By Steven P. Wheeler

Back in May of 1994, I sat down with one of rock’s biggest stars of the era and a true legend today, John Mellencamp, to discuss his then-current album Dance Naked, which was released 25 years ago today, June 21. Featuring the hit single, a cover of Van Morrison’s classic “Wild Night,” Dance Naked would become the ninth consecutive platinum album by a man who literally dominated MTV and FM rock radio throughout the Eighties and Nineties.

So I dusted off my old tape of my interview with the man who we first knew as Johnny Cougar, then John Cougar, then John Cougar Mellencamp (with 1983’s brilliant Uh-Huh album), before finally leaving the “Cougar” behind for good in 1991 with the platinum hit album, Whenever We Wanted. But more on that later…

For many rock fans like myself, the Eighties were a time of transition from radio to a new visual outlet called MTV. Not to mention a sea of concerts for various causes, including Live Aid and Farm Aid (which Mellencamp started with friends Willie Nelson and Neil Young after an off-the-cuff onstage comment from Bob Dylan at the previous Live Aid). And John Mellencamp was at the forefront of this changing tide.

Throughout the Eighties and Nineties, John Mellencamp would establish himself as one of rock’s most prominent and often controversial voices. But the road to notoriety was a long one indeed for the often ornery artist, whose own pseudonym for his producer duties was tellingly Little Bastard. And there were some traces of that reputation that seeped through during our lengthy conversation.

Teenage Husband & Father

Back in the mid-Seventies, a young John Mellencamp had visions of making it as a recording artist in the music industry, which was no easy feat for a teenage husband and father working odd jobs in the wilds of Indiana. He might as well have been in India.

In those days he was no different than millions of other musicians trying to get noticed while balancing the realities of life. Or as he would later write in his 1985 hit single “R.O.C.K. in the U.S.A.”: “Pipe dreams in their heads and very little money in their hands.”

“I don’t feel like I matured any quicker or any slower than anybody else,” he said in response to my question about the impact of marriage and fatherhood at such a young age. “And as far as following any kind of rock & roll dream, initially, I just wanted to make a record. I didn’t really have any illusions of grandeur or any dream about what I should become or what I shouldn’t become. I just had a lot of determination. Hell, I never planned anything in my life.”

Whatever It Takes

Playing by the usual rules of the music business in those days, Mellencamp played the game that the booming industry had established by the Seventies: “I had been in bands for a long time, singing in bars and fraternities, but I remembered thinking at the time that being ‘discovered’ was kind of a joke,” said the longtime heartland resident. “You had to go out and seek them, they weren’t going to come and seek you out.

“So I took every cent I had, sold a bunch of stuff, sold a lot of my record collection, sold a lot of equipment that I had gathered up over the years and raised a couple of thousand bucks and made a demo tape.”

(Interview by Steven P. Wheeler)

Of course, this was real life and not some Hollywood movie. Success wasn’t sitting around waiting for this small town boy to make his mark on the music world. “I sent that tape out to different managers and record companies, and it was rejected worldwide,” he says, without a hint of exaggeration. “I mean, hundreds and hundreds of rejections came in, and I had worked that tape in all different manners for like a year.”

Lowering his goals to perhaps jumpstart his dreams, Mellencamp and his wife ventured across state lines on a day that ultimately changed his life forever. “I decided to go down to small record label down in Louisville, Kentucky, with that tape. I remember physically driving down there that day. And I remember being told that they didn’t think that I was right for their label, and I thought, ‘Jesus Christ, I can’t even get fuckin’ signed to a little local label in Louisville, Kentucky’.”

Despondent over that soul-crushing trip in 1975, Mellencamp recalled: “So I was driving home with my first wife, Priscilla (their 11-year marriage would end in 1981), and I thought I had better start re-thinking what I was gonna do. But when I got home, the phone rang and it was [David Bowie’s manager] Tony DeFries asking me to come to New York, and I said, ‘Hell, I was just in New York and I can’t afford to come again,’ so he offered to pay for a plane ticket.

“I realized that was the whole key,” he said with a laugh. “When they start paying for you to do things, you might have something happening.”

Introducing Johnny Cougar

After meeting DeFries, things moved quickly. Not unlike Greg Brady being told that he would now be named “Johnny Bravo” in that memorable episode of The Brady Bunch, DeFries landed Mellencamp a record deal with MCA Records, although he failed to mention to the young kid from Indiana that he also now had a stage name: Johnny Cougar.

“DeFries started handing me this stuff like, ‘Well, you’re either gonna be Johnny Cougar or we’re not gonna release the record.’ Of course, I had already shot my mouth off to everybody at home, telling them that I had an album coming out and everybody’s going, ‘Sure, sure, sure.’ So I kind of had to get right with the program; I had to kind of get my mind right and get into the Tony DeFries mode of thinking.”

