord with Mellencamp and his wife Elaine, who decided to be baptized under the altar where Mellencamp had been recording.

The album may be stripped down, but Mellencamp plans an ambitious fall tour. There will be three different sections: a 30-minute "Sun Studio" set, a 30-minute acoustic set, and an hour of plugged-in tunes. And each show will start with a screening of Kurt Markus' It's About You, which chronicles the making of the record. "On those early tours [in the ‘50s], you went to see Gene Vincent, Buddy Holly, and the show started with a movie called The Girl Can't Help It," said Mellencamp, explaining his inspiration for showing the documentary. "It's not an original idea, but it's an idea that hasn't been done in decades."

The setlist for Mellencamp and Dylan's show — plus dates for Mellencamp's upcoming trek — are below.

John Mellencamp's Setlist
Pink Houses
Paper in Fire
No Better Than This
Check It Out
Save Some Time to Dream
Cherry Bomb (Acapella)
Don’t Need This Body
Small Town
Home on the Range
Rain on the Scarecrow
The West End
Troubled Land
If I Die Sudden
Crumblin’ Down
Authority Song

Bob Dylan's setlist
Watching The River Flow
Lay Lady Lay
Most Likely You Go Your Way (and I’ll Go Mine)
Stuck Inside of Mobile with The Memphis Blues Again
Rollin’ and Tumblin’
Just Like A Woman
Cold Irons Bound
Workingman Blues #2
Highway 61 Revisited
Tryin’ to get to Heaven
Thunder on The Mountain
Ballad of a Thin Man
Like A Rolling Stone
All Along The Watchtower

Mellencamp's Fall Tour Dates
October 29 - Bloomington, IN @ Indiana University Auditorium
November 1 - Cincinnati, OH @ Music Hall
November 3 - Nashville, TN @ Ryman Auditorium
November 5 - Kansas City, MO @ The Midland by AMC
November 6 - St. Louis, MO @ Fabulous Fox Theatre
November 8 - Indianapolis, IN @ Clowes Memorial Hall
November 11 - Indianapolis, IN @ Hinkle Fieldhouse
November 13 - South Bend, IN @ Morris Performing Arts Center
November 16 - Fort Wayne, IN @ Embassy Theatre
November 17 - Cleveland, OH @ Palace Theatre
November 19 - Detroit, MI @ Fox Theatre
November 20 - Pittsburgh, PA @ Heinz Hall
November 22 - Minneapolis, MN @ Orpheum Theatre
November 23 - Minneapolis, MN @ Orpheum Theatre
November 26 - Chicago, IL @ Chicago Theatre
November 27 - Chicago, IL @ Chicago Theatre

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/17386/189908