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He scuffled through a series of hard-luck bar bands, including a glitter-rock outfit with Larry Crane called Trash, which played only four gigs over a whole year. “But you can’t take away the fact that as far as what’s going on right now, I care about it.”īorn in Seymour, Indiana (population 15,050), on October 7th, 1951, the second of five children, John Mellencamp wanted to be a rock & roller in the worst way, and that’s exactly why he made it. “Yeah, John Mellencamp has a history of being the biggest joke in rock & roll, right?” he snaps. He helped organize the September 22nd Farm Aid concert with Willie Nelson and Neil Young, and in his own shows he asks fans to write to their congressmen demanding legislative action. He turned down an offer to play at Live Aid – “Concerts that just raise money aren’t a good idea” – but he has devoted much of his nonmusical energy to publicizing the plight of American farmers. Instead of relocating to a superstar community like New York or Los Angeles, he stays in Indiana, where he keeps tight with relatives, old school buddies and biker pals. Sobered by success ( Scarecrow is his third straight platinum LP), Mellencamp has replaced the chip on his shoulder with the weight of private and public responsibility. If something’s not right at a sound check, John will look at me and say, ‘Aw, do I really have to get mad at somebody today?”‘ Indeed, considering his reputation, Mellencamp was unexpectedly relaxed and thoughtful during the two sessions for this interview, backstage in Binghamton, New York, and in his Manhattan hotel suite. “He liked the rush of getting angry, but not anymore. “I don’t think he enjoys that emotion anymore,” says guitarist Larry Crane, who has played with Mellencamp for almost fifteen years. ‘This guy might not like me, so I’m going to not-like him first.’ It’s a real juvenile way of thinking, but that’s the way I functioned in my life for years.” “If you’d come in here then, I wouldn’t have wanted to like you. (Financially, he stood to lose nearly $350,000 from his refund offer, but only half the fans returned their tickets.) The thirty-four-year-old Indiana singer just sat in his dressing room until the sound problem was solved and then returned to the stage, where he told the crowd, “I feel so bad about this that if you got your ticket stub, you got your money back.” He sweetened the deal by playing for another two hours, venting his anger through ferocious renditions of his biggest hits and a long medley of Sixties nuggets. He didn’t storm offstage muttering obscenities, like he did that same year during an on-camera fracas with a CBS News interviewer. He didn’t throw drummer Kenny Aronoff’s kit into the crowd the way he did during a legendary tantrum at a London, Ontario, concert in 1982. And on this, one of the most important nights of his career, his expensive, highly sophisticated sound system went kaput not once but twice, thanks to a faulty fifty-dollar circuit breaker.īut Mellencamp didn’t blow any fuses. Nearly 20,000 fans had paid $17.50 a ticket to see the small-town boy play the biggest room in New York, Madison Square Garden. John Cougar Mellencamp had every right to be angry.
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