1986 Houston Feature

Rebel without a pause

John Mellencamp reluctantly retains the phony Cougar middle name, and with new success goes back to Indiana, back to his roots

By Marty Racine, Houston Chronicle
February 16, 1986

NOTHING matters, and what if it did? John Cougar Mellencamp had himself believing that for most of his life. It was an excellent defense against authority and tedium.

Oh, a few things ``counted'' when he was growing up in the '50s and '60s in southern Indiana, which must be a time and place not too unlike any other time and place but which we somehow idealize as the heart of the American Experience.

Girls certainly counted. So did cruising the drag with your pals. And football, six-packs and motorcycles. A good after-school fistfight counted a lot. You could get your butt pounded; worse, you could lose face.

No, nothing really mattered until the music, until John Mellencamp realized that for him it was the only escape. Music gave him purpose and a set of values that made sense of a crazy world where nothing was turning out the way they told you it would. Music gave him compassion, taught him about friendship and made him see that one does not truly, irrevocably yank his roots. A rebellious kid can deny them, but they remain.

``That'' is the attitude John Cougar Mellencamp brings to the Summit Wednesday on his ``Scarecrow'' tour, which is shaping up as one of the most-anticipated in recent rock annals. From all reports, it's a helluva show, a powerful rock 'n' roll ritual. But according to PolyGram Records, who's assumed the tour's PR responsibilities, Mellencamp, at the time of his greatest triumph, is not granting interviews outside of Rolling Stone magazine and a syndicated news service. ``Part of it's logistical, part philosophical,'' PolyGram's Dan Pine says, which might be true although we can assume it's 8-2 in favor of the latter. Mellencamp, especially when he went by the stage name John Cougar, has been one of the most misunderstood rockers of our time and his run-ins with the press are legendary.

Not that the innocent kid from Indiana wasn't always blameless. Chalk it up to what has become known as that ``Bad Mellencamp Family Attitude.''

For some odd reason, I remember exactly the day I first heard of John Cougar. His ``debut'' album on Riva (his first album was an embarrassment-turned-collector's item, another was never released in the States until much later, and his third was an English release), showed up in my take-home pile when I was working in Milwaukee. The cover featured a close-up mug of Cougar looking like some rebel, a cross between James Dean and Cool Hand Luke. A cigarette was dangling defiantly. Right in your face.

Inside, the Cougar compositions were pretty good. ``I Need A Lover, Chinatown'' and ``The Great Mid-West'' reminded me of Bob Seger or Springsteen. None of it got on the radio where I lived, but I remembered Cougar's bad-boy image as representing what I considered to be the core attitude of rock 'n' roll.

About a year later, in 1979, I had the opportunity to interview Cougar in a Milwaukee hotel room prior to that night's gig. He was a hyper little fellow, cocky but friendly and talkative. He cussed incessantly (much of it zinged toward the ``music industry'') and smoked Marlboros like they were going out of style. He made good copy.

That night, however, opening for U.F.O. at Milwaukee Auditorium, hyperactivity and cockiness translated into ridiculous macho posturing. He was a brat, apparently more interested in showing off than in getting his music across. ``This guy's a joke,'' I thought.

Seymour, Ind., at the junction of the B&O and Pennsylvania railways, sits on rolling farm land 90 miles west of Cincinnati between Indianapolis and Louisville. It's much the same as all the other one-horse towns dotting the heartland, far removed from sophistication and excitement, although it does claim the Reno Brothers - Frank, Bill and Simeon - who in 1866 are said to have pulled off America's first train robbery.

The original John Mellencamp, from a peasant farmer's family near Hamburg, Germany, and John Cougar Mellencamp's great-great grandfather, fled the Kaiser's military conscription during the late 1800s and settled in Indiana. His son, Harry Perry Mellencamp - ``Speck'' - rebelled against farming and became a carpenter. Still, Speck, typical of the Mellencamps, was a fiercely independent soul, arrogant, proud and the last one to accept anybody's welfare. He's said to have also been a kind-hearted man with an explosive temper. His two oldest sons, Joe and Richard, were considered roughnecks, and Joe had a reputation as the toughest boxer in the region.

Richard took a shine to one Marilyn Lowe, the prettiest girl anywhere, whose first recollection of Richard was when he was being hauled off to jail after a brawl. But the Lowe family could be equally tough. Marilyn's father, Joe Lowe, was known as a bootlegger, ``bon vivant'', scammer. Joe also owned a restaurant in Austin, Ind., which served as a speakeasy, pool room and gambling parlor.

Richard and Marilyn first of four children debuted on Oct. 7, 1951. But John Mellencamp almost didn't make it out alive. He suffered ``meninges cele,'' a potentially fatal disease where the vertebrae do not fuse properly in the fetus. An operation at six weeks was termed a complete success, but emotional trauma is harder to quantify.

