John(ny) "Cougar" Mellencamp: C or D?

Relative to where I come from, there are actually many more little pink houses elsewhere in the world.

That's about all I have to say too, and you said it, so thanks.

he is not quite classic. Sorry Johnny. Perhaps a couple of classic songs.

Ah yes, I remember now hearing stories about how he's kind of an asshole in person, but he seems to know toward which causes to lend his celebrity, and he totally keeps it real.

Anyway, I read something about Mellencamp being a jerk, too, I think it was an interview in No Depression, maybe with the Bottle Rockets? Anyway it's in the No Depression book of collected interviews, I think. I recall something about him having to have his own private trailer away from his band, blah blah blah, nothing out of the ordinary though, in this age of riders that include doves and color restrictions (J Lo says "NO pink!!")

Anyoone who tells you that they would rather listen to Bright Eyes or fucking Ted leo on a road trip than the 'Coog is fucking lying.

ALMOST classic.

the springsteen vs mellencamp thing that pops up on ilm a lot amuses me (btw, can't stand either of them)

Coog's car commercial jingle's catchier and clearer than Broose's car radio song.

"this is our country" inspires me to help make america great again

or buy a pick-up, i can't remember

Mellencamp is a tragedy for music. Please give it up. Let's put Mellencamp to rest for good. Then we will never have to hear his music again!

Best post-"Lonesome Jubilee" John Mellencamp Songs?

What is John (Cougar) Mellancamp's best song?

John Cougar Mellencamp's "Pink Houses": Awesome

the only link that matters
Defend the indefensible : "R.O.C.K. In the U.S.A."

I guess i've always sorta fashioned him as a Saturday Evening Post kinda guy -- High-art for the K-Mart set. Sure, Scarecrow had some nice tracks, and his work with Farm Aid is nothing less than respectable -- but most everything else from him is just blasé. Last year, when he cowtowed both General Motors and Major League Basball to get a new track out, methinks his skills my be more attuned to things corperate (or populist, as the case may be).

I'm gonna have to go Dud.

"Kowtowing" to corporate radio America is how you get a song on the radio.

i can roll with teh coog

"teh coog"

Bahahahahahaha

What do we think of the new album No Better Than This? I mean, recording in mono is kind of gimmicky and all, but it really does serve these songs well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhfpdkoPAyI

Wrote about the new album (and new box set, and a new collection of his very early tracks) here:

http://blog.rhapsody.com/2010/08/mellencamp.html

boy, would that nickname carry such a different meaning if John used it nowadays

I love this song, but I mostly love this video for the sweater.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CHvDPRWgJ4

So cute. He looks like a Menudo member!

thread title should be

john(ny cougar) mellencamp

sort of like

get up (i feel like being a) sex machine

New album Plain Spoken is quite good. Echoing the top of this thread, I'd much rather listen to him than Bruce at this point.

So many good songs!.

needs more cherry bomb

Some of those songs are great despite not being great (see also: Bryan Adams). Some of those songs I hate and never want to hear again. Mellencamp seethes with more self loathing than Billy Joel.

It's OK.

xpost

but is more tuneful about it!

I don't hear self-loathing, actually: maybe some secondhand bitterness? But I'm judging motives, so I'll stop.

xxxp Ugh. Disagree completely. Cougar and Joel are on the opposite ends of the bitter fuck spectrum.

The Coug has complained at length, yes bitterly, about his early days (the move from Johnny Cougar to John Cougar to John Cougar Mellencamp to John Mellencamp), and record industry machinations and whatnot ("Pop Singer") and has been working for years at establishing himself as a Serious Artist (often by way of painting, i.e., serious art - see: cover of Whenever We Wanted). The last time I saw him, behind "No Better Than This" in maybe 2010, he looked visibly pained every time he had to play one of his hits to get people out of their seat. I think he successfully transformed himself in the late '80s and early '90s, and I appreciate his midwest focus/dedication, but I don't think he has the skill or craft to achieve what he wants as a songwriter, either lyrically or melodically. I find his reinvention as a folk/protest singer especially unconvincing, as well as he may intend.

Seems to be an OK painter, though!

"this is our country" inspires me to help make america great again

― gershy, Sunday, October 7, 2007 7:50 AM (nine years ago)

*shudder*

wow that is kinda chilling

he/she was being ironic (I hope)

Well I'll be

Congratulations to John Mellencamp and Meg Ryan! https://t.co/ntiN3gGQpU

— UltimateClassicRock (@UltClassicRock) November 9, 2018

Does that make him Johnny Ryan? Because I want an Americana PRISON PIT soundtrack

John Cougar-Meg Ryan, Neil Young-Darryl Hannah...we'll never know if Tom Petty-Holly Hunter was next.

Had to Google that EZ still not sure but this is really something!

https://youtu.be/zxFzhx4YLpE

That’s amazing!

He had an amazing run imo.

I Need a Lover sucks, right down to the fake Jungleland opening.

I Need a Lover is awesome, including Benatar's version.