That mode of thinking resulted in a 1976 debut album that died without a trace. Chestnut Street Incident featured Johnny Cougar’s versions of such rock classics as Roy Orbison’s “Pretty Woman” and The Doors’ “Twentieth Century Fox.”

For someone who grew to become one of America’s greatest songwriters, there was no trace of that to be found on his debut album, which was only half filled with originals. Looking back, Mellencamp freely admits that he had no idea what he was doing artistically on that first recording.

“I had only written a handful of songs when I got my first record deal,” he noted. “In terms of songwriting, I definitely grew up in public. When I made that first record, I just played songs that I liked. That album really had no direction. I was completely lost about what it was that John Mellencamp was supposed to be doing on a record. My dream, or my plan, hadn’t gone that far because my initial quest was just to get a record deal, so once I got that record deal I didn’t quite know what to do with it.”

Phase Two Begins

Not surprisingly, after the failure of his first album, MCA dropped the young artist like a rock, as did DeFries. The following year in 1977, Mellencamp left Seymour, Indiana for Bloomington and quickly formed the nucleus of a band he called the Zone (featuring his longtime guitarists Mike Wanchic and Larry Crane). Songwriting also became a priority and soon afterwards he hooked up with Rod Stewart’s manager Billy Gaff, who also happened to have his own record label, Riva.

The 1978 album, A Biography, was recorded in London, but was only released in the UK and in Australia. Ironically, his song “I Need a Lover” became a Top Ten hit Down Under. With this growing confidence came his 1979 album simply titled John Cougar (no more Johnny), which would get a stateside release and also feature “I Need a Lover,” which became his first American Top 40 hit. Buoyed by much stronger material from Mellencamp’s pen, the album would go Gold.

But the best was yet to come when a young female rocker named Pat Benatar recorded “I Need a Lover” as the first single for her monster debut album, In the Heat of the Night.

“Quite honestly, I was happy that Pat Benatar had a hit record with ‘I Need a Lover.’ I knew that it couldn’t do anything but help me, and that song was also a hit in Australia for me. So that song—regardless of what people think of it or what I may think of it today—really helped me considerably at that point in my career. I mean, Pat was one of the biggest breaking female artists at that time, so I was happy with any type of success I could get.”

(Interview by Steven P. Wheeler)

One Step Up, Two Steps Back

After extensive touring helped build a healthy core of fans for the newly christened John Cougar, the singer-songwriter returned to the studio with legendary guitarist/producer Steve Cropper to work on the all-important follow-up effort after his first taste of success. However Mellencamp says that the title of his 1980 album Nothin’ Matters and What If It Did, pretty much summed up his feelings at the time.

“I wasn’t particularly interested in having a career in the music business at that time,” he said candidly. “I had just met a girl, and I wasn’t too involved with the making of that record. I was either really pissed off or really jubilant during that time.”

Although the album contained two Top 40 hits, “Ain’t Even Done with the Night” and “This Time,” and eventually went platinum, Mellencamp’s ongoing distaste for the business of music came through loud and clear on the sarcastic “Cheap Shot,” which closed the album:

The record company’s going out of business
They’re pricing records too damn high
The boys in the band can use some assistance
Get a daytime job to get by

The sentiments of “Cheap Shot” aren’t a whole lot different than how the industry veteran feels today: “I have always had a love/hate relationship with the record company; more hate than love,” he smirks. “I wrote that song basically to tell those people to kiss my ass. Young guys tend to do that, ya know.”

Superstardom Comes Knockin’

With two consecutive gold albums now on his resume, and new powerhouse drummer Kenny Aronoff joining the band, the small town rocker began work on his next album, but no one could have predicted what happened next. In fact, when Mellencamp delivered American Fool to his record company in 1982, the suits rejected it.

“The fuckin’ record company hated that album. They hated it!! They wanted ‘Nothin’ Matters’ to continue, and they wanted me to become like Neil Diamond or what that Michael Bolton guy is today. That’s how Mercury Records saw me at the time.”

(Interview by Steven P. Wheeler)

Standing firm against the powers-that-be, Mellencamp and the naysayers watched American Fool become the Number One Album in America, selling five million copies, on the strength of three hit singles—”Hurts So Good,” “Hand to Hold On To” and a little ditty about “Jack & Diane.”

“Yeah, I was surprised by the success of that record,” he told me. “We had two Top Ten singles and a Number One album at the same time. John Lennon, Michael Jackson and I are the only people that have accomplished that.

“We were just happier during the making of that record. We were a big bar band at the time, playing every club in the world. It was black leather jackets, motorcycles, tattoos, earrings, and that whole bit.”

