The Times - UK (2022-01-13)

the times | Thursday January 13 2022 9

arts

that we were rivals — he and I get

along like brothers.”

Dylan is another spiritual sibling.

They became close in the late Eighties

when Dylan asked him to direct a

music video. “Bob has always liked me

and treated me like a little brother,”

he says. “He used to call me up in the

early Nineties and read me his lyrics.

The phone would ring at 3am and he’d

say: ‘Hey, John. Let me read you these.

See what you think.’ Finally, I told him:

‘Bob, you can quit calling me. I’m not

a good sounding board because I think

everything you write is great. If you

wrote Mary Had a Little Lamb I’d think

it was f***ing great.’”

Mellencamp has been painting since

the late Eighties and it was Dylan who

encouraged him to show

and sell his work.

Mellencamp painted the

self-portrait on the cover of

his new album and he has

55 works on display at the

Museum of Art —

DeLand in Florida.

His paintings were

described by one

critic as “handsomely

grotesque portraits...

solemn and stirring.”

“During the

pandemic I painted

eight to ten hours a

day,” he says. “In an art

studio it’s just you and

the canvas and the paint.

It gives me a certain peace

of mind. I like the idea of

being by myself.”

He has been married three

times, first at 17, and was a

father in his teens and a

grandfather at 37. He lives in

Belmont, Indiana and has five

children — his daughter Teddi

appeared in The Real

agreed to make them both white. “The
guys in the band were the ones who
talked me out of recording Jack being
black,” he says. “They were like, ‘John,
we need a hit record and if you take
this one line out, it’ll be a hit record.’ ”
They weren’t wrong — the song was
No 1 in the US for four weeks in 1982
and 40 years on it is an American
classic. No one is more surprised
about that than Mellencamp. “These
kids [Jack and Diane] just won’t go
away,” he says. “I don’t know what the
f*** I was saying when I wrote that
song, but apparently it connected with
a lot of people. Particularly that
chorus — ‘Oh yeah, life goes on, long
after the thrill of living is gone’ —
which is not a positive statement but
people sing it like it’s the national
anthem.” He is working on a stage
musical adaptation of Jack and Diane
with the playwright Naomi Wallace.
“In the musical version Diane is
Hispanic and they live in a small
town,” he says. “It’s about corporate
America destroying small towns.”
In the Eighties Mellencamp released
albums such as Scarecrow and The
Lonesome Jubilee that were
masterpieces of bleak, populist roots
rock, merging catchy melodies with
downbeat lyrics. They brought him
commercial success but he was rarely
accorded critical respect.
“‘Poor man’s Springsteen’ — it would
sometimes piss me off,” he says. “I
know it’s not true, Bruce knows it’s not
true; it was just lazy journalism.” They
may have been considered rivals in the
Eighties but these days Mellencamp
and Springsteen are friends. They have
appeared on stage together and
Springsteen contributed guitar and
vocals to three songs on Mellencamp’s
new album. “Bruce is the sweetest
man I know in the music business,” he
says. “We have laughed about the idea

Housewives of Beverly Hills. After his

last divorce, in 2010, he was in an on/

off relationship with Meg Ryan — now

permanently off — and dated Christie

Brinkley, the former supermodel and

ex-wife of Billy Joel. He is currently

single.

“Women seem to like me in the

beginning — it’s after they get to know

me that they don’t seem to like me so

much,” he says. “I just had a girlfriend

for three months and she said, ‘John,

you’re just too much. You’re a 69-year-

old man who’s still a teen — some

moments you’re so mature and other

moments it’s like I’m babysitting.’

I didn’t know what she meant but I’m

going to figure it out one of these

days.” He says he is not certain why

he finds relationships difficult but

offers a hint: “I’m an obstinate

cocksucker and I don’t take orders.”

I ask how he has survived for so

long in the music business. He

remembers seeing James Brown

towards the end of his career, when he

was trying to repeat the stage moves

he did as a younger man. “He tried to

do the splits and he couldn’t get up.

I thought, ‘Oh f***. If I make it this

long, I’m going to remember this

happening to James Brown.’ ” The

folk singer Pete Seeger once told

Mellencamp to “keep it small and

keep it going” and it is advice he has

tried to follow.

Seventy is pretty good going for a

man who had a heart attack in his

early forties and continues to smoke.