Awesome.

I've already got Scarecrow and The Lonesome Jubilee, but I was thinking of supplementing those two with a good retrospective. The double-CD Words & Music probably fits the bill (cheap too), but are there any gems that were overlooked? Also, anything he recorded after that compilation that I should listen to?

Not a Mellencamp expert, but I listened to Big Daddy when it came out and was being called his anti-stardom gesture, and I always liked "Theo and Weird Henry".

Words and Music, one of my last Columbia House purchases, is marvelous but at least 15 mins too long.

The inclusion of minor chart hits like "Jackie Brown" and "Hand to Hold On To" added to my my understanding.

Yeah "Theo And Weird Henry" was good!

Big Daddy was legitimately surprising (and eventually impressive) to me as a kid. It really did seem like a pretty extreme gesture after Scarecrow and TLJ. (A move not entirely unlike Neither Fish Nor Flesh, purchased the same year, come to think of it!)

That 2 CD overview looks pretty good to me. "What If I Came Knocking" is one of my favorites and it was on there.

As a Hoosier of the 80s, you really need to just also get a copy of 'Uh-Huh'. That tape or LP was one of those recordings growing up that was just kinda everywhere like 'Live Bullet'.

Uh-Huh to Big Daddy was pretty much Mellancamp's version of the Beggars to Exile 'stones not stones' quadrilogy.

This revive seems to be focused on 80s material, but don't sleep on Whenever We Wanted. It's a barn-burner.

"Get a Leg Up" is often my favorite Coog.

John Mellencamp cements Hoosier legacy with donation of archives to Indiana University

https://news.iu.edu/live/news/28169-john-mellencamp-cements-hoosier-legacy-with

Thirty eight years after liking "Lonely Ol' Night" and getting very tired of the other singles on the radio and TV, I discover that Scarecrow contains another great song: "Between a Laugh and a Tear", with Rickie Lee Jones on harmony vocals. When he doesn't overdo the nostalgia, he can occasionally really hit a vein of wistful self-reflection.

Scarecrow's his best, I've realized. "Rumbleseat," especially "Rain on the Scarecrow." OTOH I never wanna hear "Small Town" again.

the 1-2 punch of scarecrow and the lonesome jubilee makes me wonder if the next several after those are similar in quality, big daddy/whenever we wanted/human wheels (which i always forget exists, maybe bc it has a similar title and art to human touch?)

WWW is his dumb throwaway rock album, the one he should've made after Big Daddy (the end of that phase of his career btw). "Get A Leg Up" is one of his best singles imo.

Moments of brilliance among long stretches of ordinariness.

I will say he puts on a very solid live show.

Listening to Crumblin Down right now and it’s so good

Yes, "Rain on the Scarecrow," "Rumbleseat" and "Between a Laugh and a Tear" are all great indeed. I'd also add "Minutes to Memories." The majority of the album's great or at least sounds great, but there are a few risible songs too.

dance naked has got to be one of the shortest major label albums of the 90s (29 minutes!!)

That one was the true throwaway. I'm not sure who'll agree, but his "Wild Nights" cover is credible and cool in its own right.

Big Daddy is a pretty moody record, but it has some of my favorite songs by JCM.

Jackie Brown
Theo and Weird Henry
Martha Say

Jackie Brown might be his best song. It’s depressing as he!!, but it rings pretty real to me.

I had a hankering for the Falling From Grace soundtrack this morning. It's not on spotify and my copy is still packed from moving five years ago(!)...but so's my cd player.

Anyway, side one rules -- Nanci Griffith (one of her best vocals imo), Larry Crane, Dwight Yoakam, and a Mellencamp/Crane song that pops into my head regularly despite not listening to this for like fifteen years. John Prine does a fantastic, muscled-up version of "All the Best" on side 2.

Never saw the movie. He directed...but did he disown it?
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLgE0LTiz1VN7UEF2hohwRBBRF_3ItU6lf

Falling from Grace is a decent movie. Claude Akins is great as the song writers dad. It’s based on a Larry McMurtry story, so it has some bones. It’s not Tender Mercies, which I would think is the Godfather of the broken songwriter genre, but it’s worth seeing once.

He didn't disown it, but it wasn't a happy experience. Here's what Gary Graff wrote about it:

Filming began in Bloomington and Seymour, Ind., during the summer of 1990, with Mariel Hemingway playing Buddy Parks' loving-but-spurned wife, Claude Akins as the fictional singer's father and Dub Taylor as his grandfather. Mellencamp fleshed the cast out with fellow singer-songwriter John Prine, family members and players from his band, including guitarist Larry Crane and bassist Toby Myers.

Prine told Mellencamp biographer Paul Rees that "those were probably some of the most fun weeks I've ever spent. Making a movie in Indiana in the summertime when the fields are ripe and you can smell the corn? Good times."

Mellencamp would not say the same. He was used to directing his own ship, and a much smaller one at that. There were many moving – and, in some cases, autonomous – parts required in filmmaking, not to mention cast-member egos.

