ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON MARCH 18, 1988
By Steve Newton
He’s short and short-tempered. The licence plate of his bronze ’56 Corvette proudly sports his nickname: “Little Bastard”.
He lives on 13 acres of rolling farmland near Bloomington, Indiana, where he keeps a Caddie, a Chev, a Porsche, and a Harley-Davidson to help him get around the spread.
Lately he’s taken up jogging to get in shape for his upcoming tour: “Twelve times around the driveway is a mile.”
In 1983, when the single “Hurts So Good” and the album American Fool were making him a huge star in North America, he told me: “I never really thought about being a big success. Hell, we could talk in two years and I could be playing the shittiest little club in the world and not selling any records. ”
Thirty-thousand people snapped up tickets to his March 19 and 23 shows at Vancouver’s Pacific Coliseum. The second show was added after the first sold out within hours.
He was born John Mellencamp on October 7, 1951, in Seymour, Indiana (pop. 15,000), son of a brawling electrician and former beauty-queen.
By the age of 14, he was a rebellious, beer-swilling truant.
He was kicked off his high-school football team for carrying cigarettes at practice.
His first record purchase was Chubby Checker’s 1960 hit “The Twist”. At 15 he formed his first band, a boisterous eight-piece called Crepe Soul.
He spent two years at Indiana’s Vincennes University, where they were willing to wink at his D average.
He was fired from his job installing equipment at Indiana Bell for accidentally disconnecting all the phone service in Freetown, Indiana.
In 1972, he and buddy Larry Crane (one of his current guitarists) formed a glitter band called Trash, named after the New York Dolls song, which mostly covered David Bowie numbers. When the time came to look for a manager, he called on Bowie’s manager, Tony Defries, in New York. Mellencamp waited in the outer office with two dozen Bowie lookalikes: the story has it that he got special attention because he didn’t look anything like Bowie.
Defries signed him up and put out Mellencamp’s first album, Chestnut Street Incident, under the name Johnny Cougar. Mellencamp told me in ’83 that that’s been a burden ever since. He added his real last name to 1983’s Uh-Huh album, but never shed the Cougar moniker.
He spent a year in England, where he hooked up with Rod Stewart’s manager, Billy Gaff, and recorded A Biography. The album was never released in the States, but the track “I Need a Lover” hit number one in Australia and later became a big hit for Pat Benatar.
He has a 16-year-old daughter from his first marriage, at age 18, and two more (two and six) from his second. He met his second wife, a stunning model just out of high school, at a Hollywood party in 1980, where he endeared himself to her by putting his cigarette out in her drink.
Of his lyrics, he once told Musician magazine: “I wanted to be known for being the wildest fucking guy in the world–motorcycles, tattoos, girls. And then to find out people were listening to the words!”
In an October 1987 interview for Life magazine, he said, “I’ve done my share of womanizing. Six, seven years ago. I mean, I was out of control. I was on the road all the time and hard to pin down. But I’ve pretty much curbed chasing women the last few years, man. You feel guilty. You get isolated from your spouse.”
He says that fear of AIDS has helped him kick the habit. “You got a choice: sex or death. And sex takes a back seat on that one. I’ve been around trashy behaviour all my life, man, and I’m sick of it. I always thought I had to be a lewd vagrant to create rock ‘n’ roll. But that was just a game.”
He once stormed out of a CBS Nightwatch interview because of what he considered baiting by the interviewer.
In 1982 he threw an equipment-clearing tantrum onstage in London, Ontario when technical problems became disruptive. (He later gave a free concert by way of apology.)
Though he hit it big with the ’82 release of American Fool, the best-selling album of the year, the critics were not impressed. “Not close enough for rock ‘n’ roll or anything else except cynical marketability,” said the Philadelphia Daily News. “This guy is a phony on the face of it and not in a fun way,” said The Village Voice. “John Cougar can’t help it. All he has to do is open his mouth and out oozes insincerity,” said Rolling Stone.
He told me in ’83 that “Hurts So Good” was “just some dumb song–that’s what they all are.” He told Musician magazine: “When people first told me they related to ‘Jack and Diane’ I figured they were just jerking my chain. But after a while I had to admit that even if it was an accident the song must really mean something.”
He’s cut seven albums since Chestnut Street Incident: A Biography, John Cougar, Nothin’ Matters and What If It Did, American Fool, Uh-huh, Scarecrow, and The Lonesome Jubilee.
With 1987’s Lonesome Jubilee, he passed up songs about rumbleseats and rockin’ in the U.S.A. for tunes that say something about his real life, such as the autobiographical “Paper in Fire”.
He has been involved in Farm Aid concerts, and he’s turned down lucrative offers to endorse beer, cigarettes, jeans, liquor, tennis shoes, and ketchup. He was less than courteous when asked if his ode to small-town America, “Pink Horses”, could be used as a 1984 campaign theme for Ronald Reagan.
He hates the commercialization of classic rock tunes. He says that he can’t decide which commercial is worse–the California Raisins singing “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” or Nike using the Beatles’ “Revolution”. He told the Los Angeles Times: “I almost got a gun and shot my TV when I saw that.”
Though his current record deal with PolyGram will take him comfortably to the age of 46, music isn’t his only interest these days. He’s thinking of trying his hand at acting in or directing films, and writing short stories.
“I want to be a happy, productive person,” he says. “That’s my goal. If I find myself laughing three times a day, I’ve had a good day.”
To hear the full audio of my 1983 interview with John Cougar–and my 1999 interview with John Mellencamp as well–subscribe to my Patreon page, where you can eavesdrop on over 700 of my uncut, one-on-one conversations with rockers since 1982.
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