Hey Mr. Mellencamp,... we loved the concert. The preamble to the concert kind of set expectations and informed us to the kind of musicianship you attempt to embrace when you are creating music. You are an artist. The evening was something of an anthology and belief of your music,... it harkened to the importance of how we need to embrace the way things were done in the past. From Sun records to Elvis and to Robert Johnson’s commitment to getting the sound just right,... As listener’s we tend to take so much music for granted,... the music doesn’t just seep through your pores, you work to make it right. More than that, you want the listener to feel it, like you do, it takes a certain commitment. You are a pro – we felt your commitment to,... it’s your backup musicians and their passion for the music as well. The most memorable song of the evening? Without a doubt ‘save some time to dream,’... maybe not your biggest hit, but perhaps the best thing you have ever written.
Again, it’s obvious you care about your audience. What a great night.
John took out Right Behind Me and added Easter Eve back in to the set list.
AUTHORITY SONG, NO ONE CARES ABOUT ME, DEATH LETTER, JOHN COCKERS, WALK TALL, THE WEST END, CHECK IT OUT, SAVE SOME TIME TO DREAM, CHERRY BOMB, DON’T NEED THIS BODY, EASTER EVE, JACKIE BROWN, LONGEST DAYS, JACK AND DIANE, SMALL TOWN, RAIN ON THE SCARECROW, PAPER IN FIRE, THE REAL LIFE, WHAT IF I CAME KNOCKING, IF I DIE SUDDEN, NO BETTER THAN THIS, PINK HOUSES AND R.O.C.K. IN THE U.S.A.
Check out the cover of Longest Days by a young Toronto Fan. It really shows how timeless John's repertoire is.
Just wanted to say the recent No Better Than This show we saw at Toronto’s Massey Hall just may have been the best concert experience of my life for both my wife and I. Superb work by John and the band – thanks so much for the wonderful experience!
We have three sons who are all young amateur musicians and who love the new album along with Life, Death, Love and Freedom. Our youngest really is young man with an old soul and is particularly fond of Longest Days and Save Some Time To Dream.
He posted his version of Longest Days on You Tube
It’s a fitting tribute to a great song and an indicator that John’s music really speaks across generations – just wanted to pass along the note!
John has added an additional stop in Glasgow Scotland at the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall on July 3rd during the 2011 No Better Than This European Tour. Head to the Tour page for complete details.
So far this is the set list for the first 3 shows. We will keep track of any changes.
Grand Prairie TX -Verizon Theater Austin TX Austin City Limits Live at The Moody Theatre Houston TX Jones Hall for the Performing Arts
Authority Song No One Cares About Me Deep Blue Heart Death Letter Walk Tall The West End Check It Out Save Some Time To Dream Cherry Bomb Dont Need This Body Right Behind Me Jackie Brown Longest Days Jack and Diane Small Town New Hymn Rain On The Scarecrow Paper In Fire The Real Life What If I Came Knocking If I Die Sudden No Better Than This Pink Houses Rock In The USA
World Premiere Musical Ghost Brothers of Darkland County by John Mellencamp and Stephen King Alliance Theatre’s 2011-12 Season 03.30.2011 - World Premiere Musical Ghost Brothers of Darkland County by John Mellencamp and Stephen King, Broadway Hit God of Carnage Featured as Final Shows in Alliance Theatre’s 2011-12 Season
ATLANTA — The Alliance Theatre and Susan V. Booth, the Jennings Hertz Jr. Artistic Director today announced the final pieces of the theatre’s 43rd season. Joining previously announced titles Into the Woods, Broke, Golda’s Balcony, Sex and The Second City, A Christmas Carol, The Real Tweenagers of Atlanta and The Wizard of Oz, come four more productions, including the hotly anticipated world premiere of John Mellencamp and Stephen King’s Ghost Brothers of Darkland County.
“I love everything about this season,” said Booth. “The mixture of fairy tales and ghost stories gets at the most primitive and powerful roots of the theatre – and to offer Atlanta time with the minds and hearts of artists like John Mellencamp, Stephen King, Steven Sondheim and Yasmina Reza -- as well as our own Janece Shaffer -- just lights us up at The Alliance. This is a wild ride of a season that no one should miss.”
World Premiere Musical: Ghost Brothers of Darkland County In keeping with the Alliance’s tradition of producing new American musicals, the company will produce the world premiere of Ghost Brothers of Darkland County, a chilling new musical with music and lyrics by John Mellencamp and book by Stephen King, as the closing show of the Alliance Stage Series set for spring, 2012.