“My voice is 40 years of cigarette

smoking,” he says. “It has changed

dramatically and I finally sound like

Louis Armstrong.” What wisdom have

those years brought? “You only have

so many f***s to give,” he says. “If

you’re in a car and he doesn’t take off

when the light turns [green], and that

pisses you off, that’s just a waste of

f***. Save your f***s for something

that amounts to something that’s

f***worthy.”

You sound like Indiana’s answer to

the Dalai Lama, I say. “I was with the

Dalai Lama once,” he says. “I was with

my ex-wife Elaine and him and a

couple of monks. The Dalai Lama

grabbed my hand and wouldn’t let go

of it. And the monks went over to my

wife and said: ‘He’s giving John a

reboot.’ As silly as it sounds, I did feel

elevated for a few years.”

“How many summers still remain,

how many days are lost in vain,”

Mellencamp sings on

Wasted Days, his duet with

Springsteen from last

year. “I started smoking

when I was 14 and I still

smoke, so if I make it to

80 I’ll be happy,”

Mellencamp says.

“I figure that gives

me ten summers and

I’m gone. I don’t want

to f*** them up.”

While he may once

have been ridiculed,

he thinks he has had

the last laugh because

he lasted. “The ability

to make life bearable

by painting and writing

songs are the happiest

moments of my life,”

he says. “I’ve lived an

artist’s life. I’ve never had

to work for wages. You’re

talking to the luckiest guy

in the world.”

Strictly a One-Eyed Jack is

released by Republic/EMI

on January 21

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The lyrics they wish

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I

n 1979 the lyrics to Elvis Costello’s

Oliver’s Army may have come

across as an indictment of the

treatment of Catholics in Northern

Ireland during the Troubles.

Times move on, though, and what

once was taken as a calling-out of

racism becomes construed as racist

itself. “That’s what my grandfather was

called in the British Army. It’s

historically a fact,” said Elvis Costello

of the term “white n*****”, which

crops up in Oliver’s Army as a

description of Irish Catholics, in an

interview on why he will no longer

perform the song in concert and has

asked radio stations to stop playing it.

If songwriters worried about how

their material would be judged in 40

years’ time, they would give up and

study accountancy. Costello, however,

has self-censored himself to adapt his

back catalogue for changing climates.

And he isn’t alone.

Few would mistake the Rolling

Stones for being the types who sign off

their emails by announcing their

pronouns as he/him, but even they

dropped Brown Sugar from last

year’s, ahem, No Filter tour.

“I’m trying to figure out

with the sisters quite where

the beef is,” Keith Richards

told the LA Times in 2021,

on why a rocker about

slavery, sadomasochism

and black women being

whipped in New Orleans

that begins with a line about

a “Gold Coast slave ship

bound for cotton fields” has

caused such offence.

Even songs written with the best

intentions can fall foul. Melting Pot by

Blue Mink in 1969, who were led by

the black American singer Madeline

Bell, is a plea for racial unity, but its

suggestion that we take “curly Latin

kinkies, mixed with yellow Chinkies”

does not sound as culturally sensitive

as it should.

The Beatles couldn’t have thought

there was anything controversial

about “She was just seventeen, you

know what I mean” when I Saw Her

Standing There came out in 1963,

although by 1979 the Regents did feel

the need to rein it in for their new

wave classic 7 Teen, altering a line so

the girl of the title gives all the boys

she encounters a permanent reaction.

In the original version, it wasn’t a

reaction that was permanent.

Sometimes you have to wonder

what the artist was thinking. Why did

Iggy Pop, an intelligent guy, write

1979’s African Man, which whether

intended ironically or not comes

across as racist? And Elton John and

Bernie Taupin’s Island Girl, a tale of a

Jamaican transvestite told in pidgin

English, was not their finest hour.

Some songs were awful then and

they’re awful now. In 2013 Robin

Thicke, Pharrell Williams and TI

looked pleased as punch as a bunch

of naked models pranced around them

in the video to Blurred Lines. With its

line “I know you want it” everything

about the song seemed, to use a term

of the day, a bit rapey. Now it sounds a

lot rapey. Some things really are best

consigned to history.

Will Hodgkinson

Everyday he rewrites

the book: Elvis Costello

has said he will no

longer play Oliver’s

Army as it contains

a phrase he now

considers inappropriate

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John Mellencamp.

Above: with Bruce

Springsteen in 2019.

Below: with his

former girlfriend

Meg Ryan in 2013