8 Thursday January 13 2022 | the timesarts
J
ohn Mellencamp was not
expected to last. He was
born with spina bifida, which
in 1951 was a death sentence.
When a pioneering young
neurosurgeon treated three
babies with the spinal defect
Mellencamp was the only
one who survived. His musical career
seemed similarly doomed: in 1976 his
debut album, Chestnut Street Incident,
released under the name Johnny
Cougar, sold poorly and got shocking
reviews; he was dropped by his label.
Yet here we are, 46 years later. Now
70, he has sold 60 million albums and
had hits including Jack and Diane, Pink
Houses and Hurts So Good. His rustic,
Appalachian-tinged rock has won him
a Grammy and earned comparisons to
Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan,
whom he counts as friends. About to
release his 25th album, Strictly a One-
Eyed Jack, he is on the phone from a
hacienda where he is staying on a
mountain in northern California.
“The secret to longevity,”
Mellencamp says in a gravelly voice, is
that “most people give up too early. If
you had sat behind a guitar as long asass.’ And they kept doing it and I
jumped off stage and got in a big
fistfight.” Not the most obvious way to
win loyalty but it is quintessential
Mellencamp.
He may have felt musically adrift in
the Seventies but by the early Eighties
his blue-collar heartland rock was
finding an audience. His 1982 album,
American Fool, sold ten million copies
and topped the US charts for nine
weeks. The album featured Jack and
Diane, which would become his most
popular song. It was originally
intended to be about an interracial
couple but Mellencamp, in a rare
instance of listening to someone else,My girlfriend
said: ‘John, you’re
a 69-year-old
who’s still a teen’
The singer John Mellencamp tells Sarfraz Manzoor
about his love for fighting, smoking and Springsteen
I have you could write songs.” He grew
up in small-town Indiana and never
left, and has been playing in bands
since he was 14. “My dad was the vice-
president of a big electrical firm,” he
says. “I had long hair and he didn’t
approve of that.” When he was 17 he
punched his father in the face during
an argument and his father responded
by raining blows down on him.
“I’m a Mellencamp and we had
chips on our shoulders,” he says. “I got
beat up more times than you can
imagine. I wasn’t afraid to fight but I
didn’t win many of them.” In a bar
while at college, he says, “I was stoned,
drunk and went and sat down next to
the biggest guy I could find and I
shoved him. We went round the back
and he beat the f*** out of me.” Later
that same night Mellencamp fell out of
a car while a friend, also drunk, was
driving. “I woke up the next morning
and I was unrecognisable to myself,”
he says. “I had chunks of hair pulled
out. I had road rash on my legs. I
looked at myself in the mirror and
said, ‘John, this drug and alcohol thing
is not working out for you.’ ” He has
not touched either since.We h ave
laughed
about the
idea we
were rivals
— Bruce
and I get
along like
brothers
He got his musical break thanks to
Tony Defries, the British manager who
had been instrumental in the rise of
David Bowie. Defries renamed him
Johnny Cougar and tried to sell him to
the world as the next all-American
pop-rock hero. In 1977, the year after
the release of his debut, Mellencamp
flew to London to record the follow-up
and play some concerts. Punk was in
its ascendancy and he was not used to
audiences showing their approval by
spitting at him. At one show, “I
stopped playing and said, ‘Look guys,
I know that you think that this is good
but it’s not good for me and if you do it
again I’m going to stop and whip your