One of the world's most popular authors and one of our most honored songwriters have created a riveting Southern gothic musical fraught with mystery, tragedy, and ghosts of the past, along with a roots and blues-tinged score that is sure to leave audiences asking for more. Stephen King’s script brings the power of suspense and John Mellencamp brings his original songs and new music to the Alliance production which will be directed by Artistic Director Susan v. Booth with musical direction by legendary producer T Bone Burnett.
Season Tickets to the Alliance Theatre’s 2011-12 Season are on sale now and may be purchased by calling 404.733.4600 (Mon. – Fri. 10 a.m. – 6 p.m.). Single tickets go on sale in mid-July, 2011.
Atlanta’s nationally acclaimed Alliance Theatre, recipient of the Regional Theatre Tony Award®, creates the powerful experience of shared theatre for diverse people of all ages. Under the leadership of Jennings Hertz, Jr. Artistic Director Susan V. Booth, the Alliance Theatre uses contemporary classics, field leading theatre artists and a commitment to premiere as the foundation for a national theatre with a local address. The theatre’s two stages host 200,000 adult and youth patrons each season, and the Alliance engages and educates students and teachers of all ages through its extensive training programs and commitment to providing a community forum for connection and dialogue.
The Alliance leads the national regional theatre field in the creation of significant American musicals and plays. This includes over 70 premieres that have enjoyed future lives in theatres across the country as well as Tony Award®-winning moves to Broadway: Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, Elton John and Tim Rice’s Aida and Alfred Uhry’s The Last Night of Ballyhoo. Following their Atlanta premieres, the Alliance transferred Twyla Tharp’s Come Fly Away to Broadway for a critically acclaimed Tony Award®-nominated run while Sister Act: the Musical will arrive on Broadway this season after its run on London’s West End. The Alliance also originated the national tours of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee and Bring in da Noise, Bring in da Funk. The Alliance produced two original musicals in its 2010-11 season, Twist and Bring It On: The Musical.
The Alliance enjoys a national reputation for finding and developing Atlanta artists for the national stage, including New York Times bestseller Pearl Cleage whose The Nacirema Society Requests the Honor of Your Presence at a Celebration of Their First One Hundred Years received its world premiere in the fall of 2010 at the Alliance. Further evidence of the Alliance’s commitment to new work is its nationally recognized National Graduate Playwriting Competition, a cutting-edge program introducing student playwrights to professional networks across the country while producing the world premiere of the winning student’s work here at the Alliance. Work by past Competition winners has gone on to be produced by theatres in New York, Chicago, London, San Francisco and beyond.
The Alliance continuously brings Atlanta the finest talent and finest art—proving once again that the Alliance is where great theatre lives. The Alliance Theatre is a division of the Woodruff Arts Center in Atlanta, Georgia, which also houses the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, High Museum of Art and Young Audiences.
It has been announced that John Mellencamp's concert performance originally set for April 15 at Edmonton's Northern Alberta Jubilee Auditorium has been moved to April 17. The delay, caused by a scheduling conflict, does not affect the April 16th tour date, also at Northern Alberta Jubilee Auditorium.
Tickets purchased for the originally scheduled April 15 concert will be honored on the 17th. Those holding tickets who are unable to attend the rescheduled performance may apply for a refund at point of purchase prior to April 1st and we apologize for any inconvenience caused by the rescheduling.
By Andy Greene, Article Includes Photo - Twenty Minutes After leaving the stage at New York’s Radio City Music Hall, John Mellencamp is smoking an American Spirit and pouring himself a glass of chocolate milk inside his parked tour bus. A docked iPod spins Billboard’s Top 100 songs of 1968: Motown singer Shorty Long’s “Here Comes the Judge,” followed by Aretha Franklin’s cover of “Say a Little Prayer.”
Just a few minutes earlier, Mellencamp’s new girlfriend, Meg Ryan exited the bus and docked back inside Radio City as a throng of fans lined up nearby let out a scream. Paparazzi have been following the couple all over New York, and Mellencamp is fed up, “I’m disgusted by it,” he says. “They’re more interested in her, so I feel sorry for her. We’re seniors, man. Who cares about that? They ran out of other people to fuck with.”
Mellencamp perks up when the conversation turns to the ambitious theater tour he just launched to support his raw, stripped-down new LP, No Better Than This. He’s been pleasantly surprised to find that his audience stay engaged during long stretches of new material. “You couldn’t do this kind of show in an area,” he says. “Nobody would listen.”
