John Mellencamp Community

Anthropomorphic cats and the Cocktail soundtrack: learning to love John Mellencamp
By Sean L. Maloney

I can picture it now: the tacky '70s bubble-letters, the anthropomorphic feline wearing a leather jacket, combing back his greasy pompadour, feet firmly planted in the garbage can that he presumably calls his home like some reprobate Heathcliff. "Johnny Cougar is a cool cat." Arguably the coolest sticker that ever did stick. This was my very first exposure to The Man Who Would Be Mellencamp, and I slapped that cheap insignia — anthropomorphic cat and all — right on the front of my '80s orange-cover sticker-book. And with such prime placement on such a prized possession, proudly I declared Johnny Cougar, whoever the fuck he was, to be cooler than the Garbage Pail Kids and Lisa Frank's lysergic unicorns.

My second exposure to The Coug would be more profound, and also profoundly embarrassing.

True confession, folks: In 1988, the Cocktail soundtrack changed my life. Yes, that Cocktail soundtrack — the OST for the neon-tinted cheese fest staring the Scientologist, the adventurous baby sitter and that dude from the FX movies tossing around bottles of well liquor and frolicking in the sand. That movie. Or more importantly, that soundtrack, as my parents still thought there was a chance I wouldn't turn into a degenerate and thus barred me from its R-rated delights. But the soundtrack! Oh how the soundtrack — a road map into the roots world via shiny digital-reverb and cocaine-fueled stewardship — would play an essential role in shaping the way I listen to music. You don't get to pick these sorts of things, folks, sometimes they choose you.

Beyond the big hits — Bobby McFerrin's pathologically cheerful "Don't Worry Be Happy" and "Kokomo," The Beach Boys' love letter to awkward couplets — there lay an interesting experiment in recontextualizing pop music. The Cocktail OST is an early example of the "current stars cover classic songs" method of printing giant stacks of fat soundtrack-cash. The Georgia Satellites covering "Hippy Hippy Shake." Ry Cooder covering "All Shook Up." The obligatory appearance from Robbie Neville, because California law in the '80s mandated that you couldn't release a film soundtrack without including at least one Neville Brother.

For me, the most important result of this mouse-and-shoulder-pad experiment in updating nostalgia for a new generation would be Mellencamp's Zydeco-tinged adaptation of Buddy Holly's "Rave On." Ho. Lee. Shit. While today I would count this as some fourth-string tossed-off Mellencamp cut, for an 8-going-on-9-year-old whose only prior exposure to the accordion was "Weird Al" Yankovic's 1986 masterpiece Polka Party, this "Rave On" cover was mind-blowing. Who knew the accordion could be so cool?

That's some heavy shit to lay on a third-grader.

Things got even heavier from there, as I deduced that this Mellencamp dude was in fact the anthropomorphic cat on the overcrowded cover of my sticker book. This was probably the closest I'd come to having an Encyclopedia Brown moment. Johnny Cougar had become John Cougar, who would then become John Cougar Mellencamp. While I couldn't (and still can't) fathom how anybody wouldn't want a name as cool as Johnny Cougar, I could still wrap my half-formed noggin around the fact that Johnny Cougar, John Cougar and John Cougar Mellancamp were the same dude (who would eventually settle on the moniker John Mellencamp). And this was the dude who was all over my radio, singing about fighting authority, settling down in pink houses and struggling to keep the thrill of living alive. He also sang "R.O.C.K. in the USA," a song built around my favorite lyrical trope of all-time: spelling. Spelling songs are my favorite songs — always have been, always will be. And thus this budding zygotic music nerd realized the genius of John Mellencamp (or what ever he was calling himself at the time).

By my teen years, I'd taped over the holes on my Mellencamp cassette spines, and veered off into stranger, hipper territory. There were few things I found more revolting as a teenager than the idea of embracing Small Town America. Such sentiments hit a little too close to the swampy little shithole of an exurb I called home, and Mellencamp's ubiquitous voice was a constant reminder that I might never escape. It was too heavy; I couldn't deal. But then I did escape. And when I eventually moved back home, I found my old orange sticker-book — the one with a fading anthropomorphic cat combing a greasy pompadour on the front — an artifact of an 8-year-old who knew a fucking great band when he heard one.

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