Young John, upholding the Bad Mellencamp Family Attitude, was by all accounts a hellion, a feisty sort. You know, the kid in every school in every town who's always asking for it. When he got old enough, he fancied himself a hood, and he would run with the bad boys in town - J.D. Nicholson, Mark Ripley, Dave Knotts, Pat Mackey - much to the consternation of their parents.

According to the recent and excellent biography, ``American Fool - The Roots And Improbable Rise of John Cougar Mellencamp'' (by Martin Torgoff, St. Martin's Press), an acquaintance who would later become a close friend, Gary Boebinger, recalls: ``Hell, (John) was about five or six, not even in school yet, and me and my friends were about 10 or 11, and he'd come out of his house and throw rocks at us! It was like an obstacle course getting to school because of this little kid out on the lawn. Most little kids would be afraid of the `big' guys, but his attitude was, `Attack!' ''

Due to his size and spirit, family and relatives concentrated on toughening John up for football. His gridiron career lasted until the day his high school coach found him with a pack of Marlboros sticking out of his back pocket.

As an adolescent, when John decided to become a hood, he'd flock to the old Seymour theaters and study ``Rebel Without A Cause'' and ``The Wild One'', better to perfect the Slouch. His own acting career never got off the ground. Says Mark Ripley in Torgoff's book: ``Joe (Marilyn's first child before marrying into the Mellencamps) was the type of kid who always had the lead in the school play. John, on the other hand, who had to compete with Joe, played the small part of the military man in our freshman class production of ``Li'l Abner''. He was supposed to come out and say, `Clear Dogpatch!' Of course, when his moment came, he was jacking around backstage, trying to talk to some girl. `Man, you're on!' He ran out there in front of everybody and went completely blank. One line and he couldn't remember it...''

Still, the hood had a sensitive streak, perhaps inherited from Grandpa Speck. And while the wild and defiant ones of the silver screen captured his imagination, he was also taken seriously by rock 'n' roll. After seeing a local combo play a high school dance, Mellencamp bought a guitar, at age 13 during the first wave of the British Invasion. He'd play and wait for the girls to come by. Naturally, he favored the Stones over the Beatles.

He was one of the very few in Seymour who took music seriously. He knocked around in various combos, one of which, at age 14, was called Crepe Soul and formed with Fred Booker, a young black man several years older. Mellencamp would impress Booker with his Wayne Cochrane imitations, and Booker would do James Brown.

Meanwhile, the parents of Seymour were having a difficult time swallowing the rapid cultural changes of the '60s. John, unlike his younger brother Ted, was never in serious trouble with the law (only at home), but Marilyn and Richard were reaching the breaking point. Pot, LSD, long hair, the rejection of the American Dream and - the pregnancy of his girl friend, Cil.

Against the consent of their parents, but in keeping with honor, John and Cil got married. Since John was underage, they took their vows across the state line, in Louisville. A daughter, Michelle, was born in December 1970.

Now father and husband, John Mellencamp faced the two basic options available to those growing up in Seymour. He could get a boring day job, melt into small town society and go slowly crazy with frustration. Or he could act on his dreams, go to the big city and really go crazy.

He worked for a spell for the phone company, hated it and got fired. He was a disc jockey at WVTU, but he cussed too much for that one. Meanwhile, with Cil holding down a waitress job, he plunged deeper into music, writing fragments of songs and playing in a band called Trash doing Lou Reed, Dylan, Stones, Bowie, New York Dolls. Dressed in spikes and makeup and glitter clothes, Trash must have been a sight as they stormed around rural Indiana, playing frat parties in Bloomington and traveling all the way to the big city, Indianapolis. In 1973 it was downright dangerous.

Of course, nobody in Trash knew what they were doing, musically or business-wise, and it occurred to John to make a record, any record, a badge of existence. Obsessed, he made some demos and sent them to all the record companies. Finally, collecting his unemployment compensation, he and Cil drove to New York, where he blew all his dough before finding one guy at Sunshine Records who expressed interest. Get $2000, the guy said. He had all the Right Contacts.

Returning to Seymour, John persuaded his father to co-sign a bank loan, sent the money to the man with all the Right Contacts and never heard from him again.

Welcome to the biz, John Mellencamp.

Tony DeFries, an Englishman who started in the music business in the 1960s by managing Eric Burden & the Animals, is perhaps best known for transforming David Bowie into ``Ziggy Stardust'' and launching his highly successful career in the early '70s. Bowie had been one of Mellencamp's big idols, and, upon hearing about a falling out between Bowie and DeFries, Mellencamp returned with a batch of songs to New York and walked into DeFries' management company, MainMan, on the last day of 1975.

The timing was perfect. Bowie had left the MainMan stable, and De Fries immediately sized up Mellencamp as the Next Big Thing. He'd be the new hero of the small-town Midwest. A Midwestern Bruce Springsteen.