For much of the last two decades, Mellencamp concerts have been built around his greatest hits. “I feel like a monkey on a string,” he says. “I’m a music lover, and it just turned into a spectacle. I could have made more money [on this tour] if I waited until the summer and played the hits. I’m just not that interested in that anymore.”
The ones he does play are radically rearranged: “Cherry Bomb” is delivered a cappella; he performs “Small Town” on an acoustic guitar, accompanied only by a violinist. “Jack and Diane” is as country-swing song now,” he says. “I didn’t even know what a sad song it was because I played it in the pop form so many times.”
The two-and-a-half hour set is his longest in years, and it’s not even the whole show: Fans who arrive early see a one-hour documentary about the making of the album. “This is a vaudeville show,” Mellencamp says, “There’s blues songs and country songs. The only difference is that one guy is singing them.”
Mellencamp spent the last two summers playing minor-league ballparks in small towns with Bob Dylan. “I feel as close to him as anybody in the music business,” Mellencamp, says. “He’s the funniest guy in the world. We tease each other a lot and have a nice, easy rapport.” Mellencamp has also taken advice from fellow Farm Aid board member Neil Young. “Ten years ago, he told me, ‘John, if you’ve got a problem, it’s that you’ve got too many hits.’ He realized he has too many and he was finding it noninteresting, so he kind of quit doing it too.”
Mellencamp realizes that he’s moving farther away from mainstream stardom. “I don’t expect to sell records or hear them on the radio,” he says. “These records are just calling cards to say, ‘Hey, this is what I’m doing now.’ That’s the way music started out originally. The only money people ever made was playing. That’s what I’m going to do. Go out and play.”
After Getting Her Heart Broke in 2007, Hodson-Walker Gets the Call to R.O.C.K. in the USA
By Thad Requet
Lisa Hodson-Walker has been a huge John Mellencamp fan for over 30 years. She grew up in Pittsburgh, Penn. and since her early high school years she has been into his music.
Some of her first memories of Mellencamp's music was the American Fool album that came out in 1982, the same year she graduated from high school. She was also a fan of the songs "I Need A Lover" and "Ain't Even Done With The Night" that came out in 1979 and 1980. "I remember standing on stone walls at outside parties singing "Crumblin' Down" at the top of our lungs," Lisa said. She also added that she used to play "I Need A Lover" in her car with her young kids. "They loved it so much, they would go around singing it. I had to tell them not to sing it at school," she said.
Lisa has seen John Mellencamp more times than she can remember through the years, and some of those times have been memorable concerts, including his first show, two days after the September 11, 2001 attacks. But no concert will probably be as memorable as her latest one she attended in Lowell, Mass. on Feb. 3. That was the concert where Lisa went from just being a fan to being part of the show.
A LITTLE HISTORY Lisa attended college at Purdue and then on to Indiana University for grad school. While attending IU, she had a brief encounter with Mellencamp. "It was my birthday and we were in this little bar that had a little dance floor. My friends had been playing John Mellencamp music because they knew I loved his music. We were all just out having fun and right in the middle of "Rooty Toot Toot" the music stopped dead. What had happened was that John and some of his friends had come into the bar," she explained. Lisa said that he and his friends were sitting at a table across the way, and she was too embarrassed to go talk to him. "My friend went over and asked for his autograph. I didn't go talk to him because I didn't want to bother him," she explained.
She explained that she is not one who chases celebrities. "There is no other celebrity that I really wanted to meet, but I always wanted to meet him," she said.
FROM MEET AND GREET TO DOWN AND OUT IN PARADISE Lisa was finally going to get her chance to meet John during the 2007 Freedom's Road tour. She had won meet and greet passes for the Providence, R.I. show. She and her husband Jonathan live in the suburbs of Boston, about an hour away from the venue. "I was over the moon for about a month. I couldn't wait, I was so excited. I kept thinking what am I going to say to him."
The excitement quickly turned to concern when the weather reports started coming in about an impending snow storm. "They knew it was going to snow, but it was this absolute white-out blizzard. I didn't know how I was going to get down there because it just kept getting worse and worse. They closed government offices and told everyone to go home early," she said.
She kept calling the arena in Providence and asking if they were going to cancel the show. "They kept telling me that they had never cancelled anything. So my babysitter kept trying to get to us and she only lives about 10 or 15 minutes away, and she was on the road for about an hour until she turned around and went back home."
Now without a babysitter and the concert still on, Lisa and Jonathan had to make the heart breaking decision to not go to the concert. They figured if the babysitter couldn't make it 10 minutes to their house, they wouldn't be able to make it an hour to Providence in the storm. "We decided not to go and about an hour before the concert they decided to cancel it," she said.