(Interview by Steven P. Wheeler)

Tale of a Ditty

The story behind Mellencamp’s only chart-topping hit “Jack & Diane” is the tale of a song that almost never happened. It was guest guitarist Mick Ronson of David Bowie fame who actually saved the song from the dust bin of history.

“I had run into Mick Ronson in New York and he said that he wanted to come down and play on my album. So he came down to Miami, where we were recording American Fool. We had already recorded ‘Jack & Diane’ and it was ready to go in the shit can, because I just didn’t like the way it sounded and I didn’t really care for the song.

“Ronson had previously heard the tape in his apartment and he asked me if we were going to do anything with this ‘Jack & Diane’ song, and I said, ‘Well, it’s really not working for me.’ So he says, ‘Well, Johnny, you need to put some baby rattles on it.’ And I thought, ‘Baby rattles? What the fuck’s this guy talkin’ about?’

“So a couple of days later in the studio, Ronson kept asking to work on this ‘Jack & Diane’ song, and I kept telling him to forget it and to work on something else. So one night when we finished working on what I wanted to work on, he said, ‘Let’s work on this ‘Jack & Diane’ song [laughs].’

“I finally said, ‘Alright, but the middle section, the bridge section of the song isn’t happening at all.’ So what Ronson did was he punched out all the guitars and took them totally out of the mix. So you had this little choir singing, ‘Let it rock, let it roll, let the bible belt save your soul,’ and it sounded great. Then we just beefed up the drums.

“So, yeah, Ronson really turned ‘Jack & Diane’ around by eliminating the guitars in the middle bridge part and the ‘let it rock, let it roll’ part became this male choir, kind of a cheerleading section. And that’s the story of how Mick Ronson saved ‘Jack & Diane’.”

Flexing Some Muscle

With the blockbuster success of American Fool, Mellencamp felt in control of his artistic career for the first time in his life. And the follow-up, 1983’s Uh-Huh album, would be the first to feature his given name, although “Cougar” was still there for the time being.

“I was just tired of fuckin’ around with the ‘Johnny Cougar’ business, it had been an albatross around my neck for years,” he responded when I asked about why he kept his stage name after his initial success. “So I went to the record company and said, ‘Look, I know you guys have spent a lot of dough on this Cougar business but I want my real name on this album.’ They had no problem with it; they were pretty accommodating. It wasn’t any big independence thing, it was just something that should have been done long before that and I just didn’t do it.”

The compromise was to also keep the Cougar branding for the Uh-Huh album, but adding his given name to an album that featured much more personal songs made sense. In fact the first side of that album—”Crumblin’ Down,” “Pink Houses,” “The Authority Song” and “Warmer Place to Sleep”—remains of the greatest album sides in rock music. It was truly as if the Rolling Stones had been transplanted to America’s heartland.

Bolstered by three hit singles, including two more Top Ten hits—the angry “Crumblin’ Down” and the classic tale of small town life “Pink Houses”—Uh-Huh was the first album in which the singer-songwriter put together an entire album with no filler.

But don’t go thinking that Mellencamp has any idea what the magical formula for a hit song is. “As far as ‘hits’ go, I usually don’t start thinking about hit records until the record company gets involved,” he laughs, “because that’s always their first question: ‘How many hits do you got on it?’

“They don’t give a shit if the album’s any good or not, they only care about the two songs that they can sell to radio. It’s really quite an unnerving question to be asked after you’ve made an album because, to me, it really cheapens the whole album-making process.”

Oops!

Although Mellencamp scored nine consecutive platinum albums over the course of 15 years at the time of our interview, the sales of his last four million-sellers were down in comparison to the previous four albums, which had sold between three and five million each. In response, Mellencamp bristled at my question about record sales, with his easy-going demeanor showing signs of annoyance.

“I don’t understand these questions about sales, I don’t relate to them. I don’t understand what the fuck difference it makes. It’s nice to sell records, but, to me, the quality of music has maintained over the years.”

(Interview by Steven P. Wheeler)

“It’s not like I went out and made a shitty record, although Whenever We Wanted probably wasn’t the greatest record. Big Daddy was a good record and I think Human Wheels is the best record I ever made. Even Paul Simon went through a period where he didn’t even sell 150,000 records, and then he makes Graceland in the late Eighties.

“Younger people want to have their own music, and I think that’s the way it should be,” he maintained. “But I don’t think my work has diminished in any fashion. I also think we sold more than three million copies with the last few records, but that’s not even the fuckin’ point. It doesn’t matter.

“The point is that I’m making the records that I want to make, I’m doing it at a pace that I want to do it, and I’ve always maintained that if people want to buy my records that’s great, and if they don’t that’s okay, too, because I do this now because I want to. Not because I have to or I need the money or because I feel like I have to prove something to somebody.”