"I didn't enjoy being around the other actors," Mellencamp says now. "There was nothing I liked about it, except setting up the shots. I loved creating the shots with the cameras, and I tried not to make it a lazy TV show. Larry McMurtry is a wonderful writer, so I wanted to get it as good as I could. But, yeah, [the shots], that's really all I enjoyed."

And, he adds with a chuckle: "You can't direct me; I don't do anything anybody says. 'You need to do that.' 'No, I'm not gonna do that. I'm gonna do this!' That's not exactly a Hollywood attitude, right?"

Dissatisfied with the final product, Columbia screened Falling From Grace in just 22 theaters. The film grossed $49,708 on its opening weekend according to Box Office Mojo, and nearly $232,000 during its 45-week theatrical run, after an Oct. 1 opening in the U.K. Falling From Grace actually earned a number of favorable reviews, including two thumbs-up from Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, and a 78 percent positive ranking from Rotten Tomatoes.

At the time, Jonathan Rosenbaum of the Chicago Reader noted that "Curiously, although this film was well received by some critics in New York and elsewhere when it opened, it was unloaded locally without press screenings at second-run theaters." (Rosenbaum was unable to review it as a result so I'm not sure if a special exception was made for Siskel & Ebert due to their name recognition.)

I've still got it on VHS somewhere; hopefully is also streamable, or at least on DVD. The music pro, a star of sorts, I think (haven't seen it in many years), has come back to
boondocks homeground---I forget why, but seems like there's a mutual unease between him and some family members, who may feel implicitly judged, by their own comparisons of their lives with his. Also there are resurfacing memories of past conflicts, other struggles---what the hell, McMurtry wrote it and Mellen filmed it, so seems plausible, right? Also, I read an interview where he said he saw Hud and it reminded him of his uncle: he wanted to be the individualist, but not go that far. He goes for an antsy balance in some of his best music, and prob here too, I figure. Yeah, later, he was in this big theatrical production with Stephen King, who, when they were interviewed together, kept trying to kiss his ass and soothe him into staying, but I don't think he did, being all pouty about having to work with actors and shit.

1999's Rough Harvest was a mostly refreshing round-up of folk-rock etc. redos and covers; I reviewed it, briefly, for the Voice, as archived here (made my own, because Voice links can get wonky):
https://myvil.blogspot.com/2005/12/little-punk-houses-for-you-and-me.html

(from another thread)

man i think i'm gonnna cherrypick uh-huh, scarecrow, and lonesome jiggilee and make a cd-r.

Even with Lonesome Jubilee distinguishing itself with the fiddle, those three albums actually blend very well together. Put only the highlights together in the right order (not chronologically, sequence it like a new album) and you do end up with a surprisingly cohesive masterwork. I'd use "Crumblin' Down," "Pink Houses" and "Authority Song" from Uh-Huh, "Paper in Fire," "Check It Out," "Cherry Bomb," maybe "Empty Hands" and "Rooty Toot Toot" from The Lonesome Jubilee and something like half of Scarecrow.

I just caught the opening night of his Beacon residency. (FWIW, the setlists on the tour are apparently locked in, so it'll probably be the same every night.) Great show, especially now that fiddler Lisa Germano has rejoined the band. One bit of warning - a few minutes before the advertised start time, they started playing something like a clip show that may have been done for TCM. It has some narration and interview bits, but for the most part, it's clips from classic Hollywood films that mean a lot to Mellencamp: Brando's long courtroom take in The Fugitive Kind, Gable with Monroe in The Misfits, Elizabeth Taylor visiting James Dean's home in Giant, the ending of The Grapes of Wrath, the "my mama loved me..." scene in Hud, the famous car scene with Steiger and Brando in On the Waterfront and the ending to A Streetcar Named Desire. (Even the stage decor was modeled after Streetcar's New Orleans setting, with dummies dressed up as Stanley and Blanche - they even threw in another of presumably Monroe's character in The Misfits as well.) I already knew about this when I did some cursory research of the tour, so it wasn't a big deal to me, plus it felt more like a pre-show intro - the lights were mostly up and what turned out to be an 8:30 start time for the actual concert isn't unusual for a Beacon show without an opening act. But quite a few people were getting restless and they became vocally angry, especially by the time the Streetcar clip was introduced. At least where I was sitting, the audience was about as far as you can get from cinephiles. (The couple next to me kept making meatheaded comments that were generally dismissive of old movies, all the more laughable when they're here to see a guy whose signature hits happened six Presidents ago.)

Toby Myers, Mellencamp's longtime bassist, has died after a lengthy battle with cancer

Myers joined Mellencamp’s band in 1982 and played bass on every studio album from Uh-Huh (1983) through Rough Harvest (1999). He decided to stop touring in 1999 to be a stay-at-home dad after his son Cash was born. He never left music though, he still had his own studio and rehearsal space and later contributed upright bass to Mellencamp's 2003 album, Trouble No More.