She kept emailing TonyB (Mellencamp's Webmaster) throughout the day saying she was afraid she wasn't going to make it. "He kept saying 'don't worry, we'll try to set up another time when you can meet him,'" Lisa explained.
She said she felt a little better when they cancelled the concert. "The thought of the concert going on and me not being there was just too much for me to bare."
NEVER WANTED TO HANG OUT AFTER THE SHOW For the next couple of years, Lisa had been back and forth with TonyB trying to see when John Mellencamp was going to be in the area but nothing ever came together.
After finally coming to the realization that maybe it just wasn't meant to be, Lisa decided not to email TonyB for the No Better Than This Tour. "I just decided I'm going to go to the concert. I had front row seats, so I was just going to enjoy the great seats and not bug them anymore."
Lisa said she always felt that in some point of her life she was going to meet John. But after the way things fell apart on the meet and greet situation, she had decided to move on and forget about that possibility.
COMING DOWN THE ROAD - TRYING TO GET TO LOWELL, MASS. With the great tickets that would place Lisa and Jonathan in the front row of the Mellencamp show in Lowell, Mass., she was again hearing weather reports that were calling for snow. "If you looked on the blog on Mellencamp.com, people were saying things like 'I hope there still going to be a concert, I just don't know if I'm going to be able to make it." Lisa said they headed up really early for the 50 minute trip from Boston. "We had reservations to eat dinner before the show, but as we were heading up, there was so much traffic, it was so slow going that we called and cancelled reservations because I wanted to see the movie (It's About You - by Kurt Markus, the documentary that's opening before John's show on this tour). We were about two miles from the venue and we were stuck on the Lowell Connector, which takes you from a five lane major highway down to one lane. We were stuck on it for probably over an hour. I'm calling the venue and saying 'so many people are stuck, are you going to postpone the movie a little bit,' and they were like 'the movie is playing right now,'" she explained.
After about two and a half hours on the road, they finally arrived at the venue, with time to see about the last 10 minutes of the documentary. "The venue is small and only has one concession area. So we're waiting in line to get our dinner, which consisted of a soft pretzel, and as we're waiting in line I look at my husband and said 'you know, this is going to all be worth it,'" she said with a laugh. "Every time we've seen John Mellencamp it's been so much fun and so worth it. We had front row seats which we've never had before so I was telling him it was going to be a great time.
R.O.C.K. IN LOWELL As Lisa and Jonathan were enjoying the show from right in front of the stage, she described how people from behind made their way down the aisles to get closer. Under very tight quarters, the couple took in every detail from a closer vantage point than they ever had before.
"It was close to the last song, and by this time, there were so many people up around the stage, we were squashed. And for some unknown reason, John came straight to me and he had his hand out and I'm like 'Oh my gosh, you've got to be kidding me!'" Lisa said she knew he had pulled fans up on stage before but she hadn't seen him do that in awhile. "The thought of this happening never even crossed my mind," she said.
The stage was about as high is Lisa is tall, so she needed help from her husband to push her up there with John. Before she did anything she took her camera out of her back pocket and tossed it to Jonathan, who shot video of the experience that now appears on YouTube. "You know, I'm the worst dancer. I look at that video and cringe. In the past 40 years, could someone have taught me how to dance?" she said with a laugh.
"Then he took my hand and I wasn't even thinking...then it hit me 'oh my god, he's going to have me sing. I put my hand over my mouth and whispered to him 'I can't sing! He made me feel real comfortable. He laughed and put his arm around me and said 'do the best you can.' Afterwards I thought that would be a great title for a John Mellencamp song (Do the Best You Can). Lisa got over her shyness rather quickly. "One second I'm telling him I can't sing and the next I'm belting out R.O.C.K. in the USA., so I got over it rather quickly."
When John led her back down off the stage, she jumped, forgetting how tall the stage was from the floor and wiped out when she hit the floor. "Fortunately nobody got it on video, but my husband immediately stopped videoing to pick me up off the floor. I was totally fine, nothing could have hurt me that night."
As far as being in front of such a big crowd and singing and dancing, Lisa said she really didn't even notice it at the time. "The whole time I just couldn't believe I was on stage with John Mellencamp. Afterword I remembered thinking I couldn't even recall seeing the audience. It was like me and John!"
"He sang a little bit more and then caught my eye again and came back over and shook my hand and thanked me again. This was about a minute after I wiped out," she said laughing.
Lisa said that after the show everyone was coming up to her and saying 'You were the one. "You know in line at the bathroom, walking to my car.' It was definitely my two minutes of fame," she said.
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