Art vs. Commercialism

Taking a purely artistic road has its pitfalls for any recording artist. Some fans want to hear the same thing over and over, not unlike the record labels who like targeting a specific market. Artists from Dylan to U2 have all had to deal with this dichotomy throughout their career, and Mellencamp the artist is no exception.

“I don’t mean to sound jaded or mean-spirited,” he said after voicing his strong opinion, “but I’m not looking for a commercial bonanza. I need to make records that are entertaining to me, and to the guys in the band, things that are challenging to us.

“The thing is, I could probably go out and make a very commercial record if I wanted to, drawing on what’s going on today and the experience I’ve gained over the last 20 years in the music business,” he noted, without a hint of cockiness.

“As a matter of fact, I feel like you, Steve Wheeler, and I could go in the studio with you as the lead vocalist and we could probably cut a hit record, but it just depends on whether you want to be that corny or not. Where’s the line that a guy is willing to cross.”

“Radio has become a very throwaway type of situation today. I mean, Janet Jackson has had millions of hit records and I can’t name one of them to you, but I hear them all the time. The music on the radio today is more like elevator music.”

(Interview by Steven P. Wheeler)

“It’s like my song, ‘Biege to Biege’ says. Songs have to be beige, they have to fit into a very generic format so that these people can sell their advertising. I don’t feel compelled to make a beige record in order to fit into some Program Director’s format. If it happens by accident, that’s fine, but I don’t feel that I should plan it out or calculate it. Those types of things are better left for people like Bryan Adams or Jon Bon Jovi. I’m not particularly interested in that.”

Don’t Call Him a Spokesman

Beginning in 1983, with the popularity of “Pink Houses,” the media began labeling Mellencamp as a spokesman of sorts for those living in middle America’s heartland. This would become even more enhanced with 1985’s monster hit Scarecrow, which featured such hits as “Small Town” and the powerful musical statements targeting the plight of American farmers in “Rain on the Scarecrow” and “The Face of the Nation.”

This massive commercial success would continue with 1987’s The Lonesome Jubilee with classic songs like “Check It Out,” “Paper in Fire” and the fond look back at growing up in rural America on the intoxicating “Cherry Bomb.”

But Mellencamp downplays the media’s attempt to bring him into the role of Spokesman for the Heartland. “I never felt that it was my job to hang on a cross for anybody or to articulate how any particular sector of the country felt,” he explained. “I can only write about what I know about or what I aspire to be. When people did ask me about it, I just kind of laughed it off. I really didn’t pay that much attention to it.”

Wouldn’t that fly in the face of being one of the founders of the long-running benefit concert series known as Farm Aid, which continues to raise awareness and money for American farmers? The summer concert series began in 1985 and has continued for the 33 years with only two exceptions in 1988 and 1991, and has raised more than $50 million in the process.

Not so, says Mellencamp, who is still on the Farm Aid Board of Directors to this day, maintaining that the intent behind Farm Aid was not some naïve or idealistic belief that they would change the world. 

“Farm Aid was put together only to raise awareness. I always knew that we were never going to change any political or social policies, and we didn’t,” he explained. “Back in the Sixties, it took an entire generation of people fighting in the streets to end a war. That’s the kind of participation that it takes to change social policy or to change anything that’s going awry in this country.

“The idea that I could write a song or that Woody Guthrie could write a song that could change political policy is really nonsense. So the idea that writing a song or having a concert is going to do much more than entertain people and maybe raise a few dollars is really silly.”

“I don’t mean to sound disgruntled or negative, it’s just the reality of the situation. If you look at anything that happened during the Eighties, whether it’s Hands Across America or Farm Aid or Live Aid or This-Aid or That-Aid, I don’t really think any of them made that much of a significant impact on the powers that be.”

(Interview by Steven P. Wheeler)

Final Thoughts

Since my interview with John a quarter of a century ago, the singer-songwriter has not slowed down in the recording studio, having released 11 more albums. Mellencamp, like Robert Plant, continues to explore new artistic territory when most of his contemporaries have either retired or tour the world resting on their laurels. And that is the essence of a true artist.

A few years ago in 2015, Bob Dylan was honored as MusiCares’ Person of the Year and the ceremony included Mellencamp and other artists performing songs from Dylan’s legendary catalog. And during his acceptance speech, Dylan said: “And like my friend John Mellencamp would sing, ‘one day you get sick and you don’t get better.’ That’s from a song of his called ‘Longest Days.’ It’s one of the better songs of the last few years, actually. I ain’t lying.”

Mellencamp said that this endorsement from The Bard himself was worth more than 10 Grammys. And after a career that now spans more than 40 years, John Mellencamp can indeed be mentioned in the same breath as the greatest American songwriters to have ever picked up a guitar and put a pen to paper. We are lucky he is still around 67 years on.