1985 Tim White Article

Mellencamp one cool cat

By Timothy White
November 3, 1985

Oct. 2, 1976, should have been the biggest day in John Mellencamp's 'life. But he never felt so small — or so helpless. The banners strung above his head read, "JOHNNY COUGAR DAY" and the limousine in which he was seated made its way down Chestnut Street in Seymour, Ind. The clamorous parade being mounted in his honor rang as false and hollow as the silly rock 'h' roll alias his svengali-like manager of the moment had recently saddled him with.

"Ohhh, brother. That afternoon and the whole circus that went with it is still too, too painful to talk about," Mellencamp, 33, now recalls as he sits in the kitchen of his handsome Bloomington, Ind., home, refering to the outrageous hype and hucksterism of yore.

It had all been part of a master plan for overnight excess and/or success engineered by one Tony DeFries, head of the MainMan Organization that had years earlier signed up a certain Davey Jones and foisted him on the music industry as a painted android-cum-rock band christened Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. That DeFries had gotten considerable mileage out of his initial creation owed more to Jones (aka David Bowie) prior track record as a shrewd, dandy and dauntless poseur (as well as the slack American pop scene of 1972 that he was being marketed to) than any gifted invention on Tony's part. And Bowie had a bit of seasoned talent to back up the con; it was every inch a collaboration.

On his second attempt at pop legerdemain, however, DeFries was reeling from the recent exit, amid threats of lawsuits, of a thoroughly disgruntled Bowie. And Mellencamp, who didn't have but three thin songs to his bumpy German surname, was dazed by a $2,000 swindle at the hands of a fly-by-night New York entertainment lawyer. It was every inch an act of mutual desperation.

"I've done every dumb thing a person can possibly do in pursuit of becoming some sort of damned rock 'n' roll star," says Mellencamp. "The 'Chestnut Street Incident' album that DeFries got MCA Records to put out was a total flop, every bit as bad as the jungle-animal last name he sneaked onto the album jacket and stuck me with. Plus, he left me with 'The Kid Inside,' a record never to be released, and left MCA holding the bag with a $1 million contract."

Mellencamp, who was then married and broke, found a reputable attorney, signed with Rod Stewart manager Billy Gaffs Riva Records and retreated to London to record "A Biography," which yielded a No. 1 smash in Australia with the song, "I Need A Lover." When that track reached America on his third LP, "John Cougar," Pat Benatar recorded it and made it the most played single in the nation, ensuring both her stardom and Mellencamp's second chance at career respectability. "Finally," he allows with a smirk and a shrug, "I had no other option left but to just be myself."

And that new direction of Mellencamp's has made all the difference in the world. Huddling in the studio with Steve Cropper, the renowned Stax/- Volt guitar-songwriter-producer, Mellencamp crafted 1980's "Nothing Matters And What If It Did," his self avowed last shot at recognition. It spawned two modest hits with "This Time" and "Ain't Even Done With The Night." The followup record, "American Fool," completed the comeback in 1982 when it became the best-selling record of the year on the strength of "Hurts So Good" and "Jack and Diane." Most significant of all, Mellencamp had awakened to the fact that all the grist he needed for his own rock 'n' roll mill was right in his own Southern Indiana backyard. He wrote songs about his personal follies and bedevilments, about the tiny burg he was raised in, the citizens who populate it and the hopes they hold dear. In short, he literally won the hearts of millions with "Crumblin' Down," "Pink Houses" and "Authority Song." So much so, that President Reagan wanted to use "Pink Houses" as his 1984 campaign song track. But Mellencamp declined.

"Reagan doesn't know nothin' about working place people," Mellencamp asserts in his raspy Midwestern drawl, so when his people came around hinting at wanting permission to use 'Pink Houses,' I made it clear and plain from day one that he had to forget it."

The point being that the unadorned dream of dignity that is at the core of the song is one best unsullied by the often Tony Defries-sized ballyhoo of partisan politics. The same determination to address workaday goals and needs without diminishing them with a political pitch was behind the Sept. 22 Farm Aid benefit concert that Mellencamp organized in Champaign, ILL with colleagues Willie Nelson and Neil Young. And Mellencamp's "Scarecrow" album and tour are continuing to celebrate the strivings and values that were the heart of the farm relief show.

"The farmers in the Corn Belt and elsewhere are getting the old vice job. America has got a fair trade law on their crops, which means that because a bushel of corn is, say, $2.35, in the U.S., they cannot sell it for a more lucrative price overseas. That was OK in the 1930s and 1940s when it only cost maybe 35 cents to raise a bushel, but now it costs $2.27 or more and farmers can't make ends meet. They can't compete like any other merchant.

"Just as importantly, a way of life that all of the people around me grew up with — that heritage of small family farms — is swiftly being eroded," says Mellencamp, now happily remarried with three children. The title song of the album, "Rain on the Scarecrow," is about hearts being broken by bank foreclosures on farms and the disconnection from a sense of pride and purpose that is crucial for any wage earner. Besides the deeply-felt messages of socio-economic urgencies expressed on "Scarecrow," the crisp, crackling record is also a virtual chronicle of a young man raised on rock 'n' roll in the 1960s, the spare precision of every spunky garage band and car radio classic reverberant in such cuts as "Lonely Ol' Night," "Rumbleseat," "R.O.C.K. in the U.S.A." and the latest single, "Small Town."

"Growing up in Seymour, listening to the radio every night after my parents, brothers and sisters went to bed, on all those records by James Brown, the Rascals, the Standells, the great and the unjustly overlooked, they all made me feel like anybody could reach out and have an impact. That one young person could risk opening his heart, speaking his piece and letting people have the sheer fun and comfort of knowing they were not alone in their fantasies of doing special things with their lives.

"Before we started recording 'Scarecrow' last April, I had the band learn about a hundred of those old songs to warm up. The songs had an enormous energy, but they also had a lot of individual strengths — a hot guitar lick here, a strange drum beat there — that were allowed to shine through because nobody said it was wrong to take your best shot. It helped my group — who're guys who've been through it all with me — to rediscover some of their own strings."

Anyone as yet unexposed to the band, from the knife-edged rhythm section of bass player Toby Myers and drummer Kenny Aronoff, to the keen guitar interplay of Mike Wachic and lead Larry Crane, are in for a stunning treat. Backup singers Pat Peterson and Crystal Taliaferro lend their own deft coloration to Mellencamp's raucous vocals, and Mellencamp has added keyboardist John Cascella and the violin of Lisa Germano to accent and deepen the overall sound.

He's also providing an exhilarating encore that pays tribute to a son of the South who remains one of the most gifted and original singer-songwriters of the late 1960s and early 1970s — but why give the surprise away?

However hoodwinked or misguided former Seymour mayor Donald Ernest may have been in dedicating Seymour's 1976 Oktoberfest celebration to Mellencamp and then throwing a parade and an official concert to boot, incumbent mayor William Baily will have to concede that John Cougar Mellencamp has brought credit to his small town, and to every small town where his fans can be found.