While DeFries would ultimately, depending on your perspective, play a villainous role in Cougar's career, his initial support was indispensable. He lent the Seymour Kid enough money to keep his home life solvent and allow him to put together a group called the Tiger Force Band and go into a Bloomington studio. Meanwhile DeFries made his pitch to the record companies, most of which said no way.

He also demanded Mellencamp's name change for promotional reasons - Johnny Indiana was also considered - until Mellencamp, who hated ``Cougar'' from the beginning, gave in. He had sold his soul for rock 'n' roll, and he knew it. But, hey, over a period of time, with a lot of remixing, Mellencamp had himself an album, ``Chestnut Street Incident''. MCA bought the hackneyed project, but it went nowhere. But already Mellencamp was sowing the seeds of his world view. In the title song he writes: ``Someday I'll blow 'em away with things that I sing and say/I'm just a small-town boy bein' used like a toy/And waitin' on my payday.''

DeFries was a heavy-handed promo man. His push on Johnny Cougar - he dreamed up a spectacular ``Johnny Cougar Day'' back in Seymour, arranged a tour and boasted about his prodigal son to the media - created a lot of action Cougar Mellencamp would have to live down. Early glitzy PR photos of Johnny are downright embarrassing in retrospect, and, having come to resent the foibles of the music business, the Bad Mellencamp Family Attitude surfaced in interviews. He spoke from an angry heart where other rock star hopefuls bend over backward to be tactful.

His second album, ``The Kid Inside'', had more rehearsing and arranging, but it was delivered to MCA when the company was undergoing a major corporate shakeup. The label refused to support it or back Cougar in any way. (MainMan released it in 1982 after Cougar had become popular; without explanation, it was passed off as a current record.)

Cougar had become a joke in the industry. He and MainMan parted. John disbanded Tiger Force and moved with Cil to Bloomington, bigger than Seymour and home of Indiana University.

Enter former MCA employee Bob Davis. Acting as his attorney, Davis agreed to shop Cougar around the business in Los Angeles before settling on Billy Gaff, Rod Stewart's manager. Since no one in the States would touch Cougar, Gaff sent him to England, where he recorded ``A Biography'' for Gaff's independent Riva label, which had no U.S. distribution.

Although Cougar had a running feud with the British press and fans - punk was the big thing then - the LP contained a hit, ``I Need A Lover (Who Won't Drive Me Crazy)''. It went to No. 1 in Australia, where John went to tour and shoot his mouth off (on their TV version of ``American Bandstand'', he managed to thoroughly offend the Aussies, although he later apologized).

Pat Benatar made ``Lover'' a hit back in the States, and when he returned Cougar cut his self-titled debut (his fourth overall), containing a new, cleaned-up version of ``Lover''. He started opening for big names on tour, and the little package of dynamite was blowing some of them away. He was starting to get good press. Maybe he had something to say. Maybe he was growing up.

His personal life, however, was hardly in order. He met a new girl, Vicky Granucci, in LA, whom he would eventually marry and who to this day remains good friends with Cil, who now helps run the Cougar Mellencamp business. Looking for an R&B sound, he recruited Steve Cropper to produce the next album.

Nothing Matters And What If It Did, an apt title directed toward the business (he was still second-guessing himself), and the subsequent ``American Fool'' are both crucial transitional albums that close the chapter on Johnny Cougar. From then on, he had gained enough respect to convince management to combine Cougar with his real surname.

The change was more than cosmetic. It symbolized that in a way you ``can'' go home again, where the real people in your life are. John made a choice to live in Indiana, site of his inspiration (where he's built a studio near his home in Bloomington). ``American Fool'' brought us ``Hurts So Good'' and gave us a glimpse into ``Jack And Diane,'' the red-blooded protagonists of the heartland. Both went No. 1 in 1983, and where his first LP had sold 12,000 copies, ``American Fool'' was selling twice that many a day.

Now rolling, Cougar Mellencamp had learned something about the biz, and his next album, ``Uh-Huh'', went right for radio's jugular, despite the fact that John spent less money to make a more spontaneous album and consciously avoided making merely a followup to ``American Fool''. No, instead of ``Jack And Diane'' and other paens to youth, he would take a hard look at the world around him, so exquisitely captured in the new single, ``Pink Houses'', a scene from rural Indiana:

There's a black man with a black cat living in a black neighborhood,

He's got an interstate running through his front yard,

You know he thinks he's got it so good,

And there's a woman in the kitchen cleaning up the evening slop,

And he looks at her and he says, ``Darlin' I can remember when you could stop a clock.

Oh, but ain't that America, little pink houses for you and me.

The empathy carried over into his new and best and most focused album ever, ``Scarecrow''. There's rain on the scarecrow, blood on the plow. The singer whose great-great-grandfather came from a peasant farming family, a life rejected by three generations of headstrong Mellencamps, had returned to his roots.