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Philadelphia Inquirer: Mellencamp A Star Despite Himself
02.23.2011 -
Philadelphia Enquirer By Dan DeLuca
Toward the end of John Mellencamp's two-hour-plus show at the Academy of Music
on Monday, the Indiana rocker led his crack seven-piece band through "The Real
Life," a song from 1987's The Lonesome Jubilee, the first album he released that
didn't use "Cougar" as part of his stage name.
"My whole life I've done what I'm supposed to do," the 59-year-old, gray-stubbled
Rock and Roll Hall of Famer sang with gusto. "Now I'd like to maybe do something
for myself / And just as soon as I figure out what that is, you can bet your
life I'm gonna give it hell."
"The Real Life" is the song from the Mellencamp catalog that most clearly
distills a theme - the quest for authentic, dignified, life-affirming experience
- that's run through the career of the heartland hero, who started as a
critically disparaged pop singer and has lately been telling anyone who'll
listen that he's through being a "rock star."
That 31/2-decade quest has taken Mellencamp from the days of John Cougar hits
like "Jack & Diane" - which he did in an abbreviated acoustic version,
grudgingly granting the request of a fan he met earlier in the day - to No
Better Than This, his death-obsessed, T Bone Burnett-produced 2010 album.
Mellencamp built Monday's rarely dull show around the album.
No Better Than This was recorded in some of American vernacular music's most
hallowed locales, including the First African Baptist Church in Savannah, Ga.,
Sun Studios in Memphis, and the San Antonio hotel room where bluesman Robert
Johnson recorded It's a typically earnest, naively romantic Mellencampian move,
as if recording a band in mono around one microphone in a sacred room would not
only amount to doing something for himself, but magically sprinkle fairy-dust
genius on his music.
It didn't quite work out that way, but No Better Than This is still an
upper-echelon Mellencamp album (as is its similarly stripped-down 2008
predecessor, Life, Death, Love and Freedom) largely because doomy songs like "No
One Cares About Me" and "The West End" are invested with such unflinching
conviction.
The studio versions of songs like the title cut of No Better Than This and "If I
Die Sudden" are overly severe. And there's been a depressive tendency in
Mellencamp's songs going back to "Jack & Diane," with its then callow-seeming
declaration that "life goes on, long after the thrill of livin' is gone."
All that might make it sound like Monday's show must have been a bummer. Not
so. No matter how much he fights it, and no matter how much his
cigarette-scarred voice makes him sound like Walter Brennan, Mellencamp is still
a charismatic front man and a seasoned entertainer.
And yep, a rock star. And while as American rock stars of a certain age go,
Mellencamp may lack, say, the poetic grace of Bruce Springsteen, or the pop
flair of Tom Petty, he's got his own set of strengths.
For one thing, there's that hardheaded tendency to write populist songs that
sometimes awkwardly but always earnestly grapple with life-and-death ideas.
"Jackie Brown," from 1989's Big Daddy, was a particularly heartrending example
performed in a spare, plainspoken style.
And Mellencamp, more than his white-guy generational peers, has always made
music that bears the influence of Motown and other African American '60s dance
music. As he put it in the closing "R.O.C.K. in the U.S.A.": "Don't forget James
Brown."
Mellencamp and band play with a bright, rhythmic dexterity that brings the music
to life, even when their leader is fixating on his own mortality.
Instead of an opening act, the evening began with a movie: It's About You, a
documentary about Mellencamp's 2009 tour and the recording of No Better Than
This by Kurt Markus and his son Ian.
Bad idea. The movie, which, predictably, treats Mellencamp as if he were a god,
has the deleterious effect of demystifying the concert to come. The first time I
heard "Paper in Fire" on Monday, I remembered how much I liked it. The second
time, I didn't like it